Being told to save more money is often frustrating. You intuitively know that spending less than you make is a good thing, but often life gets in the way. The car needs a new battery, an appliance breaks down, the dog gets sick, and the savings you thought you had suddenly go away in an instant. Does this sound a little too familiar? At the end of the day, if you wait for everything to be “perfect” before you start saving money, you will be waiting forever. Life will always throw punches our way; that is a fact. The good news is we are in complete control of how we respond to those punches. There are plenty of straightforward and practical ways to save money regardless of your financial situation. They might not feel like you are getting anywhere or making a significant enough dent, but a slight change made daily has a dramatic impact on your future. Here are 12 practical tips to save more money and get you a little extra breathing room in your budget and your life.

1) Shop in Bulk.

Stores like Costco and Sam’s have their business models wholly based on customers buying in bulk. When buying in bulk, the number one thing to consider is that it’s not the price of the item you should focus on; it’s the price per unit (or ounce) that really makes a difference. My wife and I have been buying diapers from Sams Club, and we have reduced our unit price from $.25 to $.11 per diaper. This may not seem like a substantial savings amount, but she used 12 diapers a day for the first three months of her life. That’s a significant amount of diapers! By dropping the unit price by a little over half, we were able to get a savings of $151.20 just on diapers alone!

As long as the expiration date of the items you are buying you feel confident will be used by that date, buying in bulk can save you a substantial amount in the long run!

2) Coupons! Coupons! Coupons!

When used efficiently, coupons are one of the most practical tips to save more of your money. Couponing for my wife and I have become a way of life. I’m not sure we have paid full price for anything in our house. If it is not on sale, we aren’t buying it. It’s as simple as that. The average couponer, which is defined as using at least one coupon in a 30 day period, averaged a savings of $36.80 a month, which equates to an annual savings of $441.60.

Sites like Ibotta, RetailMeNot, Honey, and Groupon are just a few examples of ways to get great savings very easily.

3) Just Because It Is On Sale Doesn’t Mean You Should Buy It.

This might be the most effective of all of the practical tips to save more of your money on this list.

Do you know what’s cheaper than purchasing something on sale? Surprisingly the answer is not a better sale—it is not buying the item in the first place. Often this is a lot easier said than done though, especially if your money archetype enjoys spending.

If sales are traps for you to spend more money, knowing that about yourself is half the battle! Try some of our budgeting methods to ensure that the savings you get are not chains you are putting on yourself.

4) Compare Insurance Policies

Shopping and comparing insurance policies can be a total pain. It can feel challenging to look through all the options and find a policy that works for you. Fortunately, that’s where sites like Policy Genius come into play! Policy Genius users report an average savings of $690 a year by switching their coverage. They make it easy to compare policies, and the savings are substantial. At least take a look because you may be paying more than you need to!

5) Check Your Recurring Expenses

It seems like everyone is offering a subscription these days. It is almost scary how easy it is to pay for multiple different subscriptions such as Netflix, Hulu, Apple Music, gym memberships, Amazon Prime, etc. These prices are manageable individually, but when stacked together, the cost starts to add up.

It’s healthy and necessary to cancel any subscriptions you don’t use regularly. It may feel daunting even to know what subscriptions you have, and if that’s the case, I recommend TrueBill. They can track and let you see all your subscriptions for free in one place!

6) Compare Phone and Internet Plans

Depending on where you live, this may not be entirely possible because you might only have one provider that will service the area. However, if you live in a city, make sure you compare the cost of phone and internet plans. By eliminating data plans, phone insurance, and unneeded warranties, you can save a substantial amount on your bill.

Also, think about sharing a family plan with friends to cut back on the cost because they typically offer discounts with more than one phone line. This way, everybody wins!

7) Cut The Cord

The average monthly price for cable TV is over $217 a month, equating to $2,604 a year. With how expensive TV has gotten, the cut the cord revolution that is occurring is of no surprise to anyone. There are so many alternatives to cable, thanks to streaming services like youtube, Hulu, etc…

The goal of cutting the cord is to save money, so only purchase a subscription you will use. It is very easy to have ten streaming services with prices over what it would cost for cable if you aren’t careful. But if you are diligent, you can dramatically increase your margin with one or two streaming providers while not sacrificing any of your entertainment value.

8) Stop Buying Brand Names.

One of the most effective on our list of practical tips to save money is to ditch brand names and buy generic. Almost every major retailer has a value brand that is highly comparable to its Name brand partner at fractions of the cost. This goes from everything from medicine, food, cleaning supplies, etc. 99 times out of 100, you are just buying the marketing of the brand name rather than a superior product. Yes, the logo may be cool, but your savings are far superior to any logo.

9) Cook Your Meals.

