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.

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.

Whether I am playing the video games, the trading card game or other RPGs, there comes a time when my naturally formed team needs direction and training.  This usually involves determining my team’s strategy and replacing the pokémon that doesn’t quite fit.  I am currently playing Ultra Sun and I determined that my lycanrock needs to be replaced.  Her low defenses cause her to faint before she does any damage.  Luckily there are many pokémon of different types and species that can fill her position on the team.
 
In Part I, I discussed that in June 2017 a sludge wave hit my financial pokémon team when our rent checks were stolen.  While recovering from the damage, I learned I misunderstood my team’s strategy.  I needed to replace my servine, nicknamed Income, with a Checking pokémon to strengthen my team.  That meant I had to replace my system of different bank accounts made up Income.  Just like the multiples of pokémon, there are also numerous types and species of financial accounts.  This is how I found the ones that worked best for my team.

​June 2017 started off like every other month. By the first Monday, I knew something was off because my rent check yet to clear.  This was unusual and my fiancé, at the time, called the landlord’s office.  They told him to not worry and check again on Friday.  On Wednesday, we received an e-mail notifying us our rent was late.  However, I saw earlier that morning that my rent check cleared.  After some odor sleuthing, we discovered our rent checks were stolen out of the mail and deposited.
 
The following two months were powdered with fraud claims paperwork, collecting documents and signatures, taking time off work to deal with it all and a wailmer of waiting.  The landlord’s office understood what happened and was very helpful, but we still owed them June’s rent.  We borrowed it from our wedding account and returned it once we got our money back from the bank at the end of July.  This annoying adventure became known as "June’s sludge wave" because of all the financial sludge that needed to be cleaned up after it hit.  It was a muked up mess.  I did some soul searching and exploration while cleaning, which eventually led me to restructure my financial pokémon team.
 
In Part I, I look at the damage the sludge wave caused and what I realized about how my team strategy.

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.

In Pokémon, a trainer travels collecting and training pokémon to battle other trainers.  In most of the regions, trainers compete in a league of eight gyms to receive badges.  Each badge grants the trainer a new license for using moves outside of battle and encourages their high-level pokémon to listen to them.  Once they have all eight badges, they can then battle the Elite Four for a chance to enter the hall of fame.  After earning their spot in the hall of fame, the league registers the trainer and their Pokémon and the credits begin.

In order to complete this journey, trainers must build a pokémon team of six pokémon.  The strategy of building a pokémon team becomes important to the team’s success.  The possibilities seem endless with over 800 known pokémon species and numerous differences between individuals within each species.   Trainers develop their teams in different ways, but all of them do so to win.
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The same is true for personal finances.  We use a financial management structure made of tools to help us manage our money.  I call this structure our Financial Pokémon Team.  We build our financial pokémon teams with a strategy that allows us to pay our bills, make purchases, afford trips and save for the future.  Having a financial management structure is as important to our personal finances as having a pokémon team is to playing Pokémon.

​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.

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 walk through my process of breeding a new budget with better stats.
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After a year of knowing nothing about personal finances I recognized my downfall and started to do research.  Thanks to the internet I discovered a lot of information.  I even started following my first financial blog Budgets Are Sexy.
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My personal finances were in need of a well-balanced financial pokémon team.  Being an Ace Trainer I knew that one method to building a strong team is to start with a strong base pokémon.  By the end of August, I decided that my budget would be that base pokémon.  September determined how I wanted my budget to function and how I wanted to breed my budget’s stats.