​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.

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.

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…

Four weeks from now, I’ll be a married Grown-Up Pokemon Trainer.  We will be packing our bags, saying our farewells to our friends and family, and wrapping up our whirlwind of a wedding weekend.

That’s then, but this is now.  And right now, I’m in what I refer to the week before tech week for our wedding.  We are starting to feel the pressure as we complete our finishing touches and finalizing details.  We are behind on some parts and ahead on others, but we have been through event planning before and know it will all work out.  As for the financial part, our main strategy to keep our budget in check is priority spending.

A lot of people use the website/app Mint to help them manage their personal finances.  Mint is a simple, one-stop shop for people to see the current status of their finances.  A user connects their bank accounts, credit cards, loans, investments and bills to it.  Once connected, Mint can create graphs and other ways to help their users understand their money.

Mint also has a bunch of systems set up to assist their users with their money.  It’s like a chikorita using aromatherapy to restore health to a person’s finances.  With all of their shell bells and grass whistles, I did not find their aromatherapy helpful and canceled my future appointments.
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I tried it for at least three months and did not find it useful to me.  Not all of my accounts could connect, there was too much red, my own systems were better for me and I rarely checked it.  I am sure it has improved in the past two years, but I think I’m fine without it for the moment.

​Budgets are like pokémon.  They are great tools to help us through our journey and reach our goals.  This four-part series takes a look at my budgeting history and my journey to finding my current budget.

In part one, I shared my experiences of how my budgeting developed over the decade before moving to New York City.
In part two, I shared the challenging battles from my first year living in New York City and my wins and losses.
In part three, I shared my process for breeding my new budget.

In part four, I count up through my budget’s biggest level-milestones as we have been training together.  These milestones highlight the moments in my budget’s training when I noticed it become stronger or demonstrate its strength.

​In Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, trainers were introduced to a resume feature that reminded the player of the last few things they did the last time they played the game.  This feature evolved into the journal in Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum.  What I loved about these features was how helpful they were if I picked up a game after not playing for a while.  Gone were the days of being confused why my last save was on a mountain with one pokémon at level 60, three pokémon at level 16 and two of the same pokémon at level 1.
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This feature did not last long, which disappointed me because I like records and notes.  I mostly just like keeping open memory in my head for other information if I don’t need it there and there is someplace outside of my head almost as safe.  It may play into the millennial stereotype, but I think it just makes sense.  I currently use four different methods to store my personal finance information: my financial diary, my net worth spreadsheet, my student loan notebook and my bill books.