The average family in the United States spends roughly $3,526 each year on food outside of the home. That’s almost $300 a month on eating out! It is so easy and convenient to buy food on your way home from work, or if you are just simply too tired to cook after a long day, bringing dinner home is often the choice.

By budgeting and cooking your own meals, you can save and eat better on a regular basis! For the cost of a dinner out, you can have steak for a few meals at home. It’s more cost-effective, better for you, and will produce financial margin in your lives without too much sacrifice.

10) DIY Time.

Yes, it is sweat equity time! Thanks to youtube and a quick google search, you can practically learn how to do any home project for a fraction of the cost. Want to learn how to tile, add a deck, fix your brake light, and change your car’s oil? Youtube can help with all of these things, and your savings will be substantial.

My good friend has a Costco membership, and he profits from it every year just by buying oil and following a youtube video to learn how to change his car’s oil. By rolling up your sleeves, how much you can save and learn is remarkable!

11) Bye-bye, Starbucks!

Yup. I went there. This is a tough one for many of us coffee addicts out there. Unfortunately, the math doesn’t lie to us. The $5 daily cup of coffee adds up to over $150 a month! We can still enjoy coffee; we just need to work smarter, not harder.

By buying local beans and a quality coffee maker, your return on investment will still be much quicker than buying a cup of joe, and the savings over the long run will be substantial.

12) Sell old stuff (well, really anything that doesn’t bring your joy!)

My wife loves Marie Kondo. There was a period in life when that was all we had on tv, but you know what? She has the right idea. Clutter causes stress in your life, and by selling things you don’t need, you gain a little cash plus peace of mind.

From personal experience, my own home feels like a magnet for unwanted stuff. My wife and I regularly go through our home and get rid of things that we don’t even know how, when, or where we got them. The best feeling we have is decluttering our home from unwanted or unneeded things, plus the extra cash is always a nice bonus.

The post 12 Practical Tips to Save More Of Your Money appeared first on Affording Freedom.

Why are we constantly pursuing money? Do we want money for money’s sake? Does money guarantee happiness, and is the pursuit of money a goal worth pursuing? We put a lot of pressure on our ability to make money. Sure we need to make money to live and provide for our families; I’m not saying that’s not important. But somehow, along the way, we lose sight of ourselves. Money becomes more important than our values or, maybe more accurately, becomes our only value. Money at its core is only a tool, and a tool is only as effective as the person who’s holding it. Our behaviors dictate our actions, our thoughts dictate our identity, and our identity influences our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us.

Simply put, we can make all the money in the world, but if we don’t work on ourselves and have the proper perspective, it won’t mean anything. When you work on yourself, everything else comes into place. Investing in yourself is the best investment you’ll ever make. Having all the money in the world won’t provide happiness or freedom unless we can see money for what it is, a tool at our disposal. It is not the solution; we are the solution. It is time for you to change your perspective.

Key principles for changing your perspective

1) Let go of the illusion of control

We all constantly thirst for control, which can be highly useful in life; taking responsibility for our actions and being accountable is a great thing, but not accepting the reality of how much we can control leads to disaster. What we believe we can control directly impacts our identity. If we can control outcomes and the outcomes are “bad,” we have failed. In order to change our perspective, we need to understand what we can really control, which spoiler alert isn’t very much.

When we sit back and think about it, what do we actually control in our lives? Can we control how others perceive us or our actions? What about the weather, the stock market, whether we get the promotion, and our relationships? The reality is most of life’s outcomes are out of our control. So the question is, what do we control?

We only have direct control of how we choose to respond to a given situation and our conscious thoughts towards people or situations. Financial and personal peace begins with releasing what you don’t have control over and mastering what you do.

Let’s get practical. Let’s say you are going for a promotion at work. Are you in control of getting the promotion? Sure, you have influence over the promotion by how hard you work and your job performance, but ultimately you do not decide whether or not you get the promotion. So focusing on the promotion is wasting time on what you should be focusing on, bettering yourself. Anytime something we want is outside of our control, our answer should be to look inward, and finances are no exception. To get what we want, we must focus on what we can control.

2) Replacing Trying with Training

I think I use and hear the word try in some form at least 100 times a day. “I tried my best.” “I’ll try and do better.” “I am trying to stick to this diet, but it’s just so hard.”

According to the Merriam-webster dictionary, try is defined as “to make an effort to do something: to attempt to accomplish or complete something.” We need to completely get rid of the mindset of trying. Trying implies an action that is not in line with your identity. When we say try, we leave it up to willpower which will inevitably run out. Trying also is glued to a specific pass or fail outcome. (add more)

We don’t want to try on anything of importance.

Instead, we want to train. Training is defined as “to teach so as to make fit, qualified, or proficient: to make prepared.” Training is connected to your identity. If you try to run a marathon, the odds are you will fail. If you train for a marathon, you will succeed. Our mindset is critical, and we need to be people who train.

