It’s more than just quality veggies.

Once spring has sprung the debate about whether planting a garden is a smart idea for you or not can be found wherever you inquire.

It seems that the overall opinion is that the pros far outweigh the cons and I tend to agree. Fresh vegetables out of your own backyard are hard to beat. The satisfaction of growing something from seed and placing it on the dinner table for consumption comes with a sense of pride.

Sharing some of the fruits of your labor with your neighbors also has its own upsides.

The health benefits go beyond healthy food

Eating something directly from your garden that hasn’t been processed in any way is certainly good for you and your diet, but it doesn’t stop there.

Gardening gets us out in the sunlight and keeps our body parts moving. This can mean lower blood pressure, increased levels of vitamin D, and better dexterity along with increased strength. If you’ve ever stopped to visit a friend or family member in their garden, you may have also seen that it can be pretty relaxing.

I’m all about a little less stress and good, healthy food.

Gardening tips and tricks

For those that are new to the gardening space, below are seven tips that will help you along your planting journey.

1. Plant vegetables that you will eat. It’s easy to go a little crazy in the seed aisle dreaming of growing the largest pumpkin only to realize how much space is required. Seed packs and seedlings aren’t very costly individually, but rolling up to the checkout with a cart full of items that you may not need can add up quickly.
2. Tomato plants are often sold in packs of six. However, six full-grown tomato plants not only take up a lot of garden space, but they also produce enough tomatoes for your extended family, friends, and their friends. Consider just a single plant of two different varieties. Take note of this factor when choosing each of your garden items. You may be surprised at how much a single plant produces.
3. Small raised beds are a great alternative to a full-scale 1/2 acre garden. Evaluate what works best for you in regard to how much time, money, space, and effort you’ll be able to dedicate to the growing season.
4. Time your crop. A planting calendar can guide you in the best times to get each crop started where you live. Planting half of your seeds initially and the other half a week or two later will ensure a more continuous bounty.
5. Keep the critters out. One guarantee in the world of gardening is that the wild animals will let you know when your crop is ready if you’re not prepared. They do this by eating it, usually a day or two before you were about to begin harvesting. Depending on your setup, a fence, some soap, or something noisy, minty, or spicy can help deter them from reaping what you’ve sown.
6. Set aside a small amount of time each day for gardening tasks. This will keep jobs like pulling weeds in check. The same task tackled only every couple of weeks becomes a chore and can frustrate even the most seasoned gardener.
7. Go in with a friend or neighbor. Sharing a garden space is a great way to share some quality time with people that you enjoy. More than one set of hands also helps to make extremely light work of everything involved.

It’s well worth your time if you have the time

Gardening requires an investment on your part. Watering, fertilizing, weed and pest control are all important factors for a successful harvest.

If a full-scale growing operation seems slightly out of reach due to space or time constraints, maybe you can choose a vegetable or two that you can grow in 5-gallon buckets just off of your front porch or patio.

It doesn’t matter if your garden extends far and wide or is as simple as a couple of plants that you can admire while drinking your morning coffee.

If you ask me, a walk to the garden beats a trip to the grocery store any day.

Whether you freelance full-time or on the side, once it earns you a certain amount of money, you owe the government a good portion of your hard-earned proceeds.

The good news is that you have options. You don’t need to give it all to them. You’re legally allowed to keep some of what would normally be theirs for the future you.

It’s actually rather simple.

As the money piles up

At the end of the year when you’re pulling together your 1099 MISC forms showing the bazillions of dollars that you earned for your craft, the realization sets in that you can’t keep it all. The IRS is legally entitled to a big ‘ol chunk. You have to give them some, but less than you might think.

To cover income tax, self-employment tax, and state income tax if it applies, you should plan on setting aside 20% to 35% of the amount you earn.

If you saw those two numbers and hope for the lower end, you’re not alone.

If you saw the higher and became instantly concerned, ditto.

Before the hyperventilation starts to get the better of you, keep in mind that you can easily and legally knock down the amount of what those percentages equate to in dollar amounts.

Reduce your tax burden

First, have a conversation with your accountant about all of the wonderful deductions that you can take that pertain to your freelance business. You’ll be amazed at what you can legally deduct as a business expense that will reduce the amount of tax that you’ll owe.

