March 2022 Financial Update:

Hello everyone, hope you’re all doing well! I mainly spent March trying to figure out what direction I want to go with my career. I got a little derailed and lost sight of the path I was on, but now I’m back. 🙂

I’m making content for Ease Your Financial Payne again. I just started to feel discouraged with everything I was doing and had to remind myself of my accomplishments and why I do what I do, even if little to no money comes from it.

Other than thinking about what I want my career and this next year to look like, I’ve mainly just been helping my mom declutter her home which has been amazing for everyone involved.

Also I am leaning towards not going back to school again for many reasons, but I don’t feel like explaining them all right now.

That’s about it for my month. I’m feeling inspired again and have tons of ideas for blog posts.

On to our finances for March!

We took some money out of savings for our 2021 taxes, but we will replenish it eventually. Some good financial news for us this month: our investments went up and so did the value of our home. Of course, our mortgage balance went down too like usual.

Our Partial Financial Independence Goals:

• $0 Debt.
• Brandon works part time at his job.
• I am self-employed. I can choose how much or how little I want to work & when.
• We need $2,000+/month in income, whether that comes from investments, Brandon’s part time job, my blog, my workbook, etc. it doesn’t matter.

Our Current Numbers as of March 31st, 2022:

• Roth IRAs (Betterment -SRI Sustainable): $30,572.35 and $27,623.42
• My small Traditional IRA (From an old 401(k) rollover -Betterment): $1,711.23
• Tesla: $1,075.10
• AYRO (Free Crypto from signing up with Robinhood): $1.28
• Bitcoin: $1,262.00
• Total Invested: $62,245.38
• Savings: $5,105.55
• Debt: -$119,641.16 (Mortgage only) -On track to be paid off by end of 2034.
• Just Brandon is working full time.

For me, investing in Crypto & Tesla is gambling. I invested that money knowing full well that I could lose it all and be okay with that. I also don’t include the value of our house & car in our updates, any random cash we are saving up for house projects, or how much we have saved up in credit card rewards.

As always, thanks for reading!

-Meghan

My Links:

• My Financial Planning Workbook!
• ThriftBooks -I LOVE them as a company & order all of my books from them now! They ship super fast, great service, books always show up as described, super cheap, & good for the planet because they’re second-hand, but you get to choose the quality!
• BetterHelp -A week of Therapy for FREE!
• Betterment -Invest your first $5,000 for FREE!
• Back Market -My referral code: 6888f588d6f85083 -$10 off your order! Refurbished Tech! My sister & I both got “new” phones from there. They’re awesome, great quality, so much cheaper than buying new (by up to 70%), came super fast, was super easy to buy, AND we saved 123 pounds of carbon emissions, each!