#169: One Tweak a Week in 2019 — Easy Improvements to Your Financial Life in 2019

Happy New Years! To kickoff 2019, we’ve created a free book called One Tweak a Week, outlining 26 easy, actionable ways that you can improve your financial life.

Today’s podcast episode covers these 26 tweaks, so you can listen in audio format, in addition to reading the book.

If you put these into action for the first six months of 2019, you’ll be in a stronger position in June than you started in January.

Each tweak takes less than one hour (some are as quick as five minutes), and taken together, these tweaks can accumulate into a serious impact.

Improve your money management and get closer to financial independence with our free book, One Tweak a Week. You can download it here: https://affordanything.com/2019

These tweaks include super-practical steps, like:

• Track your net worth
• Automate an extra one percent into savings
• Sell at least one household item on Craigslist/eBay/Facebook Marketplace

The tweaks also include bigger-picture action items, like:

• Write your “why” in 100 words or fewer
• Create an estate plan
• Identify one area in which you’re not performing enough preventative maintenance (such as routine veterinary checkups, or routine car maintenance)

When you download the book, you’ll also get a free weekly email reminder of This Week’s Tweak, delivered to your Inbox every Sunday.

You’ll get the podcast show notes, where you can read the description of the latest episode.

Finally, you’re invited to join the Facebook community, where you can share your stories with the rest of the community. We’ll be talking about This Week’s Tweak for the first six months of 2019.

Speaking of the community, I also wanted to cap off 2018 by sharing the numbers of how much the Afford Anything community has grown this year.

First, at the start of 2018, this podcast had 2 million downloads. We’re ending 2018 with 4.6 million downloads under our belt. Wahoo!

It took us two years to reach the first two million downloads — averaging a million a year — and then in our third year, we more than doubled our total downloads.

We nearly tripled our community on Instagram, starting 2018 with 4,000 followers and ending the year with 11,500.

We quadrupled the size of the community on YouTube, starting the year with 3,300 subscribers and finishing the year with more than 12,300.

Our email subscriber community has stayed exactly the same, starting the year with 49,000 email subscribers, rising to a peak of 55,000, and then falling to 50,000 after we culled the “cold subscribers,” those who aren’t opening emails or engaging with the content.

But the most important metric — the one that I bragged about to friends over Christmas (and it wasn’t a humble brag, it was a straight-up “hey check this out!”) — is that this community raised $21,653 for charity:water in 2018.

The Afford Anything community came together and raised enough money to sponsor either one mega-water-project or two separate water projects.

This money will go towards a water project, like digging a well or creating a rainwater catchment system, in an area of the world in which people get illnesses like cholera and typhoid from drinking polluted, dirty water.

We raised $21,653 this year. That’s incredible. And that’s the most powerful metric of all.

Thank you. Thank you for being part of this community. Thank you for subscribing to the show notes, for leaving a review, for sharing the episodes with your family and friends. Thank you for joining in the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, for tagging your friends, for spreading these ideas. This community is growing stronger everyday, and when we come together, we can (and we are!) making a massive positive impact on the world.

Cheers, and Happy New Years. Here’s to an amazing 2019 ahead.

– Paula

 

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