There are many benefits to living a healthy financial life. It is clear from some studies that many Americans are teetering on the brink of financial collapse. But improving your financial health doesn’t have to be complicated. And sticking too a budget doesn’t always mean you have to cut costs to the extreme. It is more about having a conscious plan and sticking to it. But how can you get started? Here are 10 quick tips that we use to live a healthier financial life: Spend less than you earn. This may seem obvious but is something that does not happen for many people.  In order to do the remaining…

We had a great financial plan for the first half of 2019. Or so we thought. After aggressively paying off debt through early March, we finally paid off everything except for our first mortgage! It felt great! Our next step was to put all of our monthly excess cash flow into replenishing our emergency fund which we depleted in order to pay off the debt fast. Unfortunately things didn’t go as planned… The issues arise As anyone who lived through winter in Minnesota this year knows, we had an incredible amount of snow throughout February and early March. Following that we had a bunch of rain in mid March as…

This post is brought to you by Ryan. I had a weekend of yoga teacher training so I haven’t had a chance to write a post yet. I will give a recap on my yoga weekend on Wednesday’s post, but for now, enjoy Ryan’s post about home buying that will not be popular with real estate agents 🙂 Back in 2006, I was fresh out of college and beginning my career and I really wanted a house.  I thought this was the logical next step most people take since some of my friends and colleagues were buying houses (little did I know, the average age for a first time buyer…

This post is brought to you by Ryan 🙂 On one of my previous posts I wrote about how living a healthy financial life creates “optionality”. One tip I had for living healthier financially is to limit fixed expenses as much as possible. The most obvious fixed expense are debt payments. We have been working very hard to get out of debt over the past few years so I wanted to share our story so you can understand how we got there and hopefully to inspire others to pay off debt as well. By our mid-20s, we managed to accumulate a significant amount of debt. For better or worse, I…

Here is another post from Ryan and all about his favorite topic: finance. Saving money is all about delaying gratification today for a (hopefully larger) benefit in the future.  But this is very difficult to do, particularly in our consumption driven culture (almost 70% of the United States GDP growth is driven by consumer spending).  Goals like saving for retirement can seem too abstract because they are so far off and seem so unreachable early in your career.  So let me propose another reason to save and get your financial life in order that is hopefully less abstract and more near term beneficial: optionality. What do I mean by optionality? …