Matthew Weeks

We all want to be heard. To be seen. To be understood.

And yet, it seems impossible for us to truly express ourselves to anyone. Be it emotional hangups, trauma, anger, or just not having enough time to speak, we cannot fully convey what is in our minds. Be it resentment, a lack of compassion, or a need to be heard ourselves, we cannot fully comprehend what we hear. And so our disagreements escalate into arguments into fights.

Why do we start out trying to talk to someone, but find ourselves fighting?

We suck at listening earnestly.

There is a difference between hearing and listening.

In order to listen we need to not only hear, but actively try to understand. If we are approaching a conversation as a fight, we think about a rebuttal to what's being said instead of trying to understand the person who is saying it. We hear the words, but try to refute instead of understand the message.

We suck at speaking honestly.

I don't know about you but I spend more time thinking about what people want to hear than I do saying what I believe.

Most conscientious people experience anxiety about what other people think. Especially if we feel unsafe. When we have to monitor how the other person will react to our message, we lose sight of our own truth. We struggle to convey our thoughts. We shut down. Or we lash out.

We don't find common ground.

If we can't empathize with someone we disagree with, we will fight them. In order to live comfortably alongside other people.

We are quick to judge others. Especially when we disagree with them. Snap judgements help us tune out the other person as noise. Focussing on what we disagree on. Evaluating and preparing to fight, but not listening.

This is all very depressing, but how do we feel heard?

• Listen earnestly to the person talking to you. Try to understand.

• Honestly speak your mind. Try to practice truth-telling.

• Try to find common ground. Try to empathize and relate to one another.

Your life would be better sober.

Here's why:

Think of the financial cost.

Alcohol is expensive!

I used to spend more than $600 a month on alcohol. When I was in college, that would have paid my rent and then some. Last year, that paid off 24% of my student loan. Now, that means I can invest $7200 per year.

Even if your health isn't a concern you could save so much with one decision.

Then think of your health & fitness.

Alcohol is poison.

Regardless of whether you are concerned about your immediate health or not, there is no question that alcohol is harmful to your body. You will sleep better without alcohol. You will be leaner without the calories from alcohol. Your exercise will work better.

Alcohol just makes living healthy harder.

Think of your mental health.

Alcohol is a depressant.

Whether you drink to forget about your social anxiety or drink to feel nothing at all, you're achieving the same result. Alcohol shuts down the functioning of the forebrain, our self. It causes uninhibition the same way it causes obliteration. At the moment it feels good, but each time we wake up feeling a little worse than before.

After the first three weeks, each day you wake up sober you feel a little better than before.

Ending a cycle of shame.

Like a content flywheel, but totally evil.

Something that leads to shame leads to drinking. Leads to temporary relief. Followed by a steep blowback of depression, which leads to more drinking.

When addicted to alcohol, we often drink to suppress a sense of shame, but we can't begin to heal until we stop the monster's flywheel.

Alcohol didn't give me anything.

I don’t say I “gave up” alcohol anymore because there was nothing that it gave me.

At the time, I certainly thought that it did. I drank because it made me feel like I could do anything. Or rather, it made me careless and impulsive enough to do anything. I drank because it eased my social anxiety — and yet, I never seemed to form lasting relationships as a result. I drank because it made me more confident—and yet I lost confidence in my skills, my mind, and myself with each passing year.

Once I stopped drinking, I realized what I thought I gained was nothing.

But the relief and healing that followed sobriety was something worthwhile.

When you genuinely believe you are about to die, you have some funny thoughts.

One day in 2015, I was in my favourite restaurant in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Surfer's Paradise. A tiny shop owned by an Australian couple next to the hostel I was living at. I was listening to Tom, an english fellow who taught english virtually, describing the site he was hoping to build to advertise his services to a wider audience and develop a product offering; I was having a bit of trouble focussing. I asked him for a second time how he currently found new students. Except, what I actually said was probably gibberish.

"Matt, are you okay?"

Dianna, the woman who owned the bar had walked over to our table as I woke up suddenly from my mid-meeting nap.

