Hey Reader,

Thanks for sharing your time with us. We hope this brings a fresh perspective — and a bit of renewed energy for your budget this week.

🎥 What's New

How to Reconcile in YNAB (Without Losing Your Mind)

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💲 Money Minute - From Nick

Every week, I help between 25 and 30 individual clients with their budget strategy.

And I'm almost always trying to help them answer one simple question:

Here’s what I mean.

To make progress in your finances (or really, in any area of life), you need to know two things:

1. What the next right action is.
2. How to take the next right action.

Sounds obvious. But this is where most people get stuck.

Sometimes clients don’t know what their next move should be.
So we zoom out.

We talk about their bigger goals and priorities, and I’ll ask questions like:

• What are you trying to accomplish by the end of this quarter?
• If you could only hit one financial goal in the next three months, what would it be?
• Based on that goal, what’s one small action you could take this week?

Other times, clients already know exactly what they should do…
They’re just not doing it.

That’s when the issue isn’t what to do — it’s how to do it. So we dig into what’s getting in the way:

• Is the task too vague?
• Too overwhelming?
• Tied to fear, guilt, or past failure?
• Competing with a dozen other priorities?

When we identify the real blocker, we can usually remove it — or at least make it smaller — and momentum starts to build again.

So here’s a question for you to sit with this week:

If not, that’s your starting point.

But if you do know…

Clarity on your next move — and honesty about what’s blocking it — is often the first real step toward progress.

⚓︎ Craft Your Money Story - From Hanna

My Meemaw grew up doing chores like picking cotton and canning okra. By her own admission, she whined for a lot of rest during these activities. And her mom — my great-grandma Beasley — always replied with something like:

As you might imagine, that wasn’t quite the kind of rest my little Meemaw had in mind.

I always get a good laugh from Meemaw recalling the wide-ranging “while we rest” activities of her childhood. And I think there’s something quietly profound in Grandma Beasley's approach to rest.

One definition of biblical rest puts it this way:

I tend to assume that rest means turning off my brain — which usually looks like plopping down on the couch and opening Netflix. But I’ve experienced, again and again, that those kinds of activities don’t actually leave me feeling rested — just distracted.

So Nick and I are trying to be more intentional about how we steward our rest.

Here are a few things that are helping us rest more deeply — instead of just vegging out:

1. We bought a rolling TV stand and keep it in the closet.
   • We genuinely enjoy a movie night now and then. But we don’t want TV to be our default. Keeping it stored away adds just enough friction to stop us from mindlessly sitting in front of a screen while scrolling our phones.
2. We budget to invest in our hobbies.
   • Whether it’s books, art supplies, or workout equipment, we budget intentionally for activities we enjoy. It turns out there’s a lot we’d rather spend our time (and money) on than TV. And when you’ve already invested in the tools you need, it’s much easier to choose a truly restful activity over a veg session.
3. We keep a "While We Rest" list.
   • We wrote out, ahead of time, activities that are
     ​actually restful for us. So when we hit that indecisive,
     “I dunno… what do you want to do?” spiral,
     we can simply choose something from the list and
     get started.

Now — instead of feeling like a guilty escape from work — rest feels like an important part of faithfully stewarding the life and resources God has entrusted to us.

After all, Nick and I believe we exist to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. So our money story is about more than just budgeting for responsibilities, obligations, and efficiency — it also makes room for joy, creativity, and renewal.

Our budget doesn't get in the way of rest.
It helps us make room for it.

And we hope yours does too!

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Until next week,
Nick + Hanna

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