The same is true in finances. If you try to get out of debt and become financially free, the road will be difficult. If you train yourself to be a financially free person, you will inevitably become financially free. To learn more about what makes people financially truly free, check out this article on the seven characteristics that all financially independent people share.

3) Embrace and Accept rather than avoid Avoid and Deny

Self-awareness is critical to changing our perspective. If we don’t understand our typical patterns when handling difficult or stressful situations, we don’t give ourselves a chance to overcome them in the future. We like to think of ourselves as self-aware people, but our actions and thoughts often don’t support this narrative.

It is natural to avoid and deny problems, but unfortunately, problems thrive in the dark. When we face a difficult or stressful situation, we will typically avoid or deny it, and sometimes if we are really on top of our A-game, we do both. It feels more comfortable not facing the unknown head-on and challenging ourselves to endure. This is especially true in our financial lives. We are on the edge of bankruptcy, but we refuse to make any changes. We don’t want to take a look at our spending habits because it is too scary to face the mountain of debt.

The first step in dealing with any problem is accepting that the problem is there in the first place. The second thing we must do to change our perspective is to realize that the obstacle in front of us is the way forward. I love how Marcus Aurelius puts it, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Every obstacle provides us a unique opportunity to grow and improve ourselves and the world around us, or it can be another stumbling block that we can’t overcome. The major shift occurs when you realize that you get to choose which way you want to look at it, and that choice will dramatically affect every area of your life.

The post The Art of Savings — It’s All About Perspective appeared first on Affording Freedom.

I think almost everyone understands it is essential to save. We all have a general idea of what it means to save. We dream about what the savings would bring, and we have so many things to save for like retirement, emergencies, kids’ college, the list goes on and on. Yet, when we take a look at our finances, we often fall short. Is it a lack of priority, not acknowledging our situation, bad luck, poor decisions? Well, I would say a little of some and more of others. What we need is to understand the art of saving. The true art of saving is more than just practical tips on how to save money. It is a total transformation of how we look, feel, and think about money.

The lens through which we view money directly affects our behaviors and ability to generate long-term wealth. Typically, we associate money with status and fulfillment. Once we have enough, we will be worthy of respect, and we can indeed be happy. The problem is money doesn’t solve all of our problems. It is a great tool, but just a tool nevertheless.

If money could solve all of our problems, then why do we feel like enough really never is enough? The real problem is that we don’t think about money in a healthy way. Our mind controls our behaviors, and our behaviors dictate our financial future.

In order to master the art of savings and live in true freedom, we need to take ownership of our journey.

Embrace The Journey

We have all seen the rather corny but very true bumper sticker, “It is about the journey, not the destination.” What does that really mean in our pursuit of freedom and, more specifically, to the art of saving?

So often, we only focus on the end destination with our money and even our freedom. Our goals are not to be a truly financially free person but to have the newest car or gadget available. It is not rooted in identity but rooted in things.

From my personal experience and research, I have found that goals that focus on direct outcomes associated with them are much harder to keep and don’t provide sustainable change compared to goals that affect your identity and focus entirely on the process.

When we make our process the goal and the goal the process, we are living perfectly in balance and can take whatever life throws at us. What’s fantastic about this mind shift is your goals are just byproducts of embracing your journey and process. If your goals are not pushing you towards your objective, what is the goal’s purpose? If you are pulling yourself to the goal, that requires willpower which will fail eventually by no fault of your own. When you have an identity change, your identity pushes you towards the change you are looking for.

Let’s break this down a little further. Let’s say I am overweight (which, thanks to Covid quarantine, definitely applies to me right now), and I want to lose weight. I can go about my weight loss journey in two distinct ways.

Outcome-Based Goals:

The first way, outcome-based goals, is the more traditional western approach and methodology. In this approach, I will set a goal of losing 25 pounds. Everything I do will be focused on getting my scale weight down 25 pounds from my current weight.

This method can be effective, especially in the short term, but it also comes with a few problems. If you focus solely on the number, how do you handle plateaus, setbacks, failures, all things inevitable in your journey? Also, what happens when you do reach your goal of losing 25 pounds? Once I have lost 25 pounds, I have accomplished my goal; so, what is to stop me from gaining weight and doing this all over again? I can almost promise you that the weight you lost is coming back not because of your effort but because of a lack of actual identity change.

Athletes keep their physique up because they are rooted in their identity as an athlete. The problem is as soon as they are not athletes, they typically gain weight quickly. Why? Did they forget how to work out and eat healthily? Nope, their identity is no longer as an athlete, so the actions of eating and working out quickly fall off.

