Wellness Journalism: The Health of Wealth

Since every month has a mission (thanks, LiveWell!), and I am a self-professed Wellness Guinea Pig, allow me to introduce my household:

Welcome to Knoxville Street.

Inhabitants: myself (Gina, age 27), roommate/partner/friend/potential spouse (Fale, age 30), and my daughter (Kayana, age 4).

As I have previously confessed, my spending habits have been loosey-goosey. I’m living on my high-interest nest-egg of student loans and grants. Fale is a brilliant freelance audio-visual technician and musical producer who receives unemployment checks from the government and plays a lot of golf. Until this month, we have had no official savings account, no budget, no specific goals. What we did have was a general sense of income-outcome ratios, vague goals (ex: buying a house someday), and a penchant for eating out. While we understand the importance of a tight money management system, we had been putting it off, enjoying the relative freedom of financial improvisation. But if we continued this way, we’d be asking for trouble.

When it comes to making financial management upgrades, I am dealing with a collective pattern in the household; it has its own inertia (resistance to change, for all you physics folk), and I have to expend a certain type of energy to effect change.
This effort is the initial investment. MAKE IT.

When you budget, apply S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting strategies, organize spending habits, and plan ahead with conscious awareness, you are literally “making money.” There is always room for improvement! Give special focus, attention, and thought to the pot. By doing so, you send energy into the financial dimension of wellness. This is how you nurture your piggy bank and keep it producing long into the future!

Keep your money healthy,
Your Financial Wellness in check (and balance).
Then it will not catch the flu
(Such as we see in the case of our H1N1 economy.)

Save yourselves. If you haven’t made a budget or set new goals yet, it’s never too late—not even in a month of Novembers—to get on the horse.