I’ve been off the juice since 2016 and happy about it. But a few weeks ago (watch out; this story gets a bit wild…), I had a Smart Water that I later realized contained some caffeine. 🤪 I was surprised by my good mood all afternoon and realized it was the stimulant. At such a low dose, it let me focus and get through work but didn’t trigger the jitters, anxiety or dependence I used to get from coffee.

So I’m bringing caffeine back. Just a little, only every once in a while. I’ve tried it as an antidote to light depression, and that’s been nice. And it’s wonderful for a Sunday when I’m facing a long list of writing and business tasks I really want to do but couldn’t otherwise focus on.

This is no revelation, obviously! But it doesn’t have to be. I’m not here to give advice.1 This is a snapshot of my experience, and reintroducing a drug I’ve been off of for 10 years is having a significant impact on my mindset today. Also to say: After some recent mental health challenges, it’s nice to have this little tool to help steer the ship in the right direction once in a while.

💡 A money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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Onto my money date…

I’m looking back on my week and see a calendar filled with meetings and tasks — which feels pretty good! It’s been satisfying, about eight weeks into my new job, to get into a groove and dig into challenging tasks. After a stint in a job that was just about getting a paycheck, I’m happy to be in one that stretches my brain, connects me with cool people and fills my days with purpose.

Warmer, sunnier and longer days are helping a lot, too. Cheers for spring!

💡 A money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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To-dos and expectations weigh on me so heavily. And that weight becomes worse in the winter, when it’s a slog to get anything done and those to-dos pile even higher. With spring settling in around me and my new job bringing order back into my life, I’ve felt more focused and productive in the past couple of weeks than I’ve felt for months. I’m writing to-do lists and checking things off! It’s incredible!

This is the most mundane success, but it feels enormous. I know I’m not alone in experiencing this past winter as tougher to survive than most. Any regular seasonal depression was compounded by January’s especially oppressive weather and a political environment that keeps us in anxiety and despair.

Walking into the light at the end of that bleak tunnel has been an absolute salvation.

💡 A money date is an exercise from my book, You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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I’m writing from the cocoon of a winter storm in Wisconsin. Outside, it’s on-and-off blizzard conditions, something like 12 to 18 inches of snow falling… and absolute peaceful bliss.

We’ve known this storm was coming for about a week, so everyone canceled their plans and stocked up on food. Nonessential businesses are closed, Sunday church services were canceled. Traffic is down to nothing, and no one is revving up machines for yard work. My neighborhood is silent and blanketed in untouched, glittering white snow. I took a walk with my partner this morning in the snow, and it was beautiful. We tossed snowballs around the yard and hopped through the snow like puppies, and it was wonderful.

This storm — a typical late-winter sneak attack following a snap of warmer weather — could have felt unbearable. That last instance of cold and ice and snow removal after enduring nearly five months of winter. But my respite in New Mexico a couple of weeks ago gave me the refresh I needed to get through this final stretch. Instead of more cabin fever, I’m enjoying the day inside, and I delighted in a romp in the snow.

I worried a little before the trip about spending the money, but it was the right choice. Even when life throws me a layoff and a bunch of debt to manage, reducing my spending isn’t necessarily the right answer. The money spent on that trip was the necessary salve to get me through the rest of this winter with the strength to keep making progress on recovering my finances (and my life).

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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In case you’re curious: The federal government (which designates holidays for federal employees that are often mirrored by state governments and private companies) officially calls this Washington’s Birthday and added it in 1879 to honor George Washington. Most states also designate this a state holiday, many under the name Presidents’ Day, and officially honor some combination of past U.S. presidents — some just name Washington, or Washington and Abraham Lincoln; some also include Thomas Jefferson; and some honor all the presidents.

As always, I’m grateful for the perspective of a child for inspiring this deep dive! I love when they pose a question that exposes my ignorance, especially about something that feels so commonplace I never think to look it up.