Process/Identity-Based Goals:

The second and better method is to make your goal centered around your identity. To do this, your goal must be rooted in your identity, not just a simple checklist or outcome you are searching for. When you know who you are, you know what to do. Battles are fought first in our minds, and when you change your identity, your brain will do everything in its power to affirm and keep that identity.

Let’s go back to our weight loss example. When we apply this framework to weight loss, instead of our goal being I want to lose 25 pounds which is focused on the outcome; our goal is to be a healthy and fit person. Healthy people work out, don’t eat four cheeseburgers at dinner, get enough sleep, and healthy people work on themselves. When we suddenly change our identity, we know what needs to be done, and living according to our identity seems easy.

The beauty of this is every time you workout, eat healthy, sleep, skip the donuts, you have accomplished your goal of being a healthy person at that moment. Every day you can achieve your goal of living and being a healthy person. Being a healthy person isn’t something you do, but it is who you are. Change who you are, and your actions will follow the new identity. When you change your identity, you no longer hold yourself to a standard against your future self or others. Instead, you are comparing yourself to who you were yesterday.

The same is true when it comes to the art of saving and living a financially free life. We need to free ourselves from the negative identity and embrace change. Today is a brand new day and an opportunity no matter who we were yesterday. Let’s use it!

What Now?

So hopefully, at this point in the article, you are convinced of the power of identity and self-belief. You might be thinking, how the heck does this relate to the art of saving? Here are a few practical ideas/thoughts to realize your identity as a saver and a financially free individual.

• You are not the things you buy.
• Who you are and what you do are entirely different.
• Change happens daily, whether you are aware of it or not. You are either moving towards your goals or slipping away from them.
• There is no such thing as a lack of identity. If you think you don’t have an identity, then your life feels like chaos, and chaos, I would argue, has become your identity.
• Changing your identity is work. Embrace the work. “By the yard, it is hard, but by the inch, it is a sinch.”
• You are more capable than you could ever imagine.
• Living in financial freedom is not a goal but an identity. You can’t check it off a list, but rather you accomplish everything on your list because of who you are.

As always, you got this!

The post Art Of Saving — Making Better Goals appeared first on Affording Freedom.

Naturally, the idea of learning and improving is fascinating to me, but from personal experience, mastering the skill of learning is not as easy it would seem. I always found school easy, but learning from my mistakes, especially personal interactions and non-book-related mistakes, was a whole new ball game. If it was a formula, I had it down; if it required nuance and interpretation, I have always felt like I struggled in that way. I have never related to any character in the bible more than Paul when he says, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate I do.” As an enneagram type 5, this absolutely drives me nuts. I have this driving urge to be competent in whatever I’m doing, and so often, I am not.

In our financial lives, being able to learn is critical. Learning financial literacy is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg of our financial learning journey. We need to be able to learn from our mistakes, evaluate what we are doing in the present, and be able to correct course when we steer away.

In this post, we will explore why we should care about learning, the struggles that inhibit our ability to learn, and how to learn from a given situation practically.

Why Should We Care About Learning?

There are numerous benefits to learning, but we will cover two main points when it comes to why we should care about mastering the skill of learning.

1) When we learn anything, we develop our ability to think and think well.

We talked about how 90% of our actions result from our habits in a previous article. Learning requires us to take a more active approach to our thinking which is a great thing. When we learn from our mistakes, we have to decide what’s true, how we should have responded, and critique our own perspective.

A great example of this is being able to discern the difference between us acting insane or just acting disciplined?

Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Discipline is insanity without false expectations. So very accurately, our sanity relies on our ability to think well.

2) You are destined to repeat mistakes if you can not learn from them

I know it is easy to say a generically good thing, such as it is essential to learn from our mistakes. Still, when it comes to our financial freedom, we must be able to learn from our mistakes and, ideally, the errors of others to have any chance of lasting success.

One of the most frustrating things in the world to me is making the same mistake over and over again and not being able to identify why. Unfortunately, I often feel stuck in situations where I know I have made similar mistakes, and I can’t seem to learn from them. Often what has stopped me from being able to process my mistakes was not understanding the obstacles in the way of my learning.

What Stops Us From Learning?

Even in the most basic sense of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain, our logic tells us that learning from our mistakes or harmful situations is a good thing. If it is in our best interest to master the skill of learning, why do so many of us repeatedly find ourselves stuck in similar hard situations?

There are a number of elements that stop us from learning from our everyday situations, but today we are going to focus on a couple of crucial ideas.

Recognizing and Separating Weight

I think before we go any further, I need to define what it is I mean by weight. Weight is any type of biased belief that makes a situation have extra meaning. Weights are everywhere in our lives, whether we are consciously aware of them or not. Our ability to cut to the root of the situation is critical to mastering the skill of learning. What stops me so often from seeing a situation clearly is the different weights that get added to a situation that I am either unaware of or unable to define.

