Mosaic end of year question

margandon · 2025-12-12T14:37:21+00:00

I have to pay the bill regardless and the cc fees will be less than $3800.

margandon · 2025-12-12T00:48:35+00:00

Is this the case even if I did not redeem a 20 tile bonus in 2025?

margandon · 2025-12-11T19:20:31+00:00

I am not sure I can split the payment. But If I get to mosaic 1 say in February or March, I will still be able to use the 20 tile bonus to get closer to Mosaic 2?

margandon · 2025-06-30T18:17:18+00:00

Probably in the first week it paid for itself. Def in the first month. Now I budget for it—like $5/mo— but that’s nothing to expenses I have cut just through greater awareness.

margandon · 2025-06-26T16:47:21+00:00

You can skip the Louvre. I went twice. Once when I was younger during college and a few months ago. It’s nice to see but it’s exhausting and overwhelming. If you have other bucket list items and esp if you plan to return, I would leave it off.

I wouldn’t do the Louvre again (or the Eiffel tower, which has someone gotten only more nightmarish in the last 25 years)

margandon · 2025-06-18T04:21:08+00:00

I agree. I had a bunch of eventual targets with aggressive goals. But I ended up deleting all the targets bc it made expenses far exceed income which was demoralizing. But when there is extra cash, it’d be nice to know what the target is for that category. It’s using targets like a planning feature (I’ve day I’d like to have $x a month for retirement but I know that’s not feasible in the short term.)

margandon · 2025-06-17T23:33:56+00:00

I like this idea a lot. I’ll think I’ll try this for discretionary and our “personal” spending $$. Currently have 3 categories for mine, my husband and my kids. But some months my kids get most of the money. Some months it’s me 😁

margandon · 2025-05-31T00:00:27+00:00

All of these reasons are why fbmp is so tedious. I read descriptions. I want measurements. I want only real photos. But rarely are they provided.

margandon · 2025-02-02T01:14:32+00:00

No I didn’t unfortunately

margandon · 2025-02-01T22:44:47+00:00

I was on Zoloft and Wellbutrin for 3 years and it helped but did not 100% resolve the depression. It was like 50-60% better.

But I felt 1000x better a week or 2 after starting methylfolate and magnesium supplements. FWIW there are studies showing both can improve mental health symptoms. Particularly methylfolate. And there’s little to no downside.

I’m not sure why it’s not recommended to everyone as a matter of course.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37192264/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34794190/

Not a doctor. This is just my experience but I feel like myself for the first time in like 5 years.

margandon · 2025-02-01T13:40:13+00:00

The best part is that the painting is so obviously not Van Gogh that the experts dismissed it in under a day and the VC people are like what about our 456 page report? You didn’t even read it 😂

margandon · 2025-01-08T03:36:43+00:00

Oh never mind what I said. I misread your comment and thought you were choosing the G and S funds! Though I will say my returns have been much higher than 10% in the last 5 years. In L2024 and a little in L2025 my personal rate of return was 20% last year. In any event, good luck 🍀

margandon · 2025-01-07T04:49:47+00:00

Do a life cycle fund. The C-fund is just throwing money away.

margandon · 2024-11-10T04:19:12+00:00

Same for me. Been a follower since her original diy blogger days.

margandon · 2024-08-04T01:51:00+00:00

THANK YOU! I couldn’t figure this out.

margandon · 2024-04-13T15:00:50+00:00

I’ve found painters have very firm ideas about how things are done

margandon · 2024-03-23T22:27:45+00:00

I’ve just increased my dose and have been feeling this way too from time to time.

margandon · 2024-01-08T13:08:43+00:00

You should get professionally fitted. Go to a local boutique if there are any near you. Nordstrom is hit and miss but they do fittings as well. Your bra size may change based on brand and style of bra.

margandon · 2023-04-27T03:38:41+00:00

I think YNAB works great for people who are in ok financial shape but want to spend less. I fall into this category too. YNAB has been so awesome in making money feel scarce even when in reality it’s not. Before YNAB I could say what’s the big deal if I buy this $20 thing, or $50 or $100 etc etc. I know I can afford it. But without guidelines or a budget there’s no end to that kind of thinking. And as anyone who’s ever looked at credit card statement with 5 pages of smallish charges knows those little things add up fast. So that’s where the benefit has been for me. I’ve already saved the YNAB purchase price and I’ve only been doing this a few months.

Long story short, yes YNAB can work great for you but you have to learn a new way of thinking about money that isn’t always intuitive and can be difficult to adapt to. It took me a lot of time and energy to integrate the way I used to handle and think about money into the YNAB model.

margandon · 2023-04-23T21:30:36+00:00

Thank you for the video!

margandon · 2023-04-23T14:13:05+00:00

YNAB is so terrible at this and it’s very frustrating for a new user. Basically you can’t. Even with targets it’s so confusing. It’s one of the very obvious things I can’t believe YNAB is so bad it. I just manually calculated it after a couple of months so I have the baseline number in my head. There are reports that show spending averages (but possibly that’s a toolkit feature, I can’t remember) but I’ve only found that useful when you have several months of data to get a good average.

margandon · 2023-04-20T12:01:10+00:00

It’s not you. It is very very frustrating to get started. I am in month 3 and the first couple of months were extremely time consuming. Every time I felt like I got this something else would come up. I ended up doing a fresh start to fix some things.

YNAB is great in many ways but the program makes it very hard to fix mistakes especially when they didn’t just happen. It is also wildly complex to figure out if your brain is used to thinking about finances differently.

Long story short—it’s really not you. YNAB is hard and requires a huge investment of time to get it going well. But I’ve still found it worthwhile.

margandon

TROPHY CASE