Become Financially Free with Me!
Hello 2 blog readers!
Sorry for the very long delay between blog posts. The holiday season has really taken over all of my free time…funny enough many of my free blocks of time are disappearing without things being crossed off the list. Not SURE what’s going on there. Anyhoo, I want to continue with FIRE status reports, since that is the reason I’m doing this blog…to keep myself in check! Continue reading “2 Months of FIRE – Status Report”
The first 10 days of November have been a bit of a struggle in terms of sticking to my budget. As you may know if you’ve been reading my blog, I use YNAB for budgeting. YNAB forces you to only budget money you have. Which is great when you are trying to reduce spending beyond your means. However, I have never tried to only budget for money I have. It’s so common sense but also so revolutionary…which makes no sense I realize. Continue reading “Sticking to a Budget”
If you’ve been following along in my FIRE journey, you know that I’ve started the ball rolling by reducing our family expenses. I’ve invested $84 USD to access the budgeting tool at youneedabudget.com (YNAB), since I’ve had a great experience so far with the 34 day trial (currently on day 33). This post is NOT sponsored by YNAB!
The tool itself doesn’t “save you money”. However what it does do is change your mindset. Continue reading “The Power of YNAB – A Newbie Review”
So…Hubs and I were supposed to have a budget meeting last night to set up a brand new budget in youneedabudget.com (YNAB). Wellllll it didn’t happen. Mainly because Hubs has a man cold. Is that sexist? He’s a man, he has a cold. I feel “man cold” is a reasonable way to refer to it. If you make any other assumptions based on this term, it’s not my problem, right?
ANYWAY, I mentioned “budget meeting” while he was laying on the couch watching Youtube. I got the dirtiest of the dirty looks. Continue reading “Supposed follow up Budget Meeting”
One thing that YNAB is good at is making you obsessed with budgeting. I am in there literally 10 times a day. I must say the web version seems much more user friendly than the app, though this could be my inexperience talking. Regardless, it really works to laser focus your budget efforts. Dare I say it, adjusting budget values and categorizing transactions is kind of fun. I get excited when i see there are transactions to import. I think I may be getting old. Continue reading “YNAB (You Need a Budget) Update – Week 2”
This week, my efforts are focused on getting a handle on our expenses. Simply identifying them and following a budget to try to reduce discretionary spending. I felt like this was a priority to achieve FIRE.
My friend recently introduced me to a tool she was using called YNAB – WORST name ever, but it stands for “You Need A Budget”. Which we do. HA! Anyway, I decided to sign up for a trial account at YNAB.com. So far, I’ve been using YNAB religiously for 2+ weeks, and it’s going very well. I feel I have much better awareness of where our money is going (and where it’s being wasted on lower priority things).
Side note: if online subscriptions aren’t really your thing, and you’d rather do your budget “old school” on paper or in a spreadsheet, you can still learn and follow YNAB principles by reading the book “You Need a Budget“, written by the creator Jesse Mecham.
A few lessons learned so far… Continue reading “Week 1 of FIRE – Focus on Expenses”
