We Blew Through $7K in Two Weeks: Learning to Manage Success
The Monday Blueprint 1.26.25: Essays I've read and last week's market report
Here are some financial resources for wildfire victims.
$7000 and *poof*. Where did it go?
Okay, first of all, it was $6,558.72 but We Blew Through $6,558.72 in Two Weeks: Learning to Manage Success is just not as catchy of a title. Additionally, turns out the math says we didn’t actually spend the whole $6,558.72, which seems at first glance to be good news. But really. It’s almost as much bad news as spending the amount we did.
I received this real estate commission check on Monday, December 23, 2024. You’d think a real estate commission check right before the holiday madness would be a game changer. And it was. Just not in the way I expected.
To give you perspective, for sixteen years I threatened and swore that Christmas would be small. No gifts, no cheer, just survival. And every year by some miracle or madness (usually wandering Walmart aisles at 11pm on Christmas Eve) we’ve pulled off Christmas. But this last year? My fearful self-fulfilling prophecy had finally materialized. The only thing under the tree was the skirt.
So here’s where the money went: groceries that weren’t groceries, Dunkin’ runs, a credit card payoff (small victory!), and plenty of expenses we could’ve planned better. Here’s the two-week break down:
If my math is correct, I spent $5,621.41. Which left me with a surplus of $937.31 that I carried over into the next week with the same pattern.
A couple of general observations here:
I have business expenses mixed in with personal expenses—like the Mailchimp fee for keeping access to my archive—but tracking both business and personal together makes everything feel chaotic.
$340 in groceries plus the vodka slushies. We weren’t grocery shopping—we were Christmas shopping in the food aisle. Not a single thought about meals, just sugar highs and chaos. Additionally, the trips to Hannaford tells me we aren’t really planning anything.
Dunkin is probably killing us in more ways than one.
I really honest to God thought we’d spent the entire $6,558.72.
Spending I’m proud of:
The Mailchimp suspension fee. The switch to Substack was a no-brainer and has saved me anywhere from $65 to $145 a month.
Cricket Wireless is for 4 phones. The service might scream poor white trash, I might get made fun of by other Realtors who run with the more so-called acceptable posh carriers. But no one knows. I’m not telling everyone and their siblings that I use Cricket Wireless. It’s not like this essay is brought to you by Cricket Wireless .
Making a double payment on the auto loan. I loath car payments, and this car is the first payment I’ve had in years.
Where I need to improve:
Groceries. The Christmas food excursion and vodka slushies (which were obviously essential) highlight a bigger issue: all those Hannaford trips. They scream no plan. If we committed to weekly meal plans, created a shopping list, and even ordered online—yes, even with a delivery fee—we’d save money and time in the long run.
Dunkin’s has got to go. But let’s be honest: we are not giving up eating out entirely. Most of our meals out are about exhaustion—the last thing we want to do after a long day is cook and wash dishes. But if we planned meals better for grocery shopping, we could also plan meals out, which might cut down on both grocery costs and dining-out expenses.
Subscriptions
Kindle Unlimited: I binge-read like crazy when I’m using it, then it sits untouched for months. There’s no reason I can’t cancel when I’m not using it and resubscribe later.
Canva: Thought I’d use it, didn’t. Time to drop it.
ChatGPT: Use it every day—this one’s staying.
Microsoft Office: $7 a month for something I could replace with Apache Open Office for free? Definitely worth a rethink.
Streaming Services: I currently have HBO Max, Netflix, Apple+, Disney, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Paramount. Here’s the thing: I upgraded all my streaming because I’d be stuck in bed during ankle recovery. Once I’m healed, Disney and Hulu are gone. HBO Max? I’m only watching one show that’s already free on YouTube. Paramount? Don’t even get me started on the Star Trek Section 31 movie. Poor Michelle Yeoh deserved better.
By making these improvements, I could potentially save $343.99 per month. Here's the breakdown:
Groceries: $100 saved by meal planning and fewer trips.
Dunkin’ & Eating Out: $150 saved by cutting back by 50%.
Subscriptions: $93.99 saved by canceling or reducing:
Kindle Unlimited: $11.99
Canva: $15.00
Microsoft Office: $7.00
Streaming services: $60.00 (dropping 3 platforms).
This could translate to saving over $4,000 a year.