Yes, I said accountant. They’re not as expensive as you might think. They also know things about tax law that you and I probably don’t. Whatever they charge you, they can easily save in what you end up paying for taxes each year. Plus, tax preparation isn’t fun, unless you’re an accountant.

Second, take advantage of retirement account(s). Being self-employed doesn’t prevent you from participating in these IRS-sanctioned tax shelters.

The Internal Revenue Service sets the contribution allowances for retirement plans like a 401k or an Individual Retirement Account (IRA).

According to the IRS website, for 2023, the annual limit for IRA contributions is $6,500 and increases to $7,500 for those 50 and over. The maximum 401k contribution is $22,500 and increases to $30,000 for those 50 and over.

Let’s quickly discuss these two retirement accounts as they pertain to you as a freelancer.

An IRA account can be opened at credit unions, banks, online via brokers, and through companies that offer financial planning. For those that fall in the 24% income tax bracket, contributing $6,500 toward an IRA would equal slightly more than $1,500 off your tax bill.

The potential to pay even less in taxes

If you freelance part-time and have a full-time gig that offers a 401k plan, there’s some good news.

If you’ve been hesitant to contribute to it or increase your contribution, this might be a good way to shelter a bunch of that extra income so that you can tap into it when you retire.

Up to the maximum allowed, the amount that you contribute reduces your taxable income amount dollar for dollar. For instance, if you earn a total of $60,000 between your full-time job and your freelance side hustle and contribute $20,000 toward your 401k, your taxable income becomes $40,000.

Of course, that‘s $40,000 before you and your accountant determine all of the deductions for your self-employment endeavor which can knock it down even more.

Keep your money

The best part is that those contributions are yours to keep and begin tapping into without penalties once you reach retirement age. The amount of annual return your retirement account earns depends on your investment choices and strategy.

Your options aren’t limited to a 401k or IRA. There are more available as well that you can research or speak to your accountant or financial planner about.

The important thing is to understand that depending on your situation, you are allowed keep a substantial amount of the money that you earn as a freelancer without handing it over to the IRS in the form of taxes.

You can’t just start spending it now without penalties, but your future self will thank you in the years to come.

I have zero complaints.

(11/10/25) Quick note – If you use my referral link below, we both receive a credit for one month of free service once you activate your Starlink, currently a $120 (USD) value. Note that I am not an official representative of Starlink in any capacity. I received the code a couple of days ago in a standard customer promotion email from them. Starlink is offering $0 upfront hardware costs and free professional setup for new customers in select areas. Here’s that code:

https://www.starlink.com/residential?referral=RC-556275-33207-12

I ordered Starlink satellite internet service in February of 2021 and waited almost a full year for it to show up.

Due to where my family lives in rural Vermont, we have no other alternatives for internet service outside of satellite internet. There’s clearly a disconnect between the FCC statistics on broadband connectivity and the actual reality of living in the green mountain state.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve had multiple versions of offerings from both Hughesnet and Viasat. For a while, I even used hotspot devices from Verizon Wireless.

And then…Starlink, a match made in heaven, or at least, the sky.

The others

I’ve worked from home for the last 13 years as a tech consultant and freelancer. Solid internet service has been my lifeline.

Our first HughesNet dish 20 years ago was whatever their home plan was with a basic dish. I quickly upgraded to a business account which required spending over a thousand US dollars on the equipment. A few years later, I heard about Viasat. I went through the same upgrade process with them.

I won’t even go into what it’s like to deal with frustrated installers that show up in the afternoon only to still be trying 5 or 6 hours later to get things synced up and registered with each respective company’s satellite. It usually ended with an angry technician and less-than-stellar connectivity upon their departure.

Between the hardware and having to keep up with their data cap overages, our internet bill monthly ran around $400 (USD) monthly.

Yes, you read that correctly. We were paying nearly $5,000 (US) per year for access to the Internet.

Enter Starlink

The online ordering process to get on the waiting list was simple. Log in, create an account, enter my credit card info for the $99 reservation fee, and wait.

I had seen YouTube videos of other people unboxing their Starlink dishes. Many of them lived within the same general geographic coordinates as our home address. This kept me hopeful that my order would ship sooner than later.

I was even more excited about the fact that I would be able to install the system myself, completely foregoing the inevitably hostile installation technician.

