Actually, the end of June through most of July was one long stretch of being somewhere other than our house.

We left for Europe on June 23 and landed back on July 8. A few days later, we left again for Camp FI for the weekend. We came home from that, spent a few nights in our own bed, and then moved 20 minutes away to housesit for a friend for about 10 days.

So while we were back in the country for most of July, I don’t think we were actually home and living our normal lives until the last week of the month. I only slept 12 nights in my own bed.

So July was fun! But I also missed my routines and my sheets and knowing where all my stuff is.

July’s data is therefore a funny mix of vacation life, Camp FI life, housesitting life, and a tiny bit of regular life at the end.

Let’s see what happened!

Movement

July average: 9,175 steps/day

That’s down from June’s 10,102 steps per day, but still one of my highest months of the year.

The beginning of the month was still Europe, so there were plenty of 15,000+ step days wandering around cities, going to cafés, walking through parks, and getting ourselves from one place to another.

Then we came home and my step count settled back into something much closer to normal.

One of my goals for 2026 is to average 8,000 steps per day for the year. I started January averaging just under 6,000, so I’ve been slowly working my way up.

I know 8,000 is a slightly annoying goal when 10,000 is sitting right there being a nice round number, but my joints have submitted feedback that a 10k goal just doesn’t work for them.

Year to Date

January: 7,924 steps/day
February: 8,077
March: 7,153
April: 6,315
May: 5,974
June: 10,102
July: 9,175

Peloton Stats

I logged 20 hours and 36 minutes of activity in July.

10 hours 3 minutes of strength
5 hours 53 minutes of walking
3 hours 45 minutes of cycling
30 minutes of stretching
14 minutes of yoga
10 minutes of meditation

Almost half of my tracked workout time was strength!

One of my goals this year has been to get stronger, and I like seeing that reflected in the numbers. Strength training is not always the activity I naturally gravitate toward, so 10 hours in a month feels pretty solid.

I’m also still not logging most of my everyday walking as a workout. (Walking the dog, going to get coffee, running errands, meeting someone nearby.) I’m just lazy and don’t want to fuss with my phone every time I leave the house.I count a walk if it’s the only thing I did that day or if it was like a proper hike or walk for exercise.

Sleep, Recovery & Health

I averaged 7 hours and 27 minutes of sleep per night in July, with an average Oura sleep score of 87.

My average lowest resting heart rate was 56 bpm.

Year to date:

January: Sleep score 87 • Resting heart rate 58 bpm
February: 81 • 57 bpm
March: 89 • 59 bpm
April: 87 • 59 bpm
May: 90 • 55 bpm
June: 88 • 54 bpm
July: 87 • 56 bpm

Considering how little I slept in my own bed, I’ll take it!

We started July in Europe, slept in our own bed for a few nights, went to Camp FI, came home again, and then spent about 10 days housesitting.

Apparently my body is more adaptable than I give it credit for.

Overall, my sleep has been surprisingly consistent this year. Seven and a half hours of sleep with a score of 87 during a month when I barely had a normal routine feels pretty good.

Nutrition

According to the days I actually tracked, I averaged 117 grams of protein and 41.9 grams of fiber per day in July.

HUGE asterisk.

I was very inconsistent about tracking my food this month. I skipped entire days and sometimes several days in a row, so I don’t think these numbers are particularly representative of what I actually ate.

The 42 grams of fiber especially makes me suspicious. I was probably more likely to track on days when I was eating my normal foods and less likely to track when I was traveling, eating out, or eating something annoying to estimate.

Year to Date

January: 125g protein / 28g fiber
February: 121g / 28g
March: 122g / 37g
April: 113g / 30g
May: 115g / 32g
June: 122g / 32g
July: 117g / 42g*

*July’s data is questionable at best.

Alcohol

I had 36 drinks in July and 13 alcohol-free days.

That’s my highest monthly total of the year so far. Meep.

It also makes a lot more sense when I remember what July actually looked like.

We started the month with our last week in Europe, then Camp FI. Vacation Liz enjoys a beverage. The podcast episode we recorded at CampFI brought to you by a red solo cup of champagne.

My tracker makes one day look particularly dramatic because I had five drinks. That was the day we went to a wedding that started around 11 in the morning and lasted until 10 or 11 at night.

Five drinks is certainly more than I’d drink on a normal day, but spread over a 12-hour wedding, I don’t look back on that as a day when I wildly overdid it. (It was two drinks with lunch, one with dinner, two more while dancing.)

Mostly, what I see when I look at the month is a very social first half of July followed by a much quieter second half.

Thirty-six drinks is more than I’d want to average every month. If I looked back at the end of the year and saw 36 every month, I’d want to make some changes.

As the punctuation mark at the end of several weeks of vacation, a wedding, Camp FI, and a generally very social stretch of summer? Eh, we’re okay.

Year to Date

January: 8 drinks • 25 dry days
February: 20 drinks • 14 dry days
March: 32 drinks • 19 dry days (one week in Mexico)
April: 11 drinks • 21 dry days
May: 9 drinks • 25 dry days
June: 26 drinks • 14 dry days (one week in Europe)
July: 36 drinks • 13 dry days (one week in Europe)

Year to date: 142 drinks and 131 alcohol-free days.

Spending

Remember last month when I was like…June’s spending was bonkers! Might have been our most expensive month ever?

Well.

I looked.

I spent $46,664 in July.

As always, that number excludes our housing payments and money moving between financial accounts. It does, however, include almost $31,000 of expenses related to the house we’re trying to sell.

June spending was $45,964.

So congratulations to July on somehow being even more expensive.

Cool cool cool.

I would very much like this particular financial era to end.

Here’s where the money went.

🏡 Home — $30,870

This includes $29,887 of home maintenance, plus lawn care, house cleaning, and miscellaneous house supplies.

Last month we spent $33,888 on home expenses.

Which means we have spent almost $65,000 on home-related expenses in TWO MONTHS. (Most of this was a new roof.)

On a house we’re trying to sell.

✈️ Travel & Vacation — $5,660

This was mostly the second half of our Europe trip.

As always, I put basically everything we spend while traveling into the Travel category. Hotels, trains, public transit, restaurants, coffee, groceries, shopping, random pharmacy purchases. All of it.

Between June and July, we spent about $12,500 on our two-week Europe trip (plus about $8k for the plane tickets earlier this year.)

Mmmmm, yolo?

I wouldn’t normally book a trip to Europe during the summer season when everything is extra crowded and extra expensive. But! We will probably only have a wedding in Prague once, right?

🎁 Gifts — $2,977

Plant tickets to bring my partner’s parents out to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

🐶 Pets — $2,601

The dog also wanted to participate in Expensive July.

The vast majority of this was a $2,433 vet bill, plus grooming and pet supplies.

Smaller dogs (ours is about 25 pounds) tend to have bad teeth, and dog dental work is pricey.

🍽️ Eating & Drinking — $1,618

Groceries: $971
Restaurants & Bars: $360
Takeout: $145
Alcohol: $86
Coffee Shops: $56

This is actually a pretty normal number for us, especially considering we were still in Europe for the first eight days of the month.

But there’s a catch: basically everything we buy while traveling goes into the Travel category. So the wine I drank in Prague and the croissant I ate in Paris aren’t hiding in these numbers. They’re vacation expenses.

I know nearly $1,000 a month on groceries for two people is still a lot, but what can I say. We like fizzy water, berries, protein shakes, and grocery-store convenience foods.

I think we tried to empty the fridge before leaving for vacation, then stocked up when we got home.

🚗 Transportation — $787

This includes $692 of driving expenses (parking, insurance, charging, I think we just renewed our registration) plus a little uber/lyft and public transportation.

💡 Bills & Utilities — $745

Nothing particularly exciting here. Just the recurring cost of keeping the lights on and the internet working. (In two houses.)

💪 Health & Wellness — $458

Fitness: $313 (Classpass for both of us)
Medical: $145 (A dentist appointment I think?)

🎭 Entertainment — $447

Live performances: $243
Games & Books: $204

Still one of my favorite categories to spend money on.

🛍️ Shopping & Personal — $358

Personal care: $200 (Nails, eyebrows, haircuts, etc)
Clothing: $129 (Poshmark is my new hobby)
Electronics: $29 (I don’t remember. Probably a replacement charger?)

The giant headline here is obviously not whether I spent $56 at coffee shops.

It’s the house.

Without the roughly $31,000 of home expenses, July spending would have been about $15,800.

That’s still not a particularly cheap month, but it includes $5,000 for the the end of a two-week international vacation, almost $3,000 in gifts, and a $2,400 vet bill.

I’m ready to find out what our spending looks like when we are not traveling internationally and hemorrhaging money into a house we want to sell.

Someday!

Books and Reading

I finished six books in July, bringing me to 58 books for the year.

That’s fewer than the 10 books I read in June, but I am once again reminding myself that reading is a hobby and it’s spouses to be fun not another KPI. I remain semi-unconvinced by my own argument.)

Very different genres this month, a real grab bag.

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

(historical fiction · 📖)

This was so fun and I loved every one of its 600+ pages. This is the story of women living in a small town in Mississippi during the depression. They come together to fight sexism and racism and various other bad guys. I was sad when it ended because I so loved all of these characters.

The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday

(nonfiction / stoicism · 🎧)

This one wasn’t for me.

I understand why Ryan Holiday’s version of Stoicism resonates with people, but I found the book a little too self-help-y and motivationa. Just my taste, I see why it’s popular!

A Richer Retirement by William P. Bengen

(personal finance · 🎧)

Extremely technical deep dive into the 4% rule and other withdrawal strategies for retirement.n Not exactly enjoyable, but interesting.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

(memoir · 📖)

I loved this. I read it 10+ years ago, picked it up again and I loved it all over again.

It’s the kind of memoir where the events themselves are interesting enough to carry an entire book, but the writing is extraordinary. Follows the author’s childhood living a nomadic life across the US in the 60s with her eccentric, hippie parents. This was a runaway hit for good reason.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

(fiction · iyashikei 📖)

I love books translated from Japanese and I love books that are set in a bookstore so I loved this. It’s the story of a young woman who goes through a bad breakup, quits her job, and moves to a small town to helpher uncle run his secondhand bookshop. She falls in love with reading and gets to know all the regulars. Just a cozy, wholesome delight.

I only recently learned that “Japanese cozies” or “Iyashikei” (healing fiction) is a distinct subgenre.

Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso by Jeremy Egner

(nonfiction · 🎧)

An “oral history” style book told mostly through interviews from cast and crew. If you loved Ted Lasso (and who didn’t?) this was fun.

Year to Date

📚 Total books: 58

My goal (that’s not really a goal) is still 100 books this year.

I’m slightly ahead of pace. Not that it matters! Because if I read like…87 books this year that wouldn’t mean I’m any kind of failure.

Thank You to July!

July was a weird little month. Lots of fun, and I realized how much I like being home.

I love traveling. I love doing interesting things. I love seeing friends and going to weddings and spending a weekend at Camp FI and saying yes to things that disrupt my normal routines.

But I also really, really like my regular life.

I like waking up in my own bed. I like walking to get coffee. I like knowing what’s in my refrigerator. I like my workout classes and reading before bed and taking the dog for a walk and having absolutely nowhere exciting to be.

Maybe the best part of leaving your regular life for a while is remembering that you built a regular life you actually really like coming back to.

August is 31 days of podcasting, more summer, and, if the universe would like to cooperate, perhaps fewer five-figure home expenses.

Be safe out there.

xoxo,
Liz

One, at work, things were changing faster than I could keep up. Two, at home, we spent most of the month getting our house ready to sell, which somehow involved dozens of projects I never would have anticipated. And three, we boarded a plane for two weeks in Europe and, well. When we got on the plane we had our passports and luggage but we did not actually have a fully built plan for what countries we’d be in.

Now I’d have preferred these three big things happen in three different months but that’s just too bad.

But one of my favorite things about collecting data is it keeps me honest. And while my brain remembers June as a chaotic mess, the numbers tell me I actually did okay.

Movement

June average: 10,102 steps/day

That’s my highest monthly average of the year so far.

The first three weeks of June were pretty normal. Then we landed in Europe!

Most days we wandered somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 steps through neighborhoods, parks, train stations, cafés, and pretty side streets.

At the halfway point of the year, I’m averaging 7,352 steps per day, up from 6,801 at the end of May.

My goal for 2026 is still to finish the year averaging 8,000 steps a day. And I know a goal of 8k feels random when 10k is right there but my joints aren’t always up for more steps.

My cranky body

Between my left SI joint and the tendon in my left foot, I wasn’t sure how two weeks of vacation walking would go. I packed supportive shoes, rotated between pairs, stretched every evening, used a lacrosse ball on cranky muslces, took breaks whenever I needed them, and generally tried to stay ahead of the pain instead of reacting to it.

And it worked! My body was usually cranky by the end of the day but totally manageable.

I’m still a little offended that aging appears to apply to me personally, but I suppose learning how to work with my body instead of expecting it to behave like it did at 22 is progress.

Peloton stats

I logged 20 hours in my Peloton app. 10 hours of strength, 6 hours of walking, and 4 hours combined of yoga, meditation, stretching, and cycling.

Since moving back to a more walkable neighborhood, I have stopped trying to log every outdoor walk as a workout.

Living in a walkable neighborhood means I’m outside walking all the time and I just don’t find tracking dog walks or going to get coffee give me helpful data.

Now I only log an outdoor walk if it’s then only activity I got in for the day. So on vacation, I logged a single 15-minute walk each day and called it good. It let me keep my workout streak alive without spending my vacation fiddling with my phone.

Year to Date

• January: 5,973 steps/day

• February: 6,685

• March: 7,795

• April: 6,672

• May: 6,801

• June: 10,102

Year-to-date average: 7,352 steps/day

Sleep, Recovery & Health

I’m kind of obsessed with my Oura ring data and seeing the day to day data and zooming out to see the big trends. I was impressed with my June sleep score!

| Month | Sleep Score | Resting Heart Rate |
| January | 87 | 58 bpm |
| February | 81 | 57 bpm |
| March | 89 | 59 bpm |
| April | 87 | 59 bpm |
| May | 90 | 55 bpm |
| June | 88 | 54 bpm |

Crossing multiple time zones and sleeping in eight different places across two weeks didn’t seem like a recipe for good sleep. Surprisingly, it went really well.

Before the trip I used the TimeWise app to gradually shift my schedule, then took melatonin at bedtime for the first few nights after we arrived. I also temporarily embraced morning caffeine even though I normally avoid it.

