Free Kindle eBook: From Zero to Millionaire

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Here’s a free Kindle eBook version of a personal finance and investing book that was published just last month: From Zero to Millionaire: A simple, effective and stress-free way to invest in the stock market by Nicolas Bérubé. (That is an Amazon affiliate link, so you’ll have to visit the actual website to see it.)

“Investing is a simple activity, which an entire industry strives to make complicated to justify its existence.” – Nicolas Bérubé.

The book appears to be targeted at the Canadian market primarily, or at least the author is a Canadian journalist. Either way, the underlying message appears solid but I guess it needs a little bit of marketing oomph in the United States. I haven’t finished it, but the blurb looked interesting as it promised some interesting anecdotes at the minimum. Download it now for free, read it later.

He also uses little-known examples, such as the forgotten theft of the Mona Lisa, Isaac Newton’s stock market disaster, and the mistake made by one of the world’s greatest investors, to make learning about investing a compelling journey through history, psychology, and finance.

Finally, using the latest research, he identifies proven and accessible ways to invest, and offers concrete advice on how to get started or take control of your investments today.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Essentialism Book: More By Doing Less

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If I were to summarize the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown, I would simply put up the graphic (from the book) above.

We all have finite energy. Nobody can “have it all”. You need take the time to explore and find a few pursuits that are a definitive “YES!”, and most other things need a polite but firm “No”. We know that everything is not equally important, but we still spend too much time putting out small fires.

The creates two difficult questions. What are your highest priorities? What is your “North Star”? What are you going to aim that big arrow at? As Mary Oliver says in the famous last line of her poem The Summer Day:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Second, what are you going to *stop* doing? For many people, this will be the hardest part. You have to let go of goals, say no, go part-time, decline requests, disappoint people, all in order to reclaim the energy to redirect toward your chosen focus.

This is closely related to the probably-apocryphal story of Warren Buffett and the Pilot.

I struggle with both questions. I don’t really have a singular life goal, which is partially why I pursued financial freedom. Meanwhile, I enjoy trying out different interests. But at the end of the day, I do have higher priorities in my mind and I want to do better at truly making them a priority in real life. I have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to the top picture.

While this book suffers a bit from the “magazine article stretched thinly into a book” dilemma, I found it a worthwhile read overall. It’s a simple concept, but there are some useful tips to implement it. Here are a few selected highlights from the book:

On reflection I discovered this important lesson: If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.

[…] Once an Australian nurse named Bronnie Ware, who cared for people in the last twelve weeks of their lives, recorded their most often discussed regrets. At the top of the list: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

Many capable people are kept from getting to the next level of contribution because they can’t let go of the belief that everything is important. But an Essentialist has learned to tell the difference between what is truly important and everything else.

In other words, it’s not enough to simply determine which activities and efforts don’t make the highest possible contribution; you still have to actively eliminate those that do not.

How do we maintain this focus and keep from being distracted? A good routine helps:

Routine is one of the most powerful tools for removing obstacles. Without routine, the pull of nonessential distractions will overpower us. But if we create a routine that enshrines the essentials, we will begin to execute them on autopilot.

[…] We won’t have to expend precious energy every day prioritizing everything. We must simply expend a small amount of initial energy to create the routine, and then all that is left to do is follow it.

This includes establishing clear boundaries.

One simple answer is we are unclear about what is essential. When this happens we become defenseless. On the other hand, when we have strong internal clarity it is almost as if we have a force field protecting us from the nonessentials coming at us from all directions.

For example, when asked to work extra on a Saturday:

Clay simply responded: “Oh, I am so sorry. I have made the commitment that every Saturday is a day to be with my wife and children.”

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Free Kids Book About the Banking System (PDF/EPub)

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Are your kids curious about the banking system? Are you? Law professor Mehrsa Baradaran wrote A Kids Book About Banking and it is currently available free via download in either PDF or EPub format. Physical copies (not free) are available on Amazon. Found via Axios.

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed overnight and we found ourselves wishing we knew more about how banks worked… so, we made a book!

When you think of a bank, what comes to mind? A building? A safe, filled with gold? What if we told you banks weren’t any of these things? And (get ready for this)…most money isn’t even kept in the bank! Banking is a system that allows money to move from one place to another, creating opportunities and growth. And banks only work with a shared belief in the magic of money.

