In January, I love to outline my financial goals for the year. Once I know what I want to accomplish for the year, I can then break my goals down by quarter, by month, and by week to help keep me on track.
Things always change and my goals have to adjust, but this initial mapping out of my goals serves as a guide for my goals for the rest of the year. It’s also really fun and exciting to dream about what I want.
During times of uncertainty, having a clear picture of what’s happening with our money is more important than ever. Why? Many of us are trying to adjust to life with a lower income, our expenses are changing, and we’re reprioritizing our goals to ensure we have enough cash on hand. I’m going to take you through seven steps to simplify your banking, Marie Kondo style. These steps will make your life easier and will also increase your cash on hand. Win-win.
We tend to spend more money than usual around the holidays, and this year with inflation it’s going to be even more expensive. If you are feeling stressed about your holiday budget, we have you covered.
The good news? You can add some extra holiday cheer to your life without spending more with frugal joys.
Frugal joys are free or inexpensive things that make us really happy. If you are looking for some festive free or inexpensive treats, here are our favorite holiday frugal joys.
Many of us were hopeful that our spending was going to decrease due to stay-at-home orders, but we’ve been surprised to see that’s not always the case. Many of us are now spending more.
How can this be? Yes, we’re spending much more on groceries - stockpiling shelf-stabilized goods or paying extreme markups for toilet paper, but the main culprit for most is online shopping.
Have you ever walked into a store just to “look around” and ended up needing something you didn’t know existed five minutes earlier? Or opened up your email to get some work done and got completely side-tracked by a sales email from one of your favorite brands? Yeah, me too. Companies are getting better and better at separating us from our money, and sales are one of their favorite tactics because they combine two great marketing strategies - scarcity (time is running out!) and a great deal.
So how do we decide what to do? How do we evaluate a purchase to make sure it’s worth it? With the holidays and the biggest shopping weekend upon us, it’s the perfect time to arm ourselves with a checklist to consult before buying something on sale.
Each year we showcase incredible BIPOC and women-owned businesses to support while doing your holiday shopping (and all year round). Why? Because what we buy matters! How we spend money is a way to vote for more of what we want to see in the world.
Plus, the pandemic, inflation and supply-chain issues have made the last few years really challenging for small businesses. Our support can make a big difference. We’ve compiled a list of your (and our) favorite brands. Thank you for sending in all of your new favorites this year. This list just gets better and better. And we plan to continue to add to it!
Credit cards can make our spending feel really murky. It’s hard to know if we’re spending more than we have because we don’t feel the pain of spending more (or the reward of spending less) until it’s time to make our credit card payment at the end of a cycle. This can make it hard to pay off our credit card each month, and it can also make us feel really guilty in our everyday spending since we’re not quite sure whether or not we can afford the things we’re purchasing. How can we make sure we’re using our credit cards in the most responsible way?
We don’t typically associate money with parties but I’m telling you, it’s a worthwhile association to make.
One of the reasons we don’t make the progress we want in our financial lives is because our financial to-do list continues to get put on the back burner. We have busy lives so when we don’t create the time for something (like dealing with our finances), the calendar fills up and we continue to not have time. It’s a vicious cycle.
