Category: Lifestyle Design

Why I Changed My Money Check-In Strategy

Here we are, already half-way through November. We are getting close to the end of 2023, my friends! Pretty soon, it will be time to do some year-end reflection and goal-setting for 2024.

Before that though, we still have to close out 2023.

At the beginning of this year, I decided to switch up the way I do my money check-ins with myself. Throughout 2023, I’ve experimented with going from checking in on my money and my financial independence (FI) numbers on a monthly basis to a quarterly one. Today on the blog, I’m sharing why I made the change, how it’s been going this year, and what I want to do differently next year. Hopefully it will inspire you to start thinking about your own money check-in process and see if there’s anything you want to switch up in 2024!

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How Comfortable Are You With Change?

For the longest time, change scared the crap out of me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a work in progress. I still have to actively talk myself down sometimes from freaking out when change is looming or imminent. But over time, I’ve gotten better at accepting change. In fact, I’ve even found embracing change to be quite life altering. Today on the blog, I’m diving into why I believe we could all benefit from getting more comfortable with change.

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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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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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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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Takeaways From My 3-Week Sabbatical

Hello there, friends! Some of you may know that I recently switched jobs, and in between, I gave myself 3 weeks off and decided to make it a sabbatical. I shared a bit of the journey at the time on my Instagram page, but today on the blog, I’m sharing more details about what I learned from this important time off.

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