The initial arrival estimate of my all-inclusive box of web access was the end of the summer of 2022.

Summer ended, no box.

A few months later, I received an email that it should be shipping soon and to keep an eye on my account for actual dates. Two months after that, the shipment notification was in my email.

The installation

On the day that the surprisingly small, gray box showed up on my porch in January, the temperatures were hovering well below zero degrees Fahrenheit.

I immediately texted a friend who had also signed up for the service but had yet to receive his.

It was brutally cold, but I was determined to get this thing up and running. I’d waited long enough and my current max Viasat download speed of right around 22mbps on the best day had me well prepared for this transition.

A quick slice through some packing tape and voila! There it was…packed in all its glory; a small rectangular satellite dish, a quad-pod mount, the wifi router, and 75 feet of cable. I also ordered the optional sidewall mount.

I’d already downloaded the app to my iPhone months ago and figured out where this tiny beast was going to be installed. The app made it extremely easy to determine what may or may not obstruct service.

I bundled myself up, leaned an extension ladder against the chosen exterior gable wall location, and went to work. There are trees around our property and I knew that getting the dish as high as possible was important so that they wouldn’t obstruct the signal.

Since I was getting rid of the current provider, I used the same hole through the wall for the Starlink cable to connect the dish outside with the router that would be placed inside the house.

Regarding the installation, there are only five parts to the system; the dish itself, the cable that goes between the dish and router, the router, the power cable, and whatever you choose for a mounting option whether it’s the included quad-pod or a different mount.

It’s important to ensure that the cable isn’t kinked or pulled too tightly around any corners. A relaxed cable routing is best. Be sure to use proper cable staples made for the cable so that it doesn’t get pinched. Any kinking, pinching, or extensive pulling of the cable can either reduce the speed of the system or cause it to not work at all.

Be sure to place the router in a central location avoiding as many interfering objects as possible. Keep in mind that the included cable is 75 feet long and plan the placement of the dish and router accordingly.

It’s also important to either plug the power cable into either a surge protector or power conditioner. This will help protect the system in the event of an outage. A further suggestion would be to connect it to a UPS battery backup unit. In the event of a power outage, your Starlink system will still be functional for as long a time as the UPS unit is rated.

One feature of the system is that the dish heats itself up based on the outside temperature so that snow and ice don’t build up on it. Where both of those are a thing where we live, this is a pretty big deal.

Once the dish was mounted and the cable connected, all that was left was to plug it in.

After a few seconds, the dish began to turn and move itself to properly align with the satellites. A minute or two later, the system showed online in the app.

Note that there are newer versions of the dish and the most current model seems even simpler to install.

The speed

I took the following screenshot of a speed test the morning after I installed Starlink. The temperature was -25 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, that’s minus 25 degrees.

More recently, we experienced windchills of -50°F this past February. We live about 35 miles from Mount Washington, which set a new windchill record for the United States of 108 degrees below zero that same weekend.

It was pretty cold at our house, and Starlink never missed a beat.

This is a pretty big deal because the system specifications state operating temperatures of 30°C to 50°C (-22°F to 122°F).

On average, our download speeds range from 150–300 Mbps with upload speeds of 9–22 Mbps. The latency, referred to as ping in the screenshot above, or the round trip data time between the user and the destination site, seems to average in the vicinity of 20-35 milliseconds. (Latency milliseconds updated on 3/3/25. It was initially around 35 milliseconds, but more recent speed tests show as low as 19 milliseconds.)

Compared to our previous satellite provider options and witnessing first-hand latency of well over 600 milliseconds daily, this is a big deal.

If you’ve had satellite internet and ever clicked and waited for a page to load on a regular basis, or had your bank login timeout and didn’t understand why, latency was quite possibly the culprit.

As a technology consultant, I’m extremely well-versed in all things network. Whether it has a cable or not, everything has a transmit and receive speed and a latency factor.

For comparison, the following chart shows good latency for gaming:

Our Starlink latency falls more often than not within what is considered “good” for gaming.

WiFi Calling

In addition to good gaming latency, it appears that Starlink latency is also good for WiFi calling.

Along with living in a location where internet options are limited, cellular service also requires overcoming obstacles.

If the wind is just right and I stand outside a particular kitchen window, I can make a call. Because of this, I installed a cellular repeater in our house.