I hadn't told a soul how sick I felt - had felt for over a week now. How my diarrhea had stopped only because I was too dehydrated to generate new fluids and I hadn't eaten properly in days. I was convinced it was terminal.

Dianna took one look at me and immediately knew what was wrong.

"You need to get yourself over to KSK mall and tell them you have a stomach infection."

"I can't afford it", I looked down in shame. My travel insurance had expired the month before and I was down to 2500 Baht. Barely enough for my hostel and food. I'd heard about the travellers with no insurance, left thousands in debt to a hospital with no way to pay.

"Sure you can! I went last week and it cost 100 Baht."

I stared at her, dumbfounded.

Shortly after, I stumbled less than 20 minutes down the street to Kad Suan Kaew shopping mall where I found the pharmacist on the bottom floor, and anxiously tried to explain my symptoms to him.

He stopped me, and said, "Your stomach. It feels like shit?"

I nodded, and within minutes he gave me a bottle with a few pills and instructed me to take one a day for the next few days, and to drink lots of water.

By the next afternoon, I felt some relief as my insides absorbed liquid for the first time in days. By the next day, I felt almost entirely better.

I'm pretty sure all he gave me was Imodium - Where was I going with this? Oh yeah:

In what I believed to be my final days I wrote furiously in my journal

Not emotional reflection, but trying to figure out a solution.

Sales plans, urging myself to do more work. To make the money to get by. Potential prospects and clients who owed me money that maybe one more invoice reminder would turn around.

And the kicker: A pseudo-business idea to "scratch my own itch" - A script for travellers that would require you to check-in every week otherwise it would send a personally written letter to your loved ones informing them that you've mostly likely passed away in some distant country.

The MVP? A scheduled email that I would turn off each Monday with instructions on how to recover my body.

What's the moral here?

I should have stopped reading so much Gary Vee and "hustling", and maybe taken a break from sales when I thought I was going to die.

Or maybe the work kept me going. I'll tell ya, this journal is pretty optimistic for a guy with less than $120 to his name and a severe case of dysentery.

I have this belief that the only way to make a large change in ourselves is to take action on it daily. Our lives and selves are the culmination of all of our habits. Our habits are simply the things that we do on a regular basis. To change ourselves means to simply change our habits. So we need to make a new action a daily habit to help ourselves.

Or, said in one sentence:

If you want to improve. Do one small thing, every day.

This is how I approached fitness. When I was just getting started, I was overweight, depressed, unmotivated. I decided something had to change. I knew what I needed to do from all the cliches (synonym for “something that works”). I had to eat better and exercise more.

To eat better, I needed to know what I was eating. So, I simply tracked everything I ate for a day. Then again the next day, and the next. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t 100% accurate, what mattered was that I doing something.

Exercising was the easy part. The habit was the activity, so I went to the gym that afternoon, and did a couple exercises. The next day, I went for my first run in months. Then I did a yoga class. Then back to the gym the next day.

It didn’t take long before I noticed a difference. Not only from the obvious actions (working out and seeing how much I was eating). My behaviour, and thoughts. I was becoming interested in picking out workout plans that made sense to me. I became more active throughout the day. I started to think about the food I was eating.

Within 3 months, I had gone from a self-conscious about my weight to having friends and strangers come up to me to ask about exercise. I had become an “expert” on the topic by simply immersing myself in it.

This isn’t a fitness article, so I’ll cut myself short. However, the gist of all of this is this: By taking just a few small actions, every day, I became someone I previously could have only dreamed of being. It literally transformed me for the better.

Now, I am taking this approach to writing,

I want to be a better writer.

I’ve always been interested in writing. As a kid, I would read endlessly. I found that any good book — fiction or nonfiction — you are placed in the perspective of another person. You see things through their eyes. You understand, as well as anyone can, how they perceive the situation.

This is the power of story-telling. It is the most powerful method of communication.

We’re all story-tellers, in some regard. But only some of us are great storytellers.

I want to become a great storyteller. And the best way to do so?

Tell one story, every day.