There are three primary “weights” that influence our perception of a given situation. Those are the weights we bring into a given situation, the weight that others put on a situation, and the reality of the situation.

Being able to accurately define and separate the weights in our lives is half the battle. This allows us to learn from our situations effectively and stop making the same mistakes.

Stopping to Early

You can’t learn from a situation unless you understand why it happens, or perhaps a better way to phrase it is our leveling of learning is directly tied to our level of understanding. The first step to understanding something is creating the space to be able to think about whatever it is effectively. But if I am being honest with myself, one of the biggest reasons I stop learning is because I think I have found the answer. I stop being curious.

If we think we are right or understand something, we typically don’t think about the situation, person, or thing anymore. For example, if I know my couch is red, I don’t spend time thinking about what color couch that is, did the lighting affect my perception, etc… We may not think of it as a big deal when it comes to the color of our couch, but what about when it comes to more important things? Anytime our knowledge stops our curiosity, we are inhibiting our learning. When I find that position in my life, it is an enormous warning flag whenever I start to think that way consistently.

Mastering the skill of learning is a process that we can sharpen rather than an objective that we can hit. To summarize the best advice on learning from our situations, I will have to quote the great Ted Lasso “Be curious, not judgmental.”

Be curious about ourselves, our situations, and others, and it will make learning from our mistakes that much easier.

The post Money Thoughts: Mastering The Skill of Learning appeared first on Affording Freedom.

What is the real purpose of accumulating wealth? Does wealth give us a sense of fulfillment or just a sense of security?

Imagine a perfect scenario where you don’t want for anything. You have all the money you need, and you lack nothing. What then is the money for? Once we hit financial stability, where we can cover all the necessary expenses of life, what do we do with it? If we are honest, most of us just think about ourselves, and it’s not entirely our fault. We are constantly bombarded with how to make more money, enhance our margins, profit more, get the pay raise, the list goes on. Our culture and society send us the message that we are the only ones that matter. How many self-help books do you see on a day-to-day basis? The self-help genre represents one of the world’s largest markets, but how many books do we see about helping others succeed?

Don’t get me wrong; there is nothing wrong with helping and focusing on improving yourself. It is a critical and essential thing that we all go on the journey of self-improvement. The danger of the self-improvement journey is that we get so focused on ourselves that we never look outward. When we forget money is just a tool to accomplish our goals and not the end all be all goal, things get messy. Being truly financially free and having mastery over money gives us the unique opportunity to provide others with value. In this article, we will talk about how to be effective in serving and helping others, why that is important for us, and how serving others is the key to a life of fulfillment.

Key Ideas:

• Looking outside yourself and providing value to others is the key to fulfillment
• Without trust, any effort to provide value to people will fall short of your intention.
• You can’t fake authenticity.
• You need to be trustworthy and have trustworthy people in your life.
• True fulfillment comes from living for more than yourself in all areas of your life.
• Happiness is a constantly fleeing emotion where fullfillment is sustainable.

Why Should We Care?

I have heard many “bumper sticker” theologies that boil down to treating others like you want to be treated. Sure this is nice, but if I am being honest, I often view this as a secondary marker or goal to my own selfish motivations. In other words, I will help someone if I am already taken care of or if it serves me. Living a life centered around yourself constantly requires more effort, stimulus, or the next thing to feel happy or even content. It is a draining way to live life because we deny our natural need for community. If we really want to break the chains that are holding us back, we need to understand the difference between happiness and fulfillment and our nature as social creatures.

Happiness is Fleeting. Fulfillment is Sustainable.

We all want to be happy, but the problem with happiness is it is an emotion and fleeting by nature. It changes with the wind. We can be happy one moment and angry in the next. When we chase happiness as the primary goal, it naturally makes us tired and exhausted and leaves a feeling of defeat in the long term.

Replacing the goal of happiness with the pursuit of fulfillment is where the magic happens. That is the secret sauce to a life of true freedom. Living for yourself can make you feel happy in the short term, but living for others creates fulfillment in the long run.

No matter your background or specific personality breakdown, giving and living for others has a great impact on us. We can see physiological benefits such as lower blood pressure, increased longevity, and improved mental health. (The Science Of Generosity) Human beings are social animals. We are designed to be in community with one another. When we live outside that framework, our fulfillment level goes down, and our anxiety and overall quality of life worsens.

How To Be Effective Helping People:

Unfortunately, just because we are social creatures does not mean living for others is a natural thing for us to do, let alone be effective at. In order to be effective in helping others, we need to cultivate trust. It may seem strange that to help someone, there needs to be an element of trust but let me prove it to you.

Let’s say I am at a restaurant with my wife and young daughter, and my daughter is crying as babies sometimes do. If my wife picks her up and attempts to comfort her, that is a positive gesture that my wife gives, and my daughter (River) and I can receive. River is settled and feels at ease, and I know River is in great hands with my wife.

