The 7 Personal Finance Articles We Love This Week
This has been an interesting week for me financially, because a $638 charge appeared on my credit card bill from my health insurance company. My monthly payment is about $212 a month, and I was somewhat less than pleased to be charged an additional $426. I called the company, and they immediately apologized for the mistake and told me it would be rectified by next week. It’s not that this charge is crippling; I don’t have a payment due on my credit card for another few weeks, and I am not close to my limit. But nonetheless, it was a financial shock, and I don’t love seeing my credit card balance be roughly $400 more than it should be.
I think I am always someone who is prone to freak out about something (financial or otherwise) if there is anything to freak out about. It’s definitely one of my weaknesses. In other words, there are the types of people who stress about inevitable occurrences, and then there are the people who stay calm about them, and I’m definitely the former. I let money stress creep up on me, when I should be level-headed enough to rationally find a solution and then move on without allowing it to consume my thoughts. That’s something I’ve been working on this week, so when I was reading through Rockstar Finance‘s weekly personal finance article picks, the post about the 100-day challenge resonated with me. The concept for a 100-day challenge is simple: “for 100 days, focus on engaging in one activity for 100 days in a row.” The piece provides several examples of challenges you could tackle in order to implement a new habit, and for me, I think this would be an interesting way to form a “combatting stress” habit. One of the author’s suggestions is to meditate for 100 days straight. I am sort of a meditation failure, but I could try taking three deep breaths before I respond to any stressful situation for 100 days straight. Or I could try reading one positive affirmation every day for 100 days straight.
As with the 100 days piece, I really enjoyed the selection below because I found that even if I didn’t want to fully implement some of the strategies these pieces advocate for, I could find small parts of them that would better my financial life. For example, even though I’m probably not going to reach financial independence (not needing to work) by 30, the advice in the financial independence article is still applicable to my spending and saving habits. Anyway, these are just a few of my reactions to the following seven articles, and I look forward to hearing all of your thoughts, too. Here are the seven PF articles we love this week, courtesy of Rockstar Finance:
1. How to Earn 1/3 Less but be 3x Richer — Nat Eliason
“Before you get too wedded and enticed by a certain salary, think about what savable income you’re going to have, and the lifestyle you’ll get with it.”
2. 10 Guidelines to Financial Independence — 1500 Days
“These are principals that you can grow into and work towards. It doesn’t matter where you are in your life right now. We all have to start somewhere.”
3. The Difference Between FU Money and FU, Money! — Think Save Retire
“This is the category designed for financial badasses, where money is so immaterial relative to your lifestyle that you don’t give it a lot of thought… Basically, you have money figured out to the point where you’ve effectively made it your b*tch.”
4. Becoming the Uncool Adult I Told Myself I’d Never Be — Mixed Up Money
“Sounds to me like the person I never wanted to become, is now the person I look up to and admire. Personal finance, you have changed me. And I’ll never forget it.”
5. The 100 Day Challenge — Rich Habits
“Focus on engaging in one activity for 100 days in a row. By the end of the 100 days that daily activity will become a daily habit… Here are some ideas for your personal 100 Day Challenge.”
6. Why Don’t You Have Enough Money? — The Smarter Dollar
“A few weeks back I emailed 236 of you and asked this question: ‘What’s your biggest frustration about money?’ I received 73 responses… here are the results.”
7. Convergence — The Yachtless
“Moments like these — moments when my alternate life and my actual life suddenly and temporarily unite into a single entity — are what I would call points of convergence. I experience points of convergence every day, even many times per day.”