Now, this would make me a storyteller, but it alone, won’t make me a great on. In order to do this, I need one extra addition:

Social pressure to excel

It takes pressure to ensure success. When I was seeking fitness, I could measure my weight, body fat percentage, the amount I could lift, and even just how I looked. Storytelling, on the other hand, is something that requires to parties: the person telling the story, and the person being told.

This is why I will be sharing each story to my blog. If I don’t share, I’m not a true storyteller.

You’ll be damned sure that when I publish each of these, I’m going to feel that resistance, that fear, but I’ll push through it. I’ll post it and I’ll see.

If I didn’t do well enough this time around, I’ll just learn and improve tomorrow.

This is why doing one thing, every day, works.

1. Doing something every day means there’s always a chance to improve the next time.

2. Doing something every day gives a consistent opportunity for feedback and learning.

3. Doing something every day provides a real measure of progress.

So, I hope you enjoy

I’ve been finding nested page names incredibly useful for things like locations and some events. Doing so I can make it so any instance of a place in a city or province is indexable at each level.

[[location, [[city, [[region, [[country]]]]]]]]

When creating a page, you simply add nested square brackets and it becomes a page link within a page link. You can do it multiple layers deep which is how I get the layering effect you see above where I can click on Casa Loma or Toronto or Ontario, and each will appear whenever the page is used.

To get the example in the gif, I did:

[[ Legends of Horror, [[Casa Loma, [[Toronto, [[Ontario]]]]]]

Just be careful you don’t overuse them. Clicking a nested link takes you to the nested page from any level (I could click Ontario from anywhere Casa Loma, Toronto, Ontario is used). This can make for really confusing clicking if you use it randomly throughout.

In particular, this is useful for ordered data with clear separators, like addresses, where the comma serves to separate nested links.

When nested pages for locations has been useful

This has been especially powerful when researching places to travel or live.

Whenever I take a note of an event that happened in some location, or activity to do, or home I liked for rent or sale, I can easily nest it under the location.

Looking at the location’s references, I can see all sorts of events, places, and facts I’ve tagged nearby.

Right now, my research is highly specific to a particular project, but eventually, I may find a use for these notes when planning a trip or generally researching.

For example, I took a trip to Kincardine 2 years ago. If I had put memories and photos into Roam, I could come across that while researching places nearby.

By making it easy and automatic to tag locations, I make it easy and automatic to allow lookups by location in Roam.

Don’t go overboard with this.

The main benefit of nested pages is automatically tagging the entire taxonomy of a location. This can work against you if you use it too much.

I’ve experimented using this with certain “types” of pages that I often create. For example, new projects, practices, and goals.

[[Publish 30 Atomic Essays ([[Goals]])]]

[[Buy a house ([[Goals]])

[[rethink my apartment living space ([[project]])]]

At first, I liked this because it made it clear what this page was wherever it was, and I thought it would make index pages for all my projects or Goals.

What I didn’t think about however was that the automatic tagging I mentioned earlier would happen to each of my labels. Pretty soon, my [[Projects]] page references were so cluttered, I had to change it to [[project]] to separate it out.

Now, I’m considering removing the project page entirely, and just changing it to:

[[rethink my apartment living space (Project)]]

Ultimately, it comes down to if I find a use for the page or if it’s a hindrance.

These are just a few ideas on how you can add layers of organization on top of Roam.

If you have any ideas or questions about how to use Roam, please share down below! 👇

“We don’t drink”.

These three words changed my life.

This was the most powerful instance of identity shift in my life.

I was maybe 3 months sober at the time. My girlfriend and I were on a date night, trying out Mi Taco, a new (and delicious) taco restaurant in my neighbourhood. The owner asked if we wanted to try their take-home margarita kit. Reflexively, without thinking about it, I replied “we don’t drink”.

In that moment, something shifted inside of me. I knew in that moment that I would never drink again.

How we describe ourselves has a powerful effect on how we see ourselves.

Until that moment, I had been “trying to quit alcohol”. After that moment, alcohol simply had no role in my life.

