This nest in our front-yard tree has raised five generations of robins. Note this year's remodel - some shredded strips of one of my credit card statements.

It was the fall of 1992, and the teenage version of Mr. Money Mustache was getting his first peek at a whole new world. The World of the Wealthy.

I was on a date with one of my first-ever girlfriends. She was way too attractive for me, which already induced nervousness. We had been dating for a while, and I guess things were going well because she had decided to introduce me to her Dad, who lived in another town. I was ready for terror and interrogation.

As we drove up the leafy winding road to his private, custom built house, I felt I was entering another league entirely. In my hometown, people didn’t live like this. We walked through the front door and there was her father – a friendly and casual 40-something dude, looking stylish in his faded jeans and sporting a bushy Tom-Selleck-style black Mustache.

The vibe was completely different from any girl’s father I had previously met. Most of the Dads of my town were strict, conventional, and even a bit irrational in setting rules for their daughters. But this man treated both his daughter and her new boyfriend as adults. He was funny and bright. He told interesting stories about the successful photography company he was running. After a bit of chit-chat he gave us a quick run-down of where things were in the house: TV room, hot tub, keys to the fancy car if we needed it. Then he took off to attend a meeting with one of his business partners, leaving us with the whole place to ourselves, for most of the night.

“Wow”, I remember thinking. “This old guy has entrusted me with his daughter, his house full of cool stuff, and his car, after meeting me for all of fifteen minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it!”.  A feeling of fancy adult responsibility washed over me and I made a point of not abusing his trust. We even washed all his dishes that night.

Over the decades that have followed, I’ve noticed that pattern in several more places. Successful people are usually more trusting. Less successful members of the middle class are often obsessed with locking up their houses and cars, suspecting that the world is out to get them, and avoiding risk.

The pattern also seems to apply at the corporate level. The first company I joined after moving to the US had a culture of micromanagement. The employee handbook specified that no personal emails or websites were to cross into the company’s network, ever. The CEO was notorious for second-guessing coding decisions of individual software engineers. Vacation time was closely guarded and merit-based-pay was almost nonexistent. I jumped ship from that job to a better one after only 10 months. The company went out of business shortly after I quit.

The next company was a model of employee trust and fair treatment. I was given a generous budget to buy whatever I needed to get my job done. I could book my own business travel without approval. Working time was not monitored and vacations were self-scheduled and self-reported. I worked much harder at this place, and at the time it was one of the most valuable and profitable companies in the world. (In recent years the employee experience has gone downhill but it is still a profitable and huge company).

Even on the bigger scale of entire countries, it turns out that there is a strong correlation between trust and wealth, and in fact trust precedes and causes wealth in countries as they develop. In an interesting passage of The Rational Optimist, the author noted a 2008 Princeton study on this effect. It found that 65% of Norwegians answered a question indicating that “most people can be trusted”, while only 5% in Peru felt the same way.

Once you frame the issue as “trust”, you can see the effects all over a prosperous economy. People are willing to build houses and factories on their land, because they trust it will not be confiscated by government or revolution. Companies are able to grow quickly, because they can get huge amounts of funding from investors who trust that their ownership rights will be preserved. The entire concept of money exists only because of a massive network of trust that exists in modern rich society – a shared reassurance that the money will continue to be worth something tomorrow (despite the perpetual insistence of gold bugs worldwide). Without all of this trust, we would spend much more of our time worrying and devising safety systems and much less time actually getting things done.

The effect of trust is amazing when you think about its effect on your daily life.

A few weeks ago, I decided to finally re-paint the peeling exterior of my house. It’s a big place that would have cost at least $3000 to paint if I hired a contractor. Instead, I told a friend who runs a small painting company of my plans. He mentioned that he gets a 15% pro discount at the paint department of Home Depot, plus he had a one-time 20% off coupon valid on a specific day.

We went to the store together and bought my paint along with some supplies each of us needed – on his credit card. The store was running a 12 months-no-interest promotion, which further sweetened the 35%-off deal we were getting. My portion came to just under $400. We agreed that I would pay him back before the 12 month period was up.  Then we walked out of the store with an enormously valuable haul of products, bought only on a signature, to be paid back with no interest charges almost a year in the future.

Then we further complicated the picture with additional trust. He lent me his thousand-dollar paint spraying machine, a selection of huge ladders, other painting equipment, and spent a full day helping me get started. No payment was made – I just repaid the favor by helping him an equal amount on his own projects. I also ended up paying back the full cost of the paint through further barter arrangements.

In the end, I completed the $3000 paint job at an out-of-pocket cost of $0, with only the “cost” of spending a few spring days getting some exercise in my own back yard. Climbing up, climbing down, moving ladders, spraying, rolling, cleaning, and learning. All made possible by great amounts of trust!

So how does all of this apply to building a Money Mustache? I personally use the knowledge to shoot down the phrase “You can never be too careful.” Because I feel that yes, you sure as hell CAN be too careful. Just as with the recent article on Risk and Safety, there is always a cost to every bit of caution you apply. Mistrust adds extra cost to every transaction in your life, whereas trust makes those transactions glide nicely. And transactions, whether they are dinner dates, bike rides, work contracts or friendships, are of course the source of much of life’s wealth.

Make a point of surprising your own friends, children, and employees by giving them more autonomy and responsibility than you would normally do. Watch them flourish and grow and make your life richer. Give out your house keys to close friends or lend them your car if they need it.

You can stop safely short of being a gullible fool, of course. You won’t be responding to spam emails or signing up for multilevel marketing schemes or timeshare properties. The beauty of practicing trust is that you also develop the skill of knowing when to dish it out.  But if you’re not already one of these wealthy trusting people, you should be pushing your boundaries at least a bit.

Occasionally, you will probably get burned, just as I did with The Big Mistake. But that’s no reason to stop trusting! Mistakes are just high-end lessons, and they should only serve you to refine your Get Rich Through Trust machine.

I’ve made much more through trust than I could ever possibly lose through past or future mistakes. When you comb your own personal history for evidence on the power of trust, and combine it with the scientific evidence that it works at every scale from small to large, you’ll find that it’s the only rational choice.

Well, there goes another million.

Sometime last week, this blog reached the “two million page views” milestone. It took less than three months to get that second million, compared to nine months for the first one, which I wrote about on December 10th. I remember we all thought we were pretty big business back then, but by any measure there are now more than twice as many Money Mustaches growing out there as there were when we blew past the first million mark!