It’s a good way to start a conversation, but be warned, it might be kind of scary to YOU as an adult to be reminded that all your bank deposits, the result of possibly decades of hard work, are just a bunch of 1s and 0s on a computer database somewhere. There is no gold in a vault. There are just banks taking your money and creating even more money via fractional-reserve banking. But it all collapses if we don’t collectively trust the system, or “believe in magic”. Every time I read about this system, I reconsider buying a plot of land nearby that I can see and walk on.

I tried reading it to my youngest kid, but she preferred talking vegetables and listening to The Cool Bean for the 87th time instead. I think she’s still in the trading strange metal coins for candy phase of learning about money.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Reading List: Timeless Financial Wisdom From 100 to 2,000 Years Ago

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Morgan Housel has an excellent post about Cumulative vs. Cyclical Knowledge, which points out how humans don’t seem to be able to solve behavioral financial problems like living below your means, asset bubbles, overuse of leverage, and more. In a nutshell:

Reading old finance articles makes you feel like the ancient past was no different than today – the opposite feeling you get reading old medical commentary.

The article lists several quotes from 100+ year-old sources – but not always full sources – so I felt the need to track them down to create a “timeless advice reading list”. Some have already been mentioned here previously, others have not. Book links are Amazon affiliate links (may need to visit this post at mymoneyblog.com to see them), although the really old books are free on Kindle due to copyright expiration.

The Quest of the Simple Life by William J. Dawson is a book from 1907 that talks about escaping the grind and spending less money to create a simpler life (sound familiar?). My review and highlights: The Quest of the Simple Life: Escaping The Work Grind in 1907 vs. Today. Here is a sample quote on the cost of “keeping up appearances”:

Money may be bought at too dear a rate. The average citizen, if he did but know it, is always buying money too dear. He earns, let us say, four hundred pounds a year; but the larger proportion of this sum goes in what is called ‘keeping up appearances.’ He must live in a house at a certain rental; by the time that his rates and taxes are paid he finds one-eighth of his income at least has gone to provide a shelter for his head. A cottage, at ten pounds a year, would have served him better, and would have been equally commodious. He must needs send his children to some private ‘academy’ for education, getting only bad education and high charges for his pains; a village board-school at twopence a week would have offered undeniable advantages. He must wear the black coat and top-hat sacred to the clerking tribe; a tweed suit and cap are more comfortable, and half the price. At all points he is the slave of convention, and he pays a price for his convention out of all proportion to its value. At a moderate estimate half the daily expenditure of London is a sacrifice to the convention or imposture of respectability.

The Snows in Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway. There is a famous exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway where Fitzgerald is quoted as saying “The rich are different from you and me” and Hemingway is quoted as responding with “Yes, they have more money.” The following passage from this book is the original source, but read about the full story behind this legend here.

The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

The Great Depression: A Diary by Benjamin Roth. Benjamin Roth was a lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio during the Great Depression and kept a regular diary of his impressions during the era. The diary was required reading for his son who also became a lawyer at the firm he started, in order to understand what their clients went through. My full review here.

In normal times the average professional man makes just a living and lives up to the limit of his income because he must dress well, etc. In times of depression he not only fails to make a living but has no surplus capital to buy stocks and real estate. I see now how important it is for the professional man to build up a surplus in normal times. […] His practice suffers and he has no chance of rising above the level of the ordinary practitioner who lives from day to day and from hand to mouth.

Bubble in the Sun by Christopher Knowlton. A narrative history of the massive Florida real estate boom in the 1920s (not the 2000s!) and how it helped trigger the Great Depression (not the Great Financial Crisis!). Repeating cycles indeed. Even now, how can “Buy Now, Pay Later” be considered a new invention when it’s simply more consumer debt?

From 1919 to 1929, both forms of personal debt – mortgages and installment credit – soared. The volume of home mortgages more than tripled, and the amount of outstanding installment debt more than doubled. Other kinds of credit became widely available, such as that offered through credit finance companies and department stores.

Seneca: A Life by Emily Wilson. (Listing is weird, the US version might be The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca by Emily Wilson.) This should be an interesting biography for many FIRE devotees, as Seneca was both a Stoic philosopher and someone who amassed a huge amount of wealth doing questionable things. Oh, and he died nearly 2,000 years ago.

The life and works of Seneca pose a number of fascinating challenges. How can we reconcile the bloody tragedies with the prose works advocating a life of Stoic tranquility? How are we to balance Seneca the man of principle, who counseled a life of calm and simplicity, with Seneca the man of the moment, who amassed a vast personal fortune in the service of an emperor seen by many, at the time and afterwards, as an insane tyrant?

