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It’s hard to believe that it’s been over three months now since we had that week that saw the announcement by the World Health Organization that classified COVID-19 as a pandemic and the entire nation shut down.

As often happens when uncertainty hits, the stock market took a huge dive in march. While it seemed scary at the time, I wrote an article that covered why I wasn’t concerned about being invested in the stock market even though it had tanked.

I don’t often check how my investments are doing in the stock market. Since I believe in investing in index funds that track the broad market, and since it’s going to be around 30 years before I actually need the money, I just don’t really check it much. If it goes down, I know it’ll come back up.

But COVID-19 has been anything but ordinary. People always talk about our new normal. This is not normal at all. 

In Thomas Stanley’s book Stop Acting Rich, he presents research that shows that most millionaires in this country don’t have super fancy well paying jobs, but that it’s just everyday folks who do a really good job of saving and spending within their means. 

To illustrate this, he shows some example of the different spending habits of people. 

He talks about a very small segment of the population that he calls the Glittering Rich, a group of people that truly are wealthy enough to be able to spend their money on whatever goods they want without running out. 

Remember, the goal is to make small improvements when attacking our goals.

We’ve learned from James Clear that we want to make small 1% improvements every single day. While this feels like we’re not making any progress in the moment, after a year of this steady progress, we find ourselves being 37x better over the previous year.

So if our goal becomes to live to budget another month as opposed to moving worlds to get that debt paid off your first month of budgeting, then we’re going to want to keep our budgets simple. Especially at the beginning.

I love YNAB. I literally have a shirt. And I like to wear it in public(shoutout to the other budget nerd dude who came up to talk because of that shirt).

But I’m going to be honest with you. YNAB is a little complicated. It really is a power tool that can do anything. I can really get my budget to behave in any way I want. But that will also mean that there is more of a learning curve with YNAB.

So how do you move forward with YNAB when it’s a little complicated?

First, you’re going to focus on living to budget another day. Second, you want to make your budget simple at first.

So the most important thing about budgeting is that you keep going. Sorry to say this, but, you’ll probably get it wrong a whole lot. 

And I’m here to say that’s ok. But worst thing you could do is quit. 

So I know that it’s almost summer, but let’s take a trip back in time to remember life around November and December.

Can you believe we’ve been doing this for over two months? It just doesn’t seem possible. I’m starting to feel like time has a really weird feel right now.

For some people, not having a schedule is throwing their life into chaos. For Katie and I, the schedule of our small kids feels like an unrelenting march that won’t stop.

Katie and I are lucky though. As teachers, we still have our jobs and are getting paid. But I know that this isn’t everyone, which can make for some really scary times. 

The uncertainty of what’s going on reminds us how important it is to have have a budget and to be intentional with our money.

But even if you aren’t facing financial hardship right now, the reminder of how important it is to have your financial house in order is welcome.

I felt super embarrassed starting this blog. 

I started it about a year ago, but had been thinking about doing it for much longer. 

I had watched other people start blogs or create social media accounts about their interests and projects and that really interested me. In fact, I would think it was really cool when someone else started an account that followed an interest of theirs. 

But this is not something that I thought I could do. 

Finally, I decided to start. I had never done any writing for anything like this, and it had been a really long time since I had done any writing for school. But here I was, trying to remember how to write something. 

Last week I talked about why you always need to be investing in the stock market. I talked about why you should start investing as soon as you start working and keep it going all throughout your career. 

But I also know that things are pretty tough for some people out there. Katie and I are lucky. We’re both teachers and there doesn’t seem to be any rough waters ahead from a job security point right now. 

But I know that there are a ton of people who depend on our ability to get out and interact with the world for their jobs. 

That’s why your priority might need to be building up cash reserves for an emergency that’s happening now or in the future. 

So a couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about how the stock market tanking wasn’t really that big of a deal and not a huge cause for concern.

I know everything that’s been going on can seem scary and I would totally be lying if I didn’t say that there were moments when I wasn’t a little freaked out myself.

It can also be scary from a financial perspective. And even if you were invested in good mutual funds and didn’t really have anything to be worried about from an investing perspective, the truth is, people have been let go from their jobs during all of this. When the rug is pulled out from under you, it’s a very real reason to be frightened and scared.

Everyone should be doing an assessment of where they stand financially right now.

Which categories should be in your budget?

Here’s where you have to be absolutely perfect. It’s where you need to have the perfect set of categories, with all of the perfect set of percentages assigned to each category.

Just kidding, it’s another place where we can overthink. I know I’ve done it. I’ve spent way too long searching for what other budgeting categories people use, and googling what percentage we should be allocating to each category. 

I know that Covid-19 has been on everyone’s mind. In fact, it’s easy for it all to become a little too much. This weekend, I decided that I had definitely been on my phone for far too long and needed a break.

I’m a teacher, so the week that the WHO declared a pandemic and everything started shutting down was the week that my screen time report told me my screen habits had increased by 50%. The following week, it went up another 25%.

So I won’t add anymore to the noise that surrounds Covid-19, except where interests in this blog lay. Which is why I want to outline why you want to stay the course when it comes to investing in the stock market during events like this.

I can say is that I’m really glad I’ve already seen a stock market crash in my adult life. Now that might seem like a weird thing to say, but here’s why.