It’s been a week and a half since I got back from Cents Positive and I’m seriously missing the awesome ladies I got to spend the weekend with. I enjoy being around people, especially people I connect with on so many levels, and that weekend was all about those relationships. Can we all live in the same area, please? I hear the Seattle region is a good place to be.
That isn’t at all to say I don’t love my friends who ARE in the Seattle area, but more that I wish that everyone I love and care about lived near me. I’ll be the first one to say that I wish my superpower was teleportation so I could see all of my favorites all of the time. Perhaps that should have been my answer to my “wildest dream” on FIRE Drill Podcast.
The hardest part of this post every week always is narrowing it down to my favorites, because there is just so much good content out there. If you’re ever interested in what else I’m reading, I share quite a few other posts on Twitter (and that’s also where I read most of the content to begin with these days).
Our Women’s Personal Finance Facebook group also has a sharing thread on Fridays, and that’s the place to read all the blog posts written by members over the previous week. If you’re looking for more articles written by women, that’s a great place to continue reading (plus we have plenty of great discussions on finances the rest of the week as well!).
If you don’t have the time or inclination to go searching down myriad posts, though, I will be continuing this series every week to showcase some of the best of the new content I read. If you ever read a post you thing I absolutely need to consider for this roundup, please let me know! I am always open to reading new blogs (and posts of blogs I do know, because I miss some).
Women’s Personal Finance Wednesdays – Week 8
1. October 2018 Net Worth Update Simplistic Steph
It’s so easy to share the weeks and months when everything goes right financially, or even the less good months after they’ve passed. It’s so much harder to share as they’re happening like Steph does here, but it is so good and so real. After sharing our October finances and the realization that we won’t quite hit our big 2018 money goal, this post feels extra relevant right now.
Again, like us, their financial update is still pretty dang good all things considered – look at that money shoveled into retirement accounts! – but it still doesn’t feel great to share with the world when you feel like you didn’t do as well as you should have. I so appreciate the raw honesty here, and it’s also a good reminder that even if you’re putting a ton of money into retirement accounts you can still get yourselves into a squeeze as far as cash on hand goes if you overspend on the rest.
2. Don’t Let Your Job Feel Like Drudgery One Frugal Girl
I’ve been reading One Frugal Girl since 2011 (2010?), before I even found Mr. Money Mustache and the FIRE community. She was one of the very first personal finance blogs I found while I was deep in my student loan debt payoff and her story was so inspiring to me to look toward my future. She doesn’t write the personal stuff a lot these days, but whenever she does, it is as good as I remember and it’s clear why I visited her site every week for so many years.
This post is a reflection of FIRE and specifically her thoughts on the Suze Orman conversation as of late. As someone who very much feels like too many people spend way too long in jobs they really don’t enjoy, this felt like a really great perspective of someone who’s balanced the frugal / life / career path for a long time (well before FIRE became such a popular buzzword).
3. FIRE – Financial Independence, Retire Early or Retire Ever? Life Zemplified
Another post on FIRE, but a different perspective here, and Amy echos a lot of my recent thoughts. When so many Americans – really so many people in the world – are living on such a careful edge when it comes to finances, the idea of FIRE is not one I can find too much fault with at a high level. Financial independence, or any level of financial security and freedom, is such a powerful thing to wrest control back in your life and allow yourself to make choices that are best for you, outside of money.
And really, just having any kind of financial runway is a really big deal in a time when so many people will likely never be able to retire, or if they do, they will face never ending financial insecurity because of it. This post is a well curated piece that runs down a ton of resources to get anyone to a point of better financial footing, and I can’t see how that is ever wrong.
I hope you enjoy the posts this week as much as I did. I read a ton of content and it was hard to narrow down my favorites. I’m looking forward to sharing some new ones with you again next week!
As always, if you’re looking for a categorized list of self identified women writing and speaking about personal finance, here is my comprehensive guide to the Women of the Finance Independence Community.
