Lean Into Your Creative Side

How are you designing your life on your way to financial independence (FI)? As many of you know, one of the main themes of this blog is living our best lives now, starting to take action now to make our lives more joyful, instead of waiting until some day in the distant future, when we hit our FI number (roughly 25x our yearly expenses).

Today on the blog, I’m honing in on one way we can help with the lifestyle design process now, one way we can increase our chances of living our best lives now. By getting creative! We can use creativity to figure out how we can start designing our lives, and living our best lives, NOW.

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Why I Still Struggle With Choosing Me (And What We Spent To Attend A Recent Wedding)

Hello, friends! Happy Friday! Mr. Dink and I are just getting back from attending the wedding of 2 of our very close friends. We had an absolutely fantastic time!

As we were getting ready for this wedding, and as I prepared to keep track of all my expenses so I could, of course, let my wonderful readers know all the juicy details of what we spent (this is a personal finance blog at its core, after all), I realized that I had never actually had to fly to a wedding on my own dime, as an adult. I’d always been able to drive. Or, if I flew, it was to attend a family member’s wedding and as such, the costs were much lower (ability to stay with friends and family, for example). 

I promise I will get into all the nitty gritty of what we spent to attend this wedding in the second half of the post (you can skip ahead if you’d like). But first, I want to write a few quick words on how leading up to this wedding made me realize why I still struggle with choosing me.

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Maintaining Your Health On The Way To Financial Independence

Well, my friends, I was going to publish this post last Friday, getting back to my regularly scheduled weekly blog post. But alas, life had other plans. After 3 years of avoiding it, Mr. Dink and I finally came down with COVID-19.

How poetic that the week I was going to publish a post about health, we both got sick. Such is life, I suppose.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I had absolutely no energy whatsoever to work on polishing this post to have it ready to publish last week. But I’m sort of glad I didn’t, because it gives this post new life. A fresh perspective.

Life is short, and there’s nothing like lying sick in bed with absolutely nothing to do (or nothing I can do) besides watch TV and wallow, freaking out about my shallow breathing and wondering how bad it would have been if I wasn’t vaccinated, to remind you that life is short.

This post became all the more important to me.

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Update On Our Year of Prioritizing Friends and Family

Hello there, readers! I know I’ve been MIA for a little bit, but I’m back! Apologies for being away for so long, but I promise, I have a good reason. For the past few weeks, we’ve been living out HARD our theme for the year of prioritizing friends and family!

So today, I’m here to tell you a little bit more about what we’ve been up to, as well as some of our learnings from all of the life experiences we have been having. I hope you enjoy!

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3 Months Into My New Job: An Update

This week marked 3 months at my new job! I’d love to say that the time has flown, but it hasn’t really…

Today I’m sharing how things have been going, and what I’m learning about my financial independence (FI) journey along the way.

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Can Meditating Make You A Better Investor?

For those of us on the path to FI, or financial independence, and especially for those of us who have pretty much automated all our savings, we are tasked with the tough to-do item of just sitting and waiting for compounding to do its thing. Perhaps patiently, or perhaps not so patiently.

We should be focusing on living our lives, living our best lives now, and letting our investments grow in the background. But as we all know, it can sometimes be difficult to watch our money go up and down on the roller coaster ride of the stock market.

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Experiment Success Alert! Pickleball Edition

Welcome to a new series on the blog, where I will chronicle my “experiences with experiments” (say that 5 times fast) on my slow FI journey! There will be success stories, and there will be not-so-successful stories. I’m refusing to call them failures, because I believe that there is no such thing as failure when it comes to experimentation: we try things, we learn things, there you have it!

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Why Flamingo FI?

As I continue down this road of blogging in the personal finance space, one of the top things I hear from readers and others I connect with is that they’ve never heard of Flamingo FI (financial independence) as an alternative FIRE strategy before. So today on the blog, I thought I’d share what exactly Flamingo FI is, why it is my chosen FIRE strategy currently, and why it may be a good option for you too.

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Can You Embrace A Slow FI Lifestyle and Still Work Full-Time?

It’s been well over a month now since I started my new job. It’s wild to think that only about 2 months ago, I was agonizing over the decision of whether to change companies and take another full-time job, when my ultimate goal is part-time work.

But as I agonized over this decision, I was thinking so much about this title question. Regular readers of my blog know how much of a fan I am of a slow FI (financial independence) lifestyle. Which is why my ultimate goal is part-time work. But can you embrace a slow FI lifestyle while still working full-time?

Today on the blog, I’m sharing why I think the answer is a resounding yes.

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Make A Choice And Then Let Go

When I was considering leaving my last job, I agonized over the decision. First, I told myself I’d only leave if the right job came along. And although it took me a little while, I did end up finding another job I’d consider leaving for. But even then, once I found it, I felt paralyzed. I worried I’d make a mistake by leaving. In my typical fashion, I made a pros and cons list. Even though I felt really good about the pros and cons list, that I’d thought of everything, it still didn’t seem to help me actually make a decision. So, I agonized some more.

Does this sound familiar? Do you have trouble making big decisions? Today on the blog, I’m sharing how I let go after making big decisions, and why I think it’s so important to make decisions and move on.

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