The game I’m playing here of course is Gary Keller’s green light/red light concept from The Millionaire Real Estate Agent to monitor both my business and personal finances. The idea is simple: keep and expand what works (green lights) and stop or reevaluate what doesn’t (red lights). For example, upgrading to Netflix’s two-screen plan was a green light—it added value without breaking the bank. Red lights? Habits or expenses that aren’t worth it, like unnecessary subscriptions or overspending. The game is about balance and not giving up everything you enjoy.
If you are a paid subscriber, you can learn about the red light/green light game in more detail here:
And even download a free red light/green light worksheet!
Of course, last week’s Monday Blueprint, if you remember, I talked about how you don’t need a budget to succeed with money. And I stick by that 100%. But you do need a plan because no plan is still a plan, it’s just a very very bad plan.
What’s concerning to me as I go through this red light/green light exercise during the first month of Quarter One 2025—an exercise I’ll repeat in Q2, Q3, and Q4—is that I now have so much more money than I did last year, and significantly more than I had the year before that…
It’s pretty easy being poor. Anyone can be poor.
Poor requires no initiation, no strategy, and no barrier to entry. Poor doesn’t ask you to work harder or plan better. Poor exists as the consequence of limited resources, limited opportunity, and sometimes bad luck. And poor is easy because it doesn’t demand anything extra. Poor is reactive: you scrape by, making do with what little you have, and the cycle perpetuates itself. Decisions are dictated by what gets you through the next day, the next hour, the next moment.
Poor strips away the luxury of choice. Poor makes the path forward narrow and predictable: survival, at the expense of growth. You’re stuck responding to emergencies instead of planning for stability. Poor is easy because the alternative—climbing out—takes an exhausting amount of effort, resources, and luck.
And often times, having been stuck in a situation that paid me $17,000 a year at the top of my teaching career, dragging myself into the welfare office, visiting food banks—and if you are in this situation, please please use every single resource available to you and do not feel bad about it at all—I don’t want to say I felt demoralized because that wasn’t my attitude at all. I do want to say that I had a specific mindset shaped by years of living in survival mode, deeply ingrained habits of reacting to scarcity, living paycheck to paycheck, where every dollar felt like it was already spoken for, whether it was gone or not.
Take the $7000 that wasn’t and the $937.31 I didn’t spend. When my kids came back from the grocery and said they had spent $400 between food and alcohol, I did not yell at them but I seethed on the inside. In my mind, the cash was already gone—because that’s what survival mode does. It trains you to believe you’re always scraping by, even when you’re not. And that fear shows up in moments like the credit card payoff. When my wife suggested we pay it off, I froze. What if we didn’t have enough for rent next month? What if I couldn’t close another real estate deal? What if this commission was the last one I’d ever see? That’s survival mode in action—every decision feels like a potential catastrophe.
I’m starting to realize: fear doesn’t disappear when you have more money—it just changes shape. When I was broke, the fear was about survival. Now, it’s about maintaining momentum. The what-ifs are still there, but they’re no longer about keeping the lights on; they’re about whether I can take the next step forward. I’m considering hiring a Virtual Assistant, for example and I’m asking a lot of fear-based questions. What if I can’t afford it? What if I don’t grow fast enough to justify the expense? What if I’m making a mistake? These questions echo that same survival mindset that once kept me trapped in poverty.
Not being poor takes not only work but an extreme shift in mindset. Not being poor takes deliberate action: building systems, learning to manage success, saying no to immediate gratification, and taking risks in a way poverty doesn’t afford. Wealth—or even basic financial stability—demands planning, accountability, and often uncomfortable conversations with yourself and others. Wealth requires relentless intention. Because I don’t know what happened to that $937.31other than its simply gone.
I instituted the red light green light game into my life three years ago. Every quarter I sat down and thought red light green light was a complete waste of my time because what did I really have coming in that I could realistically cut when every month rent already seemed unsurmountable?
But I had to change my mind about how I was handling my cash, and if I hadn’t instituted the red light green light system, I would not have noticed how much money I was making now. I’m still not going to do a budget for my personal income cause whatever, but for my business, yeah I will. And I’ll be splitting those houses into two different buckets, and I know now too that I need to play red light green light way more often. So instead of once per quarter, I’ll be visiting my money once a month.