Did I accidentally overdo the caffeine once or twice? Um yes. I did accidentally give myself the jitters. Overall, though, I think I handled jet lag better than I expected. Yay!

Nutrition

I averaged 122 grams of protein and 32 grams of fiber per day in June. Those are numbers I’m really happy with!

I intended to (casually) keep tracking my meals throughout our Europe trip. I was just taking a picture of everything and letting Nourish take its best guess instead of trying to be super accurate. I still only made it about a week. Eventually I just missed a few things and decided I’d just start again when I got home.

Even that first week, though, ended up teaching me something. Before I looked back through my food log, my memory of vacation was basically:

1. Raspberry sorbet every day. Sometimes strawberry.

2. Lots of wine

3. Many pastries

Looking through what I’d actually eaten, there was also plenty of protein, lots of vegetables, and meals that were surprisingly balanced. Vacation me wasn’t living on pastries and ice cream. I just remembered the pastries and ice cream much more vividly.

That’s becoming a recurring lesson this year. My memory is unreliable! But data tells the truth.

Year to Date

• January: 125g protein / 28g fiber

• February: 121g / 28g

• March: 122g / 37g

• April: 113g / 30g

• May: 115g / 32g

• June: 122g / 32g

Alcohol

I had 26 drinks in June and 14 alcohol-free days.

If you’d asked me on the flight home how much I’d been drinking, I probably would have answered, “Constantly.”

Looking back, that’s not really what happened.

Vacation definitely changes my routines. Instead of having two drinks on a Friday night and none for several days, we’d often split a bottle of wine with dinner or stop for a beer in the afternoon before wandering to the next neighborhood.

The biggest surprise looking back through my tracker is that I never really overdid it. I don’t think I had more than three drinks in a single day the entire trip.

I felt very indulgent. The data says it was actually pretty moderate. (I mean…depending on your perspective.)

Year to Date

• January: 8 drinks • 25 dry days

• February: 20 drinks • 14 dry days

• March: 32 drinks • 19 dry days (Mexico vacation)

• April: 11 drinks • 21 dry days

• May: 9 drinks • 25 dry days

• June: 26 drinks • 14 dry days

Year to date: 106 drinks and 118 alcohol-free days (out of 182).

Spending

June was…expensive.

I spent $45,964 during the month.

As always, that number excludes our mortgage payments and money moving between financial accounts (e.g. investment contributions), but it does include a new roof, two weeks in Europe, and nearly every vacation expense imaginable. This was never going to be a normal spending month.

If I back out home expenses, everything else totaled $12,076, which actually feels kinda reasonable considering we spent two weeks traveling internationally.

Here’s where the money went.

🏡 Home — $33,888

This category was most of the pie on our pie chart this month.

Right before listing our house, we discovered the roof needed to be replaced. That wasn’t exactly the surprise I was hoping for, but sometimes homeownership has different plans.

Between the roof replacement and all the other projects that come with getting a house market-ready, this category was, of course, way higher than usual.

Hopefully this is one of those expenses that’s memorable because it almost never happens.

✈️ Travel & Vacation — $6,903

This includes basically everything we bought while traveling:

• Flights between countries

• Hotels

• Trains

• Public transit

• Restaurants

• Grocery stores

• Coffee

• Museums

• Shopping (we came home with a lot of new stationery)

• Sunscreen

• Random pharmacy purchases

• And all the other little things

When I’m on vacation, I intentionally stop worrying about categorizing every meal or purchase. Everything simply goes into the Travel category. Vacation is vacation from budgeting spreadsheets, too.

🎭 Live Performances — $827

This is one of my favorite categories because it includes basically anything involving someone on a stage.

Concerts, comedy shows, author talks, lectures, poetry readings… If there are seats facing a performer, I would like to be there.

Summer is always an expensive season for this category because it’s concert season, and I’m perfectly okay with that.

🍽️ Eating & Drinking — $1,452

A pretty typical month.

• Groceries: $760

• Restaurants: $391

• Coffee Shops: $162

• Takeout: $94

• Alcohol: $45

Groceries are a little lower because we were out of town for a week and trying to clean out the fridge before leaving. I know that’s still high for two people but what can I say. There are worse things to splurge on than fizzy water and pre-made meals from the grocery store.

🛍️ Shopping & Personal — $1,318

This category is always a little random. Most of the clothing spending was shoes. (New summer sandals, slip ons, sneakers, and wedges.)

Personal care includes things like haircuts, eyebrow appointments, nails, and all those maintenance expenses that somehow add up. (A manicure and pedicure for the two of us together now cost me around $175 with tip, which still feels outrageous every time I pay it.)

We also bought new teeny tiny e-readers! Still love a kindle but the little phone sized ones are also rad.

💡 Bills & Utilities — $592

Nothing particularly exciting here.

Internet, cell phones, subscriptions, utilities, and all the recurring expenses that Iliterally) keep the lights on.

💪 Health & Wellness — $399

Mostly ClassPass memberships for both of us and a prescription.

🐶 Pets — $321

Food and treats for our very spoiled dog plus a routine vet appointment.

🚗 Transportation — $213

Insurance, charging, parking, and miscellaneous transportation costs.

One perk of driving an EV is that I still do most of my charging at work for free, which keeps this category low.

June’s spending was bonkers. Might have been our most expensive month ever? I’m just not gonna look.

Books and Reading

June was an excellent reading month.

I finished 10 books—five audiobooks and five Kindle books—which brings me to 52 books for the year. That’s just a little ahead of pace for my goal that’s not really a goal of 100.

I’m continuing to insist this is just for fun and definitely not another KPI. I would love to be someone who reads purely for pleasure, but I do love the feeling of completing a book and checking it off the list.

One of my goals this year was to spend less time mindlessly scrolling my phone and more time reading. Somewhere along the way I got into the habit of putting my phone face down and picking up my Kindle instead before bed. It’s been successful! I’m on track to finish about twice as many books as last year.

Big Time by Laura Vandercam

(nonfiction · 🎧 audiobook)

A practical book about productivity that somehow avoids making you feel guilty about not optimizing every second of your life. I appreciated that it was more about intentionally spending your time than squeezing more work into every day.

The Body Electric by Manoush Zomorodi

(nonfiction · 🎧 audiobook)

My favorite nonfiction book of the month.

If you’ve heard me recommend Outlive before, this might actually replace it. It explores how frequent movement throughout the day (not just dedicated exercise) affects our health. I found myself thinking about it long after I finished.

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

(literary fiction · 📖 kindle)

I really enjoyed this one.

It’s made up of interconnected stories, and I loved watching characters drift in and out of one another’s lives. It didn’t completely blow me away, but I found myself excited to pick it up every night.

Retire Often by Jillian Johnsrud

(personal finance · 🎧 audiobook)

The central idea is that retirement doesn’t have to be one event at the end of your career. Instead, you can sprinkle smaller “mini retirements” throughout your life. I expected it to be mainly about taking a year off at a time, which I’ve never been interested in.

Instead my go takeaway was an aha moment about asking to take off maybe 1-2 months while staying in the same job. I liked it!

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor

(psychology · 🎧 audiobook)

This was a reread. I still agree with the central premise—that happiness tends to come before success rather than after it—but it didn’t hit quite as hard the second time around.

Still worth reading if you haven’t.

Wreck by Catherine Newman

(literary fiction · 📖 kindle)

A quiet, cozy novel about family, aging, and the responsibilities we have to one another.

Exactly my kind of book.

Mattering by Jennifer Wallace

(nonfiction · 🎧 audiobook)

A thoughtful book about belonging, significance, and why feeling like we matter is such a fundamental human need.

I enjoyed it and found plenty to think about, even if it wasn’t one that completely changed my perspective.

Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

(fiction · 📖 kindle)

This one just wasn’t for me. I can absolutely see why other people love it. I’m a sucker for wholesome, but for me this veered into hokey. The writing felt over-explaining often to me. I could see how maybe this would make a good play, and I wonder if the audiobook felt like a better experience.

Whistler by Ann Patchett

(literary fiction · 📖 kindle)

A sweet, gentle family story. A women in her 50s happens to run into a man who was her stepfather for just a few years when she was young but who was a meaningful adult in her life. They reconnect and revisit some of the things she remembers, but turns out hindsight and a lot more context changes her views of those memories.

Themes of aging, memory, forgiveness, and LGBTQ identity. Ann Patchett has such a gift for making ordinary family dynamics feel completely absorbing.

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

(literary fiction · 📖 kindle)

It took me about a third of the book to become invested. Then I became completely obsessed.

It follows a woman through years of struggling with her mental health, marriage, and family relationships before finally receiving a diagnosis that helps explain what she’s been experiencing.

That sounds heavy, and it is, but it’s also incredibly funny and beautifully written.b My favorite books have substance but they don’t feel like homework.

Year to Date

• 🎧 Audiobooks: 26

• 📖 Kindle books: 26

• 📚 Total books: 52

Thank you to June!

June made me feel a little stressed but also very capable. I made a bunch of good memories and slept well. Read some phenomenal books. Spent a lot of fun time with some of my favorite people and reaffirmed my decision that Big Fancy House Life is not for me.

July is already almost over, but it’s feeling like a fun summer. In August I’ll be doing 31 days of podcasting, and I’m so (so!) looking forward to it.

Be safe out there.

xoxo, Liz

May was kind of a mess.

On paper, it was our most expensive month of the year. And somehow it was also relatively frugal. We are in the slog of prepping to list our house for sale, which means a steady stream of contractors, landscapers, repair people, cleanup crews, and assorted “well, while we’re doing that…” projects. We spent nearly $28,000 on house-related expenses in May (with more to come in June). One the other hand, our actual lifestyle spending was just $7,433. (Which is not bad for us.)

Coming up: What a bonkers expensive month actually looked like. Also, I got sick (again), rediscovered yoga, and finished seven books.

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Spending

All in, May spending came to $35,342 (that doesn’t count housing and investing). That sounds…horrifying.

$27,909 of that total was home maintenance and yard work related to preparing our big house for sale. (We moved out of that house last year but were waffling abut whether to sell it.) Excluding those costs, our actual lifestyle spending was just $7,433. Felt like a normal month!

A quick note on housing: we’re still carrying two housing costs (our current apartment plus the mortgage on our house.) I don’t include either in the monthly spending totals. A gal is entitled to a few secrets.

🏠 Home Maintenance & Yard — $27,909

Well.

Between repairs, cleanup, landscaping, prep work, and all the miscellaneous expenses that come with getting a house market-ready, this category absolutely dominated the month. And we’re not even done.

I don’t regret the spending. The house is one of our largest assets. The goal right now isn’t minimizing expenses. The goal is protecting the value of the property and getting it sold.

Still, it is objectively funny that we spent more on the house this month than on literally every other category combined. Funny. Like sooooo funny. 🫠

🍽️ Food & Drink — $1,632

Groceries ($1,113) — A pretty normal month. No hosting, no Factor, no giant Costco stock-up runs. Regular grocery shopping for two people. Our grocery spending is just always high. I like fresh fruit and Spindrift.

Restaurants ($232) — Three dinners out. Two with friends and one date night.

Takeout ($122) — A vast majority of this was getting ice cream on five lovely evenings.

Coffee Shops ($99) — Fairly typical. Six trips to local coffee shops.

Alcohol ($66) — Not much to report.

💊 Medical — $831

A handful of appointments, prescriptions, and some new glasses. Nothing dramatic, which is exactly how I like my medical spending.

🎁 Gifts & Charity — $1,662

Charity ($1,345) — You should put me on your invite list for your charity gala. I can’t resist a paddle raise.

Gifts ($317)

🪑 Home Furnishings — $521

A whole lot of paint samples. A couple of new lamps. A couple of patio chairs. A curtain rod.

🧹 Home & Personal Services — $475

House Cleaning ($400) — A constant and a joy.

Personal Care ($75) — A frangrance sampler from Ulta and a Sleepy Tie, an overnight heatless curls tool

⚡ Utilities — $535

Gas & Electric ($232) — For both homes, yes, still.

Internet ($249) — This is for both homes and I tend to take any Apple account charge and just put it here. What these actually are? None of my business.

Water ($54)

🚗 Transportation — $541

Driving ($186) — Parking, car insurance, some charging. (I mainly charge for free at work)

Auto Maintenance ($203) Mmmm I don’t remember. We took the car to the dealership for something and they fixed it. Or maybe it was routine maintenance. Shrug.

Car Service ($152) — Lyft and Uber

🎭 Entertainment & Fun — $413

Live Performances ($120) — Always yes to a show.

Games & Books ($193) — A new stationery shop and a new bookstore opened up nearby.

🏋️ Fitness — $293

ClassPass for both of us and Peloton.

✈️ Travel & Vacation — $95

Just one credit card annual fee.

🐶 Pet Stuff — $142

Pet Grooming ($101) — It helps with shedding. A little.

Pet Food ($41) — We’re down to one pet (We maxed out at three) and just one little bag of food a month.

Spending — Year to Date

January: $19,000 (Europe flights, laptop, mattress)

February: $13,859 (travel booking, medical, home purchases)

March: $9,706 (Mexico, Pilates package, home maintenance)

April: $7,434 (first normal month!)

May: $35,342 ($27,909 of which was house stuff)

YTD: ~$85,000

The biggest lesson from May is that the big things matter a lot more than the little things. No amount of meal planning, skipping lattes, or subscription-auditing was going to move the needle this month. And stuff is just expensive. When I look at our $7kish in regular expenses the number feels so high but nothing seems extravagant. We could have skipped the charity and the home furnishings and still would have been over $5k.

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🏋️ Movement

In May I logged ~18 hours and 30 minutes of movement. Mostly yoga (7h 10m), strength training (5h 31m), and walking (4h 13m), with a little stretching and meditation mixed in.

I averaged 5,974 steps per day (well below my normal range). The main reason: I spent most of the month dealing with a lingering cold/cough situation that somehow stretched 30+ days before an inhaled steroid finally got things moving in the right direction.

One silver lining of being sick was that I had to take a break from the high-intensity Pilates classes I usually gravitate toward. I still had ClassPass credits to use, so I ended up taking a lot of restorative and yin yoga classes instead. I loved them so much! I had forgotten how much I love a real yoga studio with plants and incense and sound bowls. I’ve been doing yoga at my gym or on Peloton and it’s just not the same.

I managed to maintain my 500+ day Peloton streak, although there were definitely days when a walk, a ten-minute stretch or a short meditation was all I managed.

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🤒 Sleep, Recovery & Health

According to my Oura Ring:

• Average sleep score: 90

• Average resting heart rate: 55 bpm

My highest monthly average sleep score ever! Maybe another side effect of a month spent fighting off whatever respiratory bug decided to move in permanently.

