Here are my predictions for what’s in store in 2024 and what that means for creative businesses. They’re a result of reflecting on the last year, observing larger trends and chatting with folks across various creative industries, from creators who make money on social media to to small business owners, artists, and folks in the podcasting industry. A lot of this may be anecdotal, but some of these patterns are worth paying attention to. Let’s dig in.
Read Morepersonal finance
Are You Falling Prey to Lifestyle Creep? Here's How to Tell and What to Do About It /
Lifestyle creep happens when two things in your financial life increase: your income and your spending. Specifically, lifestyle creep happens when you spend your extra income on things that upgrade your lifestyle; as opposed to maintaining your current lifestyle after your income increases.
Read MoreThe Lazy Person's Guide to Building Wealth (Part 2): Investing for Beginners /
Welcome to part 2 of “The Lazy Person’s Guide to Building Wealth.” If you missed part 1, get caught up here. If you’ve ever been curious about investing in the stock market but are honestly puzzled about how to get started, this guide is for you. If you question whether investing in the stock market is a realm reserved only for Wall Street moguls or the already rich, this guide is also for you. By the end of it, you’ll have everything you need to know to start investing.
Read MoreAn Open Letter to Buy Now, Pay Later Companies. Your product is like cigarettes for people’s financial lives. /
Dear Buy Now, Pay Later companies,
The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
“Consumers need this,” you say. “We’re giving them options and flexibility in uncertain economic times,” you say. If you shut one eye and squint the other, you may be able to fool yourself into seeing what you want to see. That’s the beauty and the curse of the human mind. You’re asking them if they’d like to be kicked in the crotch or punched in the face. Options!
Read MoreThe Secret to Managing Money as a Couple: Split the Check /
Navigating the intersection of love and money can be tricky, especially if one partner is more of a spender than the other. There is one method of managing finances that can help every couple find the balance between working towards the same financial goals, while also maintaining some level of autonomy. It’s called “splitting the check.”
Read MoreFive Financial Rituals to Adopt in the New Year /
We don’t always get what we give. At least, that’s what the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto discovered in the 1800s while harvesting peas from his garden. Pareto observed that 80% of the peas came from only 20% of the peapods, demonstrating an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. Wondering if this pattern would repeat itself in other areas of life, Pareto began to look at different data sets to confirm his findings.
While this principle might skew and not always hold one hundred percent of the time, the general principle that 80% of effects result from 20% of causes holds. Less than 10% of the population owns 80% of the stock market. Few social media accounts are responsible for most misinformation across platforms. And we’ve recently seen, in a pandemic, that roughly 20% of the most infectious individuals are responsible for 80% of the transmission.
Knowing 80% of your success and results come from only 20% of your efforts; you can apply the 80/20 rule to your financial lives. Here are the five financial rituals you can focus on that will impact results the most.
Read MoreA Black Friday Survival Guide /
The shopping season is here, and it’s coming for your wallet. Not only do we have Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, but this American tradition has also spun off into a string of frenzied buying days. There’s now Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday. Of course, I’m not a monster. I do love a good deal. But it’s hard not to be cynical and critical of our hyper-consumerist society. So for anyone looking to mindfully shop this holiday season, here are some things to consider before venturing out into the wild.
Read MoreCollecting Dots: Some Recent Reflections About Money and Life /
Here are a bunch of different things I’ve been thinking about. Lately, my work has felt like collecting dots in the hope that a constellation of meaning will soon reveal itself.
Read MoreFive Financial Things: Meditations on Money /
Here are some things I’ve been thinking about lately.
Disclaimer: I’m probably not the first person to think of these things. I’m sure I picked these up from a fellow human expressing themselves through conversations, words in a book, dialogue in a movie, lyrics in a song, or eavesdropping on folks arguing over dinner (one of my favorite things to do). Sometimes it’s hard to remember where every insight originated. Sometimes they are slowly internalized through repeated exposure, like learning every lyric to a pop song you had no intention of loving. We’re all pulling from the same weird, swirling pool of ideas
Read MoreWhat Is a Buy List and How It Can Help You Build a Conscious Spending Habit /
I went to hang out with a friend and outside of her apartment, I found an Amazon package that I picked up and brought in with me. She said she didn’t remember what she bought. That’s part of the horror of online shopping; the ability to purchase so cheaply and frequently that you lose track of your purchases. But that’s also the beauty of it - it’s a two-for-one when it comes to pleasure and dopamine. You get the first dose doing the shopping and the next when the package arrives and you anticipate what’s inside.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter responsible for transmitting signals between the nerve cells of the brain. It directly impacts our central nervous system and plays a significant role in the body. While many of us have come to believe that dopamine is involved in rewards, it’s important to understand that it’s also involved in the pursuit of rewards. Some researchers argue that dopamine when acting within what has become known as the brain’s reward system, signals desire.