From this Emily Wilson Guardian article:

We might then label Seneca a hypocrite, since he failed to be ethically rich by his own criteria. But most of us, including those who would call themselves middle class rather than fat cats, would have to say the same, if we were fully honest with ourselves. We buy things we don’t need. We get caught up in consumerist desire and lose track of what we might really want in life.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same” – Bon Jovi.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done (Book Highlights)

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone.

If you are serious about dramatically improving your personal finances (like getting rid of credit card debt), the first step is to find out exactly where your money goes – track every dollar for a month using a spending log. I recall it being quite uncomfortable, but also eye-opening. In the same way, the book Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done by Laura Vanderkam is based on the detailed hour-by-hour time diaries of thousands of people.

What characteristics make some people both feel less busy yet still spend time on the activities that are important to them? Some of the highlights below you may have seen elsewhere, but I did discover some new, actionable advice.

Know where your time goes. Track it. Reflect.

As a born skeptic, I had long been fascinated by what these logs showed about the blind spots people have about time. There can be great gaps between how we think we spend our time and reality as recorded. People claim to have no leisure time and then can recount in detail what happened on the most recent Big Bang Theory. Or—I was guilty of this one—we feel like we spend hours unloading the dishwasher, only to learn it takes five minutes each time, the four times per week we do it.

First, people who feel like they have enough time are exceedingly mindful of their time. They know where the time goes. They accept ownership of their lives and think through their days and weeks ahead of time. They also reflect on their lives, figuring out what worked and what didn’t.

It is not that people who have more free time have the time to reflect. After all, people with low time-perception scores actually spend more time on social media and TV than people with high time-perception scores. Instead, people allocate time to thinking and reflecting, and then they feel that they have more time.

Get rid of time-wasting activities. Check your e-mail less often. Check your phone less often. It wastes time, makes you more anxious, and it doesn’t create lasting memories. Be aware and perhaps limit your TV time.

They scrub their lives of anything that does not belong there. This includes self-imposed time burdens, such as constant connectivity, that clog time for no good reason. Indeed, one of the most striking findings of my survey was the gap in estimated phone checks per hour between people who felt relaxed about time and those who felt anxious.

Accept the “good enough” and even “better than nothing”. Aim for small, daily habits that move you steadily towards your goals. Five minutes towards your goal every day is so much better than nothing.

They let go of expectations of perfection and big results in the short run. Instead, they decide that good enough is good enough, knowing that steady progress over the long run is unstoppable.

What type of person do you want to be? What do you want to be known for spending your time on? Pick your worthwhile struggle. Spend time on the important people in your life.

There is freedom from things we don’t want to do, but there is also freedom to do the things we want to do, and figuring out the right balance requires understanding when commitments are burdens and when they are benefits.

These choices involve commitments, but they also stretch time, because as you choose to spend time on these things, you become in your mind the kind of person who has the time to spend on these things.

Happiness requires effort. It is not just bestowed; it is the earned interest on what you choose to pay in.

If my anticipating self wanted to do something, my remembering self will be glad to have done it. Indeed, my experiencing self may even enjoy parts of it. I am tired now, but I will always be tired, and we draw energy from meaningful things.

Outsource the other pain points if possible. Outsource the chores and errands that cause the most stress and/or block other productive pursuits.

In my life, learning to use childcare strategically has been a big breakthrough.

Fight for more flexible hours or less hours at work. The author shares stories about an engineer that had to find a new job first and threaten to quit, before the old employer would allow them to work at home for 4 days a week. (Sounds familiar!) Others have cut their work hours to 80% of full-time or 50% of full-time (if they can afford the accompanying loss in income). However, I found this quote to be useful work advice:

Of course, not all organizations or jobs are amenable to part-time work, and sometimes going off a full-time track can have far-reaching implications for a person’s career. I find that part-time options tend to work best in careers (such as medicine) where hours are more set and you are either in the office or not. The danger in other kinds of salaried work, as my time-diary studies have found, is that if no one knows how many hours anyone is working, “part-time” can often mean full-time hours for less pay. If that sounds like the reality of your industry, it might be a more satisfying option to hunt for (or craft) a job you love, and then negotiate for flexible hours in lieu of extra cash. If you do elect to take a pay cut to go part-time, work out a schedule where you get real days off—for example, you don’t go into the office Thursday or Friday—rather than accept vague promises of a reduced workload. This has the virtue of reducing work hours and commuting time too.

Ready to do your own time diary? The author provides free timesheets (including PDF, xls, and Google Sheets versions) for her 168 Hours Time Tracking Challenge at LauraVanderkam.com where you can track your own time for a week.

