NWP Monthly Digest | February 2026

Jason Zweig is a very famous writer for the Wall Street Journal.  He is one of my favorites and someone I often look to for inspiration and insight.  One of the more impressive things I’ve heard him say over the years is, “My job is to write the exact same thing between 50 and 100 times a year in such a way that neither my editors nor my readers will ever think I am repeating myself." 

Personal finance can be like that.  While the world continues to throw us chaos and curveballs, practical decision making in personal finance can become an afterthought and, dare I say, boring.

The boring is what makes it great.

In my last newsletter, I discussed poverty vs. participation and the costs of daily American life that seem to have everyone beat up and bruised, so it comes as no surprise to me that same theme has been a huge part of my conversations with my clients as our “kick-off” meetings started in earnest a little over three weeks ago.

At the beginning of every year, we like to go over expected cash flows for the coming year with our clients, and then update and review long-term cash flows to make sure everything is still on track.  It’s a fancy way of saying, “lets see how much money you’re going to make, spend, and save this year.”

As a part of that process, we also review our clients’ goals, both short and long term, and see if we have enough resources to make that happen.  As is the case with everyone, you can have almost anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want – there are always trade-offs.

Lately, the trade-off seems to be that almost everyone is feeling pinched. 

“I can’t believe how much our health insurance went up this year.”

“We don’t like to micromanage our budgeting, but it just seems like we are spending so much more money than we used to.”

“Kids!  They’re so expensive!”

“We’re getting nervous about that old car…we’ve started thinking about a new one.  I just can’t stand to spend that kind of money, though.”

“As usual, we have about 10 things we need to do to our house, but we just can’t afford all of that right now.”

Actual quotes from actual clients…and maybe those things ring true for you, also.

As I love to say, “90% of personal financial problems can be fixed by spending less money or saving  more of it.”  Sadly, however, spending less money may be the single hardest thing to fix.  Just like nutrition and dieting, where 90% of your success comes from consuming less calories and eating the right kind of food, yet millions of Americans struggle with their weight.

Social media has no shortage of people peddling their “life hacks” for you on how to become healthier or wealthier, but almost none of those will work.

Choosing not to buy that latte at Starbucks, or deciding to invest in gold, or thinking about private equity or private credit…all of that is “advice” that just flutters around the edges.  If you want to make progress with your money, there is no substitute for tracking your expenses and staying mindful of what you spend it on.

KPIs for our financial lives

I’m not advocating for a restrictive budget.  I am advocating to pay attention to what you spend your money on within a framework.

Don’t go looking to categorize every transaction into tiny pieces.  You don’t really need to know, for example, how much you’re spending on coffee.  What you should focus your energy on is knowing the difference between a “want” and a “need”, and then allow your spending to fall into those categories.

Examples of needs: rent/mortgage, taxes, utilities, food at home (groceries), loan payments, insurance, other bills, auto maintenance/gas, health care

Examples of wants: dining out, shopping, travel, subscriptions

If you allow yourself that framework, you should be able to start tracking some very basic key performance indicators that will give you all the information you need.  Are you keeping your needs to approximately 50% of your take home pay?  What percentage are your wants taking up?  Can you reduce those to increase your savings rate?

That’s it.  Simply taking the very popular 50/30/20 (50% for needs, 30% for wants, 20% for savings) approach to your household budget and giving yourself some latitude to discover what you’re actually spending your money on and if it makes you happy.

If your savings rate is below 10%, I would say make that your primary focus.  If you are spending more than half of your take home pay on wants, figure out why and if it actually makes you happy. 

But here’s the real trick to all of this.  If you make changes, can you be content with your changes?

There was viral twitter post earlier this year by author Dan Koe called “How to fix your entire life in 1 day”, and I highly recommend you read it.  It may be the best overall piece of advice I’ve seen for actually trying to create changes to your lifestyle. 