We all have a part of our brain that maintains an idea of who we are. This part of our brain is over-active in those of us who are neurotic and anxious. Alcohol, interestingly, sedates this part of our brain. It’s why we feel uninhibited when we are intoxicated. It’s why we blackout when we overconsume and can do unconscionable things that trigger regret when we learn of them sober.

Part of becoming sober is reconciling the parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of. The parts of us that we drank to hide. The parts of us that only became darker as our addiction becomes worse.

This isn’t some fake it til you make it bullshit.

If I’d been hungover and nauseous replying to the guy “no thanks, I don’t drink” — this would not have had any effect on me, because it would have been a lie.

In fact, dishonesty and shame play a major role in addiction. When we feel the need to hide our affliction out of shame we perpetuate the very same patterns that cause us to drink more.

But once I’d lived long enough without my addiction, and I knew that I was better for it, there was no shame — only pride — in admitting that “I do not drink.”

Even if you have a large sum of money saved up and are a high-income earner, you still need a budget.

Plain and simple, a budget will improve your life whether you save every dollar, or spend every cent. Understanding exactly how your finances will enable you to feel more comfortable both with saving and with spending. In coming up with and sticking to a budget, you will confront all your insecurities around money.

Budgeting is like therapy for your financial traumas.

Reward yourself, by looking back at how far you've come.

There's a certain joy that comes along with doing something well, and showing yourself proof. If you're a saver, your budget might do that for you.

By sitting down one afternoon, and gathering all your data on what is in which accounts could be an opportunity for you to see just how far you've come. Even if you already knew the numbers, sitting down to make an intentional plan about that money will hit different.

Ease your anxiety about financial ruin.

Even if you have a great income, you start to worry about what if you lost it.

A zero-based budget lets you set goals for your monthly budget. Once you've met all your goals for this month, you can budget for the next and the next. Over time, you "age your money" as you budget ahead and only spend money you earned months ago.

If you already have a large amount of savings, it will remove any anxiety by budgeting months ahead.

This is better than a regular "emergency fund". It is entirely flexible in the case of an unexpected large expense. But more importantly, each dollar has a specific purpose and you can use it without needing to justify the expense to your already frugal standards.

And if you need money for date night, and you had a big bill come in, you don't have to stress — it's already in the budget.

Enable yourself to spend on things you want.

Yes, saving is important, but cliché as it sounds: There's no point in making money if you never spend it.

Most people who've gotten rich by saving don't want to spend. This is fine for most things, being thrifty and minimalist can be fun and sustainable and part of your values. However, if this frugality comes at the cost of your ability to enjoy your money, then you have a saving problem.

If you're a problem saver, then a budget is going to force you to look at what you have saved and decide what it's actually for.

This part of the journey is a whole new journey. Learning to spend, guilt-free, while remaining disciplined about spending below your means. Learning to actively choose to spend $200 on a course or $1500 on a bike.

When working on the cutting edge, the truth is that nobody really knows what’s going to happen next.

We see countless examples, ranging from machine learning and AI, the internet of things, blockchain and ICOs, even green tech. The missions are profound, the supposed market is huge, and the end result is often underwhelming versus what was promised.

The truth is, the most successful in tech are skeptics, and you should probably consider being one too.

There is an (understandable) knowledge gap

Naturally, most folks are not up-to-date with the cutting edge of technology.

Even those in the industry are still trying to figure it out!

And yet, that is where the majority of hype interest goes. Innovators and technical folks go where they see a lot of potentials but there are a lot of unknowns. They start off experimental, then money comes in and hypotheses about the future become “the vision”. By the time leading trends in tech reach the public, they’ve often become saturated with idealists and an already complicated topic is watered down to a misleading marketing campaign.

Ultimately, this is a case of buyer’s beware, so beware that not everything is as it seems.

The hype cycle is cyclical

Innovation often rhymes, but so do the too-good-to-be true tales.

