![]() Welcome to May and it’s time for March’s Financial Review and Net Worth Update. For those who are new to The Grown-Up Pkmn Trainer, each month I write a financial review to xatu my net worth by writing down my thoughts on the previous and following months. I share these summaries so everyone can gain insight into my personal finances and my thoughts behind them. I started tracking my net worth to measure my progress, inspired by Budgets Are Sexy, which has helped me keep a keen eye on my personal finances. I have been tracking my net worth since January 2015 and writing monthly financial reviews for myself since 2016. I recommend both because they have been such helpful tools to watch my personal finances stat changes.
2 Comments
![]() Blog Berry Juice is a triannual post where my squirtle and I treat one of my newer pokémon out to the Shuckle Shack to drink some berry juice and discuss the progress of The Grown-Up Pkmn Trainer. This post’s guest, Ribombee. First, let’s check out the blog’s stat summary. It has an average of 55 unique visitors a day, with an average of 150 visitors each weekend in April. The most popular posts continue to be the monthly financial reviews, although 4 Financial Weekly Events was the most read in April. The blog’s social media following seems to continue to grow. Instagram, the place to view all the blog’s art in one spot and learn about their backstories, has 62 followers. Twitter, the place to hear about post updates, read U-turn Tuesday posts and see Shadow Sneak Peeks, has 71 followers. Facebook, the place that announces when posts go live, has 35 follows. The subscription e-mails, which I send out right after a post goes live before any social media, has stabilized at 15 subscribers. Since the beginning of 2018, I feel as though my life has been probably the busiest it has been since grad school in 2012. My evenings have become filled with activism, community meetings, project planning, design work and catching up with friends. Near the end of March, I tried to pull back some, but then April continued strong. I enjoy it and am starting to juggle everything better with my blog. This business has defogged some blogging issues that I have been struggling with. Today, I want to address my struggles with missing postdates, relatining to topics, and daydreaming about other ways to grow the blog. ![]() Acronyms have become a part of our everyday life. We LOL while texting with friends. We pull our money out of the ATM. We trade our pokémon over the GTS. These shorthand abbreviations are acronyms, words or a group of letters that substitute for a group of words. With Who’s that Acronym? I pick an acronym that you may, or may not, have seen before, and explain what it stands for, what it is and where we may encounter it in the wild. For the first acronym of 2018, we take a look at ACH. ACH stands for Automated Clearing House. It is basically the most popular method of transferring money electronically between companies and people. It is most commonly compared to an electronic check. Most of my money uses ACH for paying my bills, loans, retirement and even my groceries. ACH is something that we may encounter as part of our daily lives and may never even know it’s there nor what it does. ![]() Welcome to the second week in April and it’s finally time for March’s Financial Review and Net Worth Update. For those who are new to The Grown-Up Pkmn Trainer, each month I write a financial review to xatu my net worth by writing down my thoughts on the previous and following months. I share these summaries so everyone can gain insight into my personal finances and my thoughts behind them. I started tracking my net worth to measure my progress, inspired by Budgets Are Sexy, which has helped me keep a keen eye on my personal finances. I have been tracking my net worth since January 2015 and writing monthly financial reviews for myself since 2016. I recommend both because they have been such helpful tools to watch my personal finances stat changes. ![]() As I have been growing up I have noticed that my weekly schedule seems very busy. Mondays I catch up with Monica, Wednesdays I have date night with my husband, and Fridays I watch the Nimbasa City Strikers. Every week, I have the same routine scatterbugged with meetings and social gathering here and there. My personal finances also have a weekly routine that lock-on to four different weekly events. Each week I schedule payments, check my checking account, purchase date night’s dinner and buy groceries. ![]() For the last two months, I have been attempting to discuss with my boss that I wanted to apply and replace my supervisor’s position. I felt as though I had a clear understanding of what the job is, what kind of commitment it requires and I could return 5 years company related experience back into the position. However, I needed to overcome my intimidation before I could talk to her. A widely held belief is that fear prevents us from reaching our goals. But, what about those situations when we have captured our fear but can’t seem to use that power yet? I consider intimidation is a feeling of not being afraid to move forward, but still feeling trapped behind an invisible wall, or light screen, that needs to brick broken through. Even when I don’t feel paralyzed, intimidation still weakens my attack power making it harder for me to accomplish my goals. ![]() Welcome to March and it’s time for February’s Financial Review and Net Worth Update. For those who are new to The Grown-Up Pkmn Trainer, each month I write a financial review to xatu my net worth by writing down my thoughts on the previous and following months. I share these summaries so everyone can gain insight into my personal finances and my thoughts behind them. I started tracking my net worth to measure my progress, inspired by Budgets Are Sexy, which has helped me keep a keen eye on my personal finances. I have been tracking my net worth since January 2015 and writing monthly financial reviews for myself since 2016. I recommend both because they have been such helpful tools to watch my personal finances stat changes. ![]() Lifestyle inflation is the process of how we adjust our spending when we suddenly have more money than we are accustomed to. Although lifestyle inflation can be handled responsibly, most of the time people refer to it as reckless spending and the habits created. I get it. It feels great to be able to reward ourselves by allowing us to do the things we deprive ourselves of. Buying lunch while at work, purchasing a new tv or even getting a massage in Veilstone City. If we don’t catch it early, these little rewards become part of our everyday lifestyle and can slowly damage our finances like a sand tomb. We are going to run into lifestyle inflation no matter what, and it is our job to prepare for it. Back in September, I received a $3/hour raise with the requirement to work a 40 hour week. This gave my weekly paychecks an approximate $100 boost, after taxes. Having an additional $400 a month to spend led to a sudden battle with lifestyle inflation. The way I battled and caught lifestyle inflation in five steps was to relax, aspire, reflect, strategize and stay calm. ![]() A hot topic that I see throughout the personal finance blogosphere is the concept of the side hustle. Side hustles, or side gigs as I call them, are jobs to earn some extra coin and are optional. Not to be confused with a second job, which is more of a necessity because the first job doesn’t pay enough to pay the bills, keep mouths fed and a roof overhead. For example, a popular side hustle in Alola is chucking pyukumuku back into the ocean. In Kalos, trainers can side hustle at the Hotel Richissime by making beds, hunting down lost items and helping with room service. These small, short tasks can earn a trainer extra money for just a little bit of time and are not necessary for completing the games. For real-world examples, J. Money, who has had a lot of experience with side hustles, has documented over 70 different side hustles to share with his readers at Budgets Are Sexy. Now, side gigs seem to be romanticized by the personal finance community as a great tool that can assist with our financial goals while also being fun. However, they also forget to mention that sometimes they share characteristics, and the added stress, of a second job. So today, I am going to share four returns and frustrations, or pros and cons, to explain why I like and dislike the side hustle. ![]() Welcome to February and just in time for the first post of the month, it’s time for January’s Review and Net Worth Update. For those who are new to The Grown-Up Pkmn Trainer, each month I write a financial review to xatu my net worth by writing down my thoughts on the previous and following months. I share these summaries so everyone can gain insight into my personal finances and my thoughts behind them. I started tracking my net worth to measure my progress, inspired by Budgets Are Sexy, which has helped me keep a keen eye on my personal finances. I have been tracking my net worth since January 2015 and writing monthly financial reviews for myself since 2016. I recommend both because they have been such helpful tools to watch my personal finances stat changes. |
Bag Pockets
All
Blog
|