Welcome to Under 2, an email series delivering short insights to empower your money life – in 2 minutes or less.
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In my career as a health scientist, I regularly practiced careful observation. To draw clear, meaningful conclusions, you must be attentive and also free of bias or assumptions. Only then can you see patterns and connections in the data and prior literature that you might otherwise miss.
The same is true of our financial lives.
So often, we set goals based on what we think we should want, what everyone else is saying: save more, spend less, hustle harder. We forget to pause and ask: Are these goals actually aligned with the life I want to live?
And even when we know the answer, we struggle to trust our own insight.
It’s easy to let conventional, and even sometimes arbitrary, financial wisdom guide our choices. Save three months living expenses in an emergency fund. Cut out everything unnecessary.
But here’s the truth: what’s “unnecessary” is unique to each of us and can also be rather different during the various stages of our lives. Sometimes seemingly normal expenses are actually excessive, but other times what we’ve labeled an indulgence might actually be an investment in a bigger purpose.
For example, spending more on childcare or housecleaning might free up energy for meaningful and lucrative work. Donating to causes you care about could make your life feel more purposeful than adding to your emergency fund ever could.
And yet, the opposite may be true: clearing away unused subscriptions, low-value recurring charges, or creating boundaries to curb impulse purchases often reveal the resources you need to move firmly toward your highest priority, truest goals.
The key is to look harder at your financial life with clear, unbiased eyes. Spend time examining your outgoing cashflow with a critical eye. Where is your money going? And why?
Is it moving you closer to the person you want to become and life you want to live?
Or is it quietly slipping away on everyday things that barely matter to you?
Every small change, like canceling an unused subscription or redirecting spending to what matters most, can shift your trajectory. And those shifts are how the right kind of change is created over the long term.
Remember that financial clarity isn’t simply about spending less or more. It’s about spending better. Cutting away the noise so you can grow what truly matters.
Give yourself the space to observe and evaluate… and look harder. You might find that your current path isn’t quite the right one. And that’s a good thing to uncover.
The important thing is to observe carefully, then adjust, realign, and start using your money as a purposeful tool instead of feeling like money has a life of its own taking you along for the ride.
Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.
Joe Biden
If you are influenced by the opinion of others, you will have no desires of your own.
Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich
We like to think we can have an extraordinary life by making ordinary decisions, but it’s not true. It’s actually all the ordinary decisions – the safe ones, recommended by every expert, criticized by no one – that make us incredibly vulnerable in times of chaos and crisis.
Ryan Holiday in Courage Is Calling
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Under 2, an email series designed to share quick bites of wisdom to empower your financial journey (while keeping it short). Be sure to sign-up below to get these messages in your inbox.
All for now,
Lindsey