Hello All of You Great People and Welcome to the February 2021 newsletter. Wherever you are on your financial journey I’m glad you are here with me- Steven Donovan aka Even Steven Money!

What’s been going on this month

Since I felt like my January was filled with action and activities it goes to show that life is a balance. As I went through my February photos most of our activities were spent at or near the house working on landscaping, our backyard garden, or visiting local places.

My wife did purchase an annual membership to our local Botanical gardens so most of our pictures are visits to walk through and see birds, trees, and a vast array of plants and flowers. The picture from above included.

I am happy to report our backyard garden has officially produced many harvests of arugula and just recently broccoli as well. Next up is cantaloupe and we also have high hopes for our avocado and mango trees to produce for the first time.

I’m pretty sure everything I just wrote could easily categorize me as an old retired man!

So I’ll make sure to add my wife and I have been getting out a little on Sundays for bike rides, long runs/roller boarding of over 6 miles, and of course long walks with our dog Angel. Along with making it to the gym 5 days a week in the month of February. Does an old retired man do that?!

✍Writing On the Blog✍

After taking the entire month of January off from writing to focus on my RYFG clients I was back at it with some personal finance posts. Both articles this past month are about saving money and a couple of very specific cases of how I saved over $100 with a couple quick phone calls.

​How to Get Your Citi AAdvantage Credit Card Annual Fee Waived​

​How to Avoid Fees in your Investment Account​

If it’s anything I have learned in my 10+ years of banking and lifetime of personal experience is to always make a phone call to ask for your fees to be waived.

🗓What’s coming next month🗓

Believe it or not I recently have had an upswing of motivation to write and share my stories and personal experiences with everyone.

I’ll be talking a little bit about what debt you should pay off first. Which from personal experiences and coaching others can be one of the more difficult problems to solve. I’ll talk more about the math and the psychology behind it all.

Then later in the month I talk a little bit about investing. I talk about investing here on the newsletter pretty regularly but not as much on my blog. So I’ll dive into index funds, but talk more about the gamble and the fun stuff behind investing in individual stocks that I’m interested in.

Coaching Feedback ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

All has been quiet in coaching feedback for the month of February. I’m looking forward to working with new clients in March and can’t wait for the new adventures to begin.

🧛What I Sucked at This Month🧛

This one is pretty glaring to me. I had plans to finish my new budget template and create a free video course for those visiting my website. I did neither.

This may be an excuse but I wanted to have more people work with the new budget template before creating a video for it. Some of this is fear and some of this is procrastination.

If you want to check it out here is a testing copy that should give you view only access. If you select File>Make a Copy this will allow you to make edits and use the spreadsheet.

I'm mostly looking for feedback on the "January" and "Wide January" tabs as these are essentially the same but "January" is in a longer scroll down format to view and the "Wide January" is in a 1 page view. Both are zero sum budgets and meant to track fixed and flexible expenses.

I would certainly appreciate any feedback that you may have.

What's New

🆓Coaching Client Guidance

We are already 2 months, 8 weeks, 60 days, or 1/6th of the way through the new year. Crazy as that sounds. My recommendation last month was really a look into the first 12 weeks of the year. Here’s what should be done so far if you are following along.

Now you have taken care of the first 12 weeks of the year and you have already:

• Reflected on last year
• Did some trial and error testing on your goals for the year
• Have the the entire 1st quarter or 12 weeks goals and action plan to reach the beginnings of your big year long goals

I thought it would be fun to share with you what my goals look like for the first 12 weeks for myself at least from my health and fitness. These goals for me are much harder than financial goals. Maybe it’s the opposite for you. I’ll share my goals and progress so far down below in my health and fitness section.

As far as my financial goals for the year, most if not all of these goals are included in our Reach Your Financial Goals or RYFG talk at the beginning of the year. We have our savings and investments set up to be automatic. So I’ll check in after the first 12 weeks of the year in early April to see if we are on track and then look ahead at the next 12 weeks to see if anything needs to be adjusted.

After paying off all of our debt, our finances have been increasingly simplified.

📈Stock Market📈

The stock market itself has been a roller coaster of emotions, much like it usually is. Gamestop stock along with Robinhood and Reddit user warranted it’s own financial hearing. The stock itself soared, crashed, and soared again recently.

I personally don’t even pretend to know what the stock market will do. I suggest you do the same.