And I’m happy for the day off, because it gives me a little extra time to rest and digest my first week of work at my new job. It was a wonderful experience, and I’m tired in the very good way that makes me excited to recharge and get back at it tomorrow.

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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It’ll still be winter for several more weeks (or, I don’t know, check with a groundhog near you), but we’ve got a long stretch of above-20-degree days with sunshine in Wisconsin, and WOW, does that change the mood around here.

Oh, and I got a job. 😁

Yeah, that’s a mood-booster, too.

After three months of unemployment following a layoff, I got an offer last week for my top-choice job, and I’ll start next week.

Three months is… a long time. My household hasn’t gone this long without consistent income in more than a decade. I’m proud to know we were able to weather it because of a well-tended comfort fund, access to credit and a broad network for freelance work. Those cushions let me keep my holiday plans, and take space between jobs to try new skills and refocus creative projects. I’ve gone through times when that wouldn’t have been possible, and I’m always grateful to notice I’m not panicking over money.

I’ve got a little financial rebuilding to do once I start working again — but that’s not a failure! Savings and credit are meant to be used in moments like this! I’m so glad I had them, and I’m relieved to be moving forward again.

Details on the job (and other financial happenings) are in my money date below :)

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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To be fair, it’s sort of a putter-y time of year in general. It’s that part of winter in Wisconsin, post-holidays, sub-zero, when we all hunker down and start waiting for spring. I’m not carrying any holiday spending guilt, but I’ve been swept up in the blunt quiet of this season and slowed activities that involve spending. It’s hard to harness fresh-start energy when the world around me is at its most dead. (You might call it seasonal depression…)

And, of course, I’m extra weighed down this year by the addition of our fascist federal government going off the rails. I’m not burying my head in the sand, but I’m not doomscrolling, either. And I’m staying hopeful for the strength of our democracy. I joined my friend recently on her podcast, , to share why I’m (honestly!) optimistic in this moment, and how rejecting budget culture can help us get through the financial uncertainty that awaits us for the remainder of this administration. Catch our conversation here.

Where I live, we’re in the darkest, coldest time of the year. And we no longer have decorative lights and roasted meats to get us through. But each day brings a little more light than the last, and we’re just reminding ourselves: Spring will come, as it does every year. Whether you need this message literally or metaphorically, take it in, and hold on — we can make it!

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

What’s the most joyful thing you did with money this week?

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For me, the break has been less than restful because of the uncertainty of unemployment since my layoff in October.

This time of year asks us to reflect on the past 12 months and plan for what will be different and better in the next 12. From the limbo of unemployment, I can’t do any of that. I can look back on a year in which I started a job that was so short-lived it’s rendered meaningless. When I look ahead to 2026, all I see is a void where plans and ambitions would normally live.

While I hang in the uncertainty of a job offer that might be around the corner, client work I might want to expand, travel I might do, where I might want to take this newsletter, I can’t form a single useful goal. A new year won’t start for me until I have more answers. I’ve been floating since the layoff, and I’ll continue to float until I find a solid foundation on which to put my next era of work. (This, I guess, is a major drawback of workcentrism; when work is my anchor, losing it sets me adrift.)

Uncertainty aside, though, I’m not all gloomy right now. One amazing thing happened this year that I can cherish forever: my book launch! I released You Don’t Need a Budget with Little, Brown Spark on Dec. 24, 2024, so the first quarter of my 2025 was filled with exciting book launch activity. It was, honestly, likely that the rest of the year would have felt like a real come-down after that high no matter what happened — so maybe it was a good year for unfortunate events.

I thought I’d take this final money date of 2025 to reflect on my relationship with money this year… but that doesn’t feel useful to me now. 2026 is likely to look so different, and 2025 was so unusual, I don’t know if there are any lessons to take forward. I think I need to wipe the slate clean of everything but the book launch and start fresh whenever I can start again. If you want to join to share your money date in the comments, feel free to look back on your whole year or just the past couple of weeks — whatever feels useful for you!

