Every Monday is Intents and Purchases day at Living Behind the Curve.

Do you break out in a cold sweat when the bills come, or when you think about retirement? I used to. (Insert random anecdote here about me crying over a pile of past-due statements.) Managing your finances can be very overwhelming, and sometimes even panic-inducing. Mer and I take a different approach to finance. We set financial goals and work toward them, practice selective frugality, and tie our finances to our simplicity. On Mondays, we talk about the techniques we use to become a bit more financially zen.

Goals can be scary, too. Growing up, I learned that there are three guarantees in life: death, taxes, and having goals — we just never talked about death or taxes. I was taught that the relentless pursuit of goals was the only path to success, and anything less was failure. Mer and I don’t believe that goals need to be restrictive or confining. We see goals as guidelines — they give us a general direction to move in. As long as we are working toward those goals, we are successful.

We will bring you real-life examples from our own lives and (hopefully) those of guest posters. We’ll give you financial recaps and milestones, our frugal and non-frugal methods, our insights on investments and saving, share some ideas on short-term and long-term goals, and generally give you a window into our overall progress. Occasionally, there will also be links to and commentary on posts from related blogs around the interwebs.

And, because we will eventually run out of things to say, we are always open to suggestions. If there’s something you’d like to see here, please let us know in the comments.

Tune in tomorrow, when I introduce Kitchen Sink Tuesdays, where anything and everything can happen.