What if instead of my wife picking her up and comforting her, a stranger comes and picks her up and tries to comfort her. Even if the intent of the stranger was to help a small child and some struggling parents, the gesture completely misses the mark because we don’t know the stranger. Since we don’t trust the stranger, their ability to help is limited.

Unfortunately, we can’t know everything. Trust allows us to make decisions and survive in the world without perfect information. Trust is at the center of the reasons for buying the things we buy, the friends we have, and our interactions with others. If we want to be effective in helping others, we need to master the skill of cultivating trust.

Elements of Trust:

Trust isn’t something you can simply check off a box and have with someone. Our intentions don’t affect whether someone trusts us, it’s something more instinctual. We can have “chemistry” with someone which is a form of trust and then we can immediately distrust another individual. Why? It’s because trust is a very human feeling that supersedes knowledge and experience. We all know people we consider reliable, yet we don’t trust them as far as we can throw them. Conversely, we have friends in our lives that may not appear to be trustworthy to the outside world but we trust them with our lives.

Trust fundamentally requires two things: generosity and authenticity. We like you because you are authentic which is the foundation of trust. We then ultimately trust you because we know who you are (authenticity) and we know you have our back (generous).

The bad news about authenticity is you can’t fake it. There is no shortcut to being more authentic. What’s funny about the world we live in today is, authentic is one of the easiest things to be while simultaneously being one of the rarest qualities we see. Feeling comfortable in your own skin gives others the confidence to do the same. That’s why we all crave authentic people in our lives even if we don’t necessarily agree with them.

The reason generosity is so important is twofold. First people don’t trust takers, they trust givers. The quickest way to build trust is to do something for someone and not expect anything in return. We describe these people as “having our backs”. The second is it cultivates community. When we live generously, we create a community that can lift others up. Generosity breeds generosity. Authenticity breeds authenticity. When you combine authenticity with generosity, I can promise you your life will feel infinitely more fulfilled and your relationships will thank you for it.

At the end of the day, you will value the relationships and people you helped more than the things you bought. It’s up to us to choose generosity daily.

The post How To Find Fulfillment In An Increasingly Distant World appeared first on Affording Freedom.

We all would be ok with our finances being multiplied; at least, I know I would. We all want more of something. It could be more savings, more freedom, more time with our kids, whatever it is, we all crave more of some things. This idea of more can consume us quickly if we aren’t continuously aware of what we want more of, but it can also drive us towards the things we love if we root it in our identity. My wife and I have always said that we don’t simply want a good marriage; we want a great marriage. We don’t want to survive, but we want to thrive. This applies to all areas of our lives, but especially our finances. To financially thrive, we need to understand the critical principle of stewardship and the truth that every penny is an opportunity to multiply.

Stewardship — The First Step to Financially Thrive.

To thrive financially and live a life of multiplication, we need to start with unpacking stewardship. In the world we live in, the slow and steady approach is devalued and replaced with the quick and risky. Instead of building a life built on principles, we put all our money on red at the casino and then are upset when our financial situation doesn’t change. What we are unknowing or perhaps sometimes knowingly doing is practicing poor stewardship.

Simply put, financial stewardship is being faithful and multiplying anything you have been entrusted with.

Like everything in this blog, we always focus on our root cause, primarily our identity. We don’t simply want to practice financial stewardship occasionally, but we want to be financial stewards. When we shift from practicing stewardship to becoming a steward, we see a radical change in our outcomes.

Characteristics Of A Financial Steward:

1. Purpose Driven — passionate and discicplined in the mission of being faithful and multiplying the things they have been entrusted with.
2. Compassionate — They understand that money is a tool that has the ability to add value to others not just theirself.
3. Competent — educated in financial topics, have the ability to take in multiple perspectives, and learns from every situation.
4. Courageous — bold and radical in their mission to be financial stewards. Embrace the idea that to get the results that most people don’t get, you have to do the things most people won’t do.
5. Forward Thinking — they understand that a decision today impacts tomorrow. They sacrifice what they want now for what they want most.

Let’s Get Practical

Anytime we receive or give money or wealth of any kind, we are entrusted or entrusting someone with the impact of that money. My wife and I have had to purchase a wide array of baby products, the latest being a sleepsack, or as I affectionately call it, the baby straight jacket. This transaction is not unlike many we make throughout the month but let’s analyze this through a financial steward lens.

Situation: Purchasing A Sleepsack

• The purchase of this sleep sack provides the company to be able to make a quality product and to improve the product offering in the futre. Our money is directly adding value to the companies we spend our money on.
• This provides our daughter a great way to sleep more comfortably and hopefully longer which will improve the life of our daughter and ours as well.
• How much are other brands? is there an alternative that could be more cost effective and better for all parties involved? How long will she be in the sleepsack? Could I find something used or look for a deal?
• Can we afford the sleepsack? Is it a luxury or essential?

