You’ve worked hard on your budget. You’ve categorized all your spend, analyzed your habits, calculated your expected savings. You spend a month obsessing over every withdrawal, every expenditure. Your discipline is a thing of beauty. But can you stick to a budget long-term?

A couple of months later, the budget’s in tatters and you’re not entirely sure what you could have done differently.

It happens to the best of us. It happens to all of us. Most of all, it happens to the people who don’t admit it happened to them. So don’t listen to that blogger flexing in the corner next to a picture of a Maserati that he doesn’t own.

You need two things. The first is to forgive yourself. You’ll get past this, we all do. The second is some new methods of self-control.

Let’s get into it.

The first step on a journey of financial independence is to learn how to get out of debt. If financial independence is the sunlit peak of a mountain that we intend to climb, most of us unfortunately start at the bottom of a ravine.

That ravine is debt. You have to climb out of it before you can even begin to scale that mountain.

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance your personal situation involves some measure of debt, and that you want to begin your journey to get out of debt.

This article should help.

There’s a wealth accelerator available to every single person in the world, and all you need to access it is a simple understanding of multiplication. Compounding is mathematical alchemy that feeds your savings, accelerating your income without you needing to make any effort at all.

Without it, you’ll likely never reach your financial goals.

Compounding is the mathematical effect that accelerates the growth in your invested savings. It’s the engine that makes it possible to pass the finish line of your financial independence journey.

Not everything you buy needs to be the cheapest you can possibly find. In fact, in some cases, cheaper isn’t necessarily better.

This could be because the item you’ve bought is not as durable and the value for money is better at higher price points.

Sometimes it’s worth going to a higher price point because the lowest price point is not, actually, worth buying at all.

In my humble and totally biased, obsessive and neurotic opinion, coffee is a compromise-free consumable. If you’re going to insist on buying cheap coffee, I think you’re better off not drinking it at all.

I can’t imagine not drinking coffee, and life is too short to drink bad coffee (or wine). As a person with a carefully curated coffee dependency, I’ve been struggling with this for a while now.

If you want good coffee on a regular (daily) basis, then that’s almost a budget line-item in and of itself. The best way to ensure you understand the cost, guarantee the quality and avoid impulse-purchase situations is to get in on one of the many (oh my goodness so many) coffee subscription services out there.

In the new world of social distancing, coronavirus paranoia and responsible collective behaviour, getting your coffee delivered is also one more way to avoid running unnecessary errands and crowding public spaces.

If you’re looking for a discount on your coffee, scroll down to Pact Coffee, as I have a code for their service. Clicking on links in this article may, in a few cases, contribute to my coffee addiction.

I’m going to review them all below. Click to read on…

I’m no master baker. I’m putting that first because I don’t want you getting the wrong idea.

In fact, I’m not a baker at all.

It’s true that at home we typically cook almost every meal from basic ingredients. That’s a lifestyle habit that predates any attempt to be healthy or save money. It’s just the way my wife and I were brought up.

But bread is one of those things that, for the longest time, I never even imagined I would get anywhere other than a supermarket or a bakery.

And yet now I bake bread for the family two or three times a week. Without a machine to do it for me.

I have no idea how much I save by doing this, because again: It’s not a financially-motivated decision. I’m sure it does save money though. That’s like a perk on top of the fact that we get to eat fresh bread.

Among the Financial Independence crowd, the Side Hustle reigns as one of the primary means by which we create additional income and reach our goal of “retiring” early.

I’ve been thinking about side hustles for a while now and I’ve decided I have a problem with the words.

It’s a cool concept, and a nice catchphrase, but words matter and I don’t think the name “Side Hustle” does our efforts justice, given the amount of energy and dedication and the extent of the hopes we pin on this area of our lives.

They’re not hustles, they’re careers, because any project that takes that much energy and has that much ambition deserves to wear that mantle.

Eighteen months ago, give or take a few days, my bicycle was stolen. Very upsetting, and an object lesson in why a decent home contents insurance policy goes a long way, but that’s another story…

Very shortly thereafter we moved home, and the new address was somewhat further away from work than before. This was one of several inconvenient features of our new abode. Also another story.

The question I asked myself was: Now that I don’t have a bicycle (because someone prefers to take from others than to earn for themselves), do I walk to work or take the underground (“subway” for you foreigners out there) to work every day?