There are a few factors to consider in getting optimal results from a cell phone repeater. I’ll simply say that the working range of ours is very limited to a select area inside the house.

With previous satellite internet installations, we could make and receive calls over WiFi, but the latency made having an actual conversation almost impossible. The delay between when someone spoke and the other person heard it caused people to talk over each other along with breaks in the speech.

Having Starlink has completely changed that.

We now make and receive all of our calls over WiFi and no one on the other end is the wiser. The calls are clear and there’s no delay in the conversation. If we don’t mention it to whoever we’re talking to, they have no clue.

I also have regular video Zoom or Teams calls on my laptop with no issues.

Television streaming services

We’ve always had Dish Network for television service. As our kids grew up, Netflix became more and more of a thing, as did it using up our bandwidth in the first 10 days of the new internet service month. This quickly contributed to our $5k annual internet budget.

Starlink sent an email this past year to customers regarding its Fair Use Policy.

The email stated the following:

Customers who exceed 1 TB of data use on a monthly basis (currently < 10% of users) will automatically be switched to Basic Access for the remainder of the billing cycle, which means their data usage will be deprioritized during times of network congestion, resulting in slower speeds.

We had recently started using Netflix more often and had plans to completely cut the cord. In our case, that meant cutting the cordless cord as we had satellite television service as well. This new data cap at first concerned me, until I started to periodically take a look at our data usage.

With 3 iPhones, a couple of laptops, an Amazon Firestick, light Xbox usage and updates, whatever Dish Network updates occur along with all of our phone and video calls, we cap out at right around 400–500GB monthly.

That’s less than half of what the Fair Use Policy email warned us about.

We’ll be cutting the extra expense of satellite television without being concerned about data usage.

Are there ever any glitches or outages with Starlink?

Sure. Although, my experience is that they don’t happen often and anything over a few seconds is rare. Also, these outages almost always go unnoticed under normal internet usage. The app on my phone shows me every one of them whether it lasts two seconds or two minutes.

For the very few times in well over a year of service where a network issue has lasted a few minutes, it’s just that- a few minutes. It has never prompted me to contact customer service or required any more intervention than a quick reboot of the router or simply waiting for it to clear itself.

If you were able, you would also find that your current internet service provider has regular outages that go unnoticed by you as well.

Regarding Starlink’s customer service, I’ve come across posts where some customers have said that it’s less than stellar. I personally can’t attest to that or how good it might be as I’ve never once had to contact them in 15 months with the service.

Is it worth it?

From my experience, if you live in either a rural area where you find yourself plagued with slow speeds and data caps or someplace where your internet speed is less than stellar, it’s a resounding yes.

As of 11/24/24, their website, pricing shows $349 $499 for the Starlink Kit at some locations and residential pricing of $120 per month.

The following also appears on their website: Try Starlink for 30 days and if not satisfied, get a full refund.

There is currently no contract to sign and you can cancel the service at any time. You keep the equipment and that cost isn’t refundable, but be sure to refer back to the 30 day trial currently being offered.

The installation is actually rather simple. It really depends on your property and what obstacles exist. Many people are able to place it on their deck or on their lawn using one of the mounts available from Starlink. The key is having a clear view of the northern sky.

Portable and RV options are also now available for a small increase in the monthly service fee for those who wish to either use the system in multiple locations or while traveling.

It’s important to note at this time that Starlink isn’t currently available everywhere. You can order the service, get on the waitlist, or check availability on their website.

Conclusion and my final thoughts

On a planet with 5.1 billion internet users, it may be difficult for many to understand how Starlink has been life-changing for us.

No one in my family are strangers to lightning-fast internet. We have access to it everywhere we go, we just haven’t had access to it in our own household.

Thanks to Starlink, now we do.

*UPDATE: 6/19/23*

Still no issues or complaints. Since canceling our Dish Network account for television on 5/1/23 and  streaming all television services over Starlink (Netflix, Hulu, Paramount+, etc.), below is our all-inclusive data usage for one month. This includes television streaming, internet usage including working from home daily, wifi-calling, and light gaming.

*UPDATE: 10/11/23*

It’s been over a year and a half and we still have had the same positive experience. Our usage normally remains around 500GB +/- per month. The month of September was our heaviest usage and it seems that the bump was over the Labor Day holiday weekend.