After tracking your time, look back over your schedule and ask yourself a few questions: What do I like about my schedule? What would I like to spend more time doing? What would I like to spend less time doing? How can I make that happen?

This book was published in 2018, but the author also has a new book Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters that just came out October 2022, although I have not read it and don’t know how it differs from this book.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Money Magic: 5 Levers To Boost Your Safe Retirement Income By $50k+ a Year

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone.

In personal finance, I often think in terms of “levers” to push or pull. Here are five different levers to increase your portfolio safe withdrawal rate in retirement. Here are three levers used increase your final savings balance at retirement:

  • Asset allocation: How are you investing your money?
  • Savings rate: What percentage of your income do you save?
  • Time horizon: How long are you saving for?

Money Magic: An Economist’s Secrets to More Money, Less Risk, and a Better Life by Laurence Kotlikoff has another good example of pulling certain levers involving a couple that comes to him with their proposed retirement plan. By tweaking these five different levers, he is able to increase their allowable monthly spending (above housing) by over $6,000 a month for the rest of their lives (a net present value of over $1.5 million):

  • Delay taking Social Security. “First, they should wait to begin taking their Social Security benefits till age seventy, rather than immediately at sixty-two.”
  • Use your 401(k) to fund your retirement early years instead. “Next, they should start to withdraw from their 401(k) accounts now, rather than wait till seventy.”
  • Buy joint survivor single premium immediate annuities. “They also should take their 401(k) withdrawals in the form of joint survivor annuities.”
  • Downsize your house/condo. “Next, they should downsize their four-bedroom house by half.”
  • Move to a lower-tax state. “And finally, they should move to New Hampshire, which has no state income tax.”

The result:

This retirement makeover will make an amazing difference. In fact, it will more than double the Smith’s sustainable retirement spending! Under their original plan, the Smiths could afford to spend $5,337 per month in addition to covering their housing costs and taxes. Under the new plan, they can spend $11,819 per month in addition. That’s a ginormous increase and adds up to a $1,578,374 increase in lifetime spending measured in present value. In other words, the new plan amounts to handing the Smiths a bag filled with around $1.5 million in cash. This is money magic, pure and simple.

Now, I’m not sure I would use the term “magic”, but these are readily-available choices and the numbers come from the author’s MaxiFi retirement planning software. Living in a two-bedroom condo instead of a four-bedroom house is not the same experience, but at least you should explore it and weigh the costs and benefits. Using single premium immediate annuities to supplement Social Security is a way to guarantee income, and they are the simplest and most transparent form of annuities that are easy to comparison shop directly. I bet that significant percentage of retirees don’t even run a free, no-obligation quote.

I enjoying finding and thinking about the levers in my life. Even if not financially-optimal, it feels good to make a conscious choice and know that your actions matter. I know that I could have made more money by moving to a different state with better job opportunities, lower taxes, and/or lower cost of living. I know that I could have bought a bigger house, but also a much smaller house.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Published 100+ Years Ago, Still Practical Advice Today

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Either Jonathan Clements or Jason Zweig (both long-time, award-winning personal finance columnists) once wrote that personal finance writing was all about finding the 1,000th different way to discuss the same five basic concepts. Early in the book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1908, is the following mention of their professional ancestors:

Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence whose violence proves the interest they excite. Recently, in a daily organ, a battle raged round the question whether a woman can exist nicely in the country on £85 a year.

100 years later, we have the exact same debates. 100 years later, financial freedom is still whether you control how you spend your time. Work is still trading your life energy (time) for money, and financial freedom means creating a different source of money so you can stop trading your life energy (time) away. We are all given 24 hours a day.

You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions.

For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.

This may also sound familiar:

Which of us is not saying to himself—which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: “I shall alter that when I have a little more time”?

I assumed that this would be a philosophical book, but was pleasantly surprised at the amount of practical and actionable advice inside. Please read the book for the full and original message; I am crudely paraphrasing below.

Notice that you want more out of life. I call this the “itch”. The “itch” is what makes people seek out and devour information about financial freedom.

If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to do. We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us.

And such is, indeed, the fact. The wish to accomplish something outside their formal programme is common to all men who in the course of evolution have risen past a certain level.

Realize that even with a full-time job, you DO have control over part of your day. Most of us will spend at least a couple decades working 8-9 hours a day, 5 days a week while building up those other income sources. However, even if you spend 10 hours a day working/commuting and 8 hours a day sleeping/eating/grooming, that still leaves 6 hours where you are free to do millions of different things. (Caregivers of young children and/or other family members: I know.) The point is, if you consciously spend even a fraction of that time on an invigorating activity, you can feel better about your entire life.

