Steph and Kyle's personal blog where we share our adventures, crafts, tinkering projects, and life in California. A place to document our journey for family and friends to enjoy.
Reading is wonderful.
Sleep is also wonderful.
Unfortunately, my kids recently decided that reading is apparently more wonderful than sleep, and bedtime at 8 PM slowly started turning into… 9:30… 10:00… “just one more chapter, Dad.”
So naturally, I did the only reasonable thing:
I built a robot to enforce bedtime.
So you’re here for some fantasy book recommendations?
Fantastic. Let me just write you a book about books—because that’s apparently what this turned into.
What started as a short list of favorites turned into a full-on tour through my reading history, with all the twists, tangents, and emotionally scarring unfinished trilogies you’d expect. If you’re still with me by the end, I hope you walk away with a few new titles to check out—and maybe a few to avoid if you’re prone to obsessing over series that may never end.
Many years ago (more than I think I want to count at this point), my wife and I started using a bank called Simple. It was online-only, with no physical branches, but it had a wonderful budgeting system at its core. You could create Expenses and Goals, each with different funding methods and schedules. You’d also tell it when and how much you expected to receive from each paycheck, and it would go about divvying up your income to cover everything. Any money left over was marked “Safe-To-Spend” and could be used for whatever else we wanted (anything from food to fun).
Essentially, it was an automated envelope budgeting system. It was our first real attempt at budgeting as a couple, and it got us to a place where we could pay off some debt and buy our first house.
A few years later, but in fairly quick succession, Simple’s parent bank BBVA was acquired by PNC, the Simple service was shut down, and—poof—there went our budget. This happened right around the time we sold our first home and moved into another. We came out of that move cash-positive and assumed we had our shit together and didn’t need a budget anymore. (Foreshadowing…)
We went about two years without any real budgeting and made a number of big financial decisions: buying a new house, turning the shed into a studio, purchasing a travel trailer and a tow vehicle, and shifting to a one-income household while Steph started teaching part-time and building her side hustle.
By the end of that two years, our lives—and our finances—looked very different. We had worked ourselves back into some uncomfortable debt. We needed a budget. (Duh.)