Back to School Like a Boss
Ah, back to school time! Cute kids with fresh haircuts dominate our Facebook feeds. Pinterest is ablaze with ambitious lunchbox inspiration. And, if you haven’t picked up your spiral-bound notebooks, tissues, and TI-84 calculators yet, you might want to have a hearty breakfast and avoid wearing open-toed shoes in preparation for the wild-eyed wasteland that is the Target school supplies section.
Maybe you have a brave little babe starting preschool. Maybe your little babe, in the blink of an eye, is a brand new adult starting college. Maybe YOU’RE the brand new adult starting college, or maybe you’re headed back that way after a break in the academic action. Whether you’re wiping away tears as your four year old marches into their very first classroom, shopping for extra-long twin sheets for your teenager’s dorm room, or trying to figure out a class schedule that works with your full time job, the beginning of the school year is a great time to reflect and reorganize.
Set Yourself Up for Success
Setting goals are fun. Staying on track to meet those goals, though, is a lot of work. Maybe you send your kid off with panda-shaped sandwiches and homemade kale chips in his lunchbox on the first day of school, but two weeks in, Lunchables and Capri Suns are back on the grocery list. Maybe your back-to-school ritual is to buy a cute new planner, bullet journal furiously for a few days, and then go back to your usual system of forgetting everything that your phone doesn’t remind you about. Maybe you resolve to go to the campus gym three times a week, but then you get your first homework assignment from British Literature, and it turns out that The Canterbury Tales isn’t quite the quick read that Pride and Prejudice was.
This school year, think about trying a new approach. Instead of turning your ambition up to 11 and hoping that good intentions and a really nice notebook will keep you motivated, set a few thoughtful, attainable goals that aren’t too dependent on rapid or dramatic changes. For example, instead of putting “Learn Spanish in 6 months” on your list, you could say, “Use Duolingo Spanish app for at least 10 minutes a day. Watch a movie in Spanish once a week. Have coffee with a Spanish-speaking friend whenever you can. See what happens.”
Solve for Y, Solve for Y-O-U
Another way to keep your morale-O-meter moving in the right direction is to mix it up…short-term goals give you a chance for short-term successes, which means more motivation to stick with the long-term ones. Life insurance checks both the boxes, since buying it takes very little time (especially when you can click your way through the whole process at ourlifecovered.com), but the security that it provides lasts much longer (maybe for a decade if you go with a 10 year term life insurance policy, maybe for the duration of your life if you decide on whole life insurance).
That very specific graphing calculator your 9th grader needs for Algebra I is probably pretty expensive…but this life insurance calculator is 100% free. We can’t help with the great “leggings vs. pants” school dress code debate or offer any explanation for why cafeteria peanut butter is so weird, but we CAN answer questions like:
- What is the difference between term and whole life insurance?
- How do I find the best life insurance for young adults?
- What are some good options for affordable family life insurance?
So once the lunches are packed and the car line chaos is over (or the syllabi have been procured and the 400 pounds of textbooks purchased), check out Our Life CoveredSMto do a little extra credit work. No dress code, no pop quizzes, no stretchy peanut butter…just smart, simple solutions to protect your loved ones.
Originally published at www.ourlifecovered.com.