If my typical man wishes to live fully and completely he must, in his mind, arrange a day within a day. And this inner day, a Chinese box in a larger Chinese box, must begin at 6 p.m. and end at 10 a.m. It is a day of sixteen hours; and during all these sixteen hours he has nothing whatever to do but cultivate his body and his soul and his fellow men. During those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income.

If a man makes two-thirds of his existence subservient to one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how can he hope to live fully and completely? He cannot.

Spend 30 minutes each weekday morning doing meditation and/or mindfulness training. Either wake up a bit earlier, or use your commute. Training your mind is a worthwhile activity and strengthens it like a muscle. You will be more patient and focused with your co-workers, your kids, and yourself.

People say: “One can’t help one’s thoughts.” But one can. The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible. And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurts us or gives us” pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent. Hence, it seems to me, the first business of the day should be to put the mind through its paces […]

When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no matter what, to begin with). You will not have gone ten yards before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking round the corner with another subject. Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the station you will have brought it back about forty times. Do not despair. Continue. Keep it up. You will succeed. […]

I do not care what you concentrate on, so long as you concentrate. It is the mere disciplining of the thinking machine that counts. But still, you may as well kill two birds with one stone, and concentrate on something useful. I suggest—it is only a suggestion—a little chapter of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus.

Set aside 90 minutes per evening, three weeknights a week. During this time, you must find something that challenges your curiosity and makes you excited! If you pick the right activity, it will give you energy, not make you more tired. You might learn to rock climb, play tennis, rehearse for a community theater role, ballroom dance, read poetry, anything. You must consciously choose this activity and persevere with it for 3 months. It’s hard to break old habits, so that is why it is only for every other day.

But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty. They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a tennis match. Instead of saying, “Sorry I can’t see you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club,” you must say, “…but I have to work.” This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul.

On your commute home, spend some time reflecting. What are the principles that you chose to live by? Are your actions aligned with those principles? If not, how can we fix that?

What leads to the permanent sorrowfulness of burglars is that their principles are contrary to burglary. If they genuinely believed in the moral excellence of burglary, penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years for them; all martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles agree.

We do not reflect. I mean that we do not reflect upon genuinely important things; upon the problem of our happiness, upon the main direction in which we are going, upon what life is giving to us, upon the share which reason has (or has not) in determining our actions, and upon the relation between our principles and our conduct.

Bottom line. Give it some modern edits, a snazzy book cover, and a powerful media blitz, and the 1908 short book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett could be a modern bestseller. Don’t wait until retirement to scratch those itches. By carefully changing how you spend specifically selected hours a week and consciously choosing activities that excite, strengthen, and invigorate you, you can improve your entire life today. (The book doesn’t touch your weekends.) As the copyright has expired, you can read it for free via Project Gutenberg (or search on Libby). A final spicy quote:

If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.

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Improving Your Everyday Negotiating Skills (Never Split The Difference Book Notes)

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Initially, I viewed Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss as a tactical financial book for specific situations: buying a car, negotiating a salary, buying a home, renegotiating rent, or any number of business transactions. After all, the author is the “FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator”!

Instead of a win/lose mentality, this book helps you find out what the other person really wants overall, what they will accept specifically within your own acceptable range, and to do it in a way that everyone feels respected. I found myself using the advice every day for all the little negotiations in life: getting the kids out the door in the morning, finding out why someone was mad at me, and so on. Admittedly, I had (and still have) a lot of room for improvement, but this book helped improve my communication and listening skills. I highly recommend reading the entire book, but here are a few selected highlights and excerpts.

What are the goals after learning these skills?

What were needed were simple psychological tactics and strategies that worked in the field to calm people down, establish rapport, gain trust, elicit the verbalization of needs, and persuade the other guy of our empathy. We needed something easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to execute.

It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.

Mirroring. Here’s a very simple tactic that you can try today (really! try it on your very next conversation) to help get more information, called “mirroring”:

It’s almost laughably simple: for the FBI, a “mirror” is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. Of the entirety of the FBI’s hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, and yet uncannily effective.

It’s just four simple steps:  

1. Use the late-night FM DJ voice.
2. Start with “I’m sorry . . .”
3. Mirror.
4. Silence. At least four seconds, to let the mirror work its magic on your counterpart.

Here’s a short YouTube video with examples.

Labeling. We want to get on the same page. People want to be heard and understood. We can try to confirm a perception gently, show that we are listening, and validate their emotions with “It seems like…” phrases.