It’s not easy but adding monthly contributions to your retirement accounts, paying down personal debt, and saving money for larger purchases & rainy days ahead is the tried and true answers to personal finance, saving, and investing.

The Gamble

For those of you who are ahead of the game and investing for wealth, early retirement, or to avoid heading over to the casino you might be intrigued by what I have been researching more and more lately.

Within the last 60 days I have put more time and energy into learning more about:

• SPACs
• Turnkey real estate
• Hard money lending

I won’t get too far into the details of any of these investment ideas but I would imagine in the near future I may be writing about one or all of these.

I even did some research on a merchant cash advance business but in the end we decided that it’s more than likely a ponzi scheme. It was tough to say no because of the large returns.

So I can’t even imagine what someone who is looking to make money with a small amount of money and sees a way out of their 9-5 job through this “investment” could say no to.

Personal Side of Life & What I’ve Been Listening, Reading, & Watching

🎧Here’s what I listened to:

• ​​Robinhood Snacks Daily-If you like learning about individual stocks, market trends, and enjoy the business side of it all. It’s absolutely for you. I listen to it every morning and skim read the email.
• ​The All In Podcast-Truthfully I only came across this podcast because of Chamath Palihapitiya who in his Twitter feed can be described as CEO @SocialCapital, Chairman @VirginGalactic, Owner @Warriors, Bestie @theallinpod. I have been following Chamath recently because of my spiked interest in SPACs. I’ve only listened to one podcast and wasn’t overly impressed besides the vast knowledge they have in their related fields.

​
​​📙Book listening this month:

• ​Invested ​
• ​When to Rob a Bank
• ​Greenlights​
• ​Ready Player Two (In progress)
• ​Wild at Heart (physically reading and meeting with some guys to talk about this book)

I really enjoyed Greenlights by Matthew Mcconaughey. I went into the book with low expectations and not really knowing much about him as a person. Only from his days of romantic comedy movies, Lincoln commercials, and getting arrested for banging on some drums naked. Mcconaughey is a storyteller and his stories are just like him, pretty far out there. So Greenlights was a fun read for sure.

📺What I’m watching this month:

• HBO Max, Netflix, & Sports

Not too much has changed over the last month as we have been watching HBO Max, which has been a great purchase for the movies that are in theatres and simultaneously streamed to HBO max alone. Also watching a little bit of Netflix. My wife and I often look for a very light comedy and have recently been diving into Schitt’$ Creek which is a fun watch.

I’m still watching my beloved Syracuse Orangemen and Wisconsin Badgers college basketball as I mostly have had my heart torn out repeatedly but entertaining nonetheless. Just this past weekend I was able to take some “me time” and watch a couple games while the wife was away shopping with the family. We both came away happy with our activities.

My Milwaukee Bucks flag is still flying high (both literally and figuratively) as I do my best to catch the nationally televised games that are on before I go to bed. Seriously I should live on the West coast just so I can watch sports at a decent time. I mean come on starting a game at 9:30 ET! Go Bucks Go!!

🥕Looking Ahead🥕

The month ahead will have a little bit of catch up on items that I promised to complete last month. You have to get a little bit better each day is the goal. I’ll also be celebrating my wife’s birthday which is always a fun activity for the entire family.

I’ll be looking at finishing up the last 4 weeks of my 12 week goals in my business, health & fitness, and a few personal finance and investment activities that are expected this month.

🏋Health and Fitness🏋​

Here’s my health and fitness goals that I mentioned from above.

Looking at my health and fitness goals through the first 12 weeks they include the following:

• Lose 8 lbs and drop 2% body fat
• Get stronger in my squats and set personal records
• Increase my aerobic capacity and set personal records for rowing
• Complete 1 strict handstand push up (HSPU) by the end of the 12 weeks

Here’s where I stand so far towards my goals. My weight has basically stayed the same if anything I have eaten more food and less of a strict diet than I should to achieve my goals. I’m also starting to question if dropping weight really goes with my other goal of getting stronger. Also adding on my 1 HSPU was actually too much for me as I’m already adding on 3 after session workouts for the week and adding anything more is too much for this “old man”.

Where I have been on point is my squat program and my aerobic capacity training with rowing. I have been putting in extra work and the results show. Who would have thought if you put in extra work that results would happen?!

I’m a big believer in spending more time, energy, and money on what you truly love and value! For me that's my beautiful wife and close family members, travel, and health & fitness. I hope you are doing the same.

Until next month my friends!

Insert Financial Professional Photo;)