I know this can feel like analysis paralysis for some of you, which is something we don’t want, but intentionally thinking about how we do things is very important. We are not looking for perfection; we are simply looking for progress.

I’m sure most of you have heard the phrase anything worth doing is worth doing well. I would argue anything worth doing is worth doing badly. This is not an excuse for lack of effort, but success really is a horrible teacher. Anyone who was once an expert failed when they first started. Most of us have made poor financial choices, and often we are afraid to make a change or put ourselves in a position to make a mistake. If you can’t do it well, do it poorly!

Fail early, fail often, just learn from it! Your ability to thrive financially depends on it!

Principles of Multiplication:

The more we become financial stewards, the more our finances will multiply. It really is that simple. When we are faithful with a little, we will be given more. Faithfulness requires responsibility, consistency, and strength. That is a perfect recipe for building your finances and being able to thrive financially.

I’m sure there are a number of cliches and overused lines on this, but to quote the great Ben Parker, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Unfortunately, everything in our life that is great has the potential to hurt us. A great relationship can be the source of our greatest joy and also our great suffering. It is no different with money and, more specifically, the power of multiplication.

We need to understand two main money ideas to live a life of multiplication.

1) Multiplication happens with there is something to multiply. You can’t multiply with zero.

This is a straightforward principle, but if you don’t have financial margin, you can’t multiply your finances. Now I know that might seem hopeless to many of you out there, but in reality, we are in control of our finances, especially our margin.

Whether we realize it or not, we organize our life about what we most at any given time, and without reflection and accountability, the things we want are instant gratification. We want the house, the new car, eating out, clothes, more than financial peace and margin. It’s because instant gratification feels good, and sacrifice is hard.

The problem with instant gratification is that it creates a destructive habit cycle where the more stressed we are, the more we spend, making us more stressed, and so we spend, and on and on it goes.

This destructive habit cycle constantly erases any work we have accomplished the previous day. The beauty of life is that we have today. We have this moment to change for the better. Shame lives in the past, fear and anxiety live in the future, and peace and freedom are in the present. Which one do you want to multiply in your life?

2) The more there is to multiply, the greater the multiplication. (Either good or bad)

Nothing is stagnant in nature because life is constantly in a cycle of growth and decay. We are no exception. We are either improving daily or decaying daily; there is no such thing as staying the same. We can use this to our advantage when we are intentional or to our detriment when we are unaware.

The adage that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is absolutely true due to the power of multiplication. Let’s make it a little more real; the more debt we are in, the easier it is to get into more debt. It compounds and snowballs feeling unbearable. Contrastly, the more financial margin you can create, the more margin you will be able to experience.

It is discouraging to put all of your efforts into stopping the snowball from getting more prominent. It is exhausting but so worth it.

As always, you got this!

The post Money Thoughts: How To Financially Thrive appeared first on Affording Freedom.

So… Let’s Talk About Budgeting

Budgeting. Some of you just cringed at the very mention of the “B” word. We hear it and it immediately triggers something inside of us. To so many of us, it represents the loss of freedom. We fear losing our autonomy, of being put in a box, and if we are being honest, it is terrifying to pull back the curtain and call a spade a spade. An unfiltered look at our finances requires us to be vulnerable. Who likes that?

We often associate our financial situation with our overall value. Our finances bleed into every aspect of our lives so if we are “failing” in our finances, we will often feel like failures as human beings.

We need to separate our value from finances, and the easiest way to do this is by taking control and budgeting. Budgeting is not giving up control or freedom but taking control back and creating more freedom in our lives. Being honest with our situation and owning it changes things. You can’t control the world around you, but you can control your mindset, attitude, and, conveniently, your budget.

Now that we want to take back control in our lives, how do we practically do it?

1) Have The End In Mind

We just started this journey, but where does it lead? Ultimately, that is up to you. It can be as simple as I want to pay off debt, or I want to create more margin in my life. It could be I want to stop renting and buy a home. Whatever your goals are, list them. I would suggest categorizing your goals into three categories;

• Short-term goals are goals that can be achieved in the next three years. These can range from paying off debt to saving for a honeymoon.
• Medium-term goals are goals that can be achieved in the next three to ten years. Examples are down payment of a home, expanding or starting that business, buying a rental property, etc… 
• Long-term goals are goals that are ten years or longer which includes retirement and saving for your kid’s college.

Once we have our goals listed, we know what we are working toward and can move to step 2.

2) Fact Find

Once we have our goals mapped out, we need to get everything together in one place to look at them. We need all of our bank accounts, credit cards, debts, investments, and any other financial information organized and easily accessible.