Our neighbors who live down the road from us own an Airbnb that they also use themselves for a couple of months throughout the year. They were previously using HughesNet, but because of the poor internet speeds and latency, they weren’t able to come up to the mountains as often as they’d like while working remotely. They asked what we used for internet.

Last month, I installed their Starlink system for them. It’s been a complete game-changer for them and their guests.

Here’s that referral code again if you’d like to get a free month of service: https://www.starlink.com/?referral=RC-556275-33207-12

Easy tips to get your exercise on.

Every time I grab an unhealthy snack I tell myself that I don’t need it.

I silently promise myself and the snack that I’ll work it off when I have a few minutes. I even get a quick mental image of my schedule for the day in the middle of the junk food carnage. Hmm, maybe I’ll pencil that in for tomorrow.

If I had a snack for every time that happened…oh, wait.

Here are a couple of tried and true tips for you to find the time to get yourself and your body moving. You’ll not only feel less like crap, but you might even enjoy it (not feeling like crap).

To answer your question, yes, you have the time. Keep reading and I’ll tell you where to find it.

Disclaimer: Check with your physician before attempting any new exercises and always properly hydrate.

The 20-minute mile

The fastest mile ever run by a human was done in less than four minutes.

(Cough)overachiever.

I kid, of course. I’m pretty proud of my steady and consistent 20-minute mile. I actually walk at least a couple of miles a day…on purpose. As soon as I leave my house, it’s downhill for the first half mile. This means that the last half on the way back is, well, you know, uphill. Phew.

Notice I didn’t say that I run a 20-minute mile. I understand the importance of exercise, but unless something is chasing me, 100 steps per minute are just fine with me.

20 minutes, that’s it. Trust me, I’m in no rush. I’m just putting one foot in front of the other, swinging my arms a bit, and taking a look around at what nature or the neighbors have put in front of me to feast my eyes upon.

Walk with me. Put on some sneakers, pick a direction and head that way for 10 minutes, and then turn around.

Grab a water bottle in case you get thirsty. Pop in some earbuds and listen to a bit of your favorite playlist or choose to leave your phone at home so you can’t Uber your way back. Whatever works.

Boom. Just like that, 20 minutes of unadulterated, good, wholesome gettin’ your groove on. Maybe you even worked up a sweat. Feels good, huh?

The dreaded workout

I’ve said it before, I hate working out.

I’d much rather sit and find out which house that couple chose out of the three that were presented to them during the 30-minute TV show that left me hanging on each shiny new kitchen before every commercial break.

Who knew that a good daily workout can be done in right around the same amount of time?

If you do a web search for a 30-minute workout, I’d be willing to bet my snacks for the week that you’ll find one that suits you pretty well. The funny thing about time is that it goes by no matter what you’re doing. Why not kick yourself in the sweatpants and give it a try?

It’s completely fine if you have to take a few breaks in the middle of it or can’t quite do everything on day one. The important thing is to try. Since you’re trying, why not make it a habit?

I will admit that the sense of satisfaction that goes along with my happy and energized body after working out is a pretty good feeling. Sometimes I even celebrate with a protein shake if I wanna get real crazy.

Where does your time currently go?

How much time did you spend on your phone today looking at social media? Not sure? Well, your phone knows.

Dig in and you’ll most likely find a setting that not only shows you your screen time, but it breaks it down to show you that you may have spent more time on viral video clips than stock trades.

I’m going to make a fairly valid assumption that some of that time could be better used for a little jumpin’ jack action.

The benefits of exercise

If you didn’t already know, exercising regularly gives you more energy.

Physical activity can improve your brain health, help manage weight, reduce the risk of disease, strengthen bones and muscles, and improve your ability to do everyday activities.

You may feel overwhelmed with life and feel like you just need to rest, and that’s certainly understandable.

But don’t discount how taking a simple break from everything around you and either working up a good sweat or making a little time for yourself to get out and smell the roses, or the neighbor’s roses can be good for your mind, body, and soul.

Go for a walk or do a quick workout. Life’s crap will be there when you get back, but you’ll have the energy and mindset to better deal with it.

I have a terrible mindset when it comes to money, I always think there’s more to be made.

