​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.