Day 5 came and went! I had some time to think about this challenge while going for a walk by the lake this morning. It was bright and sunny and a balmy -4 degrees Fahrenheit. Gotta love that Minnesota madness.
Today’s task:
Eliminate unnecessary expenses.
This one requires a little bit of evaluation. I think that I’m going to do an even more thorough review of my budget tomorrow to be sure that I’m not forgetting anything. But the idea behind this is to think critically about what is a NEED versus a WANT. Today I’m focusing on my subscription-based expenses. I’m sure many of you have them, too. Netflix, anyone?
Here’s the subscriptions I currently have and what I pay for them:
- Bite – Every four months, $32 for toothpaste tabs. It’s a company that’s committed to reducing plastic waste and they send me a refill. They’re amounts are pretty much on par, unless you brush your teeth more than twice a day. 😀 Or let others use your toothpaste tabs…
- Kula Collective – $400 Annual subscription to an online yoga collective. I get on-demand classes that are uploaded three times a week. I already paid for this. My membership ends at the end of February. So I set a reminder on my calendar to review my expenses and determine if this is something I want to continue paying for, or get a membership to a gym IRL. To be honest, I love bringing this with me wherever I travel. But I could just as well watch YouTube videos as a cheaper alternative. I will be applying for their scholarship to attend my first yoga teacher training in 2023…I’ve saved for my flight, but that’s it so far.
- Netflix – On my Grandpa’s account, so covered there. He doesn’t charge me anything. 🙂
- To Be Magnetic – $23/mo. – They recently switched their platform, so I’ll be locked out of it at the end of December, but my membership is supposed to continue. They say that if you renew for another year, you can lock in the same rate. This has been one of the best investments I’ve made in my mental health in 2022. While my health insurance doesn’t cover it, I think it’s a worthwhile investment and I’ve only made it through a small portion of their courses.
- Adobe Stock – Access to a set amount of licensed stock images per month for 29.99. This was a mistake I made of not canceling my free trial early enough, and then their cancellation fee was more expensive than paying through the rest of the year. So. I’m using this for work quite a bit in my design stuff. Setting a reminder on my calendar earlier to cancel my membership so that it doesn’t auto-renew.
- Gym membership in Perham – $499 I paid for this up front in full for the year, which I’m realizing in retrospect wasn’t the greatest idea. I had every intention of staying put for another year…but as life shall have it. I’m not. I’m hoping to gift this to a friend once I move so that they can take advantage of the membership.
- Apple Cloud Storage – $2.99/mo. This is technically a business expense for me, because I use the storage to back up all of my design work. Keeping this.
- Apple Music – $10.79/mo. I listen to Apple Music religiously, anywhere from 4-6 hours a day. Keeping this.
- Acorns – $1/mo. This is an investment platform that I started using for free when I was in grad school. I started getting interested in financial literacy and wanted to find a way to automate investments even though I didn’t have an employer who could offer me that as a part-time worker. It rounds up any charges I make on my debit card, and then once that balance reaches $5, puts that money towards my investment account. Without consciously thinking about it, I’ve saved 657.79 since 2018. Not a lot, but that’s more than I would have without the app! It was a free app up until my student account expired. There may be a better platform for this, but at the moment $1 seems low enough that I’m just going to keep using the service.
Subscriptions I’ll be canceling:
- Bite – When someone asked me how much I paid for the subscription the other day, I thought to myself – $8/mo? Do I even use that much toothpaste? And the answer is no. I was thinking it would be cool to find a place where I could fill up my toothpaste tabs at a bulk store…and I think there’s one opening up soon in Fargo!
- Kula – Most likely, because I miss people and want to meet folks when I move in the spring to a new community. A gym membership will be a good way of doing that
- Adobe Stock most likely, unless I start charging for this in my rates for consulting. Depends on the value I get out of it for the next 8 months or so. 🙂
Here’s what I would recommend if you’d like to do follow suit: Make a list of ALL expenses. Then highlight the ones that are recurring. And figure out if it’s actually needed, or if you could survive without it for a bit. And remember to come back to your core values when evaluating your list. Does this expense get you closer or further away from living your values?
Some final thoughts for today…
I listened to two podcast episodes about finances today while doing some website design work, and very much appreciated what they had to say. There were a couple of things that stood out to me:
No matter where you are, take steps to receive that which you are calling in.
I feel like I’ve been talking to financial advisors, coaches, and reading books about money mindset and the like for quite some time with the idea that I’m building a billion-dollar business. But there’s no way that I’m going to build that without changing my mindset. I have to become capable of managing my own finances, let alone other people’s money. And I need to know exactly where that money will go once it’s here. I encourage you to think similarly. Maybe you’re not in the position that you need to be, but if you can take small steps to position yourself for what’s coming, you’ll be way more likely to get it.
Your only job when working for someone else is to acquire investments.
I loved this comment from Lacy Phillips, where she described the idea that you should be aggressively putting your money into things that will generate you passive income, and then to use that money to 1) cover your fixed expenses and 2) purchase the fun things that you want on top of that. I’m hoping to lean into online courses as a way of generating revenue all-year round, serving farmers with information that helps them reduce their barriers to land and capital access. What might those investments look like for you?
Finally, I wanted to share a passage that I opened a book on Mexican mythology to as I started the process of packing this evening. I said to myself before I opened the book, “Okay, Universe, what do I need to hear?”. And of course, I laughed when I saw what it said…if you read yesterday’s post, you’ll know why this is NOT a coincidence:
“‘Indian time’
The belief that the noumenal and phenomenal worlds were continually interacting one upon the other was probably in part responsible for the attitude toward time natural to all pre-Hispanic peoples and to their descendants today. Workers among modern American Indian communities have noted that the pure indigenous peoples – as distinct from the so-called ladinos who have adopted western customs – live in a space-time quite different from ours. It is not just that they are more leisurely, less rushed, and of course totally unaware of clocks. It is rather that – in spite of Einstein, modern nuclear physics, and those events that might by now have been expected to upset our purely sense-based view of time – we continue to think of yesterday, today, and tomorrow as proceeding in a single line and always in one direction. It could be said that our time is horizontal. Indian time, on the other hand, is a completely different conception. It is vertical and static. It moves to no particular appointment in the future. Future and past are extraordinarily confused in the Indian mind, and even the concept of velocity is difficult to grasp, as it was to a Oaxacan Indian who once told me that it would take an hour for me to reach a certain village; and, he added after one thought ‘Two hours if you walk quickly enough.’ It is easier for the Indian to describe time in relation to growth or change that is visible, as when peasants measure the distance from village to village in terms of ‘a hat and a half’ or ‘two hats’, according to the time it takes to plait the straw as they walk.”
From Mexican and Central American Mythology, written by Irene Nicholson, pg. 37
There you have it. Marry the vertical with the horizontal, folks. That’s the key!
Where I ended the month of November:
Income: $2500
Expenses: $2743
Not great, but not terrible. I think December will be much better!
Podcast episodes mentioned:
To Be Magnetic – Episode 208
To Be Magnetic – Episode 211
That’s all for today. Onward!