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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If you want to continue to support GiveDirectly, they asked me to share this link for their Giving Tuesday campaign to raise funds for three villages in northern Rwanda. The goal is to give 800 families $1,100 each in direct cash, no strings attached.

Donate to GiveDirectly

I went to my niece’s 10th birthday party over the holiday weekend, along with a gaggle of her 10-year-old friends. One delightful moment is sticking with me: A friend gifted her some kind of birthday-special Barbie doll (I’m out of the loop of these things as a non-parent, but maybe you know what this is?).

As my niece unwrapped the box, she said, “Wow! That’s a fancy Barbie!”

Without skipping a beat, her friend replied, “Yeah, it was $32!”

The whole gaggle responded with awe, murmuring, “Wow. What a fancy Barbie…” before turning their attention the next gift.

The adults all cringed for a second at the mention of money, then laughed it off as a cute gaffe, then forgot about it as the girls moved on. I loved it. The girls were totally unfazed that someone had revealed how much they (their parents) spent on a gift. The price was a characteristic of the doll, and that’s it.

I’m sure there’s a lot to dig into behind the cute declaration — the fact that these kids go to dozens of birthday parties each year and (their parents) feel obligated to spend money on gifts every time, the reality that the girl knew the price in the first place because her mom was probably fretting over it when she bought the doll, the whole consumerism of it all…

But in that moment, I enjoyed seeing the kids talk openly about money without judgment or shame. No one scolded her for talking about money, no one spoke up to compare spending, no one asked whether their family could “afford” that kind of spending. It was just a fact in their day. I appreciate seeing money fit into our lives this way.

A little lesson from some fourth graders as we head into the holiday season :)

P.S. Since I’m in an Auntie mood, it was a delight to see Lisa Sibbett resurface my Q&A at The Auntie Bulletin from this time last year. A lovely reflection on my experience as an auntie.

The Auntie Bulletin

10 Questions about Auntiehood for Dana Miranda of Healthy Rich

I’ve been a fan of Dana Miranda’s Healthy Rich newsletter ever since she wrote a guest post for Anne Helen Petersen in 2022. Dana writes about how capitalism impacts the ways we think, teach, and talk about money, and in that Culture Study post, she made an essential point that I still think about all the time…

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a year ago · 42 likes · 3 comments · Lisa Sibbett

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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The first mood shift, as many of you already read, was getting laid off two weeks ago. The day of the layoffs that I wrote about was terrible, infuriating. The aftermath has been freeing and empowering. I’ve forged ahead with a job search and calls for freelance work, a salve that fills financial holes much faster and puts me in the driver’s seat. As you’ll read below, I’m expanding my horizons and basically launching a new side hustle in the wake of this layoff — exciting, sad, empowering, indicting all at once.

The second mood shift was the Nov. 4 election! Democrats swept it, and socialist Mamdani creamed Cuomo in New York City. This bodes well for a shift toward sanity in 2026, and I appreciate a reason to feel hopeful about U.S. politics. (Broken enough to put a fascist into power, but not so broken as to double down on it when he starts fascist-ing.)

➡️ Of course, this shift in my life comes when a lot of Americans’ lives are being impacted by the government shutdown and the administration’s illegal refusal to fund SNAP benefits millions of families rely on to stay fed. If you find yourself one of the lucky ones right now, spare what you can for those who aren’t.

• GiveDirectly is partnering with Propel to give direct cash to SNAP households as soon as they miss a deposit. Learn more and donate here.

• Feeding America has and continues to support food banks around the country. Donate to its services to fight hunger.

• Feeding America also has a super-simple form that’ll automatically send a letter to your reps in Congress to urge them to end the shutdown. Just enter your information here.

