With the dawn of a new year approaching, the chances are that you will be thinking about your new year’s resolutions. However, you don’t want those flash in a pan promises that fail by the second week in January. You might want to get fit, but you never go to the gym. You might want…
Welcome to another edition of financial analogies Mel thinks about while swimming. If you also swim, or like parallels between fitness and finance, check out these other posts: How Running Is Like Personal Finance – Part I How Running is Like Personal Finance – Part II How Running is Like Personal Finance – Part III…
Anyone born post-1990s, you have or you will grow up using computers as if they were second nature. We don’t even think twice about it. How alien our world is to all previous generations. With this new world come a few challenges that we have to understand in order to defeat. Online safety is an…
When I started this blog, I was finishing off paying my student loans, working for a company that I sometimes still refer to as the “evil empire,” dating a guy I figured I was probably going to wind up marrying someday, and perpetually stressed about not having much money or feelings of financial security. Nowadays,…
Pexels Children learn through you. They replicate how you act. For example, it might be that when waiting at the school gates to pick our children up at the end of a long day, we hear one of their classmates swear, despite only being around six or seven years old. We know this feels odious…
I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about how easy it is to get derailed from our goals. Personal finance aside, I’ve been doing a little better about going to the gym this month. 90% of the time if I go between the hours of 11:30-3:30, the pool is pretty empty. 10% of the time,…
I would venture to say that a solid 50% of my blog is just crap. It’s sponsored posts. It’s crap I wrote at 7:30 am upon realizing I was about to miss a set post time in 30 minutes. It’s half baked raw ideas. Another 25% fall into the actual half-baked area. There’s a line or…
Image via Pexels The single most powerful attribute you can have in your life is enthusiasm. People with passion stand out. They inspire others. And they have the type of influence that creates amazing opportunities. And enthusiasm can work in an almost vital way – when you think back about occasions in your life where…
When I first started this blog, I wrote a lot of posts about debt and flailing around, trying to make ends meet, because that was where I was. Lately, I seem to write more travel tips and worth the splurge articles because that’s where I am. On the broke to rich spectrum, I’m firmly in…
Image Credit We’ve all been there. Life has been going pretty well. We are feeling optimistic, and everything seems to be in hand. It could be said that we’re taking life in our stride. But then something comes along and trips us up. It might be bad news that we can’t predict. Some things are,…
Pixabay We spend the majority of our lives engaged in a tension between what we have and what we want. What we have, for the most part, is a decent income and some money in savings. What we want is a gigantic stock portfolio, monthly dividend payments in the tens of thousands of dollars, a…
Lately, you may have found yourself daydreaming more than usual about a number of goals you’d like to accomplish in life. While you’re generally happy with your life and how things are going, you also have this nagging sense you can do, see and experience more in life. At the same time, you know you…
Image Credit When something tragic happens in our lives, it can take the wind out of our sails. You might have everything in hand and feel as though you are on top of life, and then something occurs to emotionally catapult you to places you don’t want to be. This kind of setback could come…
An issue that a lot of people have is that they’re afraid of taking sick days unless they’re physically incapable of hauling themselves out of bed. But this generally isn’t the smartest thing to do: you should remember that if you don’t feel great, and if you are able to take the day off, you…
Not that long ago, I interviewed with an opera company that sent me part of a score and asked me 8,000 (or what felt like 8,000) questions about it over the phone as part of my interview to prove I could read music. I stumbled through the entire interview. I did not get the job.…
In November, I wrote a post about sabbaticals and I can report – the average Mel can afford to take a Sabbatical – as of right now. The return to the rat race is considerably more unclear than when I left the job in December. I also wound up with a tons and tons of…
It can be done! I feel like I have two modes – DO ALL THE THINGS and DO NONE OF THE THINGS. My brother and I were just chatting about the fact that there are both times when we’re at home and work is slow that we just turn into total sloths. We lose the…
Healing an injury can take a lot of time. Sometimes it just takes as long as it takes, and there’s nothing you can do to speed it up. If you try to rush it and go back to your day to day activities too quickly, you could end up causing more serious, permanent damage. That…
I had a crazy conversation with a friend lately about a major reach job I kind of wanted and he just pishawed me and essentially said of course I’m going to get it because I’m me. I looked at him as though he’d lost his mind and changed the course of the conversation, but I’ve…
If you have to be out of work for a long time because of an injury or long-term illness, it can be a particularly worrying circumstance which you would probably rather not to have to worry about. Of course, there is plenty that you can do to try and make the most of it, and…
I know some people who just thrive in a whirling dervish of chaos. I am not one of those people. I spent the last month in Milwaukee really upset that I hadn’t brought my 2019 calendar with me because I was trying to book and organize things and suddenly felt really overwhelmed that I couldn’t…
Folks, I have tried a lot of different tactics to get my financial life in order, some with little difficulty but big payouts (like setting up a budget at the beginning or continually tracking my net worth), others with questionable payouts (no spend months, buying meat in dollar stores, mystery shopping). At the end of the…
Nobody likes to be faced with a bad situation, but you aren’t going to be able to get through life without having to deal with one or two of them. But is definitely hard at some points, and it’s no doubt the situations that we have to deal with that make it 10x worse. But…
Why Financial Independence Matters to Me I moved to the U.S. at the age of 18 to enroll in a four-year college. The first day of school, all the American kids in my dorm had their parents help them move their gazillion belongings into their rooms. As I did all the unpacking myself (all my…
https://unsplash.com/photos/n6judbg4SOY In life, we all have things we want, things we hope for, an idea of what our lives should be. Even if you’re someone that doesn’t think you have goals, you do. Because you’ll have thought about the house you want to, or the career you want, or the future you want for your…