Blogs that talk too much about blogging can get pretty boring, so don’t worry, I’m not going to write an article like this for every million. But today I thought it would be worthwhile because there are several interesting lessons that I’ve learned from this writing hobby that I’ve wanted to tell you about. Hopefully they will be useful for the many other blog writers that hang around here, as well as for writers of other stripes and even regular Mustachians.

Lessons Learned:

1 – It’s really hard to understand exponential growth.

Even though I occasionally like to write equations and draw graphs in my spare time, I still find that I have the natural human weakness of thinking in linear rather than exponential terms. When I check this website’s statistics page each night, it looks like readers are just trickling in at a steady rate, like guests to a nice party. But when you look at a graph that spans several months and divide out the numbers, you can clearly see that an exponent is at work. The exponent always surprises you.

This has applications in any internet-related business or creative venture, since the pool of people on the internet is effectively infinite. If you can get something started that has a positive growth rate, that tends to grow all by itself (by word of mouth, or search engines, or viral-style-forwarding), you can end up with some very interesting results. The Honey Badger video that we all like to quote from is up to 40 million views. A friend’s internet-based sales business is making tens of thousands of dollars per month in sales, just because of a bit of self-perpetuating exponential growth.

It also has applications in saving for early retirement. Beginner Mustachians are occasionally blown away by the numbers we throw around here. “Nobody could save hundreds of thousands of dollars!”, they say, “I’ve only got a few hundred bucks and it was damned hard to save that much!”.

I felt much the same way when I was younger. The problem is not with the numbers, it’s just with that tricky exponential function again. Today’s hundred-dollar-saver can invest his savings even as he improves his skills at efficient living and increases his employment income over his working career. When you combine all of these effects, you will see strong exponential growth in your savings. The hundreds of today can quite easily become many thousands per month in the future, until in the years just before retirement, many people are easily increasing their wealth by over $100,000 per year – sometimes more than their entire gross pay.

2 – People can actually make money with this blogging thing.

When I started writing these articles, I assumed I would only be entertaining myself and a few facebook friends until I ran out of stuff to say. The writing habit proved quite addictive, however, and the number of fun and enthusiastic readers grew. So I upgraded my goal slightly to “Saving the Entire Human Race from Destroying Itself”. But even at that point, I never thought I’d earn much more than the cost of paying the web hosting fees.

But one day, I had a look around at some other personal finance blogs. It turns out that these things are serious business. Sites that rank in the top 20 on the Wisebread list are routinely bought by internet marketing companies, often for over a million bucks. One clever guy named Pat Flynn who runs smartpassiveincome.com is an expert at generating income from websites. Last year he raked in over $400,000 from his carefully designed portfolio of sites. Get Rich Slowly, possibly the biggest blog in this niche, sold over three years ago although the sale was a secret until recently.

The most surprising part is that MMM already has a larger amount of traffic than some of the big-name websites at their time of sale. I don’t know exactly why this has happened, since we have done almost no promotion of the site. But I like to chalk it up to the fact that Frugality is the New Fanciness. This is an idea whose time has come.

In the right hands and with enough flashing credit card ads, a site this big could probably already earn more than my software job used to pay. You can tell from my feeble attempts at revenue-generation that income is not one of the main goals of this blog. But I will still proudly note that we earned $500 last month, and the income graph also has one of those sneaky exponents at work!

And don’t worry, I am not even thinking about selling this thing. Someone did send me an unsolicited offer once for something like $10,000, and I thanked him for the information. But it seems unlikely that anyone would want to pay in the millions for a blog, with the condition that the author can continue to write (or not write) whatever he wants and quit at any time without notice.. with anti-consumerism, political incorrectness, and swearing  being key parts of the message.

But I do love learning about this entirely new field, and I am pleased to see that writers now have a more democratic way of making a living than they did back in the old paper publisher days. Even big-time authors like Joe Konrath now publish exclusively in e-book formats, and they find they earn more money doing that then they could with big traditional book deals.

3 – It’s Time for Mr. Money Mustache to Get Off His Ass and Write.

The biggest thing I have learned from this Two Million Views business is that we are onto something big here. If this blog really is one of the fastest-growing things in the entire personal finance blogosphere, then maybe I’d better start taking it a bit more seriously.

So I’m going to set a couple of goals. I’d like to increase the amount of time I spend working on this site. Not to the point of burnout, but I’d at least like to get a chance to write up more of the 100+ draft article ideas that keep piling up, and  answer more of the emails that people send me. I’m going to talk to more people, take better pictures, start putting out the odd amusing educational video, do more science experiments.. stuff like that. I’ve even applied to be a speaker** at this year’s “FinCon” (financial bloggers conference) since it’s right down the road in Denver, and hey, I like talking.

I’d also like to set a goal of having this writing gig pay for my whole family’s living expenses. That’s about $2000 per month. Yeah yeah, we’re already retired and all that, but I think it would be nice psychological boost to be able to say that I’m supporting a family just with writing, and more importantly to share my thoughts on how easy or difficult it is to do without any soul-selling.

In reality, since we already have our consumption covered from other income and we have no desire to spend even more money, that means that 100% of MMM proceeds will in some way, over time, be used to improve the world. I’m not sure exactly how yet, but I still like the idea. Plus, as blog writing increases, my carpentry income has to decrease, which eats into my safety margin. By making a point of having the blog earn just a little bit of income, I can regain this margin.

We Mustachians are still a brand-new family. Most of the world has barely even heard of us so far. This site hasn’t even cracked the top 100 on Wisebread’s widely-cited blog list, since they aren’t measuring website traffic or even feed subscribers (if they did we’d be in the top 40 or better!).

That’s fine with me, since I’m here just to write to you and I have my own way of defining success. But if you do want to help out, here are a few ways to game the system a little bit:

Follow MMM on Twitter by clicking here.

Befriend MMM on Facebook by clicking here.

Become a RSS subscriber by clicking here.  Even if you usually read on the website (which is the way I prefer to read blogs), this helps boost the still-important Feed Subscribers number, and you might learn a thing or two about the convenience of RSS reading as well.

Hardcore readers can install the Alexa Toolbar* which will boost this site’s Alexa Rank.