There are fill-in-the-blank labels that can be used in nearly every situation to extract information from your counterpart, or defuse an accusation: It seems like _________ is valuable to you. It seems like you don’t like _________. It seems like you value __________. It seems like _________ makes it easier. It seems like you’re reluctant to _________. As an example, if you’re trying to renegotiate an apartment lease to allow subletters and you know the landlord is opposed to them, your prepared labels would be on the lines of “It seems as though you’re not a fan of subletters” or “It seems like you want stability with your tenants.”

Here is an example from a grouchy relative at Thanksgiving:

“We don’t see each other all that often,” you could say. “It seems like you feel like we don’t pay any attention to you and you only see us once a year, so why should you make time for us?” Notice how that acknowledges the situation and labels his sadness? Here you can pause briefly, letting him recognize and appreciate your attempts to understand what he’s feeling, and then turn the situation around by offering a positive solution. “For us this is a real treat. We want to hear what you have to talk about. We want to value this time with you because we feel left out of your life.”

“How” and “What” questions are much more gentle and respectful ways to guide the conversation along. It frames it is as a collaborative effort and asking for help, not being accusatory or demanding was “Why”.

Here are some other great standbys that I use in almost every negotiation, depending on the situation:  

What about this is important to you?
How can I help to make this better for us?
How would you like me to proceed?
What is it that brought us into this situation?  
How can we solve this problem?  
How am I supposed to do that?

Instead of “No”:

The first step in the “No” series is the old standby: “How am I supposed to do that?” You have to deliver it in a deferential way, so it becomes a request for help. Properly delivered, it invites the other side to participate in your dilemma and solve it with a better offer. After that, some version of “Your offer is very generous, I’m sorry, that just doesn’t work for me” is an elegant second way to say “No.”

Used properly, these little things can really improve your everyday life. Learning about “negotiating” doesn’t mean you like fighting or painful conflict, it can actually mean less painful conflict:

If this book accomplishes only one thing, I hope it gets you over that fear of conflict and encourages you to navigate it with empathy. If you’re going to be great at anything—a great negotiator, a great manager, a great husband, a great wife—you’re going to have to do that. You’re going to have to ignore that little genie who’s telling you to give up, to just get along—as well as that other genie who’s telling you to lash out and yell.

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MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Book Notes)

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Even though I spend a lot of time online reading through forums, blogs, e-mail newsletters, substacks, and so on, I don’t spend much time on Twitter or Facebook. Slowly reading a detailed review or educational article is one thing, but 100 different people making short, forceful, absolute statements within 5 minutes quickly overwhelms me. There is surely a lot of good discussion, but in a terribly noisy room.

I checked out How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell for a different perspective. This blurb was intriguing:

Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.

While I didn’t agree with many of the arguments made in the book, as usual I just tried to find what was useful to me and leave the rest.

What is meant by the goal to “do nothing”?

The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.

From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.

What are we trying to avoid?

But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.

Here’s what I want to escape. To me, one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves.

Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.

People read a tweet or a headline, react, and click a button—thousands and millions of times over in a matter of days. I can’t help but liken the angry collective tweet storms to watching a flood erode a landscape with no ground-cover plants to slow it down. The natural processes of context and attention are lost. But from the point of view of Twitter’s financial model, the storm is nothing but a bounteous uptick in engagement.

An short bit about John Muir, “Father of the National Parks”:

Muir had already developed a love of botany, but it was being temporarily blinded by an eye accident that made him re-evaluate his priorities. The accident confined him to a darkened room for six weeks, during which he was unsure whether he would ever see again. The 1916 edition of The Writings of John Muir is divided into two parts, one before the accident and one after, each with its own introduction by William Frederic Badè. In the second introduction, Badè writes that this period of reflection convinced Muir that “life was too brief and uncertain, and time too precious, to waste upon belts and saws; that while he was pottering in a wagon factory, God was making a world; and he determined that, if his eyesight was spared, he would devote the remainder of his life to a study of the process.” Muir himself said, “This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields.”

On Epicurus, “epicurean”, and unhappiness:

More generally, Epicurus observed that people in modern society ran in circles, unaware of the source of their unhappiness:

“Everywhere you can find men who live for empty desires and have no interest in the good life. Stupid fools are those who are never satisfied with what they possess, but only lament what they cannot have.”

Quite contrary to the modern-day meaning of the word epicurean—often associated with decadent and plentiful food—what the school of Epicurus taught was that man actually needed very little to be happy, as long as he had recourse to reason and the ability to limit his desires.