“If someone says they want to lose 30 pounds, I often don’t believe them.  Not because I don’t think they are capable, but because there are too many times when that same person says ‘I can’t wait until I’m done losing weight so I can start to enjoy life again.’  I hate to break it to you, but if you don’t adopt the lifestyle that led to you losing the weight, for life, and find a reason with a higher gravitational pull than the one tying you to your previous ways, then you will go straight back to where you started, and you can unhappily say that you wasted the one resource you will never get back: your time.” ~Dan Koe

This hit me like a ton of bricks.  In a nutshell, this is why all of our New Year’s Resolutions get thrown into the garbage can before the calendar flips to February.  Or, as Koe continues, “you aren’t where you want to be because you aren’t the type of person who would actually be there.”

I don’t write this to be harsh, and I don’t think Koe wrote his piece to be harsh, either.  But this is the first thing we have to do before we can make any sort of meaningful change with our lifestyle, whether that be our health or our wealth.  If you aren’t saving enough money to help you create some level of financial independence later in life, it’s because you aren’t the type of person who wants to achieve that goal.  Take a breath and read that sentence again.

That’s the power of working with a financial planner.  They will help you evaluate where you are, find out if that’s enough or if it isn’t, and then you’re going to have to make a significant effort to find contentment in other ways than just spending all of your money, and your financial planner will hold you accountable.

The biggest reason Grant and I see people fail with their personal finances is that they don’t want to be held accountable.  They don’t want someone to tell them they have to save more money, or they’re spending too much time worrying about things that won’t have a material impact on achieving their goals.

If 2026 is the year you’re going to make these changes, start with a very simple mantra.  Find contentment over consumption, become the kind of person who achieves their financial goals, and change your lifestyle to be that person for the rest of your life.

“Not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.” ~Morgan Housel

Noble Wealth Pro Tip of the Month

It’s the beginning of the year and I just spent a lot of time talking about budgeting with you. You’re either sick to your stomach or excited to see how you can get better with your own cash flows. What are some of the best ways to track your budget, though? The answer is, “the one you will stick with.”

I’ve tried a lot of different tools over the years. I’ve built my own spreadsheets to track spending, I was an early adopter of Mint.com, I spent weeks trying to get YNAB to work for me, Tiller Money, Rocket Money…and I finally settled on Monarch Money. Why? I’m not completely sure, but my guess is because it actually does the things that matter the most to me. It’s easy to link my accounts and customize, the interface is clean, and I keep coming back to it. I’ve stuck with it, and that was the only way I was going to be able to help my family become the kind of people that understand where their money is going.

At the end of the day, that’s what I’m trying to accomplish with any of my goals going forward. I want to become the kind of person who achieves their goals first.

Things We’re Reading and Enjoying

How to fix your entire life in one day - by Dan Koe

You’re probably going to quit your New Year's resolution.

And that’s okay. Most people do (studies show 80-90% failure rates) because most people don’t actually want to change on a deep, internal level. That is, they go about changing their life in the completely wrong way. They create a New Year's resolution because everyone else does – humans want to impress others more than they want to impress themselves... we create a superficial meaning out of status games – but they don’t meet the requirements for true change, which goes a lot deeper than convincing yourself you’re going to be more disciplined or productive this year.

I’m not here to talk down on you. I’ve quit 10 times more goals than I’ve set. I think that should be the case for most people. But the fact that people try to change their lives and utterly fail almost every time holds true. So much so that it’s a meme for the gym to be crowded during January and return back to normal in February.

A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About - by Morgan Housel

An iron rule of math is that 50% of the population has to be below average. It’s true for income, intelligence, health, wealth, everything. And it’s a brutal reality in a world where social media stuffs the top 1% of moments of the top 1% of people in your face.

You can raise the quality of life for those below average, or set a floor on how low they can go. But when a majority of people expect a top 5% outcome the result is guaranteed mass disappointment.

“There is nothing noble about being superior to your fellow man. True nobility is being superior to your former self.” - Ernest Hemingway