This Blog Berry Juice marks the end of the second tertile of 2017.  This is my opportunity to xatu about the progress of The Grown-Up Pkmn Trainer.

It has an average of over 35 unique visitors a day, with an average of over 300 unique views every weekend.  The most popular posts are still the monthly financial reviews and net worth updates.  At the time of posting, there are 52 people following on Instagram, 56 people following on Twitter, 36 people following on Facebook, and 13 people subscribed to the weekly emails.

Recently my husband and I threw a big party and invited a number of friends and family.  Our wedding was such a fun celebration of our love and commitment to one another.  Since we are both theatrical designers and have designed, planned, prepared and opened numerous large shows, we thought planning a wedding couldn’t be much different.  For the most part, it wasn’t.  The biggest differences were that the wedding happens just once, we were the actors who never got to see the show and the stress affected me differently than show stress usually does.  The stress levels were the same, but my moody emotions made it more draining than usual.  I needed extra recovery time to relax, slakoth and do nothing.  The wedding planning and recovery time steamrolled everything I hoped to accomplish with this blog four months ago.
 
With that in mind, I look in the past and toward the next four months, and it looks busy.  There are a bunch of events, a honeymoon and the release of Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.  It still appears less stressful than wedding planning, and I want to keep it that way.  This is my plan for what moves to continue making with my blog for the next four months, with a few small, additional things.

It’s back-to-school season again, which means tons of sales and discounts.  It also means another class of high school students is making their transition into life as an adult.  Some are brave birding right into the work force, which is awesome!  Others need a little more training and education and are flying to college first.
 
I headed to college because I enjoyed learning and felt I needed more education to find my career path.  College is a great time to learn about ourselves as students, trainers, and young adults.
 
Today, I want to share a few tips based on what I have learned since graduating college.  I think they can help any college student refresh their personal finances.

Since today is my wedding day, I have a guest post from a fire blast from the past, Breeder Tojo.
 
I wrote this essay back in 2008 as an assignment for my Sociology class.  We were to write about our hypothetical lives where we worked at Walmart, the apparent standard of low-income jobs, (eye rollout) and had a take home pay of $800 a month.
 
First, I must inform you that besides a little reformatting, the essay remains mostly unedited.  Reading it now, I can see it is horribly written, terribly edited and just reads like someone trying to meet a page requirement.  It also seems poorly researched and really whiny.  I hope that my writing has changed a lot since then. (Please let me know if it hasn’t.)
 
It is an interesting look into my 21-year-old mindset to see what I understood about personal finances.  I just really had no clue.  It reminds me of a trainer battling without understanding pokémon types.  They know how to cause damage, but they don’t understand why the same attack’s strength differs when attacking different pokémon.
 
Enjoy…

​Welcome to August!  The first week in August means that it’s time for July’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 pay closer attention to my personal finances.  I have been tracking my net worth since January 2015 and writing monthly financial reviews for myself since 2016.  I recommend tracking net worth because it has been such a helpful tool to see my personal finances stat changes all in one place.