Some hype cycles are real, but end up with only one big winner. The majority of hype cycles end with no real winners and a lot of losers. The truth is, even the most influential investors don’t really know what is going to happen. The average person has even less information, and therefore needs to be extra skeptical.

Nowhere is this clearer than in crypto wherein 2022 we see the same arguments in favour of new defi & nft projects as we saw in ICOs in 2017.

Fake it until you make it mentality

There are outright scams, falsehoods, and misleading advertising. All look similar and all should warrant skepticism.

Theranos is an open-and-shut case of a company outright lying to investors. Even I would like to believe that this isn’t the norm but there are likely many similar companies out there. With “fake it til you make it” as an industry’s leading motto, it’s not hard to see why.

Not every instance is a fraud, but the fake it mindset is still quite common.

Tech is inherently optimistic

You need to be optimistic to stand in front of investors and employees and claim you will build a billion-dollar business, that you are a rocket ship 🚀, with no past evidence you or anyone else can.

And, fortunate or unfortunate, that optimism is contagious. That is why smart people join along on big ambitious projects that inevitably burn to the ground. Even organizations that seem to be pillars in their ecosystem can turn out to be on the brink of collapse. As most people in tech learn over time, you need to counter optimism with realism. When you don’t know what the realistic outcome is, you need to substitute and balance optimism with pessimism.

A trite, but real principle employees use: If the snacks in the office downgrade, that’s when you really know there are real problems.

Companies will very well host large conferences and industry events weeks before announcing layoffs or cuts.

By adopting the cynical understanding that everything a company or industry believes in could turn out catastrophically wrong, you’ll have a more holistic understanding of the story.

One of the most devastating things that happen to most budgeters is unexpected expenses.

This could mean anything from a larger-than-expected tax bill to a broken car, or just some subscription you forgot to budget for. Whatever it is, it comes along, unexpected and all, and as one does when one doesn't expect expenses - you don't have the money.

Unfortunately, if you don't have systems in place, these type of unknown unknowns can set you back an force you to take on debt.

With the right plan in place you can cover anything arises

Here's how, step by step:

Create budgets for all the major areas of your life.

Rather than anticipate the specific event, you can identify the areas you most likely have things pop up.

If you own a car, this will inevitably be a concern. The same goes for things like home repairs. These also include long-term expenses that happen once a year like taxes, insurance, etc. YNAB calls this "embracing your true expenses".

When a truly unexpected expense does arise, roll with the punches.

When you don't have the money to cover something, you need to cover it with funds from another budget. Jesse Mecham of YNAB calls this "rolling with the punches".

This means pulling money from various nice-to-haves to cover your funds. If you still don't have enough, then pull from more important, but less urgent funds.

When a truly unexpected expense does arise, create a budget for it!

While your face still stings a little from that bill slapped across your face, take a moment to plan ahead.

Create a category in your budget and set a recurring goal of saving some small amount like $20 a month. I have a general budget for bike, since I experienced my bike being stolen and two flat tires in the same year. As soon as you have a budget and a goal set, you'll never forget this expense again.

Create a budget for truly unexpected expenses & true emergencies.

In the event that you forget to budget or something disastrous happens, you want to have some fallback.

First, you can create a "forgot to budget 😅" category and add $20 a month.

Second, follow Dave Ramsey's Baby Steps rule number 1 to save a true emergency fund of $1000, and then 3-6 months expenses once you've paid off debt.

Budget ahead for future months, so you always have extra.

One of the easiest ways to have money to re-allocate is to not lock up all your extra funds!

Instead of going overboard with debt or investing, budget ahead for the next months in YNAB when you have extra funds. Do this until you have a healthy buffer of cash on-hand before you start funnelling all your money into debt and investments. YNAB calls this “aging your money”.

You will experience unexpected setbacks, but if you have systems in place, you'll always be able to adjust.

Happy budgeting, y'all.

Budgeting is about much more than saving.

Many of us who have lived on very little money in the past will often have a lot of difficulty spending on ourselves. If you've had to ration your food to avoid going over-budget or hungry while affording rent, dropping $500 on a new bike can seem extravagant (God forbid $1500 for a fancy one).

