Hey Reader,

We hope this email finds you feeling merry from Christmas festivities and resting up in preparation for the new year!

📝 What's New

Nick just released a step-by-step YNAB setup tutorial for 2025. If you've never gotten your budget to work, or you've fallen off track and need a refresh, hop over to YouTube and check it out.

​2025 YNAB Getting Started Guide - Start To Finish​

💲 Money Minute

Nick here - As we wrap up 2024, Hanna and I are reflecting on some of the best (and worst) ways we've spent money this year. And, of course, thinking about how we can better align our spending with our values next year.

Our life vision is always evolving, and our budget needs to change with it! So I dig into our budget reports and use the data to identify areas for improvement.

Here are a few questions I ask to make the data meaningful. And my (Nick's) answers are below in red:

• What's the best / most favorite purchase you made?
  ​Mistborn Trilogy box set by Brandon Sanderson - this series had me sucked in the past few months. If you like fantasy novels and haven't read them, do it. ​
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• What’s the worst purchase you made?
  ​House shoes - I went too cheap and they got worn out in a matter of weeks.
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• What’s the largest eating out transaction?
  ​Foglight Foodhouse - Cajun place in the middle of nowhere TN. Hanna and I spent $157.74, and I have no regrets. It was an amazing night.
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• What’s your most frequented restaurant?
  ​Amigos Beer & Mexican - we went for a total of 15 times! Yikes, we may need to dial this back for 2025.
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• How did you use money to fund another area of life you're trying to grow in (hobby, relationship, health etc...)?
  ​After having a health scare this past summer, I started taking my health much more seriously. I spent some good money on weights, running shoes, running hats, and a couple of workout programs. So far I'm down 22 lb, and I'm really happy with the progress.
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• What percentage of our income went to giving, and what percentage went to wealth building (either debt pay down or investing)?
  ​While I'm not going to share our specific percentages here, I will say that this year has been our biggest year yet in terms of both giving and wealth building. We've been immensely blessed, and we plan to continue pushing ourselves to increase these percentages in 2025.
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  If you don't know your percentages for giving and wealth building, I would challenge you to sit down and figure them out before the new year. Then set yourself a goal to increase each by 1%.

⚓︎ Craft Your Money Story

Hanna here - Stewarding your money well goes hand-in-hand with stewarding your time well. As we prepare for the new year, Nick and I are having lots of conversations about being more disciplined with our time. As you might imagine, decreasing time spent looking at our phones is at the top of the potential improvements list.

To prep for a year of less doom scrolling, we've:

1. Organized our default phone screen so that only the most important apps are shown (Dwell Bible, Street Parking workouts, YNAB, Google calendar). Then we buried addicting apps - like Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube - in a folder that requires more swipes and taps to get to.
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2. Changed the display so that everything is grayscale. This makes using the phone way less enjoyable and, subsequently, cuts down on our tendency to constantly look at it!
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3. Removed all social media apps. If we want to access social media, we have to use the internet browser. Apps like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok etc... are specifically designed to suck you in. Accessing them through the Safari or Chrome browser is a much worse user experience - which is exactly what we want to cut down on our usage!

We hope this email inspires you to reflect on your past year and prayerfully consider ways to grow in 2025. And we'd love to hear about some of your best and worst purchases of 2024. Hit reply and let us know!
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Until next week,
Nick + Hanna

PS: We'll be opening up enrollment for our New Year's Cohort of Ahead in 100 next week. If you're ready to make 2025 your best financial year ever, keep an eye on your email to be the first to know.