The Financial Diet

Creating a home that makes you feel wonderful is a gift you give yourself that echoes through the rest of your life. A bedroom you love is one in which you want to have an organized, well-cared-for wardrobe, which means less money spent replacing your battered items. A happy, practical, smartly appointed kitchen is one you actually *want* to cook in, which means much less money spent eating out or ordering in. A chic and comfortable living room means more entertaining at home and embracing the lost art of dinner parties (always cheaper than doing drinks and a restaurant dinner!). Even a Zen, candle-filled, clean bathroom is one in which you want to spend time doing home spa treatments instead of feeling like you have to go somewhere expensive to feel beautiful. If you create a home that is most attuned to your life and somewhere you really enjoy being, everything benefits.

Saving money isn't about depriving yourself. It's about deciding you love Future You as much as you love Today You.

As I've said before, money doesn't buy you happiness, but it buys you the Lego kit of happiness. It buys you comfort, security, and options, even if you still have to build your happiness on top of it.

The worst thing about being an adult is the fact that we can do basically whatever we want. You can have Chicken McNuggets and champagne for dinner, but you know that the next day you'll feel like a whoopee cushion made of alcohol and sodium. Yeah, adulthood.

It's not unhealthy or wrong to change your mind, career wise, nor is it selfish to dream for something better than what you have, even if what you already have is "pretty good" compared to what other people have.

It can be helpful to remind yourself on a regular basis that you should't spend on luxuries just because you think that's the life you should be living.

... we have to give up that vague notion of getting all our fulfillment from one thing. We have to set our goals in little, manageable steps, and embrace the idea that not all of our emotional eggs can be put in one basket. If we can love our jobs, relatively speaking, that's awesome. But we also need to love our friends and families and significant others and hobbies and time alone as much as possible, and not expect any one thing--even our Big Dreams--to make us suddenly feel whole.

Ultimately, a job, no matter how much you love it, will never hit every note for you, and it shouldn't. We should all strive to find multiple steams of fulfillment, challenges, and income. The more we rely on one role as an all-encompassing definition, the unhealthier our relationship with that role becomes.

It wasn’t until a friend told me she made it a rule to transfer her savings automatically when her paycheck hit so she would never “see” the money

We recommend that you have three months’ worth of all living costs saved up in an easily accessible, regular savings account.

Learning basic skills like how to install a shelf or pick out a jacket that will last more than one New York winter has done more for me financially than any raise on a biweekly paycheck.

If you create the home that is most attuned to your life and somewhere you really enjoy being, everything benefits. And learning to be grateful for the space you have created will mean you spend less money trying to keep up with your own unrealistic expectations for how your home should look. It’s important to remind ourselves to be grateful and to think as proactively as possible about our home. I’d like to own property someday, so sacrificing on rent now and not paying for things I can’t afford is a fair exchange. Being smart about when

The desire to fill your life with all the things that you believe will make you a more whole or realized person has to go because it drains your checking account and fills your life with clutter.

Unless you are very, very lucky, getting what you want isn't going to be some fairy-tale narrative-- the stories are messy and the results are never exactly what we expect them to be, but the thread that connects them all is the same: prepare for the unexpected, be ready to work harder, and put all your happiness in one basket.