And yet, when we have money it is this very fear of scarcity that prevents us from being able to enjoy the fruits of our labour.

Budgeting is deciding what is important to you.

Naturally, your essential living expenses are crucial - you cannot survive and thrive without budgeting for food, rent, electricity, water, etc.

Beyond that, however, our purchases are reflective of what we value. By reframing luxury purchases to represent our values, we unlock an entirely new realm for self-development. Nobody can afford everything, but we can all afford one thing we want. When we assign dollar values to our dreams and prioritize one or another we decide for ourselves who we are becoming.

If it's big, pay for it in parts, not all at once.

You may technically have the money to pay for your thing outright, but that doesn't mean you should pay for it immediately.

Particularly if you're following zero-based budgeting, that money is likely earmarked for another purchase in the long-term like expenses or investing. Even if it isn't (yet) it may be better to spread the purchase out for yourself. Splitting up the payment will make it smaller in your mind.

If you already have the money, this reduces the stress of making this decision. If you want to spend $3000 to get laser eye surgery in June and it's January, you don't need to decide to put down that entire amount immediately. By spreading it out over 6 months, you can set aside a much more manageable $500 each month.

Practice budgeting even if you can't afford it (yet).

Even if a goal seems like it could take years to save for, add it to your budget. With this strategy, seemingly impossible goals are just a matter of time.

If you wanted to get the same $3000 laser eye surgery, you would simply need to save $500 per month the same. If you can't afford that much, you can adjust the date out.

Initially, when budgeting for laser eye surgery I was also paying off debt, so I dated it out for 4 years, making the monthly payment $62.50 per month. More than I spend on Netflix, but less than I spend on coffee.

I hope this helps you learn to invest in yourself guilt-free.

Best of luck on your financial journey!

In this article I'll explain how I paid off $30,000 of student loans using YNAB.

Made a budget

Before I even started my repayments, I learned to budget. This was a big part of 2020.

I spent several months getting a handle on what my expenses were. I paid off my excess credit card debt. I broke the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. In that time, I paid the minimums on my debts, but nothing more.

Set a goal I knew I couldn't fail to begin with.

I set the goal to be debt-free by thirty. I knew I could do this, and it was a nice milestone.

I set a budget to pay off my debt over 2 years, leaving me budgeting $1250 per month. This was significant, but built into my budget like any other category. I paid this off while maintaining all other areas of my budget, including long-term expenses.

Every month, I made tradeoffs with my other categories

Any time I had leftover money in a budget, I would decide to keep it or move it into my loan.

I didn't make extra payments immediately. Instead, I'd shift the money into my budget in YNAB to cover next month's payment. This way, I never stretched myself too thin (I still had the money) but saved 3 month's payments.

When I knew for sure I'd beat my goal, I made a more ambitious one.

As I started to gain momentum towards my goal, I experimented with more challenging goals.

I continued to save on categories I wasn't using, like my eating out budget. Now that I had a few months' extra payments saved, I put additional money on the student loan itself. This enabled me to choose a more ambitious goal.

When my priorities changed, I used my budget to stay on track, and adjust to reality.

At first, I went extreme, and set it to October.

Then, Prince Edward Island reopened travel. I knew I needed to take my vacation early to see my family for the first time in 2 years. This set me back, but not as much as if I didn't have my budget. In fact, I was able to pull from several long-term expense budgets and only set myself back to December.

A budget is all about confronting reality.

Whatever that entails, if you can stick with it and adjust as the situation changes, you will reach your goal.

This month, I'm doing the Ship 30 for 30 challenge. Here's why.

I've written daily for nearly a decade now, but I've always done so for myself for thinking. Writing for others is an entirely new beast. Publishing, in particular, can become a lengthy hurdle.

With the world gone remote, writing has become increasingly more important, and I've learned that hesitating to share is holding me back.

This course is how I will:

Engrain the habit of publishing by doing it daily.

This is the hardest part. In fact, this very essay was a struggle to publish.

