Somewhere in the swirl of a pandemic, long overdue protests, and a slew of personal ups and downs, we paid our taxes. We also made a really exciting discovery during the deepest financial dive we do all year. A money milestone that I’ve been pursuing relentlessly unfolded: we could pay off our mortgage. But we … [Read more…]
To say it’s been quite the year is an understatement. And we’re not quite halfway done! I recently heard someone joke that all of us got our 2015 five-year plans wrong. Isn’t that the truth? I don’t think any of us are strangers to curve balls, but what happens when the whole season is cancelled? … [Read more…]
When the pandemic hit, we stopped vacation planning, but we already had our air travel booked for this summer. That meant that I was going to try to do the unthinkable: get my money back from an airline. I honestly never expected that it would happen. But this past week, we got our moolah back! … [Read more…]
This isn’t going to be one of those practical posts. I don’t actually know how you should spend your stimulus check. Without knowing your exact situation, it’s hard for me to say. Truthfully, I don’t actually know how I should spend my stimulus check. But what I do know is that the idea of a … [Read more…]
I’m not going to lie. I’m not even sure when I lost sight of my goals this quarter, but I do know that by the time March 31 rolled around, those goals were the last thing on my mind. The fact that I was truly worried about trying to get more sleep and save money … [Read more…]
Productive decluttering. Declutter productively. Less waste. Waste less. I had all sorts of flowery ideals and aspirations written out in a notebook. My plan was to simply transfer it into a blog post, slap a title on it, and call it my goals for 2020. The problem is that none of those visions were concrete … [Read more…]
You probably thought the definition of insanity was doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. That is…until you read the title of this post. Then, maybe you reworked your definition, huh? But we actually purposefully make the choice to take our toddler grocery shopping. Every. Single. Week. And we like the results! In … [Read more…]
Confession time, fam. I keep busting our budget. The whole thing doesn’t go up in flames, but category after category, month after month, I keep going over budget. So as I scrolled through the spreadsheet last month, I found myself wondering if this is lifestyle inflation at its undiagnosed finest…or do I need to adjust … [Read more…]
This past weekend, I attended the 2019 Cents Positive retreat in Chicago. I started the weekend wondering what the retreat would be like (thanks to the #centspositive Twitter hashtag, I had a hunch it would be amazing!), and I am ending my weekend hoping that I can make this money retreat a yearly tradition. Here’s … [Read more…]
In less than three months, it’s going to be 2020. I don’t actually care about the year, but based on Internet memes, I needed to point that out, right? Whether it’s 2020, 2021, 2022, or any other flip of the calendar year, I think there’s something really inspiring about the time of year leading up … [Read more…]