What I’ve learned through all of this—blowing through $6,558.72 (or not), grappling with fear, and shifting my mindset—is that success doesn’t solve all your problems. It just gives you different problems to solve. Fear doesn’t vanish when your bank account grows; it evolves. The survival mindset doesn’t disappear overnight either. It takes deliberate, ongoing effort to rewire those old habits and replace scarcity thinking with something bigger: intention, accountability, and growth.
It’s easy to let money slip through your fingers, whether it’s $937.31 or $7,000. But what’s harder—and far more rewarding—is learning to see money differently. It’s not just something to spend or save. It’s a tool, a resource, and an opportunity to shape a better future. Playing red light/green light with my finances taught me to look at my money with purpose. Not just to track it, but to understand it—and to understand myself in the process.
So here’s where I am now: not afraid to take risks, but also not reckless. Ready to revisit my money every month instead of every quarter. Determined to make decisions rooted in intention rather than fear. Because wealth—whether it’s $937.31 or $7,000—isn’t about how much you have. It’s about what you do with it. And for me, that starts with showing up for my finances, again and again.
IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
Essays I’ve Read
The Ghosts are Everywhere by Charlotte Higgins, Culture Writer for The Guardian
Higgins interrogates how the British Museum institution, built on stolen treasures, reflects Britain’s fraught legacy while facing calls for reparations and recovery of looted items. The essay reckons with the tension between preserving history and returning history to those from whom it was taken—all the while investigating the internal theft of roughly 1500 items, some of which were sold on ebay for well under value of a mere fifty pounds.
But what really pulled me in was the ridiculously evocative language.
This sentence, for example, “The corpses’ hair, eyelashes, the warp and weft of their clothes, sometimes even their tattoos, are still visible.” The contrast of teh ephemeral with permanence is wild, and the rhythm is hypnotically smooth. Then, when you come upon the human teeth bowl and femur trumpet—next-level macabre. Then the essay pivots from haunting history to literal hauntings, tying the vibe of the space to emotional and metaphysical weight. “The ghosts are everywhere” feels like the heart of the whole essay.
Then that last sentence is so ambitious it could almost fall apart, but it doesn’t. Instead, we feel both awe-inspired and unsettled, like you’re staring into the abyss of human achievement and destruction at once.
@noahpinion: “Yes, Reshoring American Industry Is Working”
@paulkrugman: “No, Trump Can’t Make Manufacturing Great Again”
These two essays both dance around the nuances of the economy, globalization, and political PR. But eventually, they step into the ring, square off and size each other up. Noah’s argument swings with optimism, pointing to reshoring wins in tech and green energy. Krugman counters with a grounded jab, reminding us that manufacturing’s heyday is long gone and unlikely to return.
The thing is, I’m unsure if they are aware of each other even though they wrote on the same topic from extremely different viewpoints within 24 hours of each other. Noah Smith, the optimistic economist with his “Yes, reshoring is totally working, and here’s the proof” essay. And Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning grumpy realist, waving his “Please, stop kidding yourselves—manufacturing isn’t coming back like that” flag. It’s a Clash of the Titans Substack brawl with supply chains and GDP charts.
Noah’s argument? Reshoring is happening. Green energy, semiconductor production, post-pandemic supply chain shifts—it’s all building the next generation of manufacturing right here in the U.S.
Krugman points out manufacturing’s GDP share is nowhere near its mid-century heyday, and it’s unlikely to stage a grand revival. Sure, he concedes that some reshoring is happening, but the systemic forces that led to manufacturing’s decline (automation, globalization, etc.) aren’t going anywhere. He basically argues reshoring is political theater rather than an actual economic revolution.
Okay, they’re both wrong. U.S. manufacturing isn’t dead, but it’s a shadow of what it once was. No longer the GDP heavyweight champion—now the 1976 version of Rocky Balboa, scrappy and determined, but not a titleholder. Today’s manufacturing is leaner, tech-driven, and specialized—it’s butcher-shop-freezer-meat-punching, running-up-the-stairs, Eye-of-the-Tiger kind of grit.
Hey, listen, I don’t just read these essays for the insight; I read them because I like watching smart people fight online. This is ripe for some good old-fashioned Substack drama. Imagine the academic side-eyes. The data-dunking. Substack cage match, anyone? 🥊Let’s go!1
LAST WEEK IN THE STOCK MARKET:
A Tipping Point for Inflation and Trade?
