Category Archives: Money May

44 Strategies to Conquer Personal Finances

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Personal finances have always been a struggle for me.

Closing my eyes to my personal finance habits was so simple.  I made sure I paid bills on time, and then spent my money wherever I wanted after that.  No saving and no planning plus occasional credit card usage was a long term recipe for a meltdown.  The increasing pressure started to get to me.

I decided enough was enough.  Last month, I turned my daily focus toward my personal finances.  The event was Money May – an all out assault to become totally aware of my financial reality, no matter how much it hurt.

I had no idea what I was in for.  I had a stocked arsenal, and I was ready to go.  Every day, I read articles on Get Rich Slowly. I devoured J.D. Roth’s book on the basics of personal finance, Your Money: The Missing Manual by J.D. Roth.  I plunged into Unautomate Your Finances by Adam Baker of Man Vs Debt.  Near the end, I started looking into my relationship to money by reading It’s Not About the Money by Brent Kessel, and working with my water brothers around money issues.  The links to these books are affiliate links – if you purchase a book using these links, you’ll be supporting more self awareness experiments on Grokkery.

Conquering Personal Finances

Money May was a battle, and I achieved a more resounding victory than I could have predicted at the start.  I established an emergency fund, paid off $1,200 in credit card debt, and created a plan for my financial future.

But Money May is not the war – it was but one month in an ongoing journey of financial knowledge and awareness.

This short yet successful battle with my personal finances has left me a bit wiser than I started out.  I’d like to share the most important lessons I’ve learned through this journey.

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Money May Update: The Stunning Finale

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This is the last “official” post in the Money May series.  If you missed any of the updates or want to read the full story, be sure to check out all the posts here.

Money May has been one of the most successful 30 day trials I have ever conducted.  It has also been one of the most personally inspirational, as I have taken the power back in my relationship with money.

Am I sad to see it end?

What do you mean, end?!  These financial habits are here to stay!  The entire point of a 30 day trial is to instill new habits and practices.  I’d say that overall, this is one that will serve me incredibly well for the rest of my life.  It will serve me even better as I continue to grow my knowledge.

The Goals of Money May

My goal for Money May was simple: Raise my personal finance awareness by establishing healthy money habits. The goal was broken down in to three primary action steps, with the third having a few sub-actions to address.

  1. Read 3 articles on Get Rich Slowly or related financial sites every day to raise knowledge and awareness.
  2. Track my finances every day.
  3. Establish a clear financial picture of the present and plan for the future.
    • Create an honest awareness of debt.
    • Create a budget and stick to it.
    • Establish an Emergency Fund
    • Begin to eliminate debt

I even took some time to address larger picture aspects of my personal finance awareness, and am excited to continue to do so in the future.  More about those in a minute.

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Money May Update #5: HUGE Win!

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I’ve got my Emergency Fund filled!

The scary thing is that it only has taken me about a month to get that together, so I’m now asking the questions of, “Where did all my extra money go before?”

That’s the question isn’t it – what in the world have I been doing since my financial start, that I was able to dig myself a lovely hole?

Truth is, if I had made better financial decisions in high school, I would have been better prepared for college, and after college, “real life”.  I’m glad that I’m catching these patterns early and that I have the opportunity to significantly raise my financial awareness.

Coming Up

With Money May coming to a close, I’m getting clear on what needs to happen before the end of the month.

  1. Forget about the emergency fund completely. Emergency use only.  With a bunch of cash just hidden away, it’s extremely tempting to go buy a new gadget (iPad anyone?), but I’m staying away from that.
  2. Plan for the longer term financial future. This is a more serious goal of mine long term; at the ripe old age of 22, I’m realizing that any long term personal finance success I will be rooted in discipline and awareness.
  3. Share what I’ve learned. I spent a lot of time this month going through books and blogs about personal finance.  I’ve also dived pretty deep into my own finances.  The experience has been eye opening and I plan on sharing the best lessons after the month is over.

After Money May

I can’t figure out how the time for Money May has gone by so fast – but I sincerely feel like I’ve learned an insane amount.  Personal finance was always this nebulous concept for me:

Don’t use credit cards (Duh, right?), pay yourself first, save your money, don’t buy what you don’t need… all really simple steps, but hearing them never  affected me too much.

After Money May, I’m going to be following the plans I’m in the process of developing.  Call it my, “Personal Finance Blueprint.”  It’s basically my Money Map.

With enough time, persistence and luck, I’ll be able to create a responsible personal finance reality that I want.

