Worry Free Money
I was browsing around Chapters one day after pre school drop off in hopes of finding an old school budget planner. While I found no such planner, I did grab two financial books on a whim.
When I spotted the book I wasn’t sure if it was the cheerful yellow that grabbed my attention or the title “Worry Free Money”. I remember thinking huh….is there such a thing?
When opening the fold and reading the excerpt I knew I was hooked. I knew I wanted to stop budgeting and start living. At the time I felt like I had literally tried everything. Turns out, I hadn’t!
The very first chapter had me pulled in so many different waves of emotion all while thinking, ah huh! The concept of feeling broke leads to being broke, I totally get it. I had crunched our numbers every which way and while it always looked good on paper I was setting myself up for failure 100% of the time. In Shannon’s words I would say “fuck it”. I had squeezed the fun out of every single corner I could and then a week later throw in the towel. Riddled with guilt I would just beat myself up about it relentlessly. This was my cycle.
There are several very practical tools she discusses, for example, rating your spending habits from 1-10. This never occurred to me, but how much sense does that make! Prioritizing what makes you happy and then cutting where you can on the things that rate low on your 1-10 scale. Overall it makes for less “F it moment” because you are allowing yourself to have some fun while still staying on track for your budget goals. I would try to cut out all spending, all take out, all entertainment. I mean….
There is also a section on Social Media Influence and I honestly could write my thoughts on this for hours and maybe I should! I definitely had a moment of self reflection in this area and that’s normal. Am I making others feel negatively? Am I giving a false representation of me? Is Instagram influencing me to overspend or compare? Can I do better? I love shopping, expression through style, and creative photography that tells a story or sets a mood. You can do that without feeling like every post has to be a new outfit or new anything.
I could dive in deeper with you guys but honestly I want you to buy it, read it and support the newly published author. We implemented some of her key tools and after only a month have already found a profound impact. The only step we haven’t done yet (due to B’s crazy work schedule) is to go to our bank to open up a couple more accounts. Having everything separate means I officially have taken the guess work out of it. It also means that B can pull up our info and know whats up in a glance. Having only one account actually confused the crap out of both of us. There are a few reasons for this. I do all of the accounting (reluctantly) so he never knew what was set aside for what or when things were due. He has several business act things that I would always have to go to him to figure out what was what.
The biggest step we made was to separate all of it. Bills act, spend to zero monthly act, retirement, education, travel act, home reno act, emergency fund. This also means that when there are larger unaccounted for sums that come into play like a bonus or tax return we can have a pretty clear path for allocating it without worry but she covers this area as well. It truly is less budgeting and more living.
“You weren’t born to just pay bills and die.”