Still tracking nutrition with Nourish, still focused on protein and fiber:

• Average protein per day: 115g

• Average fiber per day: 32g

Not my highest protein month of the year, but comfortably in the range I’m aiming for.

Sleep Scores — Year to Date

January: 87 / 58 bpm

February: 81 / 57 bpm

March: 89 / 59 bpm

April: 87 / 59 bpm

May: 90 / 55 bpm

Nutrition — Year to Date

January: 125g protein / 28g fiber

February: 121g protein / 28g fiber

March: 122g protein / 37g fiber

April: 113g protein / 30g fiber

May: 115g protein / 32g fiber

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🍷 Alcohol

8 drinks

26 dry days

Again, was kinda sick the first part of the month and then had a little burst of social activity at the end.

Alcohol — Year to Date

January: 8 drinks / 25 dry days

February: 20 drinks / 14 dry days

March: 32 drinks / 19 dry days (Mexico)

April: 11 drinks / 21 dry days

May: 8 drinks / 26 dry days

YTD: 79 drinks / 105 dry days (out of 150)

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📚 Reading

Books I finished in May! Seven total (4 audiobooks, 3 Kindle books).

Of Boys and Men — Richard V. Reeves

Nonfiction · sociology / politics (audio)

I heard the author on public radio and had been meaning to read his book for a while. It’s a tough sell and a brave thing to write about: that no one is paying enough attention to men’s suffering. I moved it up my list after I saw a speaker who absolutely butchered the same topic and left the audience sneering. Reeves does a much better job here. A couple of his key points are that while the workplace discriminates against women, our education systems discriminate against men, and both problems are worth solving. He says that a central issue isn’t that feminism has gone too far but rather that it hasn’t gone far enough. It was a thinker for sure.

The Comeback — Ella Berman

Fiction · contemporary literary (kindle)

A former child star retreats from public life after a traumatic event and then gets pulled back into Hollywood years later. I thought this was going to be lighter (like…washed up starlet makes a triumphant comeback!) but it was dark and moody. I didn’t find the resolution especially satisfying, but I could see why others might enjoy it more.

The Long Game — Dorie Clark

Nonfiction · business / personal development (audio)

A book about thinking in years and decades instead of weeks and months. This would be a GREAT book for someone trying to build a business or especially trying to become a speaker/recognized expert. One of my big takeaways was when you form a new relationship, no networking asks for a year.

The Sum of Us — Heather McGhee

Nonfiction · politics / economics (audio)

My favorite nonfiction book of the month. This book is about the ways racism creates costs that ultimately affect everyone, not just the people being directly targeted. Very thoughtful. From this book and from other places I feel like lately I keep reading about the history of the public pool in the U.S., and I now see pools in a new light.

Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice — Elle Cosimano

Fiction · mystery (kindle)

After spending most of the month reading about democracy, economics, gender, and public policy, I just wanted to read a silly book about a single mom who fights crime. The Finlay Donovan books continue to be ridiculous in exactly the way I want them to be. Quick, funny, and completely implausible. The book version of a buddy crimefighting comedy.

Built to Move — Kelly & Juliet Starrett

Nonfiction · health / fitness (audio)

Sometimes you want to be told over and over again things you mostly already know and agree with. I enjoy health and longevity books. Sometimes I learn something, but mostly I’m re-motivated to do the things I already know I should be doing.

Giving Up Is Unforgivable — Joyce Vance

Nonfiction · politics / civic engagement (audio)

Part memoir, part guide for staying engaged during a time when many people feel exhausted by politics. (That’s me.)

Books — Year to Date

January: 4 audio / 3 kindle

February: 2 audio / 3 kindle

March: 5 audio / 7 kindle

April: 6 audio / 5 kindle

May: 4 audio / 3 kindle

YTD: 21 audio / 21 kindle (42 total books)

Forty-two books through May puts me right at pace for 100 books this year, and I’m still trying to decide whether that’s something to aim for. I may need to resist the urge to take reading for pleasure and turn it into a Key Performance Indicator. I do fully think that reading on my kindle before bed (as opposed to reading on the kindle app on my phone) has spiked my sleep scores.

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Closing Thoughts

May felt a little stressful and chaotic. I was sick, annoyed by all the work done at the house, and work was a little nutty. But! I spent a lot of time reading and being nice to my body, giving it protein and fiber and rest.

If you want to encourage me to do this seven more times this year, hit the like button. And leave a comment! (A nice comment.)

How was your May? What’s on your dashboard?

xoxo

Liz

A guest on a talk show (not someone I recognized) said something like: yes, I’m very busy and I’m very tired, but I’m just grateful for all of it because all of the things that are kind of a headache right now are things I prayed for when I was in my 20s.

(We have all heard some version of this many, many times before.)

But it hit me because I was really feeling sorry for myself this week. Why is everything extra hard, why are so many things happening at once, why is everything on fire at the same time. And then I paused and imagined how 20-something Liz would feel about these problems.

Because oh, I’m stressed because I’m trying to get our house prepped to list? I cannot believe I was ever even in a position to buy that house. It’s gorgeous. Younger me yearned for an apartment with in-unit laundry. A 2-bedroom felt out of reach! The fact that I bought a million dollar home and then decided meh, I didn’t like it? She would be unhinged.

And oh, I’m stressed because I’m taking on some new things at work? There was a time I would have done anything to be trusted with this kind of responsibility. I was out here raising my hand for everything, taking on every project, eager to be seen as someone who could handle more. And now I have more, and I’m stressed about it. (But she would be impressed.)

And let’s not forget! I’m also stressed because I need to sit down and book hotels for a couple weeks in Europe. An objectively, genuinely, actually wonderful problem to have.

I really try to be a grateful person. I got hit by the lucky stick when it comes to my career, when it comes to love. I have very strong fingernails, and I’m a little bit funny.

But! Sometimes gratitude feels like homework. Like another thing I’m supposed to do, sandwiched in between all the other things I’m supposed to do. Book the hotels. Prep the house. And don’t forget to be grateful! It’s on the list!

I think grateful thoughts all the time. But getting to grateful feelings is so much harder.

Maybe that’s why we have to do the homework. For every 100 grateful thoughts, you get maybe one fleeting feeling. This week I got one. I’ll take it.

On to this week’s vitals…

What’s in my algorithm: So many clips from Colbert as he wraps up his final shows.

What I’m reading: I’m in the middle of Euphoria by Lily King on my kindle and The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee on audio. The first is a novel about a love triangle between three anthropologists in New Guinea in the 1930s. The second is about how racism currently impacts our economy and democracy.

How I’m moving my body: I’m nooooot. I have a lingering cough from a virus that hit me three weeks ago and I’m taking it easy. The beautiful silver lining is that in an effort to use up my ClassPass credits when I’m not going to high-intensity Pilates, I have rediscovered restorative and yin yoga classes.

What I’m obsessing about: I added a rug, some new plants, and different art to our bedroom. I’ve gotten so much joy from it every morning. My physical space is something I never seem to take for granted, I put effort into making where I live comfortable and pretty, and I never seem to get used to it.

On my to do list: I haven’t posted new podcast episodes because I’m sick and a little stressed and very tired. But I’ll be back shortly!

Sending you love, my friends.

xoxo Liz

The first two weeks of April were fun! And the last two weeks were a bit foggy when I caught a cold.

Coming up: The first month that actually felt like normal spending. Also, I got sick and read eleven books.

Spending

All in, April spending came to $7,434 excluding housing and investing — the lowest month of the year so far, and the first one that felt like a “normal” spending month. January was big (laptop, mattress, plane tickets to Europe). February was big (travel booking, all new bed stuff, medical). March was big (Mexico, Pilates package, home maintenance). April finally just... wasn’t.

A quick note on housing: we’re still carrying two housing costs (our current apartment plus the mortgage on our house, which we’re planning to sell soon.) I don’t include either in the monthly total, but we’re in that boat for at least a few more months.

🍽️ Food & Drink — $1,311

• Groceries ($984) — No Factor subscription, no hosting, just normal week-to-week shopping that somehow adds up. (We also renewed our Costco membership for $130, so otherwise would have been around $850.)

• Restaurants & Bars ($145) — Just two dinners out this month! You can tell I was sick, ha.

• Takeout ($103) — Food trucks and ice cream in the first half of the month!

• Coffee Shops ($49) — A bit lower than usual. I blame the illness.

• Alcohol ($94) — It’s spring! The season for hitting up breweries.

👗 Clothing — $832

This looks high! I did a big order from Modern Citizen, but I’m returning most of it — about $500 worth.

I ordered this gorgeous, gorgeous dress in a couple sizes and colors, and I was obsessed with it! (Links are usually commissioned, FYI.) But sadly this dress is better suited for a smaller chest, so I had to send them back. My real total then will be closer to $350. I did keep this shirt from Modern Citizen and I bought myself some new grip socks because they’re just so stinking cute. Around $220 to get a ring repaired and another resized.

🧾 Medical — $970

Somehow we had a random $600 bill from like…more than a year ago? Plus three doctor’s appointments.

🧹 Home & Personal Services — $755

• House cleaning ($400) — A constant and a joy.

• Personal care ($355) — Haircuts for both of us, a few beauty things like new shampoo and conditioner, and I got my nails done. Nothing extravagant.

📚 Games/Books — $174

Celebrated Indie bookstore day! And got some playdate games.

⚡ Utilities — $580

• Gas & Electric ($310) — For both homes.

• Internet ($219) — Includes anything I pay for via my Apple ID which could be streaming, could be . Plus this is for both homes.

• Water ($51)

🏋️ Fitness — $286

ClassPass and Peloton.

🚗 Driving — $218

Insurance and parking andtolls. Car still paid off, still charging mostly for free at work.

🚲 Bikes — $196

Got a bike tuned up and repaired.

🖥️ Electronics — $196

My partner’s contribution to the household: a couple of pomodoro timers and a keyboard with silent penguin buttons. I don’t ask questions.

✈️ Travel/Vacation — $1,290

Mostly annual credit card fees hitting all at once. Not exactly what “travel” conjures up, but that’s where they live in Monarch.

🎭 Live Performances — $160

Always yes to a show.

🏠 Home Furnishings — $174

Small stuff like some fancy baskets for the top closet shelves. (Super stoked amazon is selling more refurbished “like new” things. I assume they were returns?)

🎁 Gifts — $80

A couple of small things for people I love.

🐶 Pet food — $20

I have been buying the small bag even though it’s more expensive. Just so much easier to carry.

Spending — Year to Date

• January: $19,000 (Europe flights, new laptop, mattress)

• February: $13,859 (travel booking, home furnishings, medical)

• March: $9,706 (Mexico, Pilates prepay, home maintenance)

• April: $7,434 (first normal month!)

• YTD: ~$50,000

I am reminded over and over that “normal” months are not normal. They’re quite rare!

🏋️ Movement

In April I logged ~20 hours and 34 minutes of movement. Mostly strength at 11.5 hours (high intensity Pilates, barre, and dumbbells at home), then a couple of hours of Yoga and cycling plus a smidge of stretching and sleep meditations to keep my Peloton streak alive while I am sick.

I averaged 6,725 steps — low for me, but I spent the last two weeks sick so I’m giving myself a complete pass on that one.

😴 Sleep, Recovery & Health

According to my Oura Ring:

• Average sleep score: 87

• Average resting heart rate: 59 bpm

March’s sleep score was 89, so a small step back but really solid.

Still tracking nutrition with Nourish, still focused on protein and fiber:

• 113g protein per day

• 30g fiber per day

Protein is a little lower than previous months, which makes sense — being sick and not wanting to eat will do that.

Sleep Scores — Year to Date

• January: 87 / 58 bpm

• February: 81 / 57 bpm

• March: 89 / 59 bpm

• April: 87 / 59 bpm

Nutrition — Year to Date

• January: 125g protein / 28g fiber

• February: 121g protein / 28g fiber

• March: 122g protein / 37g fiber

• April: 113g protein / 30g fiber

🍷 Alcohol

• 11 drinks (13.0 units of alcohol)

• 21 dry days 💚

I track everything in DrinkControl because I’m a narcissist and I love data about myself.

Alcohol — Year to Date

• January: 8 drinks / 25 dry days (Damp January 🌱)

• February: 20 drinks / 14 dry days

• March: 32 drinks / 19 dry days (Mexico)

• April: 11 drinks / 21 dry days

• YTD: 71 drinks / 79 dry days

📚 Reading

Books I finished in April! 11 total (6 audio books, 5 kindle books). I’ve been trying to move books to the top of my list when it comes to downtime! Rather than letting them come in second to phone or tv time. And I guess it’s working?

The House in the Cerulean Sea — TJ Klune

Fiction · cozy fantasy (kindle)

I started this after seeing a few people recommend it and didn’t realize it was YA queer fantasy going in (none of which are especially my genre) but I completely get why this book has such a devoted following. It’s a wholesome hug. A government bureaucrat gets sent to audit an orphanage for magical children, starts out scared, and ends up completely charmed. There are a lot of pages of him just going “oh nooooo” before a very satisfying happy ending.

Horse — Geraldine Brooks

Fiction · literary / historical (kindle)

The story is about a horse, but it’s really about race, art, history, and who gets to be remembered. Some parts felt clunky because it’s told from the point of view of so many different characters. But! I was so invested in the horse and his handler that kept my attention all the way through.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage — Belle Burden

Nonfiction · memoir (kindle)

Read this in basically 24 hours. An honest account of a high-society, New York City marriage falling apart in early pandemic days. I expected something more dishy and gossipy, but the writing was genuinely lovely and had some surprisingly poignant moments.

107 Days — Kamala Harris

Nonfiction · politics / memoir (audio)

I was hesitant to revisit 2024, but I love a behind-the-scenes account of a public event. I just wish Harris would bluntly criticize Joe Biden instead of tiptoeing around it. “No, love that guy, I’m so loyal to him, exceppppt for just a couple of tiny things that I’m still kind of mad about”

I’ll Make Me a World — Jarvis R. Givens

Nonfiction · history / education (audio)

A history of Black History Month that I started back in February. Dense with interesting information. Just took me a little longer to make my way through this one.

Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting — Lisa Genova

Nonfiction · science / psychology (audio)

Reassuring and fascinating in equal measure. Recommended if you’ve ever convinced yourself you have early-onset Alzheimer’s because you couldn’t find your keys. Also confirmed my long-held belief that people aren’t “bad at remembering names,” they just weren’t paying attention in the first place.