On giving others (and ourselves) space to change our minds:

This is one of the things I find the most absurd about our current social media, since it’s completely normal and human to change our minds, even about big things. Think about it: Would you want to be friends with someone who never changed their mind about anything?

But because apologizing and changing our minds online is so often framed as a weakness, we either hold our tongues or risk ridicule.

Weird stuff happens when attention = money. Creating hate = attention = money. Creating dissatisfaction = attention = money. Creating distraction = attention = money.

There are many things going on in the book, but I support physically go outside and hang out with people in-person, and preferably both at the same time. I will put more effort towards these pursuits. (I would say it’s a cheap form of entertainment, but booking an AirBnb within the boundaries of Yosemite National Park was not cheap! 😁)

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MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


The Four Core Types of Regrets + Thoughts on Financial Regrets

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According to the new book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Dan Pink, only 1% of people say they never feel regret. Here are the most in-depth articles from the media tour: WaPo, BBC, Atlantic.

In 2020, the author Daniel Pink launched the World Regret Survey, the largest survey on the topic ever undertaken. With his research team, Pink asked more than 15,000 people in 105 countries, “How often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently?” Eighty-two percent said regret is at least an occasional part of their life; roughly 21 percent said they feel regret “all the time.” Only 1 percent said they never feel regret.

In the book, Pink identifies these four core types of regret:

  • Foundation regrets involves an irresponsible choice that changed the course of your life. This includes not saving enough money for retirement, not taking care of your health by eating well and exercising, or not putting in proper effort at school or work.
  • Boldness regrets come from being too cautious, and not taking certain risks. This includes staying in a “safe” job instead of going for a career changes more suited to you, or not asking out someone you liked on a date.
  • Moral regrets are when you don’t live up to your own values. You cheated, bullied, lost your temper, or didn’t stand up for something.
  • Connection regrets deal with lost relationships with family members, friends or colleagues. Too often, this happens due to neglect and passivity.

I used to think of regrets as equivalent to mistakes. In our household, we try to look at mistakes as a positive opportunity to “make your brain grow bigger”. This way, they are less afraid of trying something new or challenging. Regrets are simply mistakes, so we should just learn from them and move on, right?

However, now I see regrets as a special sort of mistake. They involve looking at the past and imagining different outcomes. Over time, you realize what kinds of choices are likely to lead to regrets, and what won’t. This can help guide you towards better future decisions. To me, the phrase “no regrets” doesn’t mean I don’t have any regrets. It means I know what will cause regret, and so I do things to avoid it. For example:

  • I won’t regret ditching a little bit of work for dedicated one-on-one time with a child. If you have kids, read The Family Board Meeting.
  • I won’t regret saving a few months of expenses to ride out life’s inevitable bumps.
  • I won’t regret waiting 24 hours to send that angry e-mail.
  • I won’t regret reaching out to a friend, whether it is because you need it or they need it.
  • I won’t regret taking the time to show or tell someone “I love you”.
  • I am much more likely to regret not taking a chance, than taking a risk and failing. In many cases, the downside isn’t so bad, while the upside could be limitless.

In terms of financially-related regrets, the two big ones are the foundational regret “I wish I saved more money when I was younger” and the boldness regret “I wish to took the risk to pursue a career better aligned to my personality and interests”.

A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that only 27% of college graduates work in a field related to their major. Career paths are long and winding these days. I remembering choosing my college major when I was 17 years old, since some colleges make you pick on your application. Even though I questioned my choice after a few years in college, I felt the “sunk cost” bias and didn’t want to risk the additional time, effort, and tuition to try and change majors. I was also “good” at the major, and so I kept going. That is one of my personal regrets.

In my view, finding the right career path where you get the trifecta of “I am good at this”, “I like doing this”, and “I get paid well for doing this” is like having a jetpack on your pursuit of financial independence. Once you have a job where you wake up and actually look forward to go to work and there is a small but increasing gap between income and expenses, you are ready to blast off and start compounding. You could try and pursue financial independence with a job that is missing any one of those three factors, but the journey will feel like a slow grind instead.

Eventually, the fact that I was missing the “I like doing this” starting bugging me enough, and I was ready to quit and go back to school. But the first thing I had to do was save up a year of expenses (also helped by minimizing those expenses). That little money cushion gave me the courage to make the leap. The “ROI” on that “emergency fund” was more than any index fund or rental property. So that’s what I plan to tell my kids: When you’re young, live simply and always create a cash cushion so that you can keep searching for the jetpack trifecta. This will minimize your financial regrets.