I’ve just bought a book called, It’s Not About the Money by Brent Kessel.  He describes himself as a financial planner by day and a yogi by dawn.  The book focuses on investment “personality types” by exploring the relationship between you and money.  It’s a combination of spirituality and personal finance, taking a conscious approach to personal finance.  I’m really excited to get my hands on it.

With some of my water brothers, I’ll be going through some intense personal finance sharing, learning, and examination.  We’ve set up a small group to tackle the issues that we are actually dealing with right now.  I’m psyched for the authenticity and openness that has already been shared, and can’t wait to see what comes up next.

And lastly, I plan on retaining some essential habits from this month.  The first is checking my accounts frequently.  Mint has been a blessing for this task, and has kept me up to speed in just a few minutes every day.  I’ll also continue to grow my knowledge around personal finance.  Now that I’ve begun, the amount to learn seems to expand continuously.  I’d like to learn as much as possible about what I’ll need to know in my personal finance future, before I get there.

As the month is closing, thank you so much for joining me in this personal finance journey I dubbed Money May.  Self awareness and authenticity are two aspects that are cornerstones of this blog.  I feel that it’s important to walk the walk and share the journey.  Hopefully you are able to learn from some of these posts.

Photo by Photos8.com

Money May Update #4

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*Ahem*

This Money May update is a bit overdue, and for that, I apologize.  It’s been more challenging than I anticipated to write regular content in addition to the Money May updates, but if all goes well, there will be at least three more updates by the end of the month.

So what have I been up to the last ten days?  Getting my financial awareness on!

Money May in Action

I finished Your Money: The Missing Manual a few days ago, and was quite pleased by it.  The book starts out with information in savings & debt reduction, then moves on to money saving tips (especially on large ticket items such as a car or home), and then to investing and other financial instruments.

The best part about all of this is that it addresses what I see as the day to day issues that 80-90% of people are going to encounter in their financial lives.  It’s definitely a broad book, on the surface level of finances, but we don’t all need to be Wall Street Whiz Kids in order to save and retire comfortably.

If you are looking for a place to start a personal finance journey, this is the number one resource in my mind.  J.D. also takes the time to recommend books and resources for each area of finances, so if you get this, you’ll have a perfect road map to grow your personal finance awareness.

Recently, I’ve been reading both Get Rich Slowly and Moolanomy.  After finishing J.D.’s book, most of the GRS archives seem pretty familiar, so I’ve moved on to exploring the greater personal finance webiverse.  If you have any recommendations for what else to check out, let me know!

After spending some time doing the homework from Jayson Gaddis on financial awareness, I’ve got a more clear financial picture – not only what are my personal finance habits, but where do many of them come from?  Answer: the people and events that have had a major influence in my life – parents, family, friends, classmates, media, etc.

I’ve yet to tackle Adam Baker’s financial reality exercise, but it is my plan to do that before the end of the month.  If you don’t see the results here, throw a fit and slug me in the arm.

Budget Check In

I’ve gone over my budget by $19 in my Entertainment category, but am still under budget for the month.  We’ll see how it plays out by May 31st.  I have a feeling that the budgeting aspect of my personal finance journey will be ongoing.  There is a certain bit of fine tuning that will happen with time, and it’s going to take more than one month to get that optimized.

The biggest perk of having the budget, is that when I log in to check Mint, I can also see where I am in each category of my budget.  I got an alert and an email when I spent one penny more on entertainment than I planned to.  That type of reminder helps keep me in check.

My budget may be thrown off just a small bit toward the end of the month for two reasons: a road trip, and a house guest.  This weekend, I’m road tripping with the Grokkery Girlfriend to see my younger brother graduate high school.  The gas for the trip will put me over my projected fuel use in the budget.

We’re bringing back my even younger brother for a few weeks.  He’s a “growing young man” as they say, and from what I can hear, he can eat.  That will affect my grocery bill for sure.

The Rest of Money May

The number one goal that I have for the rest of Money May is to plot the future of my personal finances.  My career (animator) doesn’t always have predictable working patterns, so it may be challenging.  There are some months with full time work and some months with none.  I’ve got to have plans for each event so that I can keep paying down my debts.

As long as I can keep checking in on my finances and expanding my personal finance awareness, I’m on the way to creating a strong new habit.  I even wound down a little bit on Thursday night by doing my daily reading for Money May.  Crazy… but a step in the right direction.