Same as Ever — Morgan Housel

Nonfiction · finance / human behavior (audio)

The premise is a list of things that never change about humans — risk is unavoidable, stories persuade better than data, that kind of thing. Because of that framing, a lot of it felt like just very obvious points. Also, Housel opens the book by saying we can’t know what big things will shape the next hundred years, and I kept thinking...I think we do know. It’s climate change and AI.

Burn Book: A Tech Love Story — Kara Swisher

Nonfiction · tech / memoir (audio)

Delicious. Kara Swisher is a tech journalist who has a lot of opinions and will absolutely share them all. I loved every single minute of this.

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman — Lindy West

Nonfiction · memoir / essays (kindle)

Funny and sharp. I actually read this when it came out in 2016, but wanted to revisit it before starting her new book.

Rest is Resistance — Tricia Hersey

Nonfiction · wellness / social justice (audio)

I picked this up after seeing the author give a talk. The message is outstanding — rest as a radical act against a culture that treats productivity as a moral virtue. The format is more stream-of-consciousness sermon than structured argument.

The Names — Florence Knapp

Fiction · literary (kindle)

A mother with a newborn is deciding between three names. The novel then follows three alternate timelines (one for each name) checking in with the family every seven years. I really enjoyed this one, and the ending especially got me.

Books — Year to Date

• January: 4 audio / 3 kindle

• February: 2 audio / 3 kindle

• March: 5 audio / 7 kindle

• April: 6 audio / 5 kindle

• YTD: 17 audio / 18 kindle

35 books through April puts me at a pace to hit 100 this year, and I’m not sure if that would be a fun goal or maybe I’m just taking the simple pleasure of being absorbed in a book and turning it into fake internet gold stars.

Closing thoughts

I think doing this recap each month is good for me. It’s just enough in the back of my mind to help me make good choices. And it’s fun to look back!

If you want to encourage me to do this eight more times this year, hit the like button. And leave a comment! (A nice comment.)

How was your April? What’s on your dashboard?

xoxo
Liz

Good for them! And I mean that! Truly!

And sometimes I’m just so jealous that I have already gobbled up all my low hanging fruit. Like when it comes to spending, there’s no car payment to gasp at. I’ve literally never had cable (and I only pay for one streaming service at a time). I get all my books from the library. I was probably the first person you know who switched to Mint Mobile. Truly I would love to be the person who discovers they’ve been spending $200 a month on something they forgot about, but sadly I am very aware of where my money goes; it’s all been scrutinized.

At some point you graduate from “cut out the obvious bad thing” solutions to “everything I’m doing is already pretty okay, so…now what?” problems. And those are so much harder! Nobody makes a reel about marginal gains!

Absolutely nobody cares, including your own brain, when you slightly optimize something that was already fine. The before and after photos of when I clean out my closet and ditch one stained shirt and a couple pairs of threadbare socks are HIGHLY unsatisfying.

I’m not saying any of this to be a buzzkill. I am happy for the soda-quitters and the new walkers and the cable-cutters, I really, really am. I just also see you if you’re out here doing the hard, boring, invisible work of incremental improvement with no dramatic transformation in sight.

Anyway. I don’t really have a grand point here. Sometimes it just helps to say the thing that’s annoyingout loud. It doesn’t fix anything but it makes you feel approximately 7% better. I’ll take that marginal gain.

On to this week’s vitals…

What’s in my algorithm: Old Sex and the City clips and lots of SJP in general! Probably because I just discovered her instagram is a delight. Like me, she says “rabbit rabbit“ on the first of every month for good luck.

What I’m reading I just finished the novel Horse by Geraldine Brooks. (Links are commissioned) Historical fiction that traces the journey of a legendary racehorse and the enslaved man who cared for him. Told across three timelines and multiple perspectives. I liked anything about Lexington (the horse) and Jarret (his groom/trainer/caretaker), and everything outside of that was a little clunky. Hard topics (slavery, racism, animal abuse, war) but Jarret and his story kept me very invested.

I have Lindy West’s new book on hold at the library, so I’m rereading Shrill in the meantime on my kindle. A memoir about misogyny and fat-shaming. I remember loving it ten years ago.

On audio, I just finished Kara Swisher’s Burn Book. She’s a journalist who’s been covering tech forever and this is a dishy memoir. Love. I just enjoy an overly confident, mouthy, “you all should have listened to me” woman. Suze Orman vibes in the best way.

How I’m moving my body I’m being very gentle this week. Something in my body is off. I’ve been feeling really tired and rundown, so I took a couple of gentler classes and at this exact moment, I have been laying in bed all morning.

What I’m obsessing about I just tried the $35 Whole Foods family meal for the first time. It’s intended to be a big tray of food to feed four people dinner. But! There’s no rule that says you can’t buy one for yourself and make it your lunches for the whole week. Feels like a less expensive version of factor meals, though not quite as delicious.

On my to do list I ordered this dress and it’s gooooorgeous but not meant for larger busts. So I am in one of my most dreaded dungeons: I have a return label in my email inbox and I need to figure out how to print it and find time to drop it off at a UPS store. Can she do it? Stay tuned to find out.

Sending you love, my friends.

xoxo
Liz

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Yesterday was a good example.

I slept in a bit. Fed myself and the dog, took a long walk, stopped for coffee. A handsome young man paid for my cappuccino, which I’m choosing to take personally even though it was almost certainly about being charmed by the dog.

Came home, answered some Slacks, cleared email, knocked out the one thing that actually needed to happen. Did another dog walk. Then in the afternoon I recorded a podcast episode with Kathleen from The Reframe (our Parallel Play series has been genuinely so fun.).

Did a Peloton strength workout. Wrapped up a few loose ends for work.

Then walked to a local brewery. Abeer, a burger, and some local comedy.

And I kept having this thought throughout the day: if I were early retired…how different would this actually be?

I’ve spent years focusing on early retirement as the goal. There was a time I was desperate for it. Work was making me a stressed-out mess, and it felt like the only way out.

And I still think about it all the time. We’re really close to hitting our early retirement number. Maybe because work feels more and more optional, it feels less and less stressful?

But lately I’ve been wondering if I ever actually wanted to retire early, or if that just felt like the only available escape hatch.

Because this morning I took a long walk. Had a slow breakfast. Talked to a stranger. Did creative work I like. Moved my body.

The things I picture when I think about early retirement all happened today. Woven in around work that doesn’t feel like it’s costing me anything.

I know it’s not always like this. It was a slow Friday. I have seasons where work is loud and draining and relentless, and I absolutely fantasize about throwing my laptop out the window.

But I’ve been so focused on hitting a goal and moving forward towards it (having enough money to retire) that it’s almost uncomfortable to think that maybe I’d like to just pause and stay where I am for a while.

On to this week’s vitals.

What I’m Reading: I just finished reading The House in the Cerulean Sea. I picked it up on a whim not knowing it was a queer young adult fantasy novel. It was a sweet story about a sad sack government bureaucrat who learns to live and love when he’s tasked with inspecting an orphanage for magical children. Not totally my thing, but I get why people loved it. My favorite part was one of the kids who dreamed of growing up to be a bellhop. He loved to carry around other people’s luggage and practiced welcoming people to his imaginary hotel. Earnest and wholesome.

I listened to 107 Days as an audiobook, Kamala Harris’s memoir about the 2024 presidential election. I think my reaction to this book was similar to others. One, it was kind of traumatizing to relive 2024. (Beyond world headlines that year, it was also a very difficult year both personally and professionally for me.) But it felt like a lot of thinly veiled finger pointing. I love anything where you get to know more about what happened behind the scenes but this didn’t come across as especially authentic. (Book links are affiliate.)

What I’m Eating: Back on a bagged salad kick. The chopped salads in a bad that you could almost eat with a spoon? My favorite.

How I’m Moving My Body: Halfway through the “Stronger You” program in the Peloton app. It’s 4 weeks of structured dumbbell workouts. There was a benchmark test at the beginning, and I’m looking forward to seeing my progress at the end. I’ll post it if it’s good. (And also probably if it’s not so good.)

What the algorithm keeps showing me: Clips from The West Wing. Which…not sure why it took so long for the algorithm to find me. Probably the greatest show ever on television, in my opinion.

Can’t stop thinking about: I vibe coded a little program to give me a personal dashboard that shows me most of the stats I share in my monthly “Notes from the Field” posts. Sleep stats from Oura, a recent spending recap from Monarch, etc. What a time to be alive.

Sending you love, my friends. Please be safe out there.

xoxo

Liz

I am trying something a little different this year: instead of just posting a spending recap, I’m building a little monthly dashboard. Unabashedly navel‑gazing, but it’s a nice way to zoom out and see how the month actually went.

Coming up: How a week in Mexico spiked my spending, reading, and drinking while tanking my exercise, sleep, and movement.

Spending

All in, March spending came to $9,706 excluding housing and investing, down from $13,759 in February. That still feels so high, but I guess it all adds up.

From a cash flow perspective, March was b-a-n-a-n-a-s in the best way. My bonus got paid out, we got a big tax refund, I submitted all my FSA claims from last year for reimbursement, and I sold some things on fb marketplace. I’m surprised that didn’t put me in a more spendy mindset.

🏠 Housing

Housing is the only cost I don’t post, but we’re still paying for both our apartment and the mortgage on our house. We have someone we know and trust staying in the house paying less than 25% of the mortgage in rent iso we’re still carrying most of the cost.

✈️ Travel / Vacation — $842
Much lower than last month, since February covered flights and hotels for our vacation. This is mostly the Mexico trip itself: tacos, margaritas, sunscreen and day-to-day vacation spending.

🍽️ Food & Drink — $1,860
Higher overall, driven by groceries ($1,230). “Groceries” were on the high side because I kept running to the grocery store for random things: sunscreen, face wash, matches, vitamins etc. Restaurants ($496) seems high but almost half that was for a special wine tasting dinner. (Restaurant spending on vacation goes in travel.) Coffee shop spending was lower than I like ($24) so we will work on that. Takeout ($111) for mostly weekday lunches and the Costco snack bar. Alcohol ($34) for one happy hour but alcohol also sneaks into groceries, restaurants, and travel.

🏠 Home — $2,371
Mostly home maintenance ($1,166) like getting the deck painted, plus utilities like gas & electric ($404), internet ($391, includes anything I pay for with my Apple ID), and water ($42). Not exciting, just keeping things running.

🏥 Health — $1,257
A mix of a medical refund (+$168) and a big jump in fitness spending ($1,425). We’ve been doing private Pilates classes and pre-paid for a ten-pack of classes, plus my ClassPass membership ($129) and our Peloton membership ($50).

🚗 Driving — $137
I lowered the coverage on my car insurance so we saw a big drop! This includes parking and the occasional charging, but mostly I charge my car for free at work.

🧹 Home & Personal Services — $420
Mostly house cleaning ($400), with one random personal care/toiletry purchase ($20).

🎁 Gifts & Giving — $62
Sent flowers to someone who got a HUGE promotion at work.

🎭 Entertainment — $277
Mostly live performances ($222), plus things like streaming and books.

👗 Shopping — $639
Split between clothing ($270 mostly for a few things from Poshmark) and home furnishings ($369 for new end table and I replaced my walking pad). I am shopping primarily secondhand these days! With the exception of a new pair of sneakers. Accidentally got a direct hit by my dog peeing on a walk. My sneakers were near their end of life anyways, but ordered a new pair immediately.

🐶 Pets — $35
A bag of dog food for $20 and a new dog bag dispenser thingie for $15. I gotta say, this bag dispenser is the very best one I’ve had in my whole life of having dogs. (Affiliate link.) It velcroes flush onto the leash, it actually stays on instead of having a plastic hook that bounces around and eventually breaks. I only bought it because I was browsing in a pet store to kill time while I waited for someone. I felt bad not buying something after loitering for 30 minutes but I love it. Happy accident!

📦 Everything Else — $530
Includes financial/legal ($332 - mainly doing our taxes), postage ($100, the cost to set up mail forwarding), and a few odds and ends.

💸 Investing — $7,500
I didn’t include this in my spending total but took advantage of having a bigger cash flow month to fully fund one of our IRAs. So, if you were wondering why the market had a big drop in March, sorry. That seems to happen every time I drop a chunk of cash into my investments.

🏋️ Movement

In March I logged 14 hours and 43 minutes of movement.
About 11–12 hours of that was strength training, a small amount of cycling, and the rest stretching and yoga.

A little lower than February, which makes sense because I spent about a week in Mexico laying on a lounge chair reading books.

I’m trying to settle into a weekly routine that balances heavy strength, pilates, and cardio. I’m somewhat getting in a rhythm vs deciding randomly what to do each day.

I’m still not really tracking walks. Between the walking pad, quick dog walks, and just generally being out and about, it adds up without needing to log every minute. I averaged 7,153 steps in March. a smidge lower than usual, but not bad considering we were on a lazy vacation.

😴 Sleep, Recovery & Health

According to my Oura Ring, March was a really solid month.

• Average sleep score: 89 (+8 from February)
• Average resting heart rate: 59 bpm (+2, a bit worse)

I didn’t feel dramatically different day to day, but the data says I was sleeping better. I’ll take it.

I’m still using Nourish to track nutrition and focusing on protein and fiber:

• 122g protein per day (down a smidge)
• 37g fiber per day (up a smidge)

I was also just…so much hungrier this month. It feels like my baseline shifted a bit, and I’m still figuring out how to balance fueling workouts, shifting hormones, and getting enough vegetarian protein.

Mexico week was its own thing (as expected), but overall this felt like a pretty solid month.

🍷 Alcohol

March looked…very different than usual.

• 32 drinks (33.5 units of alcohol)
• 19 dry days

So this was far more total drinks compared to last month, but also more days with nothing at all.

This is almost entirely explained by a week in Mexico. Think maybe a mimosa with breakfast, one or two margaritas by the pool, a glass or two of wine with dinner. Sparkling wine at the airport.

I still track everything in the DrinkControl app, which continues to delight me with its little charts. The year-to-date chart gave me a laugh. That’s quite the spike!

📚 Reading

Books I finished in March! A whopping 12 total, bolstered by taking a weeklong beach vacation.

• Stand — Cory Booker
Nonfiction · politics (audio)

Wholesome and earnest in the very best way. Things feel so messy in the U.S. right now, something more hopeful felt like a balm.

• Growth — Daniel Susskind
Nonfiction · economics (audio)

This was a big, thoughtful look at what economic growth actually means and whether we should keep chasing it the way we do. A little dense in parts, but possible I’m just not quite as smart as I think I am to keep up.

• Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro
Fiction · literary / sci-fi /dystopian (print)

Quiet, strange, and moving. It’s told from the perspective of an AI “friend,” which sounds like it could be gimmicky but really isn’t. It’s much more about love, loneliness, and what makes us human. I kept thinking about it after I finished, which isn’t true of most books.

• Goodbye, Things — Fumio Sasaki
Nonfiction · self help / minimalism (audio)

One of my all-time favorites! I just did a book club episode of Choose FI on this book so I re-read to refresh myself. I love to listen to this while cleaning/decluttering.

• Moral Ambition — Rutger Bregman
Nonfiction · business / philosophy (audio)

This book tricked me! I thought it was going to be about pursuing careers in fields with impact, like green tech or education. It was more of a call to do something big and audacious with yourlife. He actually called out lazy people who want to retire early in the introduction so I should have known I’m not the target audience.

• Between the World and Me — Ta-Nehisi Coates
Nonfiction · memoir / race (audio)

A re-read for me. Still incredibly powerful. It’s written as a letter to his son and blends personal experience with a broader look at race in America. Easy to see why this was such a sensation when it was published.

• Heart the Lover — Lily King
Fiction · literary (print)

I’ve been seeing this everywhere and finally got my hands on it. Emotional, relationship-driven, and very readable. The kind of book where not a ton happens plot-wise, but you’re fully in it. It’s a sequel/prequel to Writers and Lovers from the same author, so it was nice to get more story from a main character I loved.

• Wild Dark Shore — Charlotte McConaghy
Fiction · literary / thriller (print)

A family lives on a remote arctic island taking care of a seed depository. It was set up to archive seeds for future humanity while climate change wrecks the planet. A mysterious woman washes up on shore. Everyone’s got secrets and everyone is suspicious. That ending, though!

• Culpability — Bruce Holsinger
Fiction · literary (print)

A family of five gets in a car accident in a self-driving care, but each person in the car has a level of culpability for the crash. Lots of moral gray areas. On the one hand it’s a thoughtful novel about the future of AI, and on the other hand there’s a mystery billionaire next door with a beautiful daughter. It’s like both a beach read and a thinker.

• Rock Paper Scissors — Alice Feeney
Fiction · mystery / thriller (print)

Classic twisty thriller. Best if you don’t think about the plot holes too hard and just enjoy the page-turning ride.

• The Correspondent — Virginia Evans
Fiction · contemporary literary (print)

Epistolary novels can be hit or miss for me. The format of telling a story in letters can be great if it’s not too gimmicky. I enjoyed this one about a fiery older woman who loves to write letters and loves to get her way.

• The Covenant of Water — Abraham Verghese
Fiction · historical literary (print)

724 pages! I had picked it up twice before, and finally I decided it would be a good one to read on vacation. Having a few hours at a time instead of 20 minutes before bed made this a lot more digestible. It’s an epic, sweeping family drama. Follows the matriarch of the family as she heads into an arranged marriage in rural India at the age of 12 in the early 1900s, all the way to her granddaughter in the 1970s making a medical discovery about the family’s mysterious generational plague.

Closing Thoughts

The dashboard experiment continues. Collecting the data is the easy part. Reflecting on the month takes a little longer.

I find myself surprised! My new year momentum is still going strong. I’m eating well, sleeping well, reading books, moving my body, even planning trips. Could the dashboard be helping with motivation? I look forward to putting it together, even thought it takes some real time.

If you’d like to encourage me to do this nine more times this year, hit the like button.

How was your March? Anything on your personal dashboard I should add to mine?

xoxo
Liz

A man came by to pick it up in his truck. He was excited. I was…not excited. I’ve been dreading this.

Last year we ran a little life experiment and downsized from a pretty sizable home into a one-bedroom apartment. Overall? I love it. Ourlives feel simpler, lighter, less stuff to manage. It’s an upgrade.

But one of the obvious tradeoffs was losing a dedicated home gym. And uffff…my beloved rower. I knew I’d miss it.

A few days ago, I did one last row. I kept it light, really focused on form, didn’t push it at all. The whole time I was thinking, this is so fun. Rowing feels like flying. Maybe it’ll be fine this time. Maybe something has shifted.

It hasn’t.

As I’m writing this, my left SI joint is aching. That’s been the pattern for the last year and a half. Rowing feels amazing in the moment. I feel strong and capable, and my cranky joints feel great. And thennnn the next day, I pay for it.

So every few months, I try again. Just to check. Just in case this is the time it’s fine?

Buuut it never is.

Selling the rower makes it harder to pretend this is temporary. It’s not “taking a break,” and it’s not “I’ll get back to it soon.” It’s me admitting that this thing I loved just doesn’t work for my body right now. Maybe not for a long time. Maybe never. Eep.

Which feels bigger than changing up my workouts. It makes me feel my body aging. Something a little existential.

The thing about having more space is you get to keep your options open. You can save the jeans that almost fit. Keep the rower for when your back gets its act together. You can look at these things and think, I’m coming back for you, baby. I’m coming back for you.

In a one-bedroom, you don’t really get to do that. Everything has to earn its footprint. You have to decide what stays and what goes.

And I can’t remember where I learned this, but the word decision means to cut away possibilities. (It’s the same Latin root as incision, scissors, concise.) To decide is to cut. You choose one thing, and you cut away the others.

Selling the rower is, in a very small but very real way, a cut.

Which completely sucks. Would love if bodies just worked all the time. Huge fan of that concept.

Instead it’s this constant recalibration. Especially with my cranky joints. Try something, pull back, swap it out, find the version that doesn’t bite you the next day.

To be clear, I’m not giving up on working out. I still have plenty of ways to move that feel good. But it is objectively annoying that I had to pull back from walking, hiking, and running because of a foot injury…so I threw myself into rowing…which ended up injuring a completely different part of my body. Funnnn.

So yes, I’ve been enjoying living in my minimalist apartment that kind of feels like a hotel. I love it!

But! It has had a few trade offs. Watching someone drive away with my rower in the back of their truck felt like closing a door I’d been keeping cracked open for a long time.

On to this week’s vitals.

What I’m Reading: I just finished Corey Booker’s new book Stand as a audiobook. He is so earnest and wholesome, I find him very inspiring. And on my kindle I just finished Klara and the Sun, a book told from the perspective of an AI robot. (Links are commissioned sometimes.) Both of these books are making me think about the future of humanity and I’m very moody about it.

What I’m Eating: I have been on such a Costco kick, I haven’t done the weekly shop at Trader Joe’s in months! I went this morning and threw all my favorite treats into the cart with abandon. Caramelized Onion Dip! Herbed Popcorn! Those amazing tiny little ice cream cones. I’m still on the protein/fiber/eat for longevity wagon, but some foods are good for your mental health.

How I’m Moving My Body: In the past week I’ve done two sessions of lifting weights (20 minutes each), three Pilates classes (50 minutes each), one barre class (45 minutes), one peloton hiking class (20 minutes), one peloton spin class (30 minutes), and one sad, farewell rowing class (20 minutes). Somehow I always feel like I’m working out all the time and also somehow not doing enough strength or cardio.

What the algorithm keeps showing me: Clips of the show American Ninja Warrior. Why? No idea, but it’s incredibly satisfying.

Sending you love, my friends. Please be safe out there.

xoxo

Liz

You’ve probably heard the argument: getting a tax refund means you gave the government a free loan. You overpaid your taxes throughout the year and they’re just giving you back your own money.

And technically, yes. That’s super true. And if you personally prefer not to get a big refund, I love that for you. But! Money is emotional, and humans don’t experience, for example, $200 a month the same way we experience $2,400 all at once.

A lump sum is easier to assign a purpose. It’s easier to say this is my vacation fund or this is going straight into my Roth IRA or this will finally knock out that credit card balance.

It’s much harder to do that with an extra $150 or $200 tucked into each paycheck. That money tends to disappear into groceries, gas, and the general chaos of everyday life.

Taxes are also…complicated. I really do try to keep a pretty close eye on mine. I check my estimated taxes a couple times a year using the IRS withholding calculator and the SmartAsset tax calculator. (Side note: I like to SmartAsset one because it estimates federal income tax plus FICA, state, etc)

But even when you’re on top of it, things still move around. Income fluctuates. You start a new job and forget to adjust your withholding. Life gets busy and you don’t revisit the math. So sometimes you owe. Sometimes you get a refund. Truly, there are bigger problems with our tax system that I care about more. (Like whyyyy do I have to type in all these forms when they’ve already been filed with the IRS?)

As long as you understand the mechanics, if you know a refund simply means you overpaid and are getting your own money back, you get to decide what you prefer. You’re the decider!

Some people want to optimize every dollar and keep their paycheck as large as possible during the year. Some people like the forced savings of a refund. Both are reasonable. (I did the math and realized I missed out on about $250 of interest by getting a silly-big refund. I’m coping.)

You know who actually feels super chaotic to me though? The people who pay zero attention and walk up to TurboTax each year like they’re pulling the lever on a slot machine. I’m kind of horrified and also kind of jealous they can live that kind of carefree existence.

On to this week’s vitals…

What I’m Reading: I just finished Heart the Lover, and I just started Klara and the Sun. I realized Heart the Lover is intended to be a sequel/prequel to Writers and Lovers, which I read last month. The first book is set when the main character is in her 20s, the second book covers both her college years and then flashed forward to her 40s.

What I’m Eating: After a week or feasting on tacos and margaritas in Mexico, I’m trying to stick to my normal patterns at home. The Costco quinoa salad I love, lots of fruit, and my beloved Fairlife protein shakes.

How I’m Moving My Body: I flunked out of my StepBet. Which I’m so annoyed about because I FOR SURE hit the goal, but my phone was being glitchy and I just decided I actually was so annoyed by the whole thing! Losing my $40 was a fine way to get the mental bandwidth back.

What I’m Obsessing Over: I borrowed my partner’s kindle because it’s the kind with a light so I can read in bed with the lights off. Total game changer! But it’s a kindle oasis, and sadly the model has been discontinued. Amazon doesn’t make any kindles anymore with clicky buttons. (Booooo!) So I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole reading about different e-readers, setting alerts on secondhand sites, etc.

Sending you love, my friends. Please be safe out there.

xoxo

Liz

Coming up: high spending, medium movement, higher drinking, medium sleep stats, and how many books I finished.

January was a huge spending month thanks to plane tickets, a mattress, and a new laptop. February was still fairly expensive, but a little closer to normal. (Like, a little.)

All in, February spending came to $13,859 excluding housing, mostly driven by one‑off expenses in travel, home furnishings, and medical.

Spending

✈️ Travel / Vacation ($5,815)

Most of this was booking flights and a hotel for a luxe trip to Mexico. This also includes pulling out about $1,000 in cash for tips and incidentals. Whatever we don’t spend of this cash will probably just live in the house somewhere rather than being tracked back into the budget.

This category also includes pre-paying the pet sitter for while we were away. We left on February 28th so all the cost of tacos and margaritas will hit next month!

🏠 Housing

Housing is the only cost I don’t post, but we’re still paying for both our apartment and the mortgage on our house. We have someone we know and trust staying in the house paying less than 25% of the mortgage in rent iso we’re still carrying most of the cost.

🍽️ Food & Drink ($1,672)

• Groceries ($689)
I paused my Factor subscription this month. I like it, but after a while the meals get repetitive and they’re also pretty expensive. This is on the low side for us for groceries!

• Restaurants & Bars ($635)
About a third of this category was one fancy date night at a high‑end restaurant. Another $170 was a cooking class, and the rest was five lunches and dinners out at neighborhood spots.

• Takeout ($66)
Just a couple quick meals, a slice of Costco pizza here, a slice of Whole Foods pizza there.

• Coffee Shops ($120)
Apparently we visited seven different coffee shops this month, which feels like a personal record.

• Alcohol ($162)
More on that below. TO BE FAIR half of this was we buying some zbiotics, those probiotic drinks that are supposed to prevent a hangover. I bought them for Mexico but I didn’t notice a huge different the days I used them vs not.

🛋️ Home Furnishings ($1,981)

This was the month of changing bed sizes, which turns out to be wildly expensive.

Last month we bought the mattress from Costco (around $700, counted for January), and this month we replaced basically everything else: bed frame ($550), headboard ($250), nightstands ($200), duvet and shams ($350), sheets ($200), and lamps ($160 for the ones I need to return, $220 for the ones I want to keep).

Some of this was secondhand and there were Venmo payments flying around for buying some of the new furniture and selling pieces of the old bed, so the totals here are a little messy. But the good news is we now have a fully assembled bed situation again. (And it’s really, really comfortable and soooo pretty)

🏥 Medical ($1,081)

Most of this was dental work for my partner plus one random medical bill.

I swear we are still receiving occasional surprise bills related to The Spinal Chaos of 2024, which continues to haunt my dreams and our mailbox. (Extremely long story short: my partner had two spinal surgeries and some messy complications.)

🚗 Transportation & Driving ($539)

Insurance, parking, and other car expenses. The car itself is paid off and I still mostly charge for free at work.

🧹 Home & Personal Services ($721)

• House cleaning ($400)
• Personal care ($321) — eyebrow wax ($50ish), manicure ($35), replacing a lipstick and concealer I used up ($100ish), and buying more period underwear ($75ish).

🎁 Gifts & Giving ($404)

I sent flowers to three people this month: a friend who got a new job, another friend who got a new job and got engaged, and a friend whose cat passed away.

Plus a couple other small gifts/things we took to a birthday party that kind of thing.

🧾 Utilities & Home ($514)

• Gas & Electric ($303)
• Internet ($140) (Includes basically anything I pay for with my Apple ID)
• Water ($46)
• Phone ($25) (Adding extra international data)

We’re still paying utilities at both homes which is…not fun.

🏋️ Health & Fitness ($182)

ClassPass plus Peloton.

🐶 Pets ($248)

• Pet Grooming ($124)
If there was one thing that would make me feel extremely rich it would be weekly pet grooming. Our dog sheds so much.

• Pet Supplies ($104) Renewing the dog’s Fi collar membership. (It’s a GPS device and tracks steps and sleep for the dog.)

• Pet Food ($20) I have started buying the smaller bags because truly I’m willing to pay more so the bag isn’t as heavy.

🎭 Live Performances ($202)

I do love a stage show. Put a mic on a stage and I’m there.

👗 Clothing ($81)

One pair of Lululemon leggings. I bought them intending to use the Amex Platinum credit…except I accidentally paid with a Chase card instead.

So that plan worked out beautifully.

I should return them and re-buy with the credit but you know what. I’m not gonna. I’ll rebuy them with the credit and just keep these too.