Some generous people have actually asked me if they could donate to this blog just to say thanks. I have always said no in the past, but given the new goals above, I will now accept that generosity and see how it goes. This is of course fully optional.. if you just want to read for free, please continue to do so!

This Paypal Button

Or the Tiptheweb Service: Tip

Or the Flattr Service

In the long run, the biggest fundraiser for this blog will probably be the MMM Recommends Page and the Commission-paying Rewards Credit Cards list. I like that method, because those things are tucked out of the way, useful, and non-spammy.

That’s enough of this behind-the-scenes stuff, it’s time to get back to the real world. Thanks again for reading and I’m looking forward to taking it all up several notches as the blog begins its second year of existence in just a few weeks.

Yee Haw!!

*The Alexa Toolbar is a browser add-on which displays the ranking of any site you visit in a tiny bar graph at the top of the browser. The toolbar sends anonymous stats to the Alexa web ranking company, which in turn determine the popularity of that website. The only weird part is, only bloggers actually use that toolbar, so your Alexa rank is really a measure of how popular your site is with bloggers. But yet many people haven’t caught onto this weakness, so your Alexa rank influences your rankings in the top 100 list as well as how much you get paid for advertising spots.  If a significant number of readers could be enticed to run the toolbar… hoohoo, that would be funny. There are already blogger networks which do a good job of exploiting this loophole, although MMM is not a member of any, hence my less-good current rank.

In a recent article, I shared my enthusiasm for some of the confidence and hacking-the-system approaches covered in the Tim Ferris book. In the reader comments that followed, there was lots of agreement but also some Tim-bashing, suggesting that he advocates taking unethical shortcuts and shunning real work. They had a good point, and it has reminded me to write this article today, on a topic I have long wanted to cover: Working Really Hard.

Sometimes on this blog, you’ll hear me celebrating the idea of leisure. In the very first post, I talked about hanging out at home on a sunny Thursday morning while everyone else is at work, sweeping a few leaves off of the driveway in my pajamas. Other times I’ll talk about kicking  back with a deluxe home-brewed beer or catching giant fish and snowboarding in exotic locations.

It would be easy for an impressionable youth to see these decadent displays and latch onto them as the end goal. “How can I take a shortcut to get what Mr. Money Mustache has?”, they would say. “I want that end result, and I’m willing to do any sneaky hacks I need to, to get it”.

So today I’m going to have to shatter the illusion I have built up about my easy life. But don’t worry, it’s not a bad thing. It’s actually a piece of even better news: you too can have the lifestyle of your dreams. And to get it, you will need to do an absolute shitload of insanely intense, ball-busting work. And here’s the best part: the insane work will bring you just as much happiness as the leisure time!

So you get to achieve whatever you want, and you get to work really hard for it. Isn’t that great news?

Despite the fact that I sometimes talk about not working, I have actually grown to really love hard work. But it was only in the last few years that I realized this.

Ever since I hit first grade and was fortunate enough to be placed in the top reading group, I have been hooked into hard work. Not realizing there was any other option in school than to get all “A”s on the report card, I naturally did whatever amount of stupid busywork and coloring, repetitive addition and subtraction, and putting up with irrational rules, to get the perfect grades. Growing up through high school, I attended all the classes and did the necessary ass-busting to get the grades that would grant me university admission and eventually graduation. At the time, I thought I was enduring a wasteful hardship, but really there was something else going on in the background.

On the side of all this school work, I signed myself up for a second line of work in the pursuit of cash. With frugal parents that didn’t believe in giving their kids a free ride, I was forced to work for any money I wanted for myself. Starting at age 10, I cut the grass and washed cars. At age 12, I started working on their old victorian house, stripping old paint from the massive front porch* and doing other projects which culminated into building my own bedroom in the attic at age fifteen. I later advanced to a cushy minimum-wage job pumping about 4,000 gallons of gas into rusty old Chevrolet Caprices every day, then moved up to a less busy gas station, then a hardware store, then a convenience store.  Then engineering jobs between school terms (even over the Christmas holidays once), then full-time engineering work including many weekends and evenings, then even the construction and blog-typing work I’m doing to this day.

There have been many times during this history of work, where I have thought that I had it pretty hard. When I had to spend entire days on the university campus in the dead of  a freezing winter, trudging through the snow with inadequate food and non-waterproof boots from the 8:30AM calculus class, to the 9:30AM chemistry class, on and on right through to the 8:00PM physics mid-term exam, all while being surrounded by a class of Engineering  students with far too many nerdy and quiet dudes who never made jokes, and far too few beautiful girls, that was pretty tough.

Whenever I’m upside down with my head and one scratched and filthy arm stuffed into a floor cavity, holding a grinder which is spinning a masonry blade cutting off old nails and plaster so I can remove a wall or a ceiling, and the whole scene is a dark din of Vietnam-style dust, sparks, and shouted expletives, I sometimes think that work can get a little unpleasant as well.

But as I’ve gotten older and made the connection between the hard work, and the results, and the constant learning and deep base of happiness it seems to provide in ever-increasing quantities, I have come to realize something I wish I could go back and tell myself at age fifteen:

Every single second of hard work you perform in your life, will come back and benefit you many times over for the rest of your life – in often unexpected ways.

In other words, no hard work is ever wasted. It sounds ridiculous, but I find it to be ridiculous how often this proves to be true.

One time I hit a serious roadblock when building my first house. Because of the architect missing some obscure rules about fire codes and roof venting, my house was not going to pass the “framing” stage of the building inspection. There was a workaround, which involved paying an extra $5000 to have an insulation company install a special kind of spray-in insulation. My business partner “Dean” (who we all met in the Big Mistake article), wanted to take the shortcut and just hire the company. The other option was for me personally to spend the entire weekend meticulously cutting and gluing up strips of rigid foam-board insulation to every square inch of a high vaulted ceiling.

“Fuck the $5000 expense”, I said, “that’s not in the budget. We can crank out the fix this weekend, and only spend $300 in foam board instead of five grand for the spray”.

Dean opted out of this task, since he always liked to take weekends off to relax. But luckily I had another hardworking friend who helped me out and we got the work done, and saved the $4700.

The work sucked at the time. It was dark and cold working in that house shell in late November, I missed my wife, and I got coated in filthy powder from the insulation. I questioned my own wisdom for taking on the extra task. It was only money after all.

