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31 Day Reset: Day 24 – Make New Friends

I’m participating in the 31 Days to Reset Your Life program at Happy Black Woman. The program is designed to help you evaluate your goals and priorities and think of them in the context of your life today and how you might be able to refocus on what’s important. Read on to learn about my experience with the challenge!

The Day 24 exercise serves to underscore the progress we’ve made the past two days with creating a Reset Project and finding a community to support it. Rosetta has asked us to go one step further and make new friends and connections within these communities who have similar goals. The argument is that with like minded people around us, we’re more likely to continue to act on our Reset Project.

I’m all about this, except with my challenge of even finding a supportive community to help me focus on resetting my finances, finding new friends in the community is even more difficult. So, I did what I could. I went to the Mint.com Facebook page to find these new connections (which I mentioned yesterday).

First I took a look at my current Facebook friends who also are a part of this online community. One of them was Emily Baime, whom I love, but I would hardly say I need to reconnect with her as I did just venture to Sacramento to visit earlier this month. The other one is a friend who I haven’t actually spoken to in probably close to four years. Perfect. So, I messaged him to reconnect, mentioned I saw him there, and asked if he has any advice or tips on improving my financial literacy.

The next two connections were a little more awkward for me. I went onto Mint.com’s Facebook page and looked at who had posted on the page or mentioned Mint.com lately. I took two people, both who mentioned loving the service or involving it in their new year’s resolutions, and sent them messages. Messaging strangers online isn’t exactly something I’ve done in the past fifteen years, so I definitely felt like I put myself out there a bit. But we’ll see what happens!

Again, if you have a better suggestion about a community or peers I could connect with to improve my financial literacy, please send it my way!

-N.C.

31 Day Reset: Day 23 – Finding Support

I’m participating in the 31 Days to Reset Your Life program at Happy Black Woman. The program is designed to help you evaluate your goals and priorities and think of them in the context of your life today and how you might be able to refocus on what’s important. Read on to learn about my experience with the challenge!

The Day 23 challenge was to find a community of people who would support you and your goals from the 31 Day Reset program or specifically your Reset Project. As my Reset Project focused on finances, this was tough for me. I knew that a step in the right direction would be to sign up on Mint.com, a website I had heard about from several people. The program pulls information from all your financial sites (checking, savings, credit cards, etc) to compile it all, create budgets, help with spending alerts, and the list goes on and on. I know, it sounds scary to give that kind of access, but I haven’t heard anything about it not being secure from anyone I know.

I signed up on the site and forgot for a minute about today’s exercise. I was amazed at the budgeting and organizing I could do on the site. Of course, as it is December, two of my largest expenses besides rent were $650 on gifts and $120 on donations to nonprofits… it will be interesting to take a closer look next month. I remembered today’s assignment and looked for an online community on the site and couldn’t find much. But I did Like them on Facebook and found a lot of activity there, and followed them (and many other similar organizations) on Twitter. I hope through these avenues I can get connected.

Please, if you know of any communities where people in their late twenties might be discussing similar issues, send them my way! I would love to get plugged in and educate myself about becoming more financially literate and secure.

-N.C.