🧩 Everything Else ($519)

Streaming ($87), Charity ($75), hosting ($65), house supplies ($16), professional services ($16, a doodle trial I forgot to cancel), a software tool I’m trying out to make slides at work ($10, for gamma), and a few odds and ends like $53 that I think is a scam/fraudulent charge.

🏋️ Movement

In February I logged 17 hours and 40 minutes of movement.

About 12 hours of that was strength training, 2 hours of cycling, 2 hours of walking, and the rest stretching and yoga.

Living in a walkable neighborhood has made me more lax about tracking walks so I’m just not bothering to track quick dog walks, walking to dinner, or using my walking pad.

🍷 Alcohol

After my Damp January, February drifted back toward my more typical habits.

• 20 drinks (20.8 unites of alcohol)
• 14 dry days

Most of the drinks were wine, plus a little champagne, one beer, and a couple margaritas.

Part of the bump came from a brief and highly questionable strategy the week before our Mexico trip where I had a small glass of wine most nights to “build my tolerance.” I’m not sure the science supports this approach, but it felt responsible at the time.

I still track everything in the DrinkControl app, which makes the little charts I love. Again, stay tuned for March’s recap when a trip to Mexico changes the way this chart looks.

😴 Sleep, Recovery & Health

According to my Oura Ring, February was a little less restful than January.

• Average sleep score: 81 (-6 from January)
• Average resting heart rate: 57 bpm (flat)

I’ve definitely been having a harder time falling asleep lately. I get in a cycle where I can’t fall asleep, then I let myself sleep in to catch up. Gotta just tough it out and stick to a schedule.

I’m still using Nourish to track nutrition and focusing on getting protein and fiber up. These are pretty similar to last month.

• 121g protein per day
• 28g fiber per day

📚 Reading

Books I finished in February:

• Dopamine Nation — Anna Lembke
Nonfiction · psychology / addiction (audio)

I have heard this author on my favorite podcast (Hidden Brain!) several times so decided to listen to her book. She has this wonderful metaphor about how your brain has a see-saw in it and gremlins on the see-saw want to keep it flat. When you push on the pleasure side of the see-saw, the gremlins run over and jump on the pain side. And when you push on the pain side, the gremlins run over and jump on the pleasure side. Of course it’s more complex, but it explains the lovely sort of “high” we feel after hard exercise, a tough sauna session, or even meditating.

• Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun — Elle Cosimano
Fiction · mystery / comedy (print)

When the headlines were feeling especially tough last month, I grabbed an easy breezy comfort read. This is a series about a single mom who solves crimes and gets into wacky hijinks. It’s truly a delight.

• Writers & Lovers — Lily King
Fiction · literary (print)

Everywhere I look I’m seeing Heart the Lover recommended! I’m on hold at the library for a copy but decided to give one of her older books a try. This was a pretty novel set in the 90s about a young writer trying to navigate some hard relationships and write her great novel.

• Validation — Caroline Fleck
Nonfiction · psychology / relationships (print)

I usually do nonfiction books in audio format, but made an exception here. This was about the skills of validating other people’s emotions. Something I like to think I do already, but it was interesting to read about a breakdown from a psychologist’s perspective. A smidge academic (vs practical) but she’s funny enough to make up for it.

• The 1619 Project — Nikole Hannah‑Jones
Nonfiction · history / politics (audio)

I read this last year during Black History Month and decided then I wanted to re-read it. At 1,000+ pages or an 18+ hour audiobook, it’s a lot to digest. I think on the first read some of the themes that really stuck with me were the violence and physical mistreatment that came with slavery in the U.S. On this re-read, I found myself thinking more about the long term economic effect, both the huge wealth accumulated by plantation owners and the long term economic damage after the end of slavery. If you’re not ready to sign up for the whole book, know that it’s really an anthology and most of the chapters can stand alone.

One more time, I’ll say wait until March! While my alcohol consumption went up while on vacation, so did my number of books finished.

Closing thoughts

February felt a little more normal after January’s spending spike and the burst of New Year motivation that tends to come with it.

The dashboard experiment continues. Collecting the data is the easy part. Reflecting on the month takes a little longer.

If you’d like to encourage me to do this ten more times this year, hit the like button.

How was your February? Anything on your personal dashboard I should add to mine?

xoxo
Liz

Not the sarcastic one. Not the ‘woooow, good for you’ with a heavy must-be-nice vibe. Not the Olivia Rodrigo version. (Though I have also been humming that nonstop.)

The sincere one. Like, genuinely. Good for you. I’m happy for you.

This week Maggie and I released an episode of Inside Out Money about voting with your dollars. We talked about choosing where to shop and invest and spend in a way that lines up with your values. Both from a practical standpoint, like okay but where are you going to buy your vitamins if not on Amazon? And also about how impossible it is to do this perfectly.

We talked about nuance.
About giving yourself grace.
About how no one is doing this 100 percent right.

I was feeling pretty wise about it. I was like…are we enlightened? Was this the best episode ever?

And then I opened Instagram.

A woman I follow posted that she had closed all of her Chase credit cards after learning about their ties to Jeffrey Epstein. She shared screenshots of zero balances. Accounts closed. Even though it would hurt her credit score and it’s an absolute hassle.

“I do not care,” she wrote. “We have to stop supporting people and companies that are morally corrupt.”

And my first reaction was not wow, good for you.

My first reaction was: that’s sooo hard.

It was, well I never pay interest.
It was, where would I even bank?
It was, can we really blame the bank?
It was, it’s impossible to get this all right.

All of that happened in maybe three seconds.

And then I had this kind of full-body cringe moment because I had just recorded a podcast about exactly this. About how when someone says, “I don’t shop there anymore,” our instinct is to respond with, “Well, do you know the views of every company you support?”

Which is such a normal human reaction. It’s protective. It’s practical. It’s defensive. It’s…when you say what you’re doing, my subconscious feels judged, and instead of sitting with that feeling, I shift into trying to poke holes in what you’re doing.

But when someone says, “This is what I’m doing,” they’re usually just saying…this is what I’m doing.

It feels like judgment. It often isn’t. It usually isn’t?

So I paused. I took a breath. And I thought, Liz. The reaction you want to have is ‘good for you!’

So I commented: ‘good for you!’

And I really did mean it.

I don’t know if I’m closing my Chase cards. I might. I might not. There are tradeoffs. There’s friction. There’s inconvenience. This stuff isn’t easy.

But one thing I can do right now is practice making my first reaction generous and supportive instead of pushing my glasses up my nose and going, “actually…”

(Which truly is my worst habit. I am such an obnoxious “actually” person sometimes. If you catch me doing it in the wild feel free to make fun of me.)

So when someone says they don’t eat at Chick-fil-A.
When someone says they sold their Tesla. (Or gave it serious thought and then decided not to.)
When someone says they’re boycotting Target. (Or FedEx. Or Home Depot. Or whatever.)
When someone says they’re not using AI.
When someone says they’re training for a race or buying a big house or painting their living room neon orange.

Instead of immediately going, okay well here’s why that’s not what I would do…

Just…good for you! Sounds like you made a thoughtful decision!

In a world where none of us can do this perfectly, where every spending decision is tangled in systems and tradeoffs and contradictions, I think this is the small thing I’m working on right now:

Less ‘actually.’
More ‘good for you.’

On to this week’s vitals…

What I’m Reading: Just finished one of the Finlay Donovan series because the world was feeling extra heavy and I wanted something light. (Links are commissioned sometimes.) These books feel like you’re watching a funny “catch the bad guy” movie, like if the movie Miss Congeniality was a book series about a single mom fighting crime. I’m also doing The 1619 Project as an audiobook, repeating my goal of last year to read it during Black History Month. It’s long and dense so a re-read makes a lot of sense.

What I’m Eating: Still on a kick of trying to hit my protein and fiber goals. All week I was like why I am so hungry every day? then I looked at my Oura ring and it told me what my hormones are doing this week and I was like ah, okay. That makes sense! And tore open another chocolate peanut butter cup.

How I’m Moving My Body: I’m doing a StepBet and even though I purposefully picked one with easier goals, I’m already annoyed. Because some days I will do a heart pumping class on the Peloton bike at work and then hit a high intensity Pilates class on my way home and have…5k steps. And I just far prefer to have an average goal for the week or the month vs a daily situation. I don’t know why I thought this was smart, ha.

What I’m Obsessing Over: After agonizing over the tiny size of our bedroom for months, we decided a California King mattress would juuusssst fit if we had a narrow frame and a wall mounted headboard. And we were right! Ideally you want absolute minimum 24” around all sides of the bed, but better to be closer to 30-36”. We’ve got 28” on one side, 31” on the other, and 35” at the foot of the bed. It doesn’t feel cramped at all. My body is sleeping much better with more space! (Any other thoracic outlet syndrome friends?) And I’m glad I didn’t go for an odd sized mattress. I was seriously considering an Olympic Queen or an RV King but hesitating over it being hard to find sheets.

Sending you love, my friends. Please be safe out there.

xoxo

Liz

Let’s start with spending. Things were normal-ish except for a couple big purchases.

✈️ Travel / Vacation ($11,099)

This category was much higher than usual. We bought plane tickets for a wedding in Europe this summer (about $8,000. Neither of us has a low back that’s gonna tolerate a long-haul in economy, I’m afraid). Another big chunk was a $1,500 venmo transfer to friends we stayed with in Washington last year. We lived in their vacation house for two months and this covers cleaning and utilities while we were there. The rest was mostly a couple annual credit card fees.

🏠 Housing

Housing is the only cost I don’t post, but we’re still paying for our apartment and the mortgage on our house. We have someone we know and trust staying in the house paying less than 25% of the mortgage in rent.

🍽️ Food & Drink

• Groceries ($1,354)
  This includes Factor for my weekday lunches (about $85 a week for five meals). I could think of it as expensive groceries or avoiding inexpensive takeout, depending on my mood. I’ve been focusing on nutrition for a couple of months and I will say having at least one meal during the week that’s not a protein shake or a handful of popcorn is pretty great.

• Restaurants & Bars ($248)
  Four dinners out at neighborhood spots.

• Takeout ($110)
  One group pizza night and a couple weekday lunches.

• Coffee Shops ($84)
  A handful of local stops.

• Alcohol ($39)
  Mostly a single theater night (one drink for me, one for a friend). There’s definitely alcohol embedded in restaurant spending too.

🖥️ Electronics ($1,182)

My trusty old laptop died! I bought a replacement at Costco because I wasn’t sure what I wanted and they have a 90 day return policy.

🛋️ Home Furnishings ($1,178)

A new Costco mattress (around $750) and a shelf/console table thingie from All Modern (about $400). I have been looking at bothfor a long time and couldn’t find what I wanted secondhand.

🏋️ Health & Fitness ($882)

Private Pilates package ($630 for a five-pack), ClassPass ($159), Peloton ($55), plus supplements (magnesium, $50) and a CVS prescription ($28).

🎭 Live Performances ($446)

I like a stage show. This is my favorite way to spend money.

👗 Clothing ($347)

A surprisingly successful Goodwill trip ($146), some Costco staples ($67), and Poshmark (around $80) for fun grip socks.

🚗 Transportation & Driving ($407)

Insurance, parking, and toll costs. Car is paid off and I mostly charge for free at work.

🧹 Home & Personal Services ($742)

House cleaning ($200), hosting guests ($197), personal care ($144), and pet grooming ($101).

🧾 Utilities & Home ($490)

Gas & electric ($350), internet ($100), and water ($40). We are paying utilities at both homes.

🧩 Everything Else

Streaming ($168, higher than usual, my Tangle subscribtion renewed), gifts ($71), postage & shipping ($41), charity ($25 to a friend’s kid’s fundraiser), professional services ($26), medical copays ($98), house supplies ($10), public transportation ($6), games/books ($2).

We kicked off the year with a whopping $19,000 spend. The plane tickets were nearly half of this, throw in a new mattress, a new laptop, and it was just a very expensive month. I am quite glad it’s nearly bonus season.

🏋️ Movement

In January, I logged about 28 total hours of movement. Almost one a day!

That included roughly 17 hours of strength training, and about two-thirds of that was Pilates. The rest was a mix of yoga, walking, and a little cardio.

Living in a walkable neighborhood has made me more lax about tracking walks. I usually log them if they’re my only movement for the day or if it’s a long one. Otherwise, I’m just not bothering to log a quick dog walk, walking to the restaurant or working on my walking pad. I averaged 8,080 steps per day.

🍷 Damp January

I did a Damp January, not a Dry one.

I only drank alcohol when we were out in social situations, and I skipped drinking at a few social things where I normally would’ve said yes.

• 25 dry days

• 8 total drinks (9.2 alcohol units)

It didn’t feel especially restrictive. If I hadn’t been aiming to cut back in January I would have probably had a couple more glasses of wine at home on quieter evenings. I realize this will feel like a lot for some people. Lately I’ve been averaging 16 per month, so this was about half.

I have used an app called DrinkControl for years, and I love the little charts and graphs it makes.

😴 Sleep, Recovery & Health

According to my Oura Ring, January was restful:

• Average sleep score: 87 (out of 100)

• Typical lowest resting heart rate: 58 bpm

I’ve been using Nourish for about three months now, and my focus has been getting fiber and protein up. I didn’t want to recommend it without giving a solid go, but with 90 days of data it’s fun to see these numbers going in the right direction.

• 28g fiber per day

• 125g protein per day

📚 Reading

Books I finished in January:

• Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad — Eliza Filby
  Nonfiction · sociology / economics (audio)

  I hear this author on Trevor Noah’s podcast. (I adore him.) I think this was marketed as a book about how the rich get richer, but the ideas are more nuanced. In classic millennial fashion, the millennial author wants to make sure you know we millennials have had it the hardest on everything from the economy to COVID.

• Convenience Store Woman — Sayaka Murata
  Fiction · literary (print)

  An absolutely sweet story about a woman who loves her job working in a convenience store. And a super fast read. I liked it a lot.

• Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working — Dan Heath
  Nonfiction · business / self-help (audio)

  I do love a business book, and Dan Heath is so good at them. I really love the idea of challenging assumptions and rejecting “the way it’s always been done.” I took some ideas into work, so that’s always a good sign.

• Atmosphere — Taylor Jenkins Reid
  Fiction · romance / literary (print)

  I know this novel was so popular, and there was a lot to like. Space! Women breaking into new fields in the 80s! A villainous sister! I liked it but (for me) it didn’t live up to the big hype. I have heard the audiobook was better than print.

