At the end of each month’s financial review, I have a section with a few notes about my net worth.  These notes reference things that I want to be clear body clear with my readers about.  I feel it is important to point out that my net worth only tracks my personal assets and liabilities and not my husband’s finances.  I don’t include his finances because we have not merged our finances.  Even with our recent wedding, we don’t see a reason for us to merge them right now.
 
Treating each other’s financial pokémon teams like we do our battling pokémon teams has been working well for us these past five years.  We discuss them often by talking about our problems, ideas and are open to making and listening to suggestions.  We understand the basics of each other’s team, how they function and each other’s strategies behind them.  When it comes to battling our finances, we do it individually and make the battling decisions ourselves.
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This works for us for various reasons. We have different strategies and goals.  Separate finances assist us when we are both freelancing.  Our current system is equal, fair and we trust each other to control our own teams.  Plus, we can always join forces for an occasional Multi Battle.

​The year of 2015 brought an evolution to how I saw my personal finances.  I had a strong budget that was flexible enough to adjust for a month out of town.  I also started working on my credit card relationship by limiting my spending with PP.  That Christmas season I over-swiped and I could visually see that I had no control over my Christmas spending.
 
A year later, I knew I needed to start preparing for Christmas earlier than I had the year before.  In October, I started odor sleuthing what I wanted to buy my family and started to build up a plan.  I used an Excel template to track my present ideas and the credit I used to purchase them.  I kept a keen eye out for deals and ended Holiday Season 2016 without using any extra PP.  This year I want to track a few more things with my Christmas budget level it up into an even more useful tool.

​Welcome to October!  The first week in October means that it’s time for September’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.

I did not like vegetables when I was a youngster.  I saw vegetables as a sign of maturity and adulthood.  I thought that if I liked vegetables it meant I was a grown-up.  Even when I got to college I resisted eating vegetables.  On Facebook, I made it clear body clear in my about me section that my diet was meat, grains, fat, and cheese.  However, if the vegetables were hidden in my food, like in pasta sauce, I would endure eating them.
 
As I started to actually behave more like an adult by started cooking for myself, I continued tricking myself into eating vegetables.  Whether I made spaghetti, enchilada hot dish or pizza, I found a way to shadow sneak them into the dish.  Yes, I knew they were in there and that I was going to eat them, but playing along with the facade helped me not feel like a grown-up.  Tricking myself into eating vegetables helped me eat vegetables at a time when I found it hard.  Today, I understand that I am a grown-up and I eat salads for lunch almost every workday.  I enjoy vegetables as a regular part of my diet.
 
My personal finances are similar.  My financial pokémon team tricks me into doing the things I know I should do but can’t quite do on my own.  Its tricks make sure I pay my credit card minimum payments, splits up my money, hides money in secret bases, absorbs extra interest, and steals money for saving.

Stress and anxiety are a natural part of being a human.  Although what causes our stress varies from person to person, money is one cause that I hear about a lot.
 
I am a natural worrier and money creates a lot of stress for many different reasons.  The way my debt uses growth to rapidly increase has been something I have battled with for years.  When I don’t work enough hours in a work week to meet my budgeted goal, I worry about paying all of my bills.  Waiting to see my new income-based student loan payment or rent increase gives me insomnia.  My stress peaks when I feel like my life is paralyzed simply because I do not have enough money right now.
 
The two main strategies I use for managing my money induced stress are distraction and reflection.  I use a variety of methods of each strategy when I start feeling the stress building.  These methods help me knock out the stress so I can recover and get back into the battle.

​Over the years I have defeated almost every region’s Elite Four with my starter pokémon as team captain*.  We ended each game together, just as we started it, until the more recent games.  In Omega Ruby, I deposited my swampert into the pc early during the game.  In Sun, a traded incineroar has become my team captain*.  What changed?

Well, recently I noticed a phenomenon I refer to as starter pokémon syndrome.  It’s when I blindly make my starter pokémon team captain without researching other possible options.  I would make the decision based only on loyalty to my starter pokémon, and not use other research to validate my decision was best for my team.

Starter pokémon syndrome also happens in real life too.  Take my starter bank, for example.  Over 16 years I blindly opened two checking accounts, two savings accounts, and a credit card.  Once I realized what was happening, I was able to research a better option to make my financial pokémon team stronger.

Welcome to September!  The first week in September means that it’s time for August’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.

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…