Millennials are changing the workplace. Love ’em or hate ’em, this is a reality.
And it’s a reality we’ll all have to deal with for the next several years, since the tail end of the Millennial generation is just starting to graduate college, move back in with their parents, and apply to part-time jobs so they can spend 20 hours per week at rallies protesting student loans.
Haha! I’m totally kidding. Sort of.
A quick reminder: these spending reports are an effort to keep myself accountable to the idea that doctors do not have to spend a totally ridiculous amount of money to live well and love life. We’re trying to do these spending reports for every month of 2018.
As I have mentioned before, we do not do traditional budgeting. You absolutely should do traditional budgeting if that works for you as a way to control your spending. More on this topic here. …
I believe that we should be teaching our employees how to be successful – not just in their specific roles in our business but also in their own career paths as the professional men and women they are. This means they need to know how to ask for raises and negotiate pay.
I don’t do raises or performance reviews just because another calendar year has passed. I meet with my employees when I need to or want to. I have an “open door” policy that allows my employees to schedule time to meet with me when they feel the need. This has worked well for my particular business.
I want my employees to love their jobs. I want to empower them to ask for the things they want out of their job, including raises.
The instructions below were written with the help of an excellent employee of mine who has been with me for four years.
It seems to me that as soon as we doctors are making any kind of decent money (which is usually immediately after graduating) we start looking for reasons to not do any actual work outside of the office.
Usually the reason given for this attitude is some version of “I can make way more at my job than what the (insert any type of manual laborer or domestic service provider) charges me per hour, so why would I not hire that out?” If we want to throw an extra layer of guilt on for anyone who might object, we say something like: “Well I have to pay someone to clean my house and cook my meals and cut my lawn so I have time to do things with my kids!”
Both of these excuses may have some superficial merit, but neither one holds much water when examined closely. …
In our ongoing efforts to be minimalist-ish, we decided last year that our small-town life was getting too big.
You may already know that we skip the use of our cars when we can, but even so our car commutes have started to annoy us in a big way. The main road in town that takes me to my office is getting more and more congested with each passing month, due to the ever-growing population here and some new high-density residential construction. My car commute is now well over 20 minutes during rush hour, which if you’ve done any research at all on happiness you know is a bad thing.
The interstate is the least-terrible route between our current house and my husband’s work, as well as our current house and Baby J’s daycare. Those drives are still in the 15-20 minute range, but if we’d wanted to spend time every day sitting on the interstate we would have moved to a big city. …
One of the interesting things about modern American life is that it’s easy to find conversations and media reports lamenting the plight of any adult who rents their residence or has roommates. What was standard money-saving behavior in college – living in a small-ish, rented space with other human beings – is apparently pitiable if you are past your mid-twenties.
Meanwhile, the advertising machine that is the news media seems determined to convince us that we all need giant luxury living spaces, that wages are plummeting and housing costs are skyrocketing, that people choosing not to buy homes will cause the entire global economy to implode, and of course that Millennials are either to blame for all this or are the helpless victims of all this, depending on which article you read. …
The summer travel season is just around the corner, and so I’ve decided it’s time for a confession.
Let me preface this by saying I have always enjoyed a moderate amount of risk and a high amount of adventure in my life. I’m pretty well-adjusted and emotionally stable. I tend to not dwell too much on the past or think too hard about things that I can’t control.
And yet, a little over a year ago, I completely lost my mental and emotional $#&! because I spent an hour positively sure that I was going to drown in the Straight of Gibraltar. …
Our guest post today is from an awesome computer engineer who agreed to share some interesting financial, schooling, work, and investment details from his life so our young people can have a real-life story to consider when contemplating career choices.
In case you were concerned that our guest-poster is a boring and out of shape nerd who spends his days indoors hunched over a keyboard, you should know that in addition to already kicking ass at personal financial management at the tender age of 28, Mr. Computer Engineer has completed over 10 long-distance running races, summited every single one of the 54 14ers in Colorado, and traveled all over the world to hike, climb, and ski. The photos in this post are his. …
Fun fact: we Americans each spend an average of 293 hours in our vehicles every year. That’s 12+ solid days out of 365. I don’t care how good the music is or how fancy the upholstery is, that’s just way more time than I want to spend sitting in a car during my waking hours.
The hubs and I honestly did pretty well at minimizing our use of cars during 2016 and the first part of 2017 (our oldest has been a decent biker for years, so that helped). …
I’ll cut to the chase: We spent $5,894.51 in March for our family of four. You can scroll down to the see the breakdown of categories in our fancy Numbers chart. This total is only slightly higher than our spending in January or February, and March included our family trip to Maui (some of our most-effective-ever travel hacking, which we are very proud of). …