EoR No. 25: What’s the most joyful way you’ve used money this summer?

Plus, LGBTQ+ retirement, the history of tipping, buying clothes with debt and more

Top of mind

As expected this time of year, I’m completely out of sorts coming into August. Does it have the same effect on you? I haven’t been able to regulate my body heat in about two months. The sunshine. Family activities. Two kids’ birthdays. The nagging need to “get outside and enjoy the weather because it’ll be gone soon!” A lot of digging? Fairs and parades and fireworks. I do like summer; I appreciate warmth and daylight as much as the next midwesterner. But the collective energy of all of us trying to make the most of these days is disorienting. It’s like three months of sweaty December.

Every year, I see Americans looking longingly at an imagined European lifestyle and calling for us all to take August off. And I support it. No one’s doing their best work this month. Let us nap with our feet in the water.

News and upcoming events:

• Reminder for folks in central Wisconsin: I’m presenting in Wausau for the Central Wisconsin Book Festival on Sep. 27! It’s a free event at the library, where we’ll talk about liberation from budget culture and getting money worries off your mind. If you’re on Facebook, RSVP to this event so organizers can see people are interested!

🥑 ICYMI at Healthy Rich this month

• Why we’re going — and staying — in debt for quality child care by

  Amy Medina

• Money date No. 29: Doing what I love through collective burnout

• 6 months later, my new relationship with Amazon

• A happier way to manage money: Saying ‘yes’ to you

• Let’s normalize talking about our credit histories

• How I vet online financial advice as a financial educator

🔗 Things to catch

• John and David Auten-Schneider wrote about why LGBTQ+ Americans are drawn to self-employment (spoiler: workplace heteronormativity and discrimination) and how to redefine retirement for yourself under those conditions.

• If you don’t know why tipped wages are a problem, take 29 minutes to catch up on the racist and capitalist history of the practice in the United States from Vox.

• Cara Howden
  perfectly describes the body and lifestyle crap that’s wound up with trying to be frugal about buying clothes — and why she finally just bought the darn thing she needed with a credit card.

• A neurodivergent career: why traditional work doesn’t work for me and what I do instead from

  Morgana Clementine

• Barbara J. Isenberg
  explains: What is financial coaching, and what’s the role of personal finance in these unsettled times?

• “I really need a wife to help out.”

  Diana Fox Tilson, LICSW
  on husbands not picking up the mental load just because a woman puts it down.

• Emily Ladau
  shares a glaring example of the high cost of inaccessibility.

• I spend a lot of my days doing intellectual things like talking about writing books — but my personal entertainment is 100% middle America, and I love it. Please talk to me if you watched Happy Gilmore 2 and felt it in your heartstrings like I did, because I very much did, and none of the smart people I know are talking about it!

• If we’ve met, you know Butch Walker is in my top five special interests. I recently remembered he somehow got Matthew McConaughey to revive the role of Wooderson for a 2012 music video, and I can’t stop watching it.

💬 Let’s discuss

What’s the most joyful way you’ve used money this summer?

I love taking this time as summer starts to wind down for a lot of people to celebrate what money brought us these past few months. Summer comes with so much out-of-routine stress and so many opportunities to spend money. It’s easy to feel out of sorts and guilty for all of it and vow to “fix” yourself in the fall — but let’s instead let go of the guilt and appreciate those moments we got to use money to support our joy!

---

I keep dropping copies of YDNAB in the LFL by a my local grocery co-op, and people keep snatching them up! Be as cool as those hippies, and get a copy for yourself 💖