But it wasn’t only money. Over the subsequent years, the information I was forced to learn about roof venting, foam board insulation, fire codes, building inspections, and a dozen other things from doing that work, have enabled me to solve countless other problems in home construction and energy-efficient design. Solving these other problems has brought in even more knowledge, and opened up a whole new section in my mental toolbox that I get to use for figuring things out in many areas of life.

And the shared experience of completing the shitty work together helped to build a longer-term friendship with the guy who helped me with the work. This guy is still out there succeeding, and probably even reading this alongside you since he is a practicing Mustachian. And when I look around at other friends who survived the Great Recession while keeping their businesses alive and their base of friends intact, it  is always the ones who were willing to sacrifice a weekend to, figuratively speaking, glue up their own damned foamboard to solve life’s little emergencies. Meanwhile, Dean ended up crashing himself into bankruptcy, mostly because of his aversion for hard work.

And that brings me to my next point: Shortcutters like my old business partner were often excited by the idea of making money without doing work. I have always been more interested in the idea of doing work, and making money from it if possible. He always talked about how our business profit sharing should not be based on how many hours we contributed. I felt that it should be, since with hard work comes accomplishment. It led me to create this Mustachian Maxim:

In the long run, in the Game of Life,  we all get Paid by the Hour.

There are a few lucky exceptions, like the kid who gets a trust fund or inherits his family’s business, the early employees in a company that eventually goes public, or the guy who gets famous for doing something stupid on TV. But when you’re starting from scratch, you need to think of every hour of work you do as planting a seed that will bloom at some unpredictable time in your future life. Sometimes it looks like successful people never do any work. Most of the time, it is because they have respected hard work all of their lives.

Tim Ferriss often praises the idea of minimal working hours. But if you look at how he arrived at the Four Hour Workweek, it was through years of extremely hard work, research and testing, and 80-hour workweeks. During those 80 hour weeks, he thought he was just wasting his time and answering customer and supplier emails and phone calls. But really in the background he was learning very quickly about how businesses and people work, and being forced to devise a system to take himself out of the loop. Without the 80 hour workweeks, he never would have been pushed to innovate, and we never would have heard of him.

Bringing all this back to the Mustachian way of life, this is why I am always advising you to work hard in your day job, but then also come home and take care of your own kids, clean your own house, cut your own grass, and spend the remaining time reading books or websites – to research things that are of interest to you. With no passive television watching allowed.

By doing all of these things, you’re actually working and learning all the time, without realizing it. Your mind is making unexpected connections between things you did during the day, things your kids said, things you read at night, and they are forming into new ways to make yourself happy, or to start your own business and earn more money, or to save money on some aspect of living, or get life in general figured out.

Hard work can be painful, but it should always be viewed as a good kind of pain, just as you celebrate a good burn in your biceps and forearms when doing a record-breaking set of concentration curls.  When you find really enjoyable work, you can get many of the same benefits without as much pain. But both kinds are to be welcomed. It is the source of growth in your life.

So get back to work!

*which, looking back, I now realize was surely lead-based paint. Nowadays we don’t let our kids play with that stuff and we make painters wear plastic space suits and ventilators just to handle it. Ahh the naive ways of the 1980s.

A few years ago, I learned the most shocking fact about public libraries:

Not everybody uses them!

“No!”, you may say, “That’s impossible – how else do people get their books?”

The scary answer that I discovered is that some people have developed a habit of regularly buying books which cost them $10 – $30 each, reading them, and then collecting them on an ever-growing series of bookshelves.

When you talk to a compulsive book collector, you’ll hear things like, “Oh, but I just LOVE books. They are my guilty pleasure. I love the feel of them, the smell of the paper, the beautiful covers and the way they look all lined up on my bookshelf. I love just being able to move slowly along my bookshelf on a Sunday morning, looking at all the titles, picking out books I haven’t read in years and sitting down and re-reading them, and blah blah blah”

I can relate to all these feelings, because I also get pretty excited when I walk past a big collection of books. I read whenever I get a chance, and I am overjoyed that so many books exist to provide me with a lifetime of unlimited learning and entertainment. The only difference is that I have several hundred thousand of them, and a paid staff who roams through my modern curved-glass 20,000 square foot book storage facility, automatically maintaining them and buying more for me constantly. I have so many books that I share them with everyone in my entire city, and we’ve even come to an agreement where we ALL pay just a few dollars per year each for the facility, and yet any one of us can borrow any of the books. By pooling our buying power together like this, everyone wins, and yet none of us have to waste space in our house storing books that we are not currently reading! We love our book sharing facility so much, we decided to call it the “Public Library”.

I know the home-based bookshelf is emotionally attractive to many who fancy themselves to be intellectuals. But if you are really that smart, why are you paying dearly for something that you can get for free?

All of us probably know one of these people, who buys “just a harmless book or two every week or so from Amazon, because hey, it’s only twelve bucks, and I’m a highly paid office worker, and I don’t really have many other vices”.  But unless this person is already completely financially independent, he might eventually wake up and notice over ten thousand dollars leaking from his ‘Stash every ten years from such a habit. A large book collection also amounts to a boat anchor of unnecessary belongings making future moves more difficult for you, not to mention the sizeable amount of natural resources that went into harvesting, printing, and shipping a thousand pounds of dead trees to your house.

But instead of the negatives of book collecting, let’s focus on the positives of library membership. The Money Mustache family can speak from experience here, since we have become enormous fans of the place over the past six years.

My city’s library is an unusually nice building, located in a scenic part of downtown. It’s within a 7-minute bike ride of my house, which has nothing to do with luck – we picked our current location specifically to be close to the library as well as the school, grocery stores, and the rest of the city’s amenities.  Because of this nice proximity, all three of us tend to visit at least once a week on average.

It romances all of us and sucks us in by catering to every one of our interests.

A kid in a library is just as amazed as a kid in Disneyland. The children’s section has thousands of kid-oriented books on all subjects, placed on low shelves encouraging them to dive in. There are also play areas, educational computers and games, and a gigantic model train set that was donated and maintained by a local model railroad club (i.e., friendly old dudes who still like toy trains and kids).

With no experience in turning to broadcast television for his storytelling entertainment (in fact, I’m not sure if he even knows it exists), Junior ‘Stash naturally turns to books. He reads simple ones to us, and we read complicated ones to him. It really seems to add up over time – we’ve read him somewhere over 50 full-sized novels during the normal bedtime reading sessions, including most of the Harry Potter series and more recently Ender’s Game.