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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I’ve been listening to the Culture Study Podcast interview with Jen Hatmaker about mid-life reinvention, and boy, do these conversations ring true at near-40 years old. The destabilization of rediscovering yourself after being an adult for two decades is… terrifying. Exhausting. Confusing. Expensive. Blinding. And I don’t even have kids! And I got the marriage and divorce thing out of the way in my 20s! I’m feeling gut punched just from the internal chaos of mid life. Those of you weathering it with kids and marriages on the brink, my heart goes out to you.

These are the moments I wish I had like a $100,000 nest egg instead of about $20,000. The latter makes me feel safe, but more would make me feel free. Free to try and fail things like I did when I was younger. Our lives are set up for self-discovery and invention in our 20s and again in our 60s — but what about rediscovery and reinvention in our 40s? Where are the back-to-school student loans? Where are the tidy, quiet, 40-something roommates who can split rent?

My parents’ generation called this a mid-life crisis, and real transformation was only available to anyone who had money to lose on it. I’m happy with the rebranding — but now that it’s more common to recognize the upheaval of this season, we’re left to figure out how to wade through it without any guideposts.

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

What’s the most joyful thing you did with money this week?

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I’m usually a one-hat kinda lady. Even with a lot of plates spinning, my work has usually fallen under some reasonable umbrella. But this year I’m experimenting and playing and expanding. I have a day job, side hustle, class in progress and nascent creative project, and none of them fall under a shared umbrella of personal goals or purpose. (I’ll share the new project with you all in due time! Paid subscribers, I appreciate you dearly, so I’ll give you a sneak peak in the safe place for vulnerability below the paywall :)

This, as has been the theme of my summer, has me looking very little at my personal finances. Instead, it’s been a season of navel gazing, self-protection and self-exploration that’s irritatingly befitting of my advancement into midlife.

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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I skipped my last money date, but I didn’t forget about it! I skipped on purpose, because I had literally nothing to report. My personal financial situation has been uneventful for several months — is that from having a salaried job? I don’t want to give too much credit to the corporation that gives me a paycheck.

I think this relative stability and peace is a combination of replacing the hustle of freelancing with one full-time gig, plus setting longer-term goals for other facets of my work. For probably the first time in my life, I’m not scrambling to redefine and reach goals from week to week. I hadn’t realized I was doing that, but it’s nice to take a break from it!

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

What’s the most joyful thing you did with money this week?

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Everyone I know and everyone I follow is in some stage of burnout lately, and we’ve got to take care of ourselves. The unfortunate thing about burnout is that, often, taking care of yourself means dropping every commitment except the bare minimum, and the bare minimum ends up being the stuff that makes you money and, so often, the stuff that fuels the burnout. I’m trying to keep my burnout from taking away things I cherish, like this newsletter. And that means letting this work shift around my needs so it doesn’t become just another stressful obligation.

This feels like a particularly important moment to learn how to weather burnout, because I don’t think this is the kind of burnout we can individually rest and bounce back from. We’re experiencing a collective, cultural burnout that’s going to weigh on all of us for a long time. We can’t just push through this and wait to rest on the other side; the other side is too far away. Anne Helen Petersen’s piece on feminist exhaustion this week discussed this collective burnout well. It has me better understanding our deep need to step back and lighten life’s load as much as possible — especially as women, queer folks, neurodivergent people, all the misfits who’ve been carrying an extra heavy load for so long already.

This might sound dark, but I don’t feel that way, actually. It’s liberating to make rest and (real) self care a priority!

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

What’s the most joyful thing you did with money this week?

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Money dates have been one of the most consistent drivers of new paid subscriptions — thank you to everyone who’s joined us behind the paywall! I’m delighted to have a space to share my own behind-the-scenes updates and to read yours. And your contributions keep this newsletter going :) Nearly 400 paid subscribers strong now, we’re getting a good conversation started as we share our experiences with money every other week!

