Commit. Plan. Take action.
Do you have a budget but feel like you’re not making ANY progress toward your financial goals?
Are you trying to pay off debt or save up for a large purchase, but your progress is painfully slow?
Or worse, you feel like you take one step forward and then two steps back?
Can you imagine what it would be like to pay off $500,000 of debt?
Well, our guest today did just that!
I have a very special video to share with you! And I am offering my first giveaway on the blog!
I’ll tell you how to participate in the giveaway in a moment, but first, let me tell you about the video.
What were we going to do?
It hadn’t even been two months since my last day of work, and we saw that our savings we had built up to prepare for me to stay home was starting to disappear.
An emergency fund is something we all know we need, but unfortunately, a lot of us don’t have any savings.
And if we do, we don’t know if we have the right amount.
You and I both know that getting out of debt and reaching our financial goals is WAY MORE than just scrimping pennies and slashing our spending as much as we can.
Right?
Have you ever had a personal loan from a friend or co-worker?
I sure have.
It’s a situation a lot of people have been in, and it has the potential to destroy relationships.
This is part 2 of 2 of our summer update. If you haven’t read part 1, click here to catch up.
In our disappointment, we scrambled to figure out what to do.
Our agent put our house back on the market, and we planned to have an open house that weekend so that we could encourage more lookers.
We had already locked in our rate with our mortgage broker so we only had a couple of weeks to find new buyers if we wanted to close on time and avoid being penalized for the transaction falling through.
And then something unexpected happened —
It is mid-May, which means many of us are going through our closets, deep cleaning our homes, and getting rid of stuff we just don’t need anymore. It feels good to go through spring cleaning each year. These actions help you clear out things that are holding you back. You can do something similar with your money. Here are some ways to “spring clean” your finances.
Spring cleaning your finances, in some ways, looks just like cleaning out your home. You have to literally get rid of things in your budget, clean out closets and sell things, and reassess what you are doing in terms of managing your money. Here are seven things you should do this spring to evaluate your finances.
Annual reviews or taking a moment to spring clean your finances each year is always a good idea. However, the frequency in which you review your attitude towards money may change with time. You may find that a quarterly review is more necessary for you, especially if you have aggressive debt payoff goals. Others may find it easier to do a quick check-in every month. In the end, it is important to find exactly what works for you in terms of reviewing and organizing your money.
Readers, do you have any annual “to-do” items for spring cleaning your finances?
It has become popular for people to choose words to describe their goals for the year. This year, my word is going to be “intentional.” I want to be more intentional about how I spend my time and what I focus on, shifting towards things that bring me joy and make me more available to my daughter.
According to Merriam-Webster, intentional is defined as “done by intention or design.” Some common synonyms for the word include conscious, deliberate, purposeful, and willful. So, instead of doing things on a whim or without planning, I’ll take my time and be intentional with how I move forward.
It’s more than that though. Since giving birth to my daughter I have avoided things that feel like a waste of time. My time is valuable. I could be spending it with my daughter, watching her continue to grow. So, when I’m not doing that, I want to be using my time to the fullest. This means being more intentional about how I spend my time. For instance, I need to make certain things higher priority during her resting hours instead of scrolling endlessly on social media. That way, when she wakes up from her nap or simply wants to spend time with me, I’m there to do it.
I’m also going to be intentional in other ways. We are working to be more intentional with our money and how we spend it. There are things we are doing (like cleaning out closets and minimizing expenses) that are helping us be more intentional about how we spend. For example, we definitely didn’t need a dozen streaming subscription services. Trimming some of those down can help us save for more important things.
Another way we hope to be more intentional in 2022 is with our health. Towards the end of my pregnancy and since my daughter’s birth we’ve spent so much money on eating out. Instead of spending money on fast food or eating out daily, we are going to put money towards our health and wellness. For me, this will take the form of private yoga sessions once a week. My husband is going to look into martial arts classes. Rather than throwing it away on junk food, we will be more intentional with our money and put it towards improving our body and mind.
When it is all said and done, financial resolutions and your “word of the year” only work if you have a plan to put behind them. To be more intentional this year, I am journaling daily, I’ve deleted many social media apps off my phone, and I’ve added more books to my TBR list. We are surrounding ourselves with people and things who are positive, intentionally working to create a happy, healthy life for our family.