Author: financeswithcarolina

Better late than never. March is the month in which my new year’s resolutions usually die. Life gets busy, tax season gets me very stressed, and I simply want to revert to the comfy zone. Thankfully, a Fidelity seminar featuring Venus Williams reminded me to write my personal finance newsletter! If you have a Fidelity account, I would definitely recommend joining their Women Talk Money Seminar Series. In this seminar Fidelity executives(Lorna Kaputa, Sangeeta Moorjani, and Ryan Viktorin) and Venus Williams chatted about knowing, and growing, your worth every day. 

The various speakers talked a lot about the role of fear in personal finance. I think the biggest takeaways from the speakers was to use fear as fuel instead of freezing over fear. 

I believe personal finance is a part of our overall health. I also am a strong believer of mental health advocacy. In therapy, I have learned that focusing on what I have control over, is liberating. Letting go of the things I cannot change and focusing on what it is within my power. Here is where personal finance gets tricky. We are constantly being bombarded by headlines of things we cannot control, such as what inflation is today and how there is a looming recession. All of this negative talk can make us think that finances are out of our control. I invite you to use the fear inducing headlines as fuel to work on the part of personal finance that we CAN control. 

Are you concerned about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse? Investigate what the FDIC role is in deposit insurance. If you take some time to read about this, you will find that the FDIC’s protection secures up to $250K per individual per institution. So if my bank account balance at Chase is less than $250,000 I literally have no reason to worry. 

The second takeaway was to think of yourself as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of your financial life. What do you think a CEO of a company does to make a company successful? When I think of a CEO I think of a confident person that is surrounded by a team of experts, they all work together to make decisions based on data and projections. Together with the team of experts the CEO determines and prepares for upcoming challenges, how to tackle them, and where the company is going. So, how was quarter 1 (Q1) of your financial life? 

Shameless plug, let me be part of the team that advises you, the CEO of a financial life. Please consider joining this newsletter or the one-on-one coaching program. You can also recommend my seminars to your graduate program/fellowship office, or send my website to your graduate program chat/slack/email list. Looking forward to connecting with many of you 🥰

Welcome to February, the month of relationships! Valentine’s Day got me thinking about what is the basis of a healthy relationship. One of the most important relationships we foster outside of families and partners’ is our relationship with money. Sometimes we inherit such a relationship from our family, whether that is an abundance or scarcity depends a lot on our socioeconomic status at the time. Whether you got a full ride scholarship or if you attended a private university with a large tuition bill, these two situations can heavily impact how secure you feel about money and the future.

First, I want to be clear that working on your finances is not going to fix an unlivable wage. Lots of workers are underpaid for various reasons, and I am not going to preach that budgeting is going to solve everybody’s financial troubles. Having said that, there are ways for low and high income earners to work on their money mindset. A scarcity money mindset can look different for you and the next person. Some examples include: yo-yo budgeting, constantly thinking of being behind others and NEED to catch up, not allowing one to dream, or having difficulty with being generous. Changing a scarcity money mindset starts with challenging these beliefs. Something I have learned from cognitive behavior therapy is that challenging our “unhelpful” thoughts can change the way we feel about certain situations. 

With this post, I want to advocate that our relationship with money is not fixed. Like any other relationship, it can change, but more importantly it can grow and flourish. For my household, finances have been a topic that we have grown so much over the last 5 years. We are both immigrants to the US and our parents believed that education was a main goal, meritocracy is fair, and that debt is evil. However, there were differences in our money mindsets which became apparent when we started living together. I know it’s cliché, but communication was the key to our progress. Some examples include: budgeting, car loans, bulk buying, and our favorite toothpaste. Needless to say we both needed to give in a little. Today, I can say that working on being in the best financial shape possible has strengthened our relationship and also the relationship with our parents. 
If any of these topics resonated with you please feel free to review this FREE presentation on working towards a healthy relationship with money. Please consider joining this newsletter or the one-on-one coaching program. You can also recommend my seminars to your graduate program/fellowship office, or send my website to your graduate program chat/slack/email list. Looking forward to connecting with many of you 🥰

For me, January is a time for personal assessment and setting up realistic resolutions for my personal or professional life. I also do this exercise with my household’s financial health. My husband and I start by reflecting on how did 2022 go? What were our 2022 wins? What did not work for us in 2022? Most importantly, what can our 2023 look like? 

As a scientist, I love data. I like to collect it, analyze it, graph it, and show it to others. Thanks to the podcast “Personal Finance for PhDs,” I started exploring personal finance as a scientist during graduate school a couple of months before the pandemic started. Today, my household is super interested in finances and we have money talks every other week over Saturday breakfast. But it didn’t look like this from the beginning, and most likely it won’t look like that for you. One of my favorite phrases is that personal finance is personal. Maybe you have never had a money date with yourself, and that is okay! My goal is to provide the necessary tools that money dates can happen over a bottle of wine, be fun, and re-framed as positive experiences, instead of stressful conversations.

The year 2022 was a year full of firsts for my household. I earned a PhD and transitioned to industry, resulting in a salary increase of $55,000. For the first time in my 10 years of working in a lab, I have access to a retirement match program (8%). I started this business, in which I provide financial coaching for graduate students for free. Two graduate students signed up for this financial coaching (see their reviews here). I made the very website you are reading this! 

My household opened a new credit card, which is VERY exciting for us. We earned $870 in credit card rewards and used a lot of it for our holiday gifts for our loved ones. Our top spending categories after housing were groceries, eating out, and our dog (Zuko). My top spending category for eating out were coffee shops, which I visited 60 times. My husband seemed to love Subway for lunch when he went in person to the office. My dog was the recipient of 10 amazon packages that included treats and many fluff and tuff toys. 

My goal for 2023 is to grow “Finances with Carolina LLC” clientele. Thus, I am going to use this newsletter as an accountability partner. Please consider joining this newsletter, the one-on-one coaching program, or recommending my seminars to your graduate program. Looking forward to connecting this 2023 🙂