The Mom Weekly Volume 86: April 1, 2025
You can read this, or any other previous Mom Weeklies, by going to the home page here.
Notes:
(This section is “not” an April Fool’s joke/prank in any way!)
Remember how much I love you,
Mom
Check the Date
Most of you know that I’m not a big fan, or a fan at all, of April Fool’s Day. It’s just not my thing, because it seems like pranks or jokes can get elaborate or messy or mean or land poorly, etc. Too much risk for not much reward.
It turns out that I’m not the only one—and this cyber security company used the “holiday” as an opportunity to educate people about scams.
Fortunately, there have been some cute April Fools posts/videos related to personal finance over the years. Let me share some for some comic relief (or at least a chuckle) this day. Most are from YNAB, because when I went looking those were the best produced and funniest.
YNAB AI—What Could Go Wrong?
YNAB for Pets
I Never Had More Money Than When I Started Using this App
YNAB Live Push Notifications
The Motley Fool April Fools Jokes Throughout the Years
Interesting/Notable:
Keeping Small Things Small: Laura Vanderkam
Best quote from this piece:
Or you can ask yourself “Whose issue is this anyway?” It might be nice if your colleague didn’t use double exclamation points in all his e-mails, but this hardly reflects on you.”
The Pros of Keeping Christ on the Cross
Another Substack writer I came across. Maybe someone shared it? I find Substack’s current interface odd and non-intuitive.
An excellent quote:
“The crucifixes are not descriptive of where Christ is right now, they’re an exploration of what that moment entailed.”
An Action Item: Prepare Your Net Worth for Quarter 1
Remember that at the end of each quarter, the action item is to update your net worth. March 31 was the end of Q1 (or the first quarter of 2025), so it’s worthwhile updating.
Repeating my regular script:
This may take slightly longer this first time, if you have not done so. But I promise you, over time, you will be happy that you do this.
The reason I hesitated is that, especially for younger people, it could be pretty likely you have a negative net worth, largely because of student loans. But that’s will be so temporary (over the long haul!) that it should not discourage you.
When people begin to track their net worth, they call it “getting back to zero” when they have a zero net worth. That may not seem promising, but it’s a great accomplishment for those who have paid off a significant amount of debt, whether student loan debt, credit card debt, or other types of debt.
And it can be very encouraging to see an improvement in your net worth over time.
Here my super-simple net worth calculator spreadsheet .There’s no formatting with cool colors and such, but it works and completes the calculations for you. Let me know what you think about it!
A couple of notes:
*Unfortunately, Google Sheets does not allow password-protecting of items. I prefer to keep this information, and most of my spreadsheets, in a format I can password protect. Think Microsoft Excel, Apple’s Numbers, etc. You can even do this on paper if you want, and store it somewhere safe.
*There are two “sheets” in the shared spreadsheet —the first is a blank one, and the second is a sample with random numbers that I have included. I have added in pretend numbers to the sample sheet, so you can see how the numbers change over time.
*Sometimes people do not add in their vehicles or mortgages. I do, because you can see how much equity you have in the house or vehicle. But I mentally don’t include them the same weight as other assets, since they are not liquid and it’s not likely one would sell them for living expenses, in retirement or not.
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