Several financial platforms can help with this task. Our coaching platform, MINT, and EXPENSIFY are a few I would highly recommend taking a look at and exploring.

Once we have all of the information gathered, we need to do something meaningful with that data.

3) Categorize Income & Expenses

Once the fact-finding has been completed, it is time to categorize income and expenses into the following categories.

• Primary Income — Income from your job that is stable and consistent.
• Secondary Income — Income that you make not derived from your primary job ex: side hustles
• Fixed Expenses — Expenses that do not vary month to month and that you have no option but to pay them. Ex: Rent, mortgage, insurance, etc…
• Flexible Expenses — Expenses that are a necessity but that fluctuate from month to month. Ex: Utilities, groceries, etc… *
• Fun Expenses — Expenses that can most easily be described as wants.

It is important that in this stage we are not making any adjustments until we have all of this information in front of us and categorized.

* What about seasonal or unexpected expenses? As we all know, life happens, so that’s why we have our budget to prepare for the unexpected. When we budget, we create financial margin so that we can handle those unexpected expenses. So inside the flexible expenses category, I would set a dollar amount for an emergency, you may not always spend it, but it needs to be accounted for in your budget.

4) Design Your Budget

When designing your budget, there are several different methods you can choose. I will talk about two of my favorite methods below. A quick note before we dive into types of budgets, finances are personal so look at these as references for framing a budget that works for you! The ultimate goal of budgeting is to make sure you save so you can achieve your goals. However, you do that is a good thing!

50-30-20 Method

The 50-30-20 method is great for getting started with budgeting without feeling overwhelmed. It is extremely easy to set up and conceptualize. All we are doing is dividing our earned income into three major categories.

The first category is Needs which represents 50% of our budget. The next category is Wants which represents 30% of the budget. Savings represent the remaining 20%. As long as each given category is within its specific threshold (50%, 30%, or 20%) then you are on track with your budget.

Here is an example of the 50-30-20 rule that would apply to an individual with an after-tax income of $4,000 a month.

Of course, you can change these numbers to match more of your spending preferences, but this is an excellent rule of thumb and starting point when beginning to budget.

If this method doesn’t get you as much clarity as you want into your finances, the zero-out method might be for you.

Zero-Out Method

This is my favorite budgeting method. Where the 50-30-20 is more of a top-down approach, the zero-out method is a bottom-up approach. This budget does take longer to set up and maintain but I have seen fantastic results from those who stick with this!

Step 1) Deeper Categorization

We already have done a good job of general categorization of our income and expenses, but for the zero-out method, we need a little more detail. We want to know how each dollar that we have earned is being spent. If we are purposeful with our budget, our finances will thank us. Start by defining all of the elements you spend/earn into a list as I have below:

• Food
• Health/Medical
• Housing
• Personal
• Pets
• Utilities
• Travel
• Debt
• Transportation
• Gift
• Emergency

• Bonus
• Paycheck
• Investments
• Side Hustle
• Savings

Step 2) Subtract your income from your expenses so they equal zero.

It is important to note that I treat investments and savings as expenses for this method. I prefer to focus on my fixed expenses and investments first, and then the remaining balance I use to allocate for everything else. At the end of each month, we want our income minus all of the categories to equal zero. If it is greater than zero, your income is higher than your budgeted expenses. Fantastic!

If it is less than zero, you are spending more than you are making. First things first, if you find yourself in this situation, don’t panic. Budgeting like this takes some time to get used to. The whole point of this type of budgeting is that each dollar has a purpose to it. So when you are succeeding or struggling in a given area, you know exactly where it is you need to focus.

This method can feel daunting to people because it requires a little more work and getting used to than the 50-30-20 method. I find this method, albeit more work, serves to maximize my savings each and every month.

Here is a quick example of a zero-out method budget.

Monthly after Tax Income: $4,000

5) Take Action

Now that you have created your budget, it is time to start implementing this into your day-to-day life. You will need a way to track the progress of your budget and make sure that the budget is working for you and your lifestyle.

Google Sheets is a great way to track your budget. It has free budget templates, but it does require manual entry and extra diligence to record each transaction manually. Mint is an entirely free option and tracks your expenses and bank account balances, which makes it easy to compare for budgeting purposes. There is also U-VEST which offers financial coaching in tandem with their full financial planning app.

Needless to say, you have options to choose from; just make sure you have a way to execute your budget and a system to track your progress over time.

6) Keep At It

Whatever budget you deploy, make it a habit! Budgeting is one of the most effective ways to increase your financial margin. Yes, it can feel uncomfortable, but change normally is. If you are married, make sure you and your spouse are together on this. Talk about what is important and hold each other accountable. Accountability is critical to making a permanent change.

The post Make Budgeting Your New Best Friend appeared first on Affording Freedom.