Today I am going to share some tips for planning an entire year in advance. Wait? Wha? I mean it. I try to plan my year, as much as I can, in as far of advance as I can. 

A few weeks ago a friend of mine shared a really funny picture on Instagram, it said: “Dear student loans, thank you for getting me through college, I can never repay you.” I will admit it’s a pretty funny meme. But I don't necessarily think it's true. 

This is a conversation that we need to be having more of because pretending like we're perfect little money angels doesn't help anyone.

On today’s podcast I wanted to share a few things I regret and mistakes I made and how I am learning to get past them.

Each time I've had to withdraw money from our savings account it hurts. I think about the long hours we worked to save that money. I think of the extra time my husband put in away from us. I think about all the long nights I spent working only to get up early with my babies.

I like to refer to my emergency fund as my financial secret weapon. But if you’re starting from scratch the idea of building an emergency fund might be a little overwhelming. So today I am going to give you a few tips to help you build that emergency fund faster.

This is my plea to you -- to stop whatever it is you are doing and go right now and start working on an emergency fund. 

It’s so easy to compare yourself to where others are in their debt free journey, or just life in general. Today I wanted to share with you how and why I just stopped caring and how that gave me so much more mental clarity and emotional freedom.

Life is full of sudden changes, slow changes, and ups and downs. Anytime we get off-balance, sometimes that's when our spending gets out of control, or maybe our thought process isn't the most rational.
 
So today I wanted to tell you of a few times when you might want to avoid making big purchases.

The word budget doesn't exactly make your heart sing with joy. That's okay. You still need to do it and here are a few tips to get you started.

Today I'm talking about my biggest regret when it comes to marriage and money.  

For those of you who don't know, my husband Jason and I have been married for twelve years. And we did not combine our finances for the first five years of our marriage. I think that that led to a lot of the money problems that we ended up having — because we did not have accountability.

He had his checking account. I had my checking account. We thought we had a pretty good system. He would pay the mortgage out of his account and I would pay all the bills out of mine. We thought this was fine; this was just a great way to keep things afloat and to keep things going. You have your money and I have my money and we're good.

Some people can handle life that way. But we couldn't. There was a lack of accountability. There was a lack of structure. We weren't communicating. And, really, I feel like our marriage was missing something as a result.

It feels so overwhelming when you’re working so hard and not getting ahead. And it can become so easy to look at what another family is doing and what is working for them and feel like a total failure. But you’re not.