As a trainer, I like to always have a good set of poké balls with me. I never know when I’ll need to grab one to catch an unknown pokémon and help make my team stronger. Once I catch a pokémon, I learn all about them by battling with them and by entering their info in my pokédex. Then when I encounter them again in battle, I understand how to defeat them and how they may hold me back. I feel that a common struggle with personal finance is that fear and anxiety act like unknown Pokémon. Fears of not knowing how much debt someone has or needing to cut back can hold people back. Once we enter them in our "feardex", we start to understand how they hold us back. We just need to have the poké balls to stand up and catch our fears so we can make them our own.
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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. I always thought being a grown-up would be amazing! But now that I am one, I realize it’s hard. Growing up is universally hard for people of all ages. Every stage of life has their hardships. I hear every day how someone can’t lift that or eat this anymore. Children have to learn to walk, talk, use the big kid potty and eventually do homework. What I find makes growing up so hard for me is the never-ending challenge to improve my life. Navigating a career, starting a family and keeping myself healthy are just a few of my everyday challenges. Personal finances are a big enough challenge for me, they get their own sentence, blog and section in my RSS reader. I do not claim to be an expert with personal finances. If you have seen my net worth, you may have noticed there is a lot of regeneration to be done, and I am working on it. As with being an Ace Trainer, I know that in order to improve, I don’t need to be afraid of losing. I just need to learn from the winners and figure out what works for me. When I was a Youngster, I started a savings account to help teach me about banks and personal finances. At the time I thought banks were an important part of everyday society, like Pokémon Centers. For those of you who don’t know, pokémon centers play a major role in pokémon society and culture. They are a place where trainers bring their pokémon to restore their health, store excess pokémon, offer areas for trainers to connect and all for free. Every town or city, no matter the size, has at least one. Some are even located outside of towns on routes and near caves. In my mind, banks were a lot like pokémon centers. They kept our money safe, made trades easier, helped our finances stay healthy, everybody used them and they were free! Before heading to college I opened my first checking account. Over the following ten years, I slowly learned that banks are not pokémon centers. Yes, they both provide storage and make trading easier, but banks are actual businesses. They can only heal our finances so much for free and they all offer different services to do that. 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. 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. 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. 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 look at the challenging battles from my first year living in New York City and my close wins and loses. Moving to New York City was the beginning of a new game generation of my life and my first year was really exciting and had a lot of wins. I made a whole new batch of friends. I fell in love with my now fiance. It was my first year out of school where I got to put my master’s degree into practice and live life as a grown-up. I worked 11 out of 12 months shopping, assisting and designing. I designed costumes for a total of eight shows and assisted a costume designer on a Broadway show. My budget was fighting an eventually losing battle. I knew moving to a very expensive city and I would have to adjust my lifestyle for a higher cost of living. However, my budget wasn’t able to adjust and evolve fast enough to counter the challenges that were to come. 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 look at how my budgeting developed and changed as I grew up over the decade before moving to New York City. “Early” Education The first time I remember understanding the concept of personal finance was as a Schoolboy Trainer working on my Personal Management merit badge for the Boy Scouts. It taught me about budgeting, saving and how to purchase daily necessities and one time purchases. I learned about the envelope system and about tracking expenses in a book. I have learned so much from the Pokémon games that have been able to baton pass into real life. Here are just five of the lessons I have learned from the game and how I see they pertain to personal finances. Networking In the game, we meet a lot of people. We talk to everyone because we don’t know who is going to be the one to give us a special item, trade a pokémon or introduce us to other characters. Through this networking, we meet very important people. Before we know it, we’re chatting with the president of Devon Corp., the makers of most of the specialty pokéballs, about his son. It is so flattering to learn that these VIPs have already heard about us and have been looking forward to our meeting! Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah! As 2016 closes and 2017 opens, people start to act like xatu and resolution season begins. Xatuing, or what I will call reflecting on the past and looking into the future, tends to create goals as a way to improve the future. I adore New Year’s resolutions! As such, I now xatu at different points throughout the year to keep the improvements going all year long! The Big New Year’s Resolution I like to give myself a big New Year'srResolution. It is usually something to strive for over the whole year that may hopefully become a natural habit. My resolution for 2016 was to not purchase any plane tickets without using actual money. My goal was to work on my moody credit card relationship by using actual cash to immediately pay for the plane tickets. |
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