As I putter along through my summer, my brain has space to think about creativity and business building. I’ll continue to share personal updates through these money dates, but I’ll probably be sprinkling in more business updates and goals in the near future, too, as those take up more brain space. Reply to this email or leave a comment if you have specific questions about building a freelance or solo business, and I’ll try to get to it in future content!

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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My life is so wonderfully boring on paper right now. I just wrote my niece a letter while she’s at camp, and I had nothing to report except the books I’ve been reading1. And I feel the same way writing to you: My brain is quiet — which is such good news! — but that leaves little to say in these reflections. (Unless I want to dig into the political events making horrifying headlines, which I don’t; plenty of braver people are spilling enough ink on those.)

My entire millennial adulthood has been dedicated to striving, and that makes pretty good blog content. I’m sorry if I enjoy my middle-aged summer too much and don’t have enough strife to share here, but let this be a reminder that experiencing peace is totally OK. I’m not going to seek out news or content to analyze and critique, to get angry or agitated just so I have something to say. I’m going to let my world be quiet for as long as it will be, because I know turmoil will come eventually. Thanks for letting me enjoy this peace while I have it. ✌️

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

What’s the most joyful thing you did with money this week?

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A wonderful thing about having a full-time job (that’s remote with flexible hours) is the freedom I’ve gained to think about things other than work again. For years, I’ve been doing the millennial hustle: grinding upward at a job, freelancing, building my own brand, writing a book, freelancing again… I’ve always been striving.

I’m taking a break from that. I’m fine, for a while, with surviving. Maybe even thriving, personally, while simply existing professionally. I do my work, and I clock out. I spend lunch hours walking in my nascent garden, evenings hiking in the woods, weekends hanging in the city and mornings drinking tea and letting my brain wander. It’s an absolute delight to live without goals for a bit. Growth is for cold months.

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

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I first noticed it when I was in college: Student loan refunds during the school year put extra money in my pocket, and focusing on school gave me fewer opportunities to spend money. Then summer would hit — no refund and tons of opportunities for extra spending. Family events, road trips, parties, patio drinks with friends. Money always felt tight in the summer, and I couldn’t bring myself to care about my finances. The pattern continued as I moved into adulthood working a combination of hourly service jobs and freelance gigs — busy summers always meant less time to work and less money coming in, coupled with more opportunities to spend.

I’ve mostly broken out of that boom-bust pattern these days, even when I’m freelancing. But the carefree feeling of summer is still there, especially in Wisconsin, where our warm, sunny days are so fleeting. The last thing anyone wants to do is crunch numbers. My money date this week felt like a little bit of a slog (the numbers part, not the writing to you all part!), and I expect that feeling will stick for a couple of months. I don’t mind it; I’m really not afraid to be less worried about money for a little while! It’s probably a good thing that this season rolls around every year, drags me outside and forces me to think less about all the things that get me down over the winter.

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

What’s the most joyful thing you did with money this week?

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This is a new situation for me. I’ve been a media company staffer before, and I did a tiny bit of freelancing on the side of that. And I’ve always had some kind of personal project going over the past 15 years. But I’ve never had a personal project that made a viable, substantial side hustle the way this newsletter does. Something that can’t just fade away while I become entrenched in a new job. So I look forward to learning what all those bloggers were talking about throughout my 20s — what it’s like to build a business while working full time. I always enjoy a new challenge! Stay tuned for lessons learned.

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

What’s the most joyful thing you did with money this week?

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Nothing is changing at Healthy Rich! But I’m at the threshold of a big change personally, as you’ll read below. It puts me in a good mood this week and — in contrast to my last money date — laser-focused on my financial commitments and goals.

I spend most of my life itching to live in this kind of optimism. I suppose it’s what keeps me constantly on the move; a transition brings a period of pure possibility, hope and wonder before I know how things will actually turn out. If I make big life changes often enough, I can stay in that period of wonder… (No, I’m not in therapy, and yes, I know I should be, why do you ask?)

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

What’s the most joyful thing you did with money this week?

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