• The Heartbreak Hotel — Ellen O’Clover
  Fiction · romance (print)

  A cozy novel about a young woman who gets dumped and decides to open a bed & breakfast for people going through breakups. I adore Ellen O’Clover. I could have passed on the romance plot (I’m a romance grinch), but I loved the story of the big old house, the people who came to heal, the family dynamics, the best friendship.

• The Housemaid — Freida McFadden
  Fiction · thriller (audio)

  A juicy page-turner, the movie just came out. I almost always do fiction in print and non-fiction as an audiobook. But other people enjoy fiction as audiobooks so much I wanted to give it another go. This was a fun story, but I found the accents/the voices distracting. I would have preferred to read this in print.

• The Power of Moments — Chip Heath & Dan Heath
  Nonfiction · business / psychology (audio)

  Another Dan Heath business book! About why some moments can be so powerful. I thought this was great.

My goal in 2026 is to read at least 30 print books and 50 overall. Off to a good start.

Closing thoughts

I felt motivated to do a detailed recap of January because January felt so good. (On a personal level.) I am definitely channeling the energy of a new year and feeling hopeful and optimistic.

I will say, I thought I’d be able to throw a lot of data into an AI tool and get a pretty clean summary. But while I will thank ChatGPT for doing a lot of the formatting, it still took me a couple hours to organize my thoughts. If you’d like to encourage me to do this 11 more times this year, hit that like button? ;)

How was your January? Anything I should add to my dashboard?

xoxo
Liz

You’re coming off a two week bender of eating nothing but cookies and potatoes. It’s cold, it’s dark, you don’t even know what day it is. I love the foggy week between Christmas and New Year’s, but that version of me is not I want in charge of making decisions for the rest of the year.

So here’s my pitch: January is a free trial month.

Try a few goals on. Put them in your cart. See how they feel in real life with your real energy levels, your real schedule, your real brain.

If you’re still excited about them in February, proceed to checkout.

Also, can we talk about how weirdly mean the resolution discourse is?

Somewhere along the way, New Year’s resolutions became a punchline. Or a punching bag. I don’t know, they just get punched.

We roll our eyes. We act like trying in January is cringe. We complain about the crowded gym, “they’ll be gone in a few weeks.” As if that’s some kind of gotcha. (As if we didn’t also slack a bit between Thanksgiving and Christmas.) Someone even coined a whole “Quitter’s Day” concept, the day in January by which most people have lost their resolve.

It’s so rude and it’s so mean and I kind of hate it.

Yes, plenty of people will quit their resolutions. But a lot of people won’t quit, and how lovely is that? Some people will catch a little fresh-start momentum and decide to ride it.

If someone is trying to feel better, move their body, get their money under control, sleep more, drink more water, stop doomscrolling, floss their teeth, whatever, why the eye rolling?

All the more reason to abandon January resolutions entirely.

And if you want alternate “new year” energy that is not January 1, February is full of it:

• St Brigid’s Day is Feb 1, traditionally tied to new-season, early-spring vibes.

• Lunar New Year in 2026 is Feb 17.

• Groundhog Day is Feb 2, obviously, and if that is not a built-in metaphor for “try again,” I don’t know what is.

If you love January 1 goals, I’m genuinely rooting for you. Go off. Take up space. Be earnest. It’s such a wholesome thing to do. I’ll catch up with you next month! :)

On to this week’s vitals…

What I’m Reading: Just finished Convenience Store Woman and it’s an absolutely delightful story. (For some reason I find myself always loving books that were translated from Japanese.) I’m in the middle of Heartbreak Hotel. I like this author so much, but for this one I find myself skimming through some of the more romantic bits. I’m much more interested in the family dynamics in this novel.

What I’m Eating: I’m on Factor still! So expensive but makes my life so easy. I’m actually hitting my 100+ grams of protein goal, thanks to Factor meals, Fairlife protein shakes, and bags of shelled edamame.

I’m also doing Damp January (as opposed to Dry January). For me, that means I’m only drinking in social situations. I have had 5 drinks so far this month.

How I’m Moving My Body: Went to Pilates a few times this week and I have been using the Peloton bike at my office. I had one of those wonderful days yesterday where I checked how many steps I had…and somehow without trying I’d hit 11k? (But today I am…nowhere near that ha.)

What I’m Obsessing Over: The Subway Takes guy! He does these quick interviews on the subway where people give their hot takes. I can’t stop watching them, I’m completely obsessed!

Sending you extra love, my friends. Please be safe out there.

xoxo

Liz

Mainly to build some velocity muscles. I am elite at analysis paralysis.

Some weeks I’ll spend a full hour circling an episode before I ever hit record. Staring at the mic. Opening my notes app. Closing my notes app. Scrolling Instagram, convincing myself I’m “thinking.”

I don’t think that hour helps. I don’t think it makes the episodes any better. It’s just procrastination.

Thirty one days of podcasting doesn’t let me do that. I don’t get to loiter in my own head. It’s a forcing mechanism: I sit down. I record. I post.

Secondary reason? I love year end wraps. I love data about myself. I love finding patterns. Spotify Wrapped, but make it a new one every day. I fear there’s an element of narcissism here, but don’t we all love data about ourselves?

And third, you have told me you like it when I do 31 days of podcasting. And I like doing it. So win-win!

So far the episodes have been things like:

• three times I had to actively calm myself down in 2025

• why my last paycheck of the year feels like its own tiny Spotify Wrapped

• my 2025 alcohol consumption

• the level of success I had avoiding Target and Amazon last year

I’m mostly just talking to myself and calling it a podcast. I’m learning by talking. If that sounds fun, come hang out. We’ve got 22 days left.

On to this week’s vitals…

What I’m Reading: Just started Convenience Store Woman and it’s an absolutely delightful story so far.

What I’m Eating: I’m on Factor again. It’s pricey but it’s just so darn easy.

How I’m Moving My Body: Went to Pilates a couple times, racked up lots of steps on my walking pad, and did a few Peloton strength workouts.

What I’m Obsessing Over: I dropped my iPad and shattered the screen. I picked up a new one on facebook marketplace and wowee wow! Who knew an iPad that’s two years old would feel so much nicer than one that’s 9 years old? It came with the keyboard and touchpad that just attaches with a magnet. I feel like the fanciest lady.

Sending you extra love, my friends. Please be safe out there.

xoxo

Liz

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Quick 2025 snapshot

• Total: I read 50 total books. (After realizing I was at 40 in December and then deciding 50 was too close not to hit.) 22 audio books, 28 print books

• Print books: all checked out via Libby from the library and read via Kindle. Most print books were fiction.

• Audiobooks: a mix of Libby and the free audiobooks included in my Spotify membership. Most audiobooks were non-fiction.

• Average length: 325 pages

• Average books per month: 3.6, except for December when I decided I wanted to hit 50 and read 10 books in a mad dash to the new year.

Here’s what I read by theme. (And full disclosure, I put my full list into ChatGPT and asked for help with the grouping, which turned out well. The help with grouping the photos of the book covers is about 90% right, ha. It mixed up Tom Lake with The Art of Spending Money, News of the World with All the Beauty in the World, and made a few other goofs. To save my tired typing wrists, I’m leaving them where they are!)

Power, politics, and the attention economy

Nonfiction about life in the US.

Finished:

• The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (Chris Hayes, audio)
  Probably my favorite book this year. A look at human attention and how it became commoditized. Made me feel like I was back in college taking a sociology class in the best way.

• The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (Nikole Hannah-Jones, audio)
  I decided to read this during Black History Month. Dense, difficult content, but fascinating. I will re-read for sure.

• The Small and the Mighty (Sharon McMahon, audio)
  I struggled a lot with the narration on the audiobook. I don’t think most authors are the best readers for their own work.

• Should We Go Extinct? (Todd May, audio)
  Someone told me this was a philosophical text and I thought they meant in the casual pop-science kind of way, but this was a legit philosophical treatment of the question. Quick and good.

• Something Lost, Something Gained (Hillary Rodham Clinton, audio)
  Love her or hate her, she is a fascinating person.

• Careless People (Sarah Wynn-Williams, audio)
  This was definitely the juicy tell-all it was billed as about working at Facebook. But the author didn’t seem to have much self-awareness.

DNF (Did not finish):

• Bowling Alone (Robert D. Putnam, audio)
  Tried to re-read but it’s so dense with statistics. I bailed and just listened to a few podcast interviews with him. He is a very charismatic speaker. His interview with Jon Favreau was a delight.

Money books and life design

I’m drawn to frameworks that help answer, “What is enough?” and “What am I buying with my money besides stuff?” Also, I will read any book that even vaguely implies you can spend less while having more fun. I’m predictable.

Finished:

• The Wealth Ladder (Nick Maggiulli, audio)
  I wasn’t 100% sure who this book was for. It outlined several levels of wealth (net worth) and how people typically behave and advance. Not sure if it was meant to be more of a how-to or more of a sociological study. I also don’t think the content was a great fit for an audiobook.

• The 5 Types of Wealth (Sahil Bloom, print)
  This book is more of a compilation. The author pulled together a bunch of frameworks so you can flip through and jump around. More of a reference than something you’d sit down and read straight through.

• The Art of Spending Money (Morgan Housel, audio)
  Morgan Housel has so many good ideas and so many truly strange examples. We did an episode of Inside Out Money about this book if you want more of my thoughts!

• The Art of Frugal Hedonism (Adam Grubb, Annie Raser-Rowland, audio)
  Short, sweet, clever.

• Meet the Frugalwoods (Elizabeth Willard Thames, audio)
  A re-read for me. This is one of the first personal finance books I read and it’s near to my heart. The story of a young couple going ultra frugal to reach early retirement.

• Adventures in Opting Out (Cait Flanders, audio)
  The super extended metaphor content just isn’t my thing (hiking is like life, prepping at basecamp, hitting false summits, etc.) but I see why others enjoyed this.

• I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt (Madeline Pendleton, audio)
  Based on the cover I expected not to enjoy this but I loved it. She was so candid and real in talking about navigating early career days through the Great Recession. The perfect blend of very candid how-to and personal memoir.

• Switch (Chip Heath, Dan Heath, audio)

  A re-read for me, and more of a business book. I love behavioral psychology and especially ruminating on how you get groups of people (employees, customers) moving in the right direction.

• Never Ask for the Sale (Sue Heilbronner, audio)

  A friend recommended this who worked with the author. She’s smart and candid! Not super applicable to my life but lots of themes that work broadly: bring value, don’t be desperate.

DNF:

• Get Good with Money (Tiffany Aliche, audio)
  Just didn’t capture my attention and then my library book expired. I don’t think I’m the target audience.

Memoirs and meaningful nonfiction

Books that brought ordinary life into a more poignant focus.

Finished:

• Stay True (Hua Hsu, audio)
  Just such a beautiful book about the time in college when your identity is so tied to liking music people haven’t heard of.

• All The Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me (Patrick Bringley, audio)
  This is a very pretty book written about the experience of working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward (Melinda French Gates, audio)
  I liked her first book more, I think, but she seems like such a smart and lovely person.

• Drop Dead Healthy (A.J. Jacobs, audio)
  Two years in the life of a guy trying to be the healthiest human. Charming and funny. And written ten years ago with hilariously dated topics like “this new gadget called a Fitbit.”

• Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism (Fumio Sasaki, audio)
  A multiple reread for me. This is one of my favorites, and it’s about downsizing and the freedom of minimalism. I love how he acknowledges human nature and how we all care what people think, even if we shouldn’t.

• The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly (Margareta Magnusson, audio)
  This was mostly a series of sweet anecdotes from the woman who wrote the Swedish death cleaning book.

• Next Level: Your Guide to Kicking Ass, Feeling Great, and Crushing Goals Through Menopause and Beyond (Stacy T. Sims, Selene Yeager, audio)

  Given the algorithm does nothing but throw pre-menopause scare tactics at me lately, I decided to read one book and then set the topic aside in my brain. This was great.

Fictional Novels

1) Beach Read Vibes

I had a clear Elin Hilderbrand season. I had Covid in February and these kept me company in bed. I like beach reads that don’t have romance as the central plot, and Elin is great at this.

• Winter in Paradise (Elin Hilderbrand, print)

• What Happens in Paradise (Elin Hilderbrand, print)

• Troubles in Paradise (Elin Hilderbrand, print)

• A Summer Affair (Elin Hilderbrand, print)

• The Castaways (Elin Hilderbrand, print)

2) Romance, longing, and matters of the heart

• Say You’ll Remember Me (Abby Jimenez, print)
  I saw this shared too many times not to check it out. I’m not a big romance reader but I enjoyed this, especially because they were immediately a couple, skipping the will they won’t they.

• One True Loves (Taylor Jenkins Reid, print)
  Not my favorite by this author, the story of a woman whose husband is presumed dead. But surprise, he’s found right after she gets engaged to someone else.

• Slow Dance (Rainbow Rowell, print)
  Flawed high school friends finding their way back to each other as adults. Cozy.

3) Page-turners and mysteries

• None of This Is True (Lisa Jewell, print)
  A twisty thriller. And about a podcaster so couldn’t resist.

• Here One Moment (Liane Moriarty, print)
  A woman starts predicting people’s age and manner of death, and they really freak out when her predictions start coming true.

• Finlay Donovan Is Killing It + Finlay Donovan Knocks ’Em Dead (Elle Cosimano, print)
  Pure fun. Someone sitting next to a murder mystery author who’s describing a new book to her agent. The eavesdropper mistakes her for an assassin and tries to hire the author to kill her bad guy husband. Feels like reading a movie script where Sandra Bullock would play the author, wondering how she got into these shenanigans.

4) Literary-ish, character-driven, emotionally complex

• Tom Lake (Ann Patchett, print)
  I’ve literally never read an Ann Patchett novel that didn’t captivate me.

• The Most Fun We Ever Had (Claire Lombardo, print)
  Loved. A couple who’s mad about each other raising 4 daughters who all have their own drama.

• The Wedding People (Alison Espach, print)
  I get why this was popular. Highly enjoyable, plot was a bit tidy/convenient at the end.

• Sandwich (Catherine Newman, print)
  A middle-aged mom dealing with her aging parents on one hand and her newly adult children on the other. Told over their weeklong beach vacation. Titled because she’s the sandwich generation. And also they eat a lot of sandos.

• My Friends (Fredrik Backman, print)
  I don’t know how to describe this but it was fantastic.

• No One Is Talking About This (Patricia Lockwood, print)
  Definitely an unusual writing style/structure. Took me a minute to settle in, but very thought provoking.

• The Someday Daughter (Ellen O’Clover, print)
  Loved. Adore this author. A famous motivational speaker drags her daughter around on a summer tour. Secrets come out, drama ensues!