Mrs Money Mustache heads upstairs and loads up her backpack with books about gardening, parenting, and intelligent-looking Lady novels with obscurely artsy titles and drawn-out and emotional subject matter.

I’ll usually end up in the non-fiction section and get books about economics, investing, technology, social trends, as well as cheesy self-help books, construction guides, and on a special occasion a little bit of science fiction or action – like Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

Between all of us, we tend to have 30 books checked out at any given time, and we make the most of the generous six-weeks-including-renewal holding period.

What a wonderful place. When you visit the library regularly, you start to notice that it’s not just a local government service that lends you books. It’s a place where the whole community of people interested in learning gathers together, secretly avoiding the TV and the shopping mall that gets the attention of everyone else. Local experts come in and give free talks in the conference rooms. People stop by to donate their recent issues of magazines after reading them. Volunteers raise and donate money and books.  Surplus library books get sold off for a buck each.  Little display tables get set up with currently applicable themes. There was a “peak oil” display recently with some articles, magazines, and books all laid out, free for anyone to sign out and read. And there is free wi-fi access throughout for those who want to just tune in and read on their laptop or phone.

Overall, you can get the equivalent of another complete University education in a different field, every few years,  just by being a regular visitor and letting your curiosity lead you around. You’ll learn new skills even while you enjoy the ultimate free leisure activity. All in a nice building surrounded by relatively cool people.

So your local library is much more than just your well-stocked home bookshelf. It’s really a Temple of Mustachianism, at which you would do well to start worshiping if you are not doing so already.

If you’re like me, you currently live somewhere. But can you explain WHY exactly you live there?

For most people throughout the history of our species, the reason they live somewhere is because they were born nearby. And the reason they were born there is because their parents were born nearby.

Very rarely, a brave and enterprising person will make a Big Move to a whole new place in search of wealth or happiness. Some of your ancestors did that, forming an interesting chapter in your family history. And maybe even YOU have done that in your own lifetime, and you’re currently living far from where you were born, probably because of a bold personal choice you made. Good for you!

I’m bringing up this topic because I am often amazed at the disparity in Niceness between different regions of the US (and of other countries and parts of the world in general). There are some areas which have drastically better weather, or landscape, or outdoor recreation, tax rates, job possibilities, mountains, ocean, lakes, beaches — you name it. And yet, as I study the areas with the best attributes, the cost of living in these areas is often completely uncorrelated with how nice they are.

I like to make fun of the New York/New Jersey region, because it is just amazingly expensive and crowded, and yet it is completely unremarkable compared to the rest of the United States – humid summers, rainy and cold winters, limited access to wide-open natural areas. All wrapped in a package of heavy regulations on small business owners like myself and shocking property taxes (annual tax on a house like mine would be over $10,000 there vs. $2300 that I pay now, even while the house itself would probably be a 1-bedroom shack in my under-$400,000 price range). It is true that some people make ridiculous salaries in New York City, and for those people it is logical to live there for a short time to maximize their savings. Others actually like it there, and of course many are tied by strong family bonds, which are very important. But after we rule out those groups, there are still millions of people who are just there because they are there, living a crowded and expensive life just because they haven’t realized how energizing it can be to MOVE.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen a lot of other parts of the US on my many roadtrips over the past decade. When visiting Tucson, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was astounded by the gorgeous scenery, neverending clear blue skies, and the extremely low cost at which you can pick up a stylish stucco house on a palm-treed lot in nice parts of town near the university. Especially after the housing price crash we’ve enjoyed in recent years in this country. My own Colorado is mostly cheap and presents a nice balance of culture, recreation, and reasonable outdoorsy year-round climate.

In Las Vegas, you can get a very nice house in many parts of town for about $100 grand. A stylish condo near the strip which you can rent out to tourists for massive profits as a vacation rental, or a spacious modern house with a pool out near the foothills where you can swim and hike out of your back yard, and never see winter again. You won’t care about the housing market or even the job market, because your cost of living will be so low that you may be able to retire a decade earlier than normal! The same story of palm trees and neverending warmth combined with negligible living costs now exists in Phoenix, AZ, and even the desert suburbs near the foothills just East of Los Angeles.

In the Pacific Northwest you can live affordably in the land of Beer and Beards in hip towns like Portland, Oregon or Bellingham, Washington. You can even live on a rainforesty island in the nearby San Juan Islands, and spend many of your days exploring coastlines by kayak.

In the 200-mile-stretch of beach cities around Miami, you can pick up a luxury house, or a snappy condo complex with a sweet pool and hottub, or a skyscraper overlooking the beaches and turquoise waters, for pennies on the dollar thanks to bank foreclosures, making a waterfront tropical beach compound less costly than a vinyl-clad shack in a Toronto suburb.

Ahh, Toronto, the Big City near my birthplace. It’s the Canadian version of NYC. People pay fantastic amounts for modest houses that are buried in stale brown snow for several months each year, and commute 40 minutes each way through a 16-lane traffic jam to get to their jobs. Or Fort McMurray, Alberta, where people pay Toronto prices to live in a Mosquito Tundra near the arctic circle, just to plug themselves into an above-market income stream from the Saudi-Arabia-sized Oil Sands project that is in a permanent expansion there. What kind of life is this!?!?

Canada has the fantastic Oceany Cliffs of the Maritimes, where everyone is friendly, houses near the sea are nearly free, and the parties are legendary. It has the Sunny Granola/Marijuana hippy belt in Interior BC and the Okanagan valley. There’s the Hong Kong Cosmopolitan buzz of Vancouver, with its non-snowy winters, or the Indie Rock/University Town/Island vibe of Victoria.

I also love Australia and New Zealand, where pleasantly different and fun-loving cultures combine with much more Ocean and noticeably cheaper Food and Beer – all in a gorgeous climate that rivals the best parts of North America.

With the increasing number of careers and entrepreneurial businesses that can be done from ANYWHERE through teleworking, and the fact that an ambitious person can carve out a job for themselves in almost any city, I think that moving is often a fantastic idea, and it is mainly fear of the unknown and fear of change that is holding people back.

