Money Date No. 5: Just… tired

Business moves, (almost) good job news and celebrating the power of freelancing

Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, one money exercise I encourage in You Don’t Need a Budget is a periodic money date — a little check in with yourself, your partner(s), or your family to process your financial situation and consider any big or small changes you want to make. As an experiment, I’m adding my money date reflections to this newsletter so you can see how this exercise looks in real life. 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?

• Is there anything you did with money this week that you’d like to change or avoid in the future? Why?

• What did you do (financially or otherwise) to support your goals this week?

• Based on your experience this week, are there any changes you want to make to your commitments or goals?

Money Date for 8/1/24

This past week can defined in one word: exhaustion. Part of that is because I’m writing this on a day when I woke up at 3:30 a.m. to take Stefan to the airport and then came home and filed campaign finance reports for — not one — not two — but three committees ahead of Wisconsin’s primary election on August 13. A larger part, though, is because transitions are so freakin’ hard.

I’m in a moment of moving from co-owning a local business to working for someone else. In the midst of an election year and less than five months out from a book launch. Come January 2025, almost nothing about my life will look like it does today. Transitions require you to hold multiple versions of yourself at once, and that takes a lot more energy than normal times. Stefan asked me yesterday why I haven’t broken down from burnout yet, and… I don’t know. Maybe I’m not doing enough??

Photo by Brina Blum on Unsplash