Happy June! I love the start of a new month. June, in particular, has always heralded the start of summer for me personally. This June I’ve got big plans, financial and otherwise, and I can’t wait to share them.
I’ve got exactly a week left at my nonprofit job. (I extended my last day twice already for my boss because we’re such a small company.) But now we’re in the final countdown, I begin training my replacement tomorrow and I’ve sent my last invoice! I’m really excited to be wrapping up this job. I’m going out on a positive note with my boss and I made a little extra money by staying a week longer than planned.
I plan on spending the first two weeks of self-employment doing more of the funemployment thing. I am really struggling with burn out, and I’m constantly exhausted. I want to sleep a lot and give myself a little break.
This coincides nicely with the start of June. On the 6th my housemates and I are moving for two weeks while repair work is done on our houses foundation. I plan on taking those two weeks as a staycation, full of self-care and figuring out exactly how I want to build my brand.
Due to the inconvenience of moving out, my landlord has knocked two weeks off of rent for June, and he’s paying for our AirBnb. I’ve also scheduled enough catering events this month to meet my bare minimum income need ($1,200) from that alone. With the extra week of payment from the nonprofit, I feel really good about taking a mini-break from life for two weeks.
(I’ll still be catering throughout those two weeks, but not having to do anything in between catering events for the nonprofit is going to make a HUGE difference.)
My rent for June is due today, and I’m actually going to send in enough money for June and July. I have the money in my account to do so, and I like knowing rent will already be paid for when I start my first true month of freelancing in July.
I am also just a few hundred dollars away from hitting my $2,000 goal for my Fuck it Fund, and my e-fund is actually higher than I had planned on it being. I have 5-6 months of expenses saved up at this point. Plus, I’ll be catering at least a few events each month for the rest of the year, so I should be fine when it comes to hitting that bare minimum each month.
On a non-financial note, June is also going to see a radical shift in my eating habits. I’ve been dealing with stomach pains for the last three years and have no explanation for them. They come and go; sometimes they’re severe and accompanied with vomiting, sometimes they’re mildly annoying. I’ve seen countless doctors and had a bunch of tests done. (Like, I had a colonoscopy at 24.)
I’ve done a few different things throughout the past couple years to combat the pains, but this month marks a new effort. I’m embarking on a very strict elimination diet over the next five weeks with the help of a GI. Hopefully, we’ll be able to find a food or a group of foods that causes the pain and I can just cut it out from my diet altogether.
I’m pretty into healthy eating and already restrict myself in lots of ways- no red meat, no pork, low dairy. But I eat a ton of sugar, I drink coffee every day, and I rely a lot on carbs at most of my meals. I’ll be cutting out sugar, dairy, soy, meat, legumes, eggs, alcohol and gluten over the next five weeks, and then slowly reintroducing things to my diet.
It’s going to be hard! I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m not sure what the cause of the pain is, but I’m willing to do this thing for five weeks to try and find out! I keep telling myself that it’s just like debt payoff- work hard now and reap the rewards later. I’m a sprinter, so I’m just gonna sprint through this!
What are your June plans and goals?
Kara Perez is the original founder of From Frugal To Free. She is a money expert, speaker and founder of Bravely Go, a feminist financial education company. Her work has been featured on NPR, Business Insider, Forbes, and Elite Daily.