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MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Anthony Bourdain: Not Too Late to Change Your Direction

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[Programming note: Posting will be light through the end of the year. Hope you have a restful and rejuvenating holiday season!]

The WSJ article Anthony Bourdain: Feast of Memory (link should bypass paywall as I am a WSJ subscriber) briefly highlights four different books that all explore his life and legacy from different perspectives:

So far, I’ve only finished the first one. This observation hit close to home:

At the news of his death, millions of people mourned—and not the way that we mourn a commodity celebrity, with a sharp breath of sorrow and a fleeting salute and a sad-face post on social media. Millions of people mourned Bourdain the way you mourn a friend: primal, personal, disbelieving, unreal, unhealed.

A good Bourdain quote:

“I used to think that basically, the whole world, that all humanity were basically bastards,” he tells John W. Little, in a 2014 interview for Blogs of War. “I’ve since found that most people seem to be pretty nice—basically good people doing the best they can.”

On being an enthusiast:

I’m passionate to the point of being evangelical about things that I love, that give me pleasure, and make me excited. And, um, you know I didn’t really travel until I was forty-two years old, I spent my whole life in kitchens. I’d seen nothing of the world. So, this is all still relatively new to me. People have been very kind to me. I feel very, very, very fortunate.

[…] I don’t feel like I’m an advocate, or a spokesperson for anything. I’m just, you know, I’m an enthusiastic son of a bitch.

Bourdain made a huge dent in the world after the age of 44. I took special notice that he didn’t publish his breakout book Kitchen Confidential until he was 44 years old. He wrote the book as memoir of sorts, by someone who felt at the end of his career. I am now 43 years old. I also feel at the end of some things, and smack in the middle of other things. Perhaps the trick is to also feel at the beginning of something new.

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MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Digital Minimalism Book Review: Parallels With Time and Money Management

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I initially stopped reading the NY Times bestseller Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport midway through because it seemed to target a problem that I did not have – I don’t spend much time on social media and deliberately avoid the front page news cycle. However, I’m glad that I went back as it contained many useful parallels with time management and financial independence.

Here is my favorite definition of digital minimalism:

A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

Read that quote again but remove “of technology” and “online”, and isn’t that just a good philosophy for life in general?

This thought process also aligns with the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals:

A truly practical approach to making the best use of time demands that we stop trying to deny the undeniable, acknowledging not merely that we might not get around to everything but that we definitely never will. That we’re guaranteed to have to abandon certain ambitions, disappoint certain people and drop certain balls in order to make time for doing a few things that count.

I also appreciated this description of the digital maximalist:

Notice, this minimalist philosophy contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default—a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention. A maximalist is very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might miss out on something that’s the least bit interesting or valuable.

Put another way: minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

This comparison of minimalism vs. maximalism was the most useful part of the book for me. You can apply it to everything – your monthly spending, your collection of clothes/gadgets/stuff, the food you consume, how you spend your time every day. Minimalism is about where to draw the line, and how that line is probably closer to “less” than you think.

Happily missing out. I am working to identify my maximalist tendencies, and I like the phrase “happily missing out” as the opposite of FOMO. Instead of trying to moderate your use on something that isn’t clearly awesome, it’s easier to simply cut it out completely. Delete the app from your phone. Cancel the subscription. Don’t let the junk food enter you home. End the toxic relationship. Get rid of the widget that didn’t work out (even if it was expensive). Sell the regrettable investment (even at a loss). After the initial shock, I usually end up saying “Why didn’t I do that earlier?”

If you are interested in changing your tech habits, here’s the basic actionable strategy of the book:

  • Perform a 30-day “Digital Declutter” where you completely stop using social media and other optional digital apps.
  • During this reset, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful. Socialize in-person, spend time alone without your phone, build something with your hands.
  • After 30 days, reintroduce the apps carefully into your life one-by-one. They should only return if they are the best way to help you achieve something you deeply value.

Even this could have parallels to personal finance:

  • Perform a 30-day “Expense Fast” where you stop every optional expense.
  • Experiment by replacing your expenses with alternatives. Think of ways to eat everything edible that is already in your house. Realize that you have 10 different subscriptions and you don’t need them all. Walk outside instead of the gym. Ask someone to walk with you. Talk with an old friend on the phone. Don’t buy a single piece of new clothing.
  • After 30 days, reintroduce each expense life one-by-one. Some things you may realize should be a high priority. That’s good. Some things you may realize are low priority. Happily spend your money on the high priority items, and happily miss out on the rest.
My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.