To make anything a habit you need to repeat it regularly. In fact, 30 days is the amount of time it takes to learn or unlearn most habits. So publishing daily is crucial. Like any new skill, however, it is difficult.

With each rep, I will improve slightly.

Rediscover my interests

In all that's going on in the world, it's easy to lose motivation.

The best way I know of to build motivation is to actively engage it with curiosity. My hope is that b by writing and sharing things that I've been learning will reinvigorate my motivation.

Using the constraints to force my thinking

The short format is forcing me to stay concise.

350 words is not a lot. In fact, I haven't been able to reach that lower limit yet. But the fact that I am trying to stay close to it is forcing me to be brief. My hope is that I am gradually reducing the amount of noise in my writing.

Learn to communicate better

Learning to refine my message to the essentials.

When writing for yourself, you don't need to be as precise. When writing for others, they will notice duplication like this one, or be distracted by unnecessary words. So trying to avoid that will be key (in the future).

Sharing your thinking builds your confidence

I know not every essay I write will be great, but the fact that I'm doing it will reinforce the fact that I have something to say.

If you're considering writing every day, try it.

Even on your off days you'll be proud you did it.

I went from $40,000 in debt to having 2-month emergency savings and some investments in 3 years. In this article, I'll teach you how I did it.

If you're in debt, you know the struggle. The only way to fix our finances is to take control of our spending. This is why you need a budget.

Unfortunately, too many of us get ahead of ourselves, try to cut back too much, and wind up back in the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle.

The only way to get out of debt is to take control of your finances.

So why don't most budgeters succeed in taking control of their financial future?

• They set ambitious and unrealistic savings goals.

• They immediately try to cut back to rice and beans without a plan.

• When they fall way behind, they give up instead of starting over.

• They try to tackle too many goals at once.

Finally, give the reader a sentence of hope: you're going to explain to them how they can overcome all these problems you just laid out!

But breaking the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle is possible. Understanding these common pitfalls helps us to take a simpler approach and make debt-freedom inevitable.

Here's how, step by step:

Step 1: Create your best-guess budget. Only budget what you have.

Our budget doesn't need to be perfect to help us. It just needs to give us an idea of where we're at.

That said, it should be as realistic as possible. First, write out the obvious fixed costs (rent, credit card minimum payment, subscriptions) go over your credit card statements for the last few months to get an idea of what you spend. Assign goals to each category with your average spent.

Once you have your goals, you can assign money to your budget, but remember to only budget what you have today. Remember: We aren't trying to rack up more credit card debt. If you don't have enough to fund all your categories, fund the most immediate payments and budget the rest only when you get paid next.

Step 2: Budget weekly. When you're wrong, adjust, and improve.

Most budgeters start with step 1, but when their best guess is inaccurate, they think they've failed and they quit.

What they don't realize is that this is actually the most important part. Unexpected expenses always come up, and sometimes we underestimate how much we'll spend. Everyone overestimates how much they can save at first. Learn to roll with the punches and adjust your budget to improve.

It took me 3 months to learn to accurately record expenses, and another 3 months before I had an accurate representation of my expenses in my categories. Once I did though, I had a pivotal experience.

Step 3: Adjust your spending to pay off your debt.

An accurate map of every expense makes saving easy, even automatic.

Unlike most budgeters at the start, by this point, you're a pro. You're not planning to live on rice and beans and stop paying your rent. You know what you're spending, and when you see yourself moving money to categories that don't bring you joy, you'll want to adjust to meet your goals faster.

Step 4: Pay off your debts using the Debt Snowball Method.

With an accurate budget in place and your goal firmly in mind, paying off your debt is inevitable.

The Debt Snowball will help your build momentum. Start by putting all your extra income into paying off your smallest debt first. Once you've paid it off, you can apply all your money to the next smallest debt.

With each debt repaid, you'll free up more to pay off the others. Like a snowball rolling down a mountain you will build momentum and become an unstoppable budgeting force.

Once you've paid off your debt, that momentum won't stop. Saving investments and an emergency fund will be easy when you have all those debt payments as free cash flow.