Helpful Tips

I wrote a post awhile back about How To Master Your Time, complete with video.  Since then, the system has continued to evolve, and now incorporates Remember the Milk + NetVibes + Master Your Workday Now.  I changed my homepage to NetVibes.com, which has an awesome RTM widget.  Now, every time I launch Chrome, I get a clear reminder of what I’ve got to do today.

This has helped me every day of Money May as I’ve added checking my commitments, my budget and my spending as daily entries into Remember the Milk.  It’s pretty hard to forget when I see it so often.

The last tip I’ve got is to know where all your financial accounts.  I hadn’t stopped to keep track, but I had way more accounts than I knew about.  Moving from CA to MO and having to change banks gave me two more on top of the ones I had before, and that doesn’t include online savings accounts or credit cards.  If you don’t know where your money is, it isn’t working for you.

Photo by Roomic Cube

Money May Update #3

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Just a quick update tonight, with a juicy caffeine confession at the end of it.

Quick Money May Update

Money May is chugging along.  I took my budget from Google Docs and put it into Mint, so my finances are 100% loaded up.  It feels good to track so closely where my money is going.

I went to start my emergency fund in the savings account I have, but for some wacky reason, it has a limit of $100 that I can put in per month.  It seems like a “Get Rich Very Slowly” account, which I’m pretty sure is not what I’m looking for.  I will probably be closing that shortly and opening an online savings account for my emergency fund.

This is a HUGE conscious step forward for me, and I’m loving this new financial self awareness.

Most of my efforts thus far have been oriented toward reading through Your Money: The Missing Manual by J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly. So far, the book is very much like the blog, in that it gives wise advice and best practices in a way that is extremely digestible.

I’ve started diving through the financial homework I’ve assigned myself: the exercise from Unautomate Your Finances to define my ideal financial reality and the one assigned for the Men’s Leadership Training I’m a part of.

The more fascinating to me is the MLT financial exercise.  The questions it asks are pretty profound, asking where my relationship to money has come from, what is my relationship to different aspects of money (saving, spending, investing, loans, etc.), and where I am in each of those areas.  I feel that this is going to be a huge step forward in my financial awareness, and I’ll share the results as soon as I’m through them.

And with that brief Money May update… the juicy stuff.

Juicy Caffeine Confessions

When I gave up caffeine for this month, I underestimated my bodies cravings.  I started a few days early and gave myself a warm-turkey program:  3 energy shots the first week, 2 the second week and 1 the third.

I am here to confess that last night, I dipped my guilty hand into the third week’s caffeine intake.

I was up late working on some animation pre-production for the job I started today.  The work I was doing was going to be keeping me up late, and in a quick phone conversation, the Grokkery Girlfriend sweetly offered to stop by Starbuck’s for me (note: she’s an enabler, though I love her dearly; the caffeine goons must have forced her to switch sides).

The savory thought of a triple grande peppermint white mocha had me salivating… it almost made me giddy.  She heard the excitement in my voice as I made the decision, and asked if I wanted a venti.

Go big or go home, right? I went for it.

The caffeine gods smiled on me and when she ordered the triple mocha at the drive through, they offered her a fourth shot of espresso for free.

After she politely declined the free(FREE!!!) espresso, she heard me shouting through the telephone, “YES, YES, TAKE THE FOURTH SHOT OF ESPRESSO!”

Perhaps I was a bit too excited.  I knew that with this last indulgence, I would give turning away from caffeine for 21 more days, no more warm-turkey program.

It was with knowledge that I would be giving up the caffeine next week.

So as of now, I’m completely off of it.  The most I’ll have is in whatever tea’s I drink, which are Green, Peppermint and Yerba Mate’s.

Perhaps more than the physical addiction to caffeine is the emotional addiction.  I love the quick bursts of energy and the easy, cheap ups that it can provide when I’m dragging.

Diet and exercise ladies and gentleman, that’s where I’m heading.

See you next time!

Photo by D’Arcy Norman

P.S.!

My buddy, Sam Spurlin from The Simpler Life, released his first e-book today. Congratulations Sam! It’s called Living the Simpler Life: 8 Essentials to Practice Everyday (not affiliate link).

I can tell you from being about 80% of the way through it, that this book is worth picking up.  Every step has concrete, actionable steps that you can implement into your life.  And when you buy it, you’re also supporting an artist and an individual contributing value to this world.  Show the love!

As a special feature, I’ll be doing a review of the e-book, and Sam has agreed to answer a few questions for a brief interview.  Look for that in the coming few days!