The U.S. markets wrapped up a volatile week with declines across major indices. The S&P 500 slipped 0.29%, the Dow Jones fell 0.32%, and the Nasdaq shed 0.50%, reflecting investor unease amidst lingering inflation concerns and evolving trade policy uncertainties. The Russell 2000 also dipped 0.30%, as smaller-cap stocks struggled to sustain the prior week’s modest optimism.
Bond yields held steady, while commodities painted a mixed picture. Crude oil inched down by 0.03% to $74.60 per barrel, signaling demand uncertainties, while gold climbed 0.45% to $2,777.40, reflecting renewed caution as investors grappled with shifting risks.
Big Themes to Watch:
The Evolving Inflation Story
Two weeks ago, optimism around easing inflation data spurred market gains, but this last week highlighted the labor market’s role in sustaining wage-driven price pressures. While service inflation showed moderation, particularly in shelter costs, the tight job market remains a persistent wildcard.The Federal Reserve is widely expected to hold rates steady in its upcoming meeting, continuing the cautious stance highlighted last week. However, President Trump’s demand for immediate rate cuts injects fresh political tension into the Fed’s data-driven approach. Investors hoping for clarity on inflation and monetary policy may find themselves waiting longer than anticipated.
Tech Stocks: From Momentum to Hesitation
Tech led the charge two weeks, but this last week’s insider selling and mixed earnings reports hint at a reassessment of near-term confidence. Nvidia’s 4.44% drop and Texas Instruments’ 13% decline stand in stark contrast to the previous optimism we’ve seen, signaling that high valuations and inventory challenges remain significant concerns.However, selective optimism persists. Twilio and Middleby Co. posted gains, reflecting investor interest in niche innovation and industrial resilience. The Nasdaq’s pullback suggests the sector may need to weather more volatility before reclaiming leadership.
Commodities Reflect Persistent Uncertainty
Two weeks ago, commodities pointed to a risk-on environment, with gold and crude oil slipping. But this past week, gold’s rebound suggests a renewed search for safe havens, even as oil prices remain subdued due to geopolitical pressures, including new sanctions on Russian exports.These shifts underscore how quickly market sentiment can pivot as investors weigh optimism against long-term uncertainties like inflation, global growth, and geopolitical risks.
Trade Policy and TikTok’s Tangled Future
TikTok’s future has evolved into a broader narrative about trade policy. President Trump’s proposed tariffs on China are now being linked to TikTok negotiations, amplifying uncertainty for tech and trade sectors alike.If enacted, these tariffs could reignite inflationary pressures just as the Fed battles to contain price growth. Meanwhile, companies like Meta and Alphabet stand to benefit if TikTok faces restrictions. The interplay between policy, inflation, and competition is becoming an increasingly critical theme.
Geopolitical Risks Gain Momentum
Focus on localized risks like the Los Angeles wildfires has given way to global challenges. Russian oil sanctions are already disrupting supply chains for key players like China and India, and trade tensions between the U.S. and China remain a key source of uncertainty. These risks are adding layers of complexity to an already fragile market environment.
Looking Ahead
The Fed makes decisions independently of the executive branch and is not directly controlled by the President or Congress; that said, the Fed isn’t entirely immune to political pressures. The next few weeks will be critical in determining how U.S.-China trade relations evolve. Investors will probably seek clarity on whether AI and cloud computing remain the sector’s saving graces or whether overvaluation risks dominate in the short term.
With consumer sentiment dipping (will egg prices ever come down) and delinquencies rising, particularly in credit card debt, markets will monitor retail sales data and spending trends to gauge the health of the broader economy. The University of Michigan’s next sentiment index update will be especially telling. Russian oil sanctions and ongoing U.S.-China trade dynamics will remain front and center. Additionally, shifts in global energy markets could either exacerbate or relieve inflationary pressures, depending on how demand evolves.
In a viral TikTok video, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered a sharp critique of the current administration’s priorities, pointing out how policy decisions appear disconnected from the struggles of everyday Americans.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Regardless of political leanings, her remarks cut to the heart of ongoing debates about inflation, energy policy, and the broader disconnect between Washington and the realities facing average Americans.
Question of the Week
If your bank account were a movie, what would the title be?
