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In the next five minutes you can start a blog or purchase a $1,000 course. But that won’t give you a business.

That will give you a thing that can become a business, once you take the time to actually plan, consider your goals, and do the work.

I want to protect you from wasting money and hours, months, or years of time hustling for a business that isn’t right for you. From facing setbacks you could have avoided had you asked the right questions. From buying thousands of dollars of MLM inventory your friends don’t want.

Personally, it took a lot for me to come to this conclusion. Wrapping my head around the numbers and making deciding this may be the right fit for me was hard enough. An equally big part of my struggle has been reconciling feelings of shame and guilt.

My decision goes against what many articles in personal finance community, especially financial independence section, recommend.

As a reader, I never really gave a thought to how I could tell a good actor from a bad one. If I enjoyed the blog, I would read it. If I didn’t enjoy it, I would stop…

I never gave a thought to their ethics, or ethical standards of blogging. Why would I? I enjoyed all this free content. It kept me entertained, educated me, and helped me in my financial path. I was grateful for all these strangers on the internet that spent so much time creating helpful information for me to consume.

The reason our last budget didn’t work is because it was too much work to track & manage. The problem was that we didn’t have a system in place that would work for us.

So I recently set out to come up with a system that would fit our needs.

Because at the end of the day, the most effective budget is the one that you’ll stick to.

We weren’t sure how long it would take to get another job and what job that might be. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that this was a low point in my career, or at least I thought it would be.

Now, this could be a sob story about how unemployed life is hard, but it’s not.

Since I was laid off 4 years ½ years ago, I have increased my salary by over 100%.

We love Disney movies. We’ve been to Walt Disney World Resort in Florida several times. We play Disney themed board games at our house on family fun nights. I’m typing this article while wearing pink Mickey Mouse pajama pants.

Big. Disney. Nerds.

So, when my son and daughter asked about taking a trip to Walt Disney World, inspiration struck. I knew this could be a great opportunity to teach my kids a hands-on lesson about budgeting and saving money to reach a bigger goal.

I supported my parents more than half my life because I genuinely believed my parents loved me and I wanted to help them. Turns out, Momloved me, but Dad? He skated on the strength of her love and sacrifice which was so strong he could mimic both just from the reflected glow.

I share these harsh details to express that I know why I started off slow financially and why I used to treat money like it’s worthless. It was used against me, it was kept from me, and aside from the candy bar instance or my mom’s gambling issues, it wasn’t discussed.

But what it came down to was the fact that the toll of being the sole income earner (while he failed to contribute to the relationship in any significant way) was seriously impacting my well-being – physical, mental, emotional. Stress is a killer. It finds its way out, one way or another.

My break up fund was essentially my year-end bonus that I was 100% planning to put to any other use you could think of rather than helping me crutch my way out of an emotionally abusive and manipulative relationship.

Simply put, I benefit from the wage gap. If I realize that, but choose to keep quiet because I don’t want to rock the boat, then that is a tacit endorsement of the wage gap. And that sucks.

What I’m asking you is to just consider for a moment that there may be more to the story than meets the eye. You make fun of their fancy car, but what if they inherited that car from a parent who recently died?

Because like I said, adulting is hard and expensive enough in and of itself. So it’s only right to find some ways to treat yourself without emptying your wallet.

The reality is that, well, we kind of do hate poor people. And there’s a reason for that.

We’ll have to completely overhaul our budget to accommodate the realities of my new paycheck