Have you ever worked construction at the entry level? I spent part of a summer working for a general contractor, getting paid $8 per hour to pour concrete, hammer nails, and do whatever else they needed. That was hard work. I don’t regret my time working in construction, and the main reason is that it […]
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The Financial Buffer is the financial wall you build between yourself and economic insecurity. I want to stress that the financial buffer is not the same as an emergency fund. An emergency fund covers three to six months’ worth of living expenses. An emergency fund is just common sense and structuring your life so that […]
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Why, if you have credit card debt, would you buy a new pair of skis and bindings for over $1000 if you can buy demo skis (that have been used about five times) for $400? If you don’t have at least $1 million in assets, why would you spend $50,000 on a new truck when you […]
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Juliet Schor’s The Overspent American was one of the five books that put me on a vector towards financial independence. I read the book in my early twenties, and the material helped unhook me from the unconscious spending patterns of modern society.Key Ideas From The Overspent AmericanPeople use spending to establish their social position–to send […]
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Prices are often more negotiable than you think. I recently visited an REI to buy new hiking shoes in preparation for a trip to Croatia. I was kind of bummed that basically all the shoes I liked were selling for $120.00 or more, which seemed a bit rich. So I deployed one of my favorite […]
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It’s sort of nuts that people don’t use our beautiful libraries more. Especially those people focused on achieving financial independence and generally being smart with their money.You Can Get Kindle Books From Your LibraryFirst, did you know you can check out Kindle titles (and e-books more broadly) from the library? My library has tons of […]
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Here’s a counterintuitive approach to achieving financial independence. Indulge small luxuries. What do I mean by that? It’s simple. We all have the impulse to splurge sometimes–to buy something nice. To enjoy luxury. Rather than attempting to suppress that instinct completely, it is far better to indulge the urge on smaller, more affordable items rather than something […]
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It was the heart of winter in Riga, Latvia. Dark. Dark when you got to work, dark when you went home. On those few occasions when the sun did peak out from cloudy skies, the light at 57 degrees north was wan and slanting. And in walked The Frugal One. The Frugal One had come to work […]
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Mr. Money Mustache is arguably the most influential financial blogger on the planet. He hacked his way to early retirement in his early 30s, chilled for a few years, then established a website focused on financial independence that receives millions of visitors per month. In this review, we cover the Pros and Cons of the “Mustachian” […]
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Not long ago, I wrote about the importance of finding leverage on your path to wealth–leverage through scale, leverage through attention, leverage through investments, even leverage through elite institutions. I want to clarify something about leverage, however. Consider this. What if you tried to be Katy Perry, Warren Buffet, Tom Brady, and a real estate tycoon all […]
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