When I graduated from Engineering school, I moved 300 miles away from my hometown, because that was the location of the best jobs that I knew about at the time. It was also where my wonderful sisters and my girlfriend, the future Mrs M., lived. But as my career progressed, I learned about the work opportunities South of the border. They sounded fantastic, as did the increased choice of geographic settings, versus those available in my native Ontario (“Smoggy metropolis”, “Mosquito Forest”, or “Mosquito Swamp”). I did the research, got the interviews, fought for the work permits, and BOOM, here I was in a fantastic new land of untold adventure.

I can’t even express the joy this decision has brought to my life over the past twelve years. It’s strange, because I cannot deny that regardless of where you move, you are still the same person. So some would suggest that you should be equally happy regardless of your surroundings. But it doesn’t seem to work that way for me. I think that for some people, there really is A BETTER PLACE. For me, it was the presence of mostly nature and sunshine with just enough city thrown in to make life convenient, and the odd combination of culture in the Boulder, Colorado area that starts with an entrepreneurial and educated base, but throws the whole Workaholic thing out the window and seeks Quality of Life instead. Sure, we still have douchebag consumerism and the odd clueless fancypants daintily laying grocery bags into the back of an empty Cadillac Escalade. But it’s drastically less than in other areas. And the much-mentioned pressure to compete based on material possessions seems to  be nonexistent in the area I live myself.

And let’s not forget the economic argument to moving. For me, the irresistible combination of higher income, lower taxes, and a lower cost of living was the thing that allowed me to retire so early. If I had not moved here at age 24, I’d probably still be working an increasingly monotonous high-salary job to this very day back in Canada.  Mr. Money Mustache would not even exist yet! Early retirement is still completely feasible in any capitalist economy, of course – it’s just speedier in some areas than others.

So the combination of geography, climate, culture, and economy is what makes me happy in my particular Better Place.

I do miss my family, especially when I read the emails about casual get-togethers that I missed out on because of living 1700 miles away. But we were always a far-flung family who got together only a couple times a year anyway. With the new model of making a six-week visit every summer, we get almost as much visiting time, without having to give up the benefits of the better life when not visiting.

Moving is easy when you’re young, fresh out of college, and with no kids. It is mostly in the minds of those people that I am trying to plant these ideas. Considering new cities is like reviewing a broad and exciting variety of new dishes and deciding which one to eat. I highly recommend doing this type of dreaming and strategizing when you are young. My own way of browsing involves reading Best Places to Live lists, touring the country and the world in person, and virtually flying around to check out the terrain and the bike paths using Google Earth (and the house prices and ‘hoods using Realtor.com).

The Ultimate Human-friendly city in my own view is one with a population between 50,000 and 200,000, in a compact and bikeable footprint, separated from neighboring cities by Actual Cows And Fields, as opposed to the fake cities that exist by the dozen on the sides of giant cities. Denver has “Lakewood, Englewood, Centennial, Aurora, Westminster” and a bunch of other silly non-cities attached to it. It should all just be called DENVER. But you have to drive for some time and pass a number of different crops and animals before you reach the distinct cities of Boulder and Longmont, for example. This distinct city status ensures that you’ll have everything you need right in your own town, and yet you’ll be able to hit the streets and very quickly end up in the country soaking up open vistas and black starry skies, even without resorting to car transportation. Your cell phone will have data access, FedEx will deliver your Amazon packages efficiently.. but yet you’ll never find yourself paying to enter a parking garage or waiting in an endless line for a restaurant. There is space for everyone in these Person-friendly cities.

For slightly older and more settled folks like the MMM family, moving is temporarily off of the menu – we want the lad to grow up in a stable place where the faces and friends stay the same from birth until high school graduation, and even the trees and hills and seasons become familiar through the span of his childhood.

But Mr. and Mrs. Money Mustache have  already got some more Adventure Moves planned for the many decades to follow in the future. Maybe we’ll move to a different college town as part of helping our son earn in-state tuition in another state. Maybe we’ll try Hawaii or another tropical island. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for San Diego.. but I also am fascinated by some expatriate destinations in Mexico like Lake Chapala near Guadalajara. Or maybe Victoria, on Vancouver Island back in the homeland.

You should live in whatever place works best for you. But you should be able to prove to yourself that it really is the right place – instead of just being the place you happened to be born.

Some consumer products become the butt of many jokes, because they are often bought in a fit of good intentions, but then discarded almost immediately. Treadmills and exercise bikes are in this category, as are juice extractors and bread machines.

So you can understand the hesitation I felt three years ago, when the temptation to own a bread machine of my own started growing within me.

The justification in my mind was that we were eating a lot of bread at the time, and hey, who doesn’t like fresh bread?

So I let the idea sit and rise for a while, and meanwhile the Mrs. and I went over to dinner at the home of some friends one night. These friends are a sophisticated and frugal couple from Holland who had just moved to the US.

They served us an exotic spicy vegetarian meal that was insanely delicious, with a slice of steaming seed-encrusted fresh-baked bread on the side.  ”Damn!”, my wife and I said, “We need to start eating more like you two!”. The table immediately broke into two discussions – the ladies debated the merits of various vegetarian recipes, and the men went to the garage to learn about this whole bread machine deal.

What I learned is that a bread machine is not necessarily a failed consumer product to be scoffed at. In the right hands, it is an instrument of Supreme Frugal Gourmetitude. “You just throw in some flour and a few other things”, explained my European friend, “and you have a great loaf of bread in just a few hours. Since you eat the bread each day, you are forced to make more several times per week. There is no chance of not using the machine regularly, so I do not understand why these machines are often abandoned in the United States.”

I love how Dutch people explain things, by the way. It is as if in their country, logic and reason are actually practiced by a majority of the population. (?!). When you add the cool accent, you have a very persuasive group of people.

With this new endorsement from a logical person, I had a peek on Craigslist. Sure enough, there were dozens of almost-new bread machines out there. I was able to find one right in my own town, at a price of $10 (the original value of this particular machine was around $100).

Three years into ownership, I must say that this machine is still a huge hit. First of all, the cost savings are significant: to buy a good-quality loaf of whole wheat bread in the grocery store costs about $2.50. To put in flour, yeast, olive oil, water, salt and sugar costs me about 50 cents to get an equivalent sized loaf of bread, with flour purchased in 50-pound bags from Costco. The time investment is also miniscule – without any special preparation, I timed myself in measuring the ingredients into the machine and pressing ‘START’ last time I made bread: 90 seconds. If you factor in the time needed to walk to the bread section of your store and pick out loaves during regular grocery shopping, the net time cost might even be zero. Plus I prevent a plastic bag from being manufactured as well.