I made a decision based on a vague notion that, given the choice, it’s better to not spend money. This is a decision I’ve stuck with for eighteen months, walking 45 minutes each way every single working day.

I also chose to walk because I’m all about taking control of my money, and this is one of those areas that I completely control my spending. If I can’t move the needle here, what chance do you have in areas you don’t directly control?

So I was looking for an idea for something to talk about on my blog today and it occurred to me that I’d never actually run the numbers on this decision, and I’ve spent approximately 450 hours walking as a consequence of this decision. So perhaps I should… you know… check?

It’s quite concerning having to check a decision that’s cost you so much time, facing the very real possibility that you’ve cost yourself several weeks of productive time pounding the pavement just for the sake of getting from A to B and saving a buck or two.

Anyway: How’s that worked out?

How many hustle or business ideas have you abandoned or mothballed?

Do you sometimes feel that no matter how many times you are inspired by a new idea, concept, project or opportunity, it never seems to work out the way you imagined? Most often, do you even know if it would have worked out, or did you give up before you got to the point where you find out? These grand designs of earning extra income inspire at the outset but do you end up disappointed?

There’s this glorious honeymoon phase during which you’re passionate about a project. You invest a lot of effort and a great deal of hope. Then, after some time, you start to run out of steam. Reality never seems to live up to your expectations (or hopes), there are unanticipated hurdles, unexpected complexity, unrealistic demands and unhelpful market conditions. You lose steam, begin to procrastinate. Eventually, you give up.

Soon, this project, like so many before it, is consigned to the graveyard of once-good ideas. A crowded place in your mind you prefer not to examine too closely because of all the wasted time and energy those failed ideas represent.

There are many reasons why these otherwise good projects so often fail. One of the most common is that while you’re dreaming it up, you fall into the imagination trap. A disconnect occurs between what you’re likely to achieve and how you picture it in your mind. The project gets better and better in your imagination, and reality can’t keep up. Once this happens, you become unconsciously reluctant to launch the project, because it’s psychologically painful to close that gap and let reality intrude on the dream. That could cause some serious cognitive dissonance. Better to keep the idea that it would be successful alive.

One of the basic building blocks of frugality, that I’m sure we all understand, is that little things add up to bigger things. One of these little things that I’ve become good at over the years is doing things myself. Where before I might call someone to fix something, I’m quite likely to get it done on my own now.

This saves money, sure. More than you might think. It also has other advantages.

Repairing things around the house is a small, contant, subtle money leakage. It’s also a frustration and a dependency that you can – to a large extent – manage out of your life.

This site recently fell victim to a hack, whereby someone managed to inject some malicious code which went on to mess with large parts of my wordpress installation. The code served to redirect visitors to sites that looked innocuous enough, but contained malware.

Thankfully, I caught it very fast and the malware was pretty out of date, so my computer identified it immediately, quarantined it and then trashed it.

Unfortunately, it took me a long time to get rid of the infection. I spent all of last night working on the site, trying to figure out where the remaining parts of the malware were.

Eventually, the only solution that provided me with some confidence that the site was clean was to roll back everything to the way the site was over a week ago, including the database.

If you’re a parent to very young children (or you remember what it’s like), then you’ll be familiar with the astounding regularity with which everything needs to get washed over, and over, and over again.

As things cycle in and out of drawers and cupboards, sizes get mixed up and things get confused. Eventually, one morning, you’re standing, bleary-eyed, in front of the cupboard. What looks like thousands of pieces of clothing are overflowing drawers and shelves, and you yet you can’t identify any two items that would both fit and not clash. In frustration, you finally dress your daughter in fancy dress, because you’re too tired to think.

Then, one day, you stumble across the Marie Kondo (or is it Konmarie?) method, and you think, “Wouldn’t it be nice if my cupboards looked like an exercise in zen gardening?“

I tried the Marie Kondo method once before, with decent results, but maintaining it and applying it all the kids clothes is a different challenge.

One day, hopefully soon, you’ll reach that magical moment when you pay off the last of the debt and all the money you’ve been putting towards debt repayment no longer needs to go there. What now?

This is a fairly critical moment. The direction you set is likely to define what happens in your financial life going forward. You are faced with both risks and opportunities.