financial stable sign

20 signs you’re financially stable:

You’re at peace with your money situation. Yup, more or less.You don’t fight about money with your spouse. Thankfully!You don’t use your credit cards often, or if you do, you pay them in full every month. We put everything we can on our card to get the cash back and to budget easier, but then we pay it all off at the end of each month.You’ve got a fully stocked emergency fund. Fail.A job loss wouldn’t mean you couldn’t pay your bills. Truth. For a little bit, at least… Unless we’re allowed to pull from our investments? (Which I’d never do! I’d go in debt before doing that!)Financial emergencies don’t invoke panic. For the most part, yeah… It always stings though.You’re okay with spending money on special occasions. No doubt! Can’t be obsessive!The thought of being generous sounds exciting and not panic-inducing. YES!! I get more pain from *not* giving back as much as I want to vs actually giving it… :(You’re happy about your financial situation. I am.Saving money has become a habit. Yup! Between retirement accounts and apps that help automate everything (Digit,Acorns) it’s been ingrained for years now.Others’ opinions about what you have/don’t have don’t concern you. Ain’t nobody got time for that!Paying the bills doesn’t require an in-depth plan. Haha, true… I love paying bills actually!Retirement and/or kids’ college expenses are covered.Retirement, yes. College for kids? We could be better about it… Kinda put it on pause the last few years while the Mrs. was working on finishing up her PHD, so once she’s back into the workforce again we’ll be revisiting it.Your debt-to-income ratio is below 30%. Yup! In fact, it’s 0% now w/ the mortgages gone.You’re thoughtful about purchases. I try to be, yes.Avoiding/eliminating debt is a priority for you. It was in the top 3 over the years, but never really the #1 spot since we weren’t dealing with credit card debt or other worse-than-mortgage types… I typically prefer to invest over paying off low interest debt, but I go in kicks depending on what’s motivating me at the time.  As for *avoiding* it altogether, well, that’s always preferable, yes, but I’m not opposed to taking on debt where it makes sense. Like for business or college or even loans to cover crap cash flows for short amounts of time, etc. You never really plan to take on debt if you don’t have to, but you know – $hit happens.You budget or you’re so good at spending wisely that you don’t need to budget. Used to be the former, now it’s moved over to the latter :) We more or less spend roughly the same every month minus some random events that go down, but I give us enough padding where we don’t have to worry about it much… But I’m still a HUGE proponent of budgeting especially in those earlier stages!! One of the best things you can do! (Which of course is why it’s in the title of our blog here ;) Though lately it’s more about *financial freedom* being sexy than anything!)You have a plan for the unexpected. No comment, haha… Planning is not my strong suit, though depending on the situation I’m fairly confident we could overcome it. I just don’t have every last contingency planned or a million buckets of cash spread around for each possible scenario. Hopefully our cash + credit lines + investments could cover whatever might be looming!You buy appreciating as opposed to depreciating assets.Yup, pretty much… I don’t really buy any “things” anymore but just little “experiences” like eating out or some beers and coffee here and there and those such things… All extra money pretty much goes into investments these days (or into my kids ;)).Large purchases don’t create a damaging ding in your finances. I don’t know what these large purchases would be, but yeah – we’d be safe from a lot of them. Or we’d just finance them if it made better sense and didn’t screw over our cash flow (see – I’m okay with debt! But that purchase better be something damn good like a unicorn or trip around the world or something!)