So I’ve been saving two bucks per loaf, two loaves per week, for about 3 years. That’s $600 in bread money that is now part of the ‘Stash. Plus the bread is much more delicious, and you can even get crazy and make fancy bread – at various times I have made more decadent types such as my “Beer, Cheese, Bacon and Olive” bread. That stuff is baad~asss. You can throw in flax seeds, sesame seeds, even random crickets and ants from your back yard if you want to get really International/African with your recipes. Olive Ant Bread. Could be quite interesting.

BUT WAIT!! There is an even more exciting contribution this $10 machine has made to my life. It has completely eliminated the temptation to order pizza. Nowadays, I make the pizza dough in the machine, and roll it out into enormous thin-crust sheets which I bury in gourmet ingredients. It is just ridiculously delicious. I also make little personal 8″ pizza crusts by the dozen and freeze them. These are whipped out every afternoon and made into near-instant pizzas as lunch or after-school snacks for my little son. If you have a party at your house where pizza is in demand, you roll out some big fancy crusts and let the guests create their own edible works of art. It is a highly sociable alternative to ordering pizza that improves upon the experience in every way.

It’s hard to estimate how much cash this machine has saved me. At a minimum, it would be $600 in bread plus a a random allocation of $150 for pizza savings: $750. More realistically, we used to order pizza at least once a month at about $20 including tax, tip, and delivery. Nowadays, the raw ingredients cost $6 for a giant pizza. 3 years x 12 pizzas x $14 in savings per pizza is actually $504 worth of pizza, making this machine worth a total of over a grand so far. Regardless of the actual numbers, I am a happy Mustachian.

When it boils down to it, a bread maker is just another motorized consumer product that a true minimalist would scoff at. But in my own odd life which combines both frugality and decadence, I have found this device to be quite a worthy contributor to the family. If you eat bread and/or pizza regularly, I can safely recommend having a peek at your local Craig’s if you want to dip a toe into the breadmaking world as well.

*** Bonus Epilogue Section! ***
This article ended up gathering an unexpected number of views and comments. I figured I should update it with the following useful tips to make it more useful:

Once you get your machine, you will be excited to try it out right away, as I was. I walked into my standard grocery store (Safeway or Kroger) and picked up some whole wheat flour and breadmaking yeast. But when I did the math on the per-loaf cost, I was spending almost as much as the commercial bread! Why was this?

It’s because these ingredients vary widely in price. In the grocery store, they try to sell tiny 4 ounce jars of bread making yeast for $5.29 or so. In Costco/Sam’s club, you can get a 32-ounce double bag for a this price – maybe even less! Similarly, my local Safeway grocery store likes to display boutiquey-looking 3-5lb whole wheat flour in small bags for $5 bucks.. while Sam’s club was selling 50-pound bags of whole wheat for $15 or so when I last visited. Even Kroger (known in Colorado as “King Sooper’s”), sometimes has their store brand whole wheat flour for $1.79 per 5-lb bag. Since this ingredient can be stored forever, just stock up to infinity when you see it at this price.

The other ingredients (sugar, salt, oil, assorted seeds and grains) are fairly low cost at any store, but Costco still rules.

 Update – almost two years later: Although Mrs. MM and I no longer eat wheat these days (she became gluten intolerant and we both moved to more of a Mark’s Daily Apple style of low-carb eating), this bread machine still gets used regularly. My son still requires fresh-made Dad’s pizza, and we make the odd loaf of gluten-free bread whenever we need the magical weight-gaining properties that bread seems to provide for us.

Today is an Exciting Milestone in the Mr. Money Mustache blog – our first official Guest Posting!

This Instant Classic essay comes from a reader with alias ‘Poorplayer’. He seems to be an older, East-coast version of me, complete with a similar writing style. Good fun.

Thanks very much for the submission, Mr. P.!

Get Rich with: Scooters

Not all of us can be crazydog cyclists like MMM. Some of us are not quite in cycling shape, some of us may be physically unable to bike, some of us may not quite have enough time in our day to bike everywhere, and some of us might just be uninterested in cycling. But we sure would like to find some way to save all that money we waste tooling around town even in our efficient used Toyota. My answer to this dilemma is…get a scooter!

I first got into scooting in 1976 (which shows my age) back when I worked in Queens NY and lived just over the Long Island/Queens border. To commute to my first job I bought a 1976 Puch moped. This was a true moped, a motorized bike with pedals. I rode this about 12 miles one way through the streets and boulevards of Queens. Even back then, when gas was $0.60/gal., I realized gasoline was a limited resource that needed to be conserved. Also the first OPEC oil embargo brought shortages of gas to the US, and gas rationing brought long lines at the pumps for limited supplies of gas. So the Puch was something that allowed me to get through that time more easily than most. That’s what first hooked me.

I bought my next scooter in 1991. A colleague was trying to sell his daughter’s 1989 Yamaha Razz, and I bought it for $600 with very few miles. It was a far cry from my Puch. A flat running board to rest my feet, twist-and-go throttle, a wide seat, and a rack on which to put a milk crate or other carrying case. Not only that, but it mixed its own oil and gas! It had a 50cc motor, so no need to get a motorcycle endorsement. Driving around town was now not only dead easy, it was fun!

My current ride is a 2009 Kymco People S 250. I sold the Razz for $300 (nice return over a 19-year ownership). The Kymco is made in Taiwan, tops out at 85MPH, and gets 65MPG on average. It’s pretty much my principal mode of transportation from mid-March to mid-Nov. (I live in a snow belt region in upstate NY). I went and got the MC endorsement for this – one more off the bucket list!

It’s a real puzzle to me why most Americans won’t consider a scooter as an alternative to a second car. It seems to be some sort of cultural prejudice. In most third world countries the scooter is the most popular form of urban transportation – the streets are filled with them.  I think scooters hit the sweet spot between driving a car and biking in urban areas. A 50cc scooter new costs maybe $1200 on average, with the high end at $2K. No doubt used models can be found on Craigslist or eBay for much less. In most states a 50cc scooter can be licensed and driven on city streets where the speed limit is 45MPH or less (in CA they have to be C.A.R.B. certified, an emissions issue). Even on state highways and county roads they can legally be driven on the shoulder. The cost for insurance is about $5.00, and registration usually costs the same. A 50cc scooter gets about 85-95 MPG, and has a top speed of about 30 MPH*. Add a luggage rack or saddle bags, or even a roomy backpack, and you have the perfect errand-running and commuting vehicle for urban areas.

