Category: Lifestyle Design

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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Here’s My Work Manifesto, What’s Yours?

Hello, friends! Well, I’m approaching the last few days of what I’ve been calling my job-switch sabbatical (which you can read more about in some of my recent posts on my Instagram page). I’ve had 3 weeks off in-between jobs, and I’m starting my new job on Monday!

In honor of this new start, I thought what better time than now to take a moment and share my work manifesto.

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Side Hustle vs Passion Project: Where Do You Land?

I feel like recently (and when I say recently, I mean more like the past few years…) the phrase “side hustle” has become VERY popular. All the buzz.

But side hustling has never resonated all that much with me. To be honest, it’s mostly because of the word hustle. I, personally, just don’t subscribe. Since getting off the hamster wheel, my life goals have been about the opposite of hustle. I cherish slowing down and leaning in to the creative part of myself I never knew existed when I was living the grind. But many of the things I do on the side of my 9-5 in support of my newfound creativity get confused for side hustles. So what gives?

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Why I Took Another Full-Time Job When Part-Time Work Is My Goal

I live in Vermont, and one of the state’s famous sayings is “if you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes.” What this saying has at its core is that things change. Things change ALL. THE. TIME. The sooner we can wrap our heads around that, the sooner we can accept it and move on. Things always change, and so we must adapt.

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How And Why We Should All Get Better At Having Difficult Conversations

Let’s face it: it’s a tough world out there right now. If you don’t have a different opinion on some important topic from at least one immediate family member or friend, consider yourself lucky. Inevitably, we are likely all faced with the possibility of having difficult conversations on a consistent, if not daily, basis. In a time where this is the sad norm, wouldn’t it benefit everyone to get at least a little better at having difficult conversations?

This topic is especially on my mind right now because last week, I accepted a job offer with another company. Inevitably, I had to give my resignation notice where I currently work. Therefore, I’ve been having what feels like a lot of difficult conversations lately.

Today on the blog, I’m sharing some tips from my and others’ experience on ways we can get better at having difficult conversations, no matter the topic.

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