Read MoreHow to Maximize Your Benefits During Open Enrollment /
What you need to know to learn how to maximize benefits and get the open enrollment help needed to have a health benefit plan that will work for your needs
Read MoreHow to Have a Year-End Personal Money Review /
The end of a year is a time for reflection. As you plan your end-of-the-year celebrations and start to plan your new year resolutions, you may want to consider taking some time to take a closer look at your finances. A year-end personal money review can help you reflect on the choices you made over the previous year and help guide you to make better financial choices in the new year.
Let’s take a look at what a year-end personal money review is and how it can help you have a better relationship with money:
Read MoreMost Common Investing Struggles (and How to Avoid Them) /
Hey reader, just a little heads up that I am not an investment advisor, and the following article is not investment advice.
Before I took my first investment course in college, I had a lot of assumptions about investing. Many of them were wrong. I thought you had to know a lot about individual stocks and companies. I believed it was much more complicated than it turned out to be. And I expected it to be so much more exciting.
Investing is kind of like film and television. The result might be sexy and shiny and cool. But if you’ve ever been on set, you know that the process of filming is usually pretty dull compared to the result. There may be some excitement, but the great majority of the time gets spent waiting around - a lot like investing!
However, lately, investing seems to have changed -- from the Gamestop chaos to the Dodge coin drama, to the general market run-up over the last two years, investing feels exciting. Ask anyone who has seen their investment balances go up over the last couple of years.
Read MoreThe Lazy Person's Guide to Building Wealth (Part 1): Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and Index Funds /
The stock market can be intimidating for anyone just starting to invest. One of the most common fears new investors have is how to choose investments. Choosing a company to buy stock from opens the door to a myriad of frightening possibilities. What if that company isn’t disclosing their finances properly? What if I’m not doing enough due diligence before purchasing shares? Buying individual stocks also leaves you at risk of not diversifying your portfolio enough.
Read MoreThe Sequence of Savings /
The sequence of events is consequential when we cook a meal, tell a story or travel to a destination. Instructions and directions are ordered, stories have sequential acts and arcs that depend on events. It’s the way things are, we accept this.
The same thing is true in the world of saving and investing. The chronology for both how you save (and invest) and where you save (and invest) matters.
Financial Paradoxes /
Paradoxes are fancy literary devices that can teach us lessons through the use of logical contradictions. Examining them allows us to practice our ability to hold opposing ideas in our minds at the same time.
Read MoreSix Important Financial Lessons I've Learned While Writing A Book /
It's easy to complicate things; it's hard to simplify them.
"Earn money. Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Rinse and repeat."
This is the advice an old boss would give when asked to distill financial planning into its simplest parts. It's excellent advice. When I first heard him deploy the words that would become a well-worn mantra in my mind, it was the moment I realized how easy it is to complicate things and how hard it is to simplify them.
Read MoreHow To Be Awesome At Investing: Lessons From A Decade In Finance /
People always assume I am so deeply passionate and stoked about finance. Like I jump out of bed and get excited about interest rates. That's not exactly true. I am super stoked and passionate about helping people, feeling like my work matters and having autonomy over it. So when people ask me why I started The Hell Yeah Group, the answer is often that, " I looked inside of my tool box of skills and realized I had some sharp tools that all pertained to bookkeeping, running a small business and personal financial planning.” As much as I wanted to create a cool company that had nothing to do with finance, I had constraints: I needed to earn money and there was no denying the skills I had, no matter how uncool I thought it was. Not exactly visions of grandeur, more like shining a turd.
But I’ve really grown to love how my work makes me feel, regardless of it’s non-passion status. I want to share the industry-specific things I’ve learned and observed over the years that I think everyone should know.
Read MoreHow to Make Money: Use Skills to Solve Problems for Specific People /
Picture this. You’re back in 5th grade. You’re standing in a line with your fellow classmates, facing an open field. And you’re all about to be humiliated because you’ll now be ranked by your kickball skills.
There are two team captains and they’re staring you all down and sizing you up. The first picks start and of course, the kids with the most kickball skills are picked first. Then the kids with the moderate skills are picked. They don’t even need hard kickball skills, they can have skills like morale building, being a team player or not getting in the way of the star players. And then the last picks are the kids who might not only lack skills; they might be a liability. On the dusty field, it’s not about feelings or friendships, it’s all about skills. After all, it’s not called friendship ball.
Read MoreBig News: The Money Diaries Podcast! /
I’ve been a big fan of Refinery 29’s Money Diaries since I first heard about it. Up until then, almost all the articles I’d read about money were drier than Joshua Tree in August. They were boring, not relatable and the antithesis of a conversation.
Needless to say, I was stoked when I was asked to be a co-host for the new Money Diaries podcast.
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working closely with their production team, doing research and recording interviews with experts and new diarists with my co-host, Lindsey Stanberry.
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