I’m not wrong. But applying that attitude if you’re financially over-extended is only feeding the financial vacuum of your lifestyle even more into the abyss, and that really sucks. If you’re reading this right now, you’ve either been there are you are there. If that’s the case, you also know what being in debt can do to your stress level.

You need to fix it.

Your health is far more important than money. A bold statement, but a true one. Keep overspending, playing catch up, and living paycheck to paycheck and the health risks creep up silently. Money won’t be your only problem. Or rather, lack of enough of it.

Sure, when money’s tight you need to find another income stream or, gulp, ask for a raise. There’s a faster way to initially balance out your influx with your outflow. I’m going to share it with you at the end of this.

You might not like it, though.

It’s nothing new

Whoever raised you may have told you somewhere along the line to live within your means. I know that I’d heard it a few times in a variety of ways. I was told to take ten percent of everything that I earned and forget it was there.

It seemed simple enough. Ten percent didn’t seem like a big deal. Plus, that left plenty to live off of. Piece of cake.

Well, it seemed like a piece of cake, until I learned that I liked cake, lots of cake.

It wasn’t long before I’d spend my allotted ninety percent net earnings before my next paycheck showed up and start to eye my bucket ‘o savings. It was that other amount that was staring me in the face every time I logged into my bank account.

There it was- checking account on the first line, savings account on the second. They were dangerously tied together and it wasn’t long before I started shaving a little off to help feed my excessive sweet tooth. Clearly, that’s a metaphor for crap that I didn’t need, but I bought it anyway.

Over time, I started making the local convenience store part of my morning routine. Soon after, it became part of my lunch routine and spiraled into my evening routine. Coffee, other drinks, and snacks quickly came to twenty to thirty dollars a day.

Ouch.

It doesn’t take a CPA to be able to add that up in your head.

But why stop there? Take out or even sit-in restaurant meals a few nights a week, an in-app purchase on my phone, the all-too-easy amazon prime single-click to order…guilty, guilty, guilty.

On top of that, there were things that I bought that I never needed in the first place which were now taking up valuable space in my space.

The quick fix is not the fix

I like having stuff. I liked not worrying about spending excessively. In order to keep at it, I needed more money, so I just made more.

I grabbed a second full-time job and did some stuff on the side. Money in, money out. The more I made, the more I spent.

It was exhausting.

The hard truth

It’s not that I had to work all the time. I’m pretty efficient. I figured out the ratio of having a job to actually having to do something for said job years ago. What ate away at me, was that I had to be available all the time to my income streams. I was tethered every day.

I started to realize that the only way to not constantly be accountable to the hand that fed me, was to stop needing to eat so much.

That was it.

I needed to stop spending money on useless shit.

Once the realization was made I started slowing the cash-sucking snowball that I’d created. Whatever I saw that I could do without was like a little ray of sunshine at the end of the hole in my wallet.

I give you…the answer

It’s not perfect, but you need to start somewhere. The below suggestions are the low-lying fruit of your dying tree. Harvest away and continue pruning until you flip your bad financial decisions around.

A tough pill to swallow? Probably. Worth the medicine? Absolutely.

1) Make a better deal

As far as your cell phone plan goes, yes, there’s a better deal out there. You probably don’t need or use everything that’s currently included in what you’re paying for. Check into that.

For that matter, call whoever provides services to you and ask if they have a better deal to offer you. Be diligent, stand your ground, and if you have to, mention the junk mail offer that you received from their competition. Some won’t budge, others will.

A single phone call can save serious cash.

2) No more one-click ordering

Throw your stuff into your shopping cart and don’t checkout.

It’s funny how if you wait a day or two you realize that you don’t actually need something that previously caught your eye.

3) Cut it

Getting rid of cable and cord-cutting is a great idea, as long as you don’t fall prey to every streaming service out there and end up paying even more than you were for your nightly binge-watching sessions.

Spend a few minutes and do the math. Keep in mind that most of your favorite network TV shows are available the next day on a streaming platform.

4) Grocery shop online

I hate going to the grocery store. It’s just not fun for me.

Whether you feel the same way or not, order online. You see exactly what the final price is, you show up and they bring your goods to your vehicle. For budgeting reasons, this will save you so much money you’ll kick yourself for not doing it sooner.

While you’re browsing through the online food aisles, plan the week. Toss in things to cover you for breakfast and lunch. Put a little thought into dinner ideas. With a little perseverance, you’ll be having too much fun whipping up your own tasty creations to miss going out to eat all the time.

