Denali Northern Expenditure

Category: Personal Finance Page 4 of 6

I Found the Hairbands and Saved Money!

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On February 15, 2016

In Personal Finance

Sarah over at The Yachtless wrote a poignant piece that was featured on Rockstar Finance called Small Things about losing hairbands and tracking your spending. This is a response to that awesome blog post.

Hey Sarah, Maggie here.

I’m just writing to tell you I found them! Yes, ALL the hairbands.

This was a pretty big week for me. Mr. T and I cleared out our bathrooms and our kitchen cabinets. Both of these things we figured would take a couple of hours total, but they ended up being a much bigger deal than we anticipated. I was in that bathroom for hours. And, just as you supposed, every dark corner hid at least a couple of hairbands.

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What Does: “I Can’t Afford it” Actually Mean?

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On February 5, 2016

In Personal Finance

Stop Saying “I Can’t Afford It”!

I am often uneasy with the phrase “I can’t afford it,” especially with my children. This phrase is used to mean so many different things. In some scenarios, it means “We literally couldn’t scrape enough money to buy that even with credit cards, payday loans, or selling plasma.” For us, we use this when the kids say something ridiculous like “I wish we lived in that mansion on the beach in Hawaii.” With our incomes, there is no possible way to make that happen. No bank would give us that loan and we do not have enough assets and investments to sell everything to make it happen. Thinking you can afford something when you can’t is also dangerous.

Other times, “We can’t afford it” means someone that has a cash-only mindset. It disregards putting the purchase on credit cards or taking out any loans (payday or otherwise). This example would be a new couch or car for someone that doesn’t have enough cash saved up to pay cash for the purchase. Then there’s the “we can’t afford it” because that money is allocated elsewhere. This is the one we’re most cautious about. By all previous definitions, we can afford it. We have enough cash to make it happen, (and can track it all with our free Personal Capital account) but we choose not to buy another car because we (already have two and three would be ridiculous) would rather save that money to retire early. For my young children, it is often unclear which definition people are using. I’ve realized that most of the time, the kids hear the very first definition: we literally don’t have enough money to make that happen no matter what we do.

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The Bell on the Fishing Pole: Living in the Present

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On January 29, 2016

In Personal Finance

Want to know EVEN MORE about us? Today we had the pleasure of being interviewed by the great Mr. 1500 Days! Check out our interview.

One morning while we were in Hawaii during Christmas time, Mr. T and I left our sleeping kids in the care of my parents and took a walk out onto a rocky point to watch the sunrise. It was still pretty dark when we arrived, so we sat and watched the waves crash against the rocks. As we sat, we saw a group of fishermen getting ready to fish off the point. They spent about twenty minutes setting up their poles, baiting them, and casting out the lines. Then, they tied bells to the poles and walked away. I watched them leave the poles behind, get out some food, and start visiting with each other. I’m used to Alaskan fishing, which is very hands-on, so it surprised me when they walked away. And I kept staring at the bells.

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The Two Things Keeping You From Retirement

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On January 27, 2016

In Personal Finance

The biggest financial finish line in the majority of people’s lives is retirement. Researchers have poured years into studying how to get people to actually take the steps to prepare for retirement because not enough people are doing so. The definition of retirement is to leave one’s job and cease working. Quitting work is the easy part of retirement. The hard part is being financially prepared to no longer have paychecks coming. Everyone is looking for a magic bullet to retirement—the as-seen-on-TV pill for becoming rich. People want to win the lottery or inherit large amounts of unexpected money because otherwise, they just don’t know how they will ever have enough money to retire.

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The Power of a Good Cleanse

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On January 13, 2016

In Food!, Personal Finance

I got a bit trigger-happy this morning and published TWO posts, so be sure to also check out What I Learned at the Holiday Bazaar and we’ll hopefully back to our regular posting schedule on Monday! 🙂

Every January, after the holiday treat-eating, Mr. T and I go on a two-week food cleanse. Don’t worry, we’re not crazy. Let me explain what that means for us. We don’t juice. We don’t starve. Mainly, we focus on eating just fruits and vegetables. We condense Whole Living’s 28-day cleanses (there are several years available online, so we use all those resources for recipes) into just two weeks. We mainly do it to jumpstart our bodies. We eat so much wheat and so many carbs (cracked 7-grain oatmeal for breakfast, sandwich with homemade whole wheat bread for lunch, rice or pasta for dinner, etc.), so we take two weeks to give our body a break from processing the usual stuff. We cut out all meat, dairy, grains, eggs etc. After the first five days, we add back eggs and gluten-free grains. Also in January, we go on a spending cleanse. We pay for our cleanse produce and other food for the month and nothing more at the grocery store.

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Accept Yourself Now

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On January 6, 2016

In Personal Finance

It’s not even one full week into the New Year and already several people have abandoned their resolutions. The statistics on New Year’s resolutions are bleak. Over 80% of New Year’s Resolutions fail. In order to avoid this, some people don’t make any resolutions at all. I’m a huge fan of New Year’s and the accompanying resolutions. I love the chance to look back on the previous year and see what I was able to accomplish and look ahead to a clear calendar and figure out where I want to be in a year. Spending a week in Hawaii with my family made me realize not everyone is like me. When asked where he wants to be in a year, my brother-in-law responded: “I have plans for in 5 years and 10 years, but 1 year is hard to define.” My sister said: “Oh no. Is this about hopes and dreams? I hate talking about those!” And my dad and husband said “I don’t know!”

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Back to Basics: The Basic Steps to Financial Awesomeness

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On December 16, 2015

In Personal Finance

Today, we’re going to return to the basics of finances. There is nothing new in this post, so if you’re already well on your journey to financial independence, you’re dismissed for class today. However, if you’re overwhelmed with the amount of awesome financial information out there, you’ve decided you want to be financially awesome, and you just want someone to tell you where to start, this is the post for you. If you’re in college or about to get your first job, you need to read about how simple your path to financial awesomeness really is before you do anything else.

Here are the basic steps to take to be a financially awesome person:

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Money Buys Color: #PFMessages in A Little Princess

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On December 14, 2015

In Personal Finance

This post is part of a larger series of Personal Finance Messages in popular culture. Follow along on Twitter: #PFMessages.

A common story line in many well-known tales, especially those targeted to children, is the rags to riches story. At the beginning, there is a poor (usually a) girl that is kind and has hope despite her horrid circumstances. She then overcomes great odds to end up wealthy and happy at the end of the story (by circumstance, not by work), all the while remembering to be kind. These stories provide the message that hope and kindness are rewarded with wealth.

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Dream Big

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On December 9, 2015

In Personal Finance

Who are the first people you think of when I say “successful person”? Chances are, you think of the famous people: Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Phelps, Tom Hanks, Adele, etc. Maybe you’ll swing back around to including a relative that isn’t so obviously successful, but more likely, you’ll think about the big names first. There is an endless amount of resources telling you about the habits, routines, diets, and life hacks of “highly successful people” so you can mimic them and be successful too. You’ll even find amazing stories of the failures of successful people that they overcame before they succeeded. But let me focus on the obvious element to success that we hear a lot: Successful people dream big.

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The American Dream? No, Thank you!

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On December 4, 2015

In Personal Finance

I took a film class where a whole section was on the American Dream. We talked about how, in film (and other mediums), the American dream is represented by a working father, children, a cute house with a yard and a white picket fence. Even after identifying those symbols and how they are a ridiculous representation of the American Dream, I still had those ideas ingrained in me as the symbols of success.

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