Handling The Hard Stuff

Category: Finances

  • Define Your Own “Rich Life”

    Breaking News: We don’t all care about the same things. My closest friends and I value things so incredibly differently. I do NOT care about having a nice car, I care that I don’t have a car payment. My closest friends have brand new cars – a few of them even lease them just so…

  • Where’s Your Money?

    I recently read an article that says 56% of women married to men leave the financial planning and investment decisions to their husbands. The same article shared the statistic that 80% of women lose their spouse to death or divorce. Regardless of gender, in a lot of relationships there’s one person that “handles the finances”.…

  • Retail Therapy

    We’ve come up with a lot of coping mechanisms as a society. I read an article today about how something like 60% of spending is to cope with things like anxiety, depression, and boredom. I was just talking with a friend who chuckled telling me about a three-hour rant-filled phone call with a client wherein…

  • I Love Boring

    I have never wanted to be special. I want to be average. I do not need to stand out in any way. Of course virtually nothing about me is average. But I have always been very comfortable being part of a system, just a cog in the wheel. The more we can systematize the more…

  • Start Somewhere

    I’ve written before about the paralysis of analysis. We get so overwhelmed by the “bigness” of a goal that we just shut down. Just start. It doesn’t have to be good – it probably won’t be. You will be embarrassed, you’ll look back later and laugh at yourself, you will probably wish you’d done it…

  • Wanting wealth is not a bad thing!

    This feels like such a controversial statement in a knee-jerk kind of way. I have spent my career helping the underprivileged and working with non-profits and I come from an area with a lot of poverty. My parents were civil servants and no one in my family ever encouraged wealth or prosperity. I was raised,…

  • Lifestyle Creep

    Oof. Boyfriend and I have resolved that we’re keeping a budget this year. So at the end of each month we review our spending and enter it into a spreadsheet. And it is painful. We spend so much freaking money on such dumb stuff! Our biggest expenditure is Amazon. Now granted, we buy some grocery/pantry…

  • Hard to Handle: Death

    What happens if you die? Not to be morbid or a downer (although, really that’s what lawyers are trained to be), but do you have a plan for what happens if you die? I know this is something a lot of people don’t want to think about. It’s hard. Imagining your kids being raised by…

  • Holla “We Want Prenups”

    This may be the only time in my life that I’ve agreed with Kanye West. On this ONE thing, he’s not wrong. I know prenups get a bad rep. It’s one step worse and more taboo than talking about money. But if you’re ready to marry someone, you should be able to talk about both…

  • Let’s Talk about Money Honey

    My mid-life crisis manifested in a fear about my financial future. Realistically, I’m probably going to be fine. But at least part of that is due to my new-found understanding of (and fascination with) finances. If you’re anything like me, you’ve never been comfortable talking about money. I grew up solidly middle class, surrounded by…