Maybe you’ll even start inviting friends and family over to show off your culinary skills.

5) Mug ‘o joe

Get a cool travel coffee mug and make your coffee at home.

Don’t know how? The basic method is one tablespoon of ground coffee per cup of water in your coffeemaker.

6) Pay your bills just before the due dates

If you’re the type to pay all of your bills on the first of each month, stop that. Whoever you owe doesn’t care when you pay them as long as you pay on time.

You’ll miraculously see what the rest of the world knows as cash flow. It becomes addictive. You’ll see that you always have some money in your checking account, you’ll like it, and you’ll flip back to that ten percent saving teen you always knew that you could be.

7) Sell shit

Yeah, I went there. People buy everything.

I’ve seen social media posts for porch pickup items that someone was asking two dollars for. If there’s something that you haven’t used in months, clean it up, take a few good pics, and post it online. Once you start clearing out your clutter, you might even realize that you can live comfortably in a smaller space.

8) Bonus tip

If your credit is still in decent standing and your car keeps breaking down, buy or lease a new one.

Seriously. The cost of a new vehicle is the monthly payment. The cost of a paid-off vehicle that keeps having issues is the bill to get it fixed and the inconvenience of being without it while you wait for it to get fixed. The loan or lease payment is probably much cheaper if you look at what you’re spending each year. Plus, warranty. Yay.

I could keep going. The point is, to figure out what you can do without. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll find more freedom with having less than with having more.

I don’t care if you only send one email to your subscribers each month, have a newsletter.

It’s been said time and time again that owning your mailing list of people interested in what you have to offer is one of the most valuable assets to your business. If your business is being a creator, I would argue that it’s by far the most valuable. It doesn’t even matter what you create.

I’m going to share the two simplest and most important reasons why.

1) You own it

If every current online platform were to fall apart tomorrow, you’d still have access to those on your mailing list.

2) Direct access to your people

This isn’t where you post something which is followed by hoping that some feed doesn’t bury your best pitch or whatever you had to say underneath the ice cream flavor of the week.

A newsletter allows you to skip past the social media finger-crossing, and hand-deliver your goods to people who already said they were interested.

Allow me to elaborate

I’m not sure what else needs to be said. Of course, me being me, I’m gonna say some more because it’s what I do.

Maybe you have some questions…

1. Where do I start?
2. Won’t this cost me money?
3. What would I even include in my newsletter?

Let’s tackle them, shall we?

Where do you start?

Take a pause from reading this right now, and either search Google or Yeehaa, or whatever your favorite search engine is these days for the best free mailing list. If you want to skip the search and check out a few, here are some options of what’s out there:

• MailerLite
• Substack
• ConvertKit
• Mailchimp
• AWeber

Not a single affiliate link here, just some to check out. I recommend looking at the pricing options for each, seeing what’s included, and choosing what works best for you.

What’s the cost?

Each of the options that I’ve just listed has a free version, or at least free for up to a certain amount of subscribers. Once you surpass that number, you’ll have to pony up a little cash to reach more of your people.

If you reach that relative number, chances are you’re catching onto this whole thing and doing well enough to invest the small monthly fee your chosen provider charges. Once you go up a tier or two, they usually throw in some extra goodies to allow you to get even more value from your list.

Some newsletters even offer the means of having your subscribers pay you for something, easily offsetting the price once you graduate from the free option.

What’s in a newsletter?

Perhaps the best part of it all…

Whatever you want to include.

I’ve learned that brevity is the key. Even though your mailing list includes people that said that they want to hear from you, that doesn’t mean that they want you to talk their ear off. Have some long intro in your email and not only will you probably lose them in the first few lines, but they also might skim for the unsubscribe link.

Keep it on point.

Mine is simple. I say a quick hello, share a couple of my own personal discoveries of the past week, and point them to something that I want them to read, aka, one of my recent articles.

That’s it. Just keep it interesting.

Still on the fence?

If you’re still thinking about it or wondering if you need to have a newsletter? The answer again is a resounding yes. Once you sign up for whatever service looks good to you, get that link at the bottom of everything that you’ve ever written.

Start even if you aren’t sure what you’ll do with it yet. The value of having direct access to the people that believe in you is invaluable.