Living for today - Planning for Tomorrow
We talk about frugal living often on ELYM. But frugal living without a purpose is pretty pointless. So today I wanted to go over three benefits of frugal living and the ways it’s helped to improve my life (plus two drawbacks). You’ll Have Less Stress When you make the conscious choice to live frugally and spend less than you earn you’ll naturally have less stress.
If you’re at the point in your life where you’re living paycheck to paycheck or just want to save and invest at a faster speed there are certain expenses you can lower or eliminate that will have a huge impact. Sure, skipping your morning coffee will save you a few bucks but if you really want to improve your financial health fast here are the
I am a firm believer that there is no one right way to manage money. We’re all in different stages of our life and we all have different personal preferences. What works for me might not work for you and vice-versa. That’s the way it should be. You should experiment with your money management systems until you find what you like and find something that
As I think back over my last couple of years it’s pretty incredible how far I’ve come. I remember in my early twenties working a low paying office job and thinking that I’d never earn more than $2,000 a month. Where I live there really are no high paying jobs. As far as flexibility and pay, I was doing okay compared to others in my
When I look back just a couple years ago it’s funny to think of how hard I thought investing was going to be. It completely intimidated me. So of course, like an idiot, I started with individual stocks and then penny stocks. I lost almost all of my money on the penny stocks and the others aren’t doing too great either. And then when I
I’m a believer that when it comes to personal finance you need to look at both sides of the equation: income and expenses. But before you focus too much of your time on income you first need to make sure that you have your spending in line. After all, if you spend every penny you earn then you’re never going to be able to save
After calculating my new two person budget I realized that combined we would be socking away 47% of our income on a bad month and even more on the months where we earn more than average. The good news was that we will able to do this at a quite comfortable spending level. (Note that I’m not talking about spending ungodly amounts of money on
Just in case you didn’t know I got married a couple weeks ago! It was something I had been thinking about for a while but wanted to feel one hundred percent confident about when I did. So I did it on a whim when I felt ready. Jamie and I went and bought a marriage certificate and had my old boss make it official for
Valentine’s Day. There’s one thing I now like about it and that’s decorating a Valentine’s box for my kindergartner to take to school. But giving your significant other gifts for a commercialized holiday? It feels so dirty. I’ve always felt this way. I’m not a girly girl to begin with. I don’t like flowers, I don’t wear much jewelry, I don’t wear perfume, and I
Don’t Be Like Everyone Else The other day one of my close family members came over and saw my expense tracking worksheets laying on my kitchen table. “I need to start doing that too” she said. “Yeah I think you’d be completely surprised at just how much money you spend in certain areas.” I said in a general type of way – mostly meaning that