• Broken Country (Clare Leslie Hall, print)
  A murder mystery, a love triangle, class clashes. All in a small town. Completely see why this was a hit.

• What Does It Feel Like (Sophie Kinsella, print)
  I thought I was picking up an easy read from the Shopaholic series author, but this is a fictionalized-ish autobiographical story about the author getting a brain tumor. Gorgeous. Sadly, she recently passed.

• Three Days in June (Anne Tyler, print)

  A deceptively simple book about families. On one Friday, our main character gets fired, her ex-husband unexpectedly shows up on her doorstep, and it’s the weekend of her daughter’s wedding.

• News of the World (Paulette Jiles, print)

  This was made into one of those movies that wins all the awards. A shoot em up Western, Captain Kidd is trying to return a young girl who was captured to her family. I enjoyed this but wow did the blurb seriously give away the ending

• The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald, print)
  A classic I never had to read in high school. Truly I felt so dumb, I had to read the Cliff Notes to follow along.

• Wicked (Gregory Maguire, audio)
  A re-read. I don’t recommend this. It’s obviously a great story but with so many weird gross details about bodily functions. Just watch the movie.

• What You Are Looking For Is in the Library (Michiko Aoyama, print)
  Loved. Also a contender for my favorite of the year. Four or five short stories about people who go to a semi-magical librarian for book suggestions. She suggests to each of them a book that puzzles them at first before changing their life, leading to an epiphany.

  

• Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir, print)
  Literally this is like Armageddon meets MacGyver. Zero character development but super entertaining. Movie based on the book coming soon.

• The Ministry of Time (Kaliane Bradley, print)
  I read this because it was on a zillion best books lists. It’s time travel fan fiction about a real ship captain who died at sea. Strange, but very interesting writing.

DNF:

• The Queen of Sugar Hill (ReShonda Tate, print)
  Fictionalized biography of Hattie McDaniel. It felt a little too simplified after a few chapters.

• A Spool of Blue Thread (Anne Tyler, print)
  Just wasn’t absorbed in the story. But I liked the other Anne Tyler book I read.

• All Fours (Miranda July, print)
  Call me a prude but this was way too raunchy for me.

• The Covenant of Water (Abraham Verghese, print)
  I picked this up when I was at the start of a cold. Realized I needed to come back to it later.

This week on the podcast, more thoughts about reading for a goal vs reading for pleasure. I want to be a person who doesn’t have a reading goal, but I also know I’m highly, highly motivated by a fictional gold star. And the more time I spend reading print books, the less time I spend scrolling. So I’m wrestling with an approach for 2026.

Please tell me if you agree or disagree with my takes on any of these! And I'd love your reccomendations for what to read next. <3

xoxo,
Liz

It’s funny, because I have no trouble taking dollars today and putting them aside for future me. But when I try to do the same with journaling, to set aside time to write down thoughts and memories for future me, I can’t keep up the habit.

Still, I’ve realized I kind of do keep a journal. Not with a notebook and a ballpoint pen, but through about a dozen apps on my phone.

My Monarch Money dashboard shows how I spent my money, which really means how I spent my time. Tickets to a show. Flowers sent to a friend. A dinner date. A medical bill, and the spike in takeout after the medical bill.

DrinkControl logs every glass of wine. When I look back and see a spike, I can usually tell you exactly why. Those three days in a row, that was a work trip. Big Saturday night of two glasses of chardonnay and a martini? A black-tie fundraiser. Three weeks of nothing in February? Covid. That other three weeks of nothing in September? I was in a drink-water-and-get-10k-steps phase…that lasted for three weeks.

Goodreads tracks every book I’ve finished. The titles line up with my moods. I read so many books about feminism in 2017. Six beach reads in a row was the result of a much needed vacation in Mexico.

Even my dog contributes. His GPS collar records a walk when we leave the house, each route a little map of our days together. It knows whether we went to the coffee shop up the hill or the park down the hill.

My Oura ring knows how much I sleep, how much I move, and when I’m stressed. That spike in stress? The week my company did layoffs. A run of great sleep? From when we went up to our friend’s cabin.

Nourish is something new I’m trying, a diary of every meal. It lets me set goals for protein and fiber, but I can hide total calories so I don’t become obsessive. Hume tracks my effort to put on more muscle. Peloton logs my workouts. Instagram stories catch my daily musings.

I think about future me a lot. That’s why I save money. That’s why I wear sunscreen. That’s why I try to give her good memories.

And when she looks back at all this data, I hope she doesn’t just see numbers. I hope she remembers the full life underneath them.

On to this week’s vitals…

What I’m Reading: I am re-reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, because I remember that I really enjoyed it, but I couldn’t remember exactly why. (links are affiliate)

What I’m Eating: When it starts to get cold I just love a stuffed pepper. Something about it makes you feel so warm and cozy.

How I’m Moving My Body: I managed a couple short strength workouts this week, but nothing terribly impressive.

What I’m Obsessing Over: I got my nails done in an old favorite color. It’s THE perfect neutral for me, a mauve-y, brown-ish, pink-ish creamy pink. I need to practice painting my own nails, because these manicures are adding up.

Also, loving Taylor Swift’s new album. I don’t think I’ve ever been one to listen to one of her albums all the way through, but I have this one on repeat. Every song is a bop, no skips!

Sending you love, my friends. Be safe out there.

xoxo

Liz

Back in February I was in my friend and cohost Maggie’s backyard by the fire. I got too close, melted a little hole in the back, and probably left a tiny piece of my jacket fused to her fire pit. Sorry, Maggie.

It looked janky, with fake down escaping like dandelion fluff. Last week I finally patched it. I went hunting around for black tape. No luck. I had brown duct tape, so I used that. Problem solved.

If I were a self-aggrandizing financial influencer, here’s where I would pivot into “And that is how I became a millionaire.” If I were a LinkedIn influencer, I would make it worse with ten tidy lessons about grit and resourcefulness. Barf.

The thing is, not everything is a lesson. Sometimes a jacket is just a jacket with brown tape on it.

People on the internet love to cherry pick examples from their life with a “and let that be a lesson” tone. It drives me bananas.

The faux-wisdom version of this story says I am wealthy because I don’t buy a new iPhone every year, seldom DoorDash, and still wear a patched parka. That is annoying and it’s nonsense. I am wealthy because I stumbled into a job at a fast growing startup. Because as my salary grew, I happened across some good advice about maxing out tax-advantaged accounts and using index funds. Because for most of my life I’ve lived in very nice but affordable one bedroom apartments.

Today my black coat has a brown square on the back. It makes me laugh. It keeps me warm. It did not change my net worth. It did not teach me anything about leadership.

On to this week’s vitals…

What I’m Reading: I started a novel on my kindle called The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo (links are affiliate). It’s a long one—500+ pages of epic family drama. I’m at the good part where now I remember everyone’s name but I still have a lot left to enjoy.

For an audiobook, I just finished Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. It was a hoot, not just because the author is funny, but it was written ten plus years ago so he’s talking about new health fads like pedometers and walking desks. He predicted their success!

What I’m Eating: I was on a work trip and I absolutely indulged in alllll the snacks in the office. Drinking wine with coworkers, team dinners, hitting the buffet at the airport lounge, I was highly enjoying food this week.

How I’m Moving My Body: Trying to keep my Peloton streak alive by squeezing in a short stretch or short core workout before bed. Next week I’ll be back in a normal routine I think.

What I’m Obsessing Over: I bought a heated vest for the winter and then I made the even smarter decision to buy some extra battery packs for it. And I just ordered my holiday cards!

What I’m Annoyed About: I have chronic I-hate-my-nail-color syndrome. Whenever I get a manicure I pick a color and usually have regrets on the way home. This week I have hot pink nails that are a little too irridescent/Barbie-esque for my taste, but I also paid $30 for the manicure so I don’t want to take it off. Honestly hoping it chips soon so I feel good about taking it off.

Sending you love, my friends. Be safe out there.

xoxo

Liz

I buy from Minted. They’re a bit pricier, but they turn out beautifully. Some years I splurge for foil trim or add extra photos on the back. Totally unnecessary. Completely delightful.

Last year I spent about $400 on photo cards for friends and family, $200 on Liz Gets Loaded holiday postcards, and about $150 on postage. I like to break it out like that because $750 total sounds bananas, but 400 + 200 + 150 feels oddly reasonable to my brain. Mental accounting at work. (Is this “girl math”?) I think you can be good with money and still spend too much on holiday cards, as long as it’s in the budget.

It’s a whole thing in my life:

• It creates a rhythm. Every December I sit down with tea (sometimes wine), put on some holiday music, and sign the cards by hand. It feels like a closing ceremony for the year.

• It builds connection. Even if our only connection for the year is a holiday card and a follow-up text, it keeps people in my orbit.

• It’s a small creative project. I love poring over the design options. Picking photos and copy scratches the “make something” itch that I don’t get in my day job.

• It’s a built-in reflection point. I love scrolling through Instagram stories, my credit card statement, and the photos on my phone to jog my memory while I write a year-in-review.

• It is the opposite of doomscrolling. Ten out of ten recommend.

And if holiday cards are not your thing, keep your money for the thing that is. We all have a little category that looks silly on paper and pays out in happiness. This one is mine.

On to this week’s vitals…

What I’m Reading: I started a novel on my kindle called The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo (links are affiliate). It’s a long one—500+ pages of epic family drama. I’m still in the early chapters where I’m trying to remember everyone’s name, but enjoying it so far.

For an audiobook right now, I’m in the middle of Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. The author is trying out all the fads and trends to achieve top health outcomes. This was written in 2012 and while it’s written with a lot of humor, it’s also an unintentionally hilarious time capsule. “Have you heard of this new device called a fitbit?” I’m thoroughly, thoroughly enjoying.

What I’m Eating: I think I had three veggie burgers this week. It’s just such an easy option when we want to go out. A burger and fries and tons of ketchup? Never gets old.

How I’m Moving My Body: A little less frequently with the weather getting colder! I’m just trying to get in a walk or a 20 minute peloton strength class each day. Bonus points if I get to both.

What I’m Obsessing Over: I bought a heated vest for the winter and wow am I happy I bought this! (And wow am I annoyed at myself for not buying this sooner.) I saw they had them at Costco but sadly only in men’s sizes. (I tried one on, but precidtably it was too baggy in the waist and too tight on the hips.)

I ended up buying this one from amazon because it has zoned heating (so you can turn different areas on and off), it has an extra-large battery, and I like that you have the option to turn off the indicator lights on the power switch so it’s not completely obvious you’re wearing something electric. This is already something that if I lost it tomorrow, I’d replace it immediately. Like pay extra for overnight shipping immediately. I’m debating a second battery pack so I never had to be without it while it’s charging. I love it almost as much as I love sending holiday cards.

Sending you love, my friends. Be safe out there.

xoxo

Liz

One of Housel’s primary ideas is that you only ever spend money for two reasons:

1. To make you or your family happier.

2. To impress other people.

This can be a helpful way to think about your motivation--is it internal or external? But my instinct was to say, no wait, I spend money for lots of other reasons. To bring myself comfort, on things that are actual necessities, and sometimes out of obligation. You could argue all of those still fall under the first category because finding comfort, meeting needs, and fulfilling obligations can make you happy. But if the first category is that broad, then number two is really just another extension of it. If impressing other people makes you happy, then it all folds into the same bucket. And once “happiness” covers every possible motivation, it starts to lose meaning. At that point, you could just say we spend money because we spend money.

A thousand think pieces have been written about avoiding “keeping up with the Joneses,” and we all nod along because yes, other people should definitely stop spending money to impress other people. It’s extremely rare that we recognize we’re doing it ourselves. Housel quoted Eliot Aronson in the book, humans aren’t rational, we’re rationalizing.

There’s a whole other bucket of spending, though, that isn’t really about impressing (subcosciously or otherwise). It’s about avoiding whatever the opposite of impressed is. Avoiding embarrassment. Avoiding judgment. Avoiding standing out in the wrong way. “Scorn” might be too strong a word, but it’s in the neighborhood.

I recently spent about a thousand dollars on a dress for my sister’s wedding. I fretted over this purchase for weeks. I didn’t want to spend that much, but after trying on a dozen dresses, it was the only one that fit, wasn’t too revealing, and didn’t make me feel like a lumpy sack of potatoes. When I wore it, I had almost no expectation that anyone would be impressed. No one was going to say, “Wow, Liz, that’s the perfect dress to war to your sister’s wedding! You look both beautiful and brilliant.” What I was really trying to avoid was someone thinking it was too dressy or too casual or too frumpy or too flashy.

When I think about my own spending, a lot of it isn’t about trying to stand out so much as trying not to stick out. I’m aiming for that invisible middle where no one thinks you got it wrong.

I don’t need anyone to admire the grass on my lawn, but I really don’t want anyone noticing the weeds. I don’t care if anyone thinks I’m stylish, but I’d rather no one think I look sloppy. I doubt anyone cares what kind of car I drive, but I still felt embarrassed when mine had a rusty dent.

Most of the time, I’m not spending to impress anyone. I’m spending to stay safely unremarkable. Which, I suppose under Morgan Housel’s definition, is still something that makes me or my family happy. He’s not wrong!

On to this week’s vitals…

What I’m Reading: On top of Morgan Housel’s The Art of Spending Money, I’ve also been reading Anne Patchett’s Tom Lake. I can see why Anne Patchett’s books are so popular. I love a story that unfolds across different generations, but she’s so creative in that her plots and settings are always so different.

What I’m Eating: I feel like I made an absolute leap from summer to fall! A few weeks ago I was devouring peaches. Now I want soup or chili whenever I can get it.

How I’m Moving My Body: Beautiful fall walks. And Peloton strength workouts at home with my little pastel dumbbells.

What I’m Obsessing Over: I’m feeling so stoked I updated my wireless plan. I was an early adopter of Mint Mobile. For a long time I enjoyed having a 5GB cap on data, it made me feel like I didn’t end up mindlessly scrolling while out in the world. (Only at home on wifi!) It was almost a stoic practice, downloading music and podcasts before leaving the house. But on the other hand it was just one more thing to manage. And under the heading of simplification (and with a coupon code for a good deal) I switched to visible. $5 more a month to free up brain space seems like a good deal.

What I’m Searching For: Jeans. I have one pair that fits great, but they’re cropped. Heading into cooler temperatures I think full length pants are in order? All the other jeans in my closet seems to be too big, too small, or need to be hemmed. I feel very unenthusiastic about shopping for jeans, though. Think I can get away with tights and boots for the next six months?

Sending you extra love, my friends. Be safe out there.

xoxo

Liz