Mindfully Spent quietly turned 1 year old in September! This belated recap discusses how the year changed the way we live. While we are celebrating some big financial wins, the greatest gains have little to do with money.
Mindfully Spent is about managing finances, time, and more in pursuit of meaning. It chronicles my journey to use money and moments for things I truly love.
Save money. Pay off debt. Simplify. Do the unimaginable big things that you want with your life. Look back on your dollars and days and find they were Mindfully Spent.
All tagged making change
Mindfully Spent quietly turned 1 year old in September! This belated recap discusses how the year changed the way we live. While we are celebrating some big financial wins, the greatest gains have little to do with money.
Like almost all choices in life, there is no right or wrong answer about how to choose a career. However, almost all professions have room for growth. Also featured: a handcrafted graph of annual income changes over time.
Just ten months ago, we were 5 digits deep in consumer debt. We had a department store card balance, general credit card debt, and a car loan payment. Now we have none. But we're not done! How our financial goals and our relationship with money are changing.
Each of us comes packaged with highly variable values and priorities. Just like there is no single standard of beauty, there are a multitude of ways to define what it means to live a good life. It's why we all want different things in romantic partners, household budgets, and political candidates. Building a meaningful life (much like setting big financial goals) requires a deeply moving "Why?" Also... a bit about the evils of external validation.
Money can't fill a hole. Neither can distractions. Building a fulfilling life requires us to tackle the hard stuff and seek out more than the quick thrill of shallow experiences. (Also, some crazy interesting stuff on Signalling Theory and how it impacts our shopping habits!)
Now that we've made some great changes in our finances, we can no longer take our inspiration from sheer panic. We've turned the ship and righted the sails, and staying motivated to make smart decisions takes something different.
9 completely free tools that can help you spend less, better understand your finances, set meaningful priorities, and put a few bucks in your pocket.
The post is part of Mindfully Spent's Series "Doing the (Seemingly) Impossible." Guest Contributor Katie Oaks Weiler Stephens writes with grace about her relationship with the material things in her life and why she decided it was time to unburden herself of some very sentimental possessions.
Guest Contributor Markus Almond (Brooklyn, NY) shakes us awake in the first post of Mindfully Spent's Series "Doing the (Seemingly) Impossible"; reminding us that "Making life count is a choice."
"There is no such thing as normal month," says You Need a Budget (the blog). And they are right. Normal pay periods are also few and far between, so it shouldn't have been a surprise when several less common expenses stacked up to have a real impact on my extra cash. Despite this, I still found six major wins for week ten.
If past weeks were about adopting new spending habits, then this pay period was for becoming the champion of my hard-earned dollars.