How much can you save? Well, I’m not a numbers guy, but it doesn’t take too many brain cells to realize that a gas-powered vehicle with an annual fuel cost of about $300/year is going to save a lot of money over a second car. Even a car rated at 30MPG in city driving is using 3x more gas per mile than a scooter. Repairs? Almost nil. Change the spark plug on a 50cc scooter and you’ve done a tune-up. Heck, these things in some ways are as cheap to maintain as a bike.

Now, perhaps some of you guys reading this might think a 50cc scooter just isn’t “manly” enough. Well, I have noticed how Mrs.MM has been urging the ladies to change their perceptions of what it means to appear womanly, so I say to the guys out there – get over your damn macho selves! Know what? My Razz was PINK when I bought it, and I got quite a few stares and laughs over the years riding my Bahama-colored scooter. But I could always laugh back, knowing I was building my ‘stash to send my 3 kids to college debt-free. And I think making sure that your kids start out their lives college-debt free is pretty fuckin’ manly! I’ll let you ponder that shit for awhile, so maybe you’ll give a scooter a second thought.

More information can be found at this fun and breezy web site about scooters. I’ve found scooter riding to be one of the most fun and effective ways to cut down my transportation expenses significantly over 30+ years of scooting. It’s maybe the biggest secret out there to putting more cash in your pocket while maintaining the convenience of motorized transportation and keeping a light footprint on the environment. So if you can’t quite make the giant leap to high-octane cycling, and hypermiling makes you a little crazy, think about investing in a scooter. I’m pretty sure you won’t regret it.

*Rumor has it that a 50cc can go faster than 30 MPH if it is de-restricted. Doing this, however, may make your ride illegal.

MMM Note: I heartily agree with this strategy, although you still should eventually throw in as much biking as possible, it’s even better for you. Also check out the electric-powered scooters that are available these days such as this one from e-Moto.  Prices vary widely if you shop around, and with the benefits of zero tailpipe emissions (actually almost zero overall emissions if you use only wind or solar-generated electricity as I do) and no noise, you can feel even more Mustachian about your urban commuting.

Ahh, Craigslist. We’ve mentioned it together many times already here on Mr. Money Mustache, but it is such a great invention, on par with the bicycle as one of the Top Two Things that will Save America From Itself, that it deserves its own love note.

Let’s illustrate with a little story.

Early this afternoon, I was enjoying some manly hobby time, fiddling with tools out in the shed.  Then a piece of wood fell over and bonked me in the shin. I picked up the wood, only to snag it on a fluffy bag of insulation poking out into the room. I tried to stuff this back into place, but the shelf was already overflowing with scraps of wood and other construction materials. “God Dammit!”, I said, “My shed is way too crowded!”.

The root of all this evil was a pair of Papasan chairs that were also hanging out in there, taking up half of the floor space. They were surplus furniture – one from the good ol’ days in my first house, circa 2000 , and another left behind a few tenant turnovers ago in the rental house. Both in good shape and fairly stylish and modern, but just with no reasonable place to fit in our current house.

In the bad old days, you’d have four choices for bulky troublemakers like these:

1. Leave them in your garage or basement, forever cluttering up your life and let your children sort them out in your estate sale when you die.
2. Plan to hold a garage/yard sale someday to sell them off.
3. Pay an exorbitant fee to list them in the local newspaper classified in hope of selling them.
4. Throw them out.

Note that options 1 through 3 usually turn out to be equivalent – you are unsuccessful in unloading the items so they stick around and burden you until your death.

But here’s what I did today instead:

1. Heaved them onto a reasonably clean section of my driveway with some trees in the background.
2. Whipped out the iPhone and snapped a few pictures – an overall shot plus a few closeups, with cushions on and off.
3. Ran the Craigspro app on the phone to log into Boulder Craigslist, type a description, upload the photos and click “Post”. (I priced the chairs at $25 each, in case you were wondering).
4. Received a text message on said phone approximately ten minutes later. “Your chairs still available? Can I pick them up tonight?”, “Yup, here’s my address, see you at 5:00!”.
5. 90 minutes later, helped the young lady who had just moved from Chicago to Boulder (a very wise move in my opinion) load them into her pickup, with a fresh fifty dollars rustling cheerfully in my pocket.

Shed cleared, ‘Stash enhanced. What a fantastic invention Craigslist is. And the more popular it becomes, the more useful it becomes, since the market grows. It is the type of service I feel we need to save the world – completely non-corporate, non-greedy, and community organized. Craigslist does everything for free except for a very small subset of categories of postings (such as employment ads placed by companies in NYC).  This small stream of income is enough to pay their tiny staff and run the service around the whole world.

And what a service they are providing. Even though it is very simple, it enables countless millions of people to buy and sell products and services, free from advertising and commission fees. And most significantly to me, to get almost anything you need, used, and sell anything you don’t need for a fair price as well.

The value of used goods is a funny thing. A high-quality front-loading washing machine and dryer set costs about $1200 new these days at a store. On Craigslist, you’ll pay $400-$500 for a very similar set that is just a few years old. The person you bought them from lost $700 on the transaction. But if you buy carefully and keep them good shape, you can use these appliances for a few more years and re-sell them for virtually the same amount if you need to move on or upgrade. The used-to-used depreciation is even less on longer-lasting things like furniture or garden tools.

This brings up a neat possibility – not only should you use Craigslist instead of a retail store to buy every manufactured thing you need. You can also use it as a free way to “store” your unused goods. I didn’t hesitate to sell my papasan chairs today, because I know if I ever need them back, I can open up Craigslist and find plenty more just like them at any point in the future.

I feel the same way about the 2001 Honda VFR800 motorcycle I “stored” on Craig’s a few years ago. She was my baby when I foolishly bought her new in 2001, but I just wasn’t finding many chances to ride by the year 2007, having no job to commute to and a young child to care for. I was hesitant to sell the bike, until I realized I was really just storing it and letting someone else pay for the continuing depreciation. There will always be an infinite number of motorcycles streaming by on Craigslist and if you need one, you just reach your hand into the stream and scoop one out.

Over the years, I’ve probably done a couple hundred thousand dollars of deals on Craigslist, including finding about fