design your intentional life.
It’s all about balance. Whether you’re mindfully experiencing the seasons, caring for your home, organizing your finances in a thoughtful way, planning your next goal, cultivating a gratitude practice, or taking a moment to examine your life via journaling, we are here to help. You can balance your progress with ease, intention, and joy.
Organize Your Kitchen
A simple, clear organizational strategy helps us see how to reduce food waste by buying less food overall and using what do buy after we have it. It has a definite impact on the amount of food we have to throw away.
Make Homemade Vegetable Stock
While you’re cutting up veggies for your meal, take a second to glance skeptically at the contents of your crisper drawer. Is anything still good but getting to the edge? Wash it, chop it, and add it to the stock container in the freezer.
Set Your 2021 Goals
What is your goal for your work or school this year? Are you looking to achieve something particular at your job, start a project on the side, or find a new job that allows you to live your purpose? Brainstorm some options.
Pick Your Financial Heroes
What is this person’s financial story?
What are the major challenges they’ve faced? How have they succeeded?
Why does their story resonate with you? What do you admire about them?
Reduce Plastic in Your Kitchen
Just like tracking your spending or counting your calories, actually looking at what you’re throwing out regularly will let you make the most informed decisions that you can.
Track Your Spending
Before you get to work on your spending habits, you need to know exactly what they are. This is how you’re going to get that data!
Take Something Off Your To-Do List
Is there something you’re doing supposedly to save or make money, but doesn’t? Some people can rock a couponing app, for example. Others spend hours adding coupons, watching the associated ads, trying to find the correct products at the store, and scanning them, only to realize later that we had spent, in the end, more (unless that’s just us).
Check Your Financial Values
We spend so much of our time trying to fit our budget into our income that it’s easy to see it all as “needs.” And yes, some of them (maybe even most of them) are needs. But let’s take a few minutes to think about it in the big picture. After all, this is your money that you’re earning to support your life. Let’s make sure it’s actually supporting your financial values!
Work Toward a Zero Waste Bathroom
We tend to find a configuration and routine in the bathroom and stick to it. We can use those habits to our advantage; once we optimize them, we can just lock in again, and the benefits will compound on their own.
Assemble Your Finance Team
It’s time to create your own Justice League. (Or knights of the round table. Or Avengers. Or whatever.) Choose three of your friends or family members to be your financial confidantes over the next year.
Get a Water Bottle
It takes a plastic bottle at least 450 years to degrade, yet we only recycle 30% of them in the U.S. Ouch.
GIVE YOURSELF A FINANCE AWARD
You deserve security and wealth. And even when the process is slow, you’re making it happen. You should be proud. So, here are some reminders to use as prizes, phone backgrounds, cards to stick on your mirror, or whatever else you need them for.
Optimize Your Coffee Habit
Chances are, you have built some daily habits around your delicious mug of energy juice. That makes it a great opportunity to make a difference.
Build an Emergency Fund
An emergency can happen to any of us, and when it happens to you, you don’t want to be worried about how close to the limit your credit card is, or how you’ll pay for groceries this month, or where you could possibly get the money. You do not deserve that kind of stress.
SPREAD OUT YOUR SPENDING
Decide on an amount of money large enough to throw off your spending plan for the month. It doesn’t have to be large enough to wreck it completely, just enough to annoy you.
Reduce Your Mail
Make a list of paper catalogs and flyers you get in the mail, from places you’ve done business with. Check your recycling bin and your credit card history if you need clues to make a comprehensive list.
Join a Farm Share
With community-supported agriculture getting increasingly popular, you may be seeing advertising and hearing whispers about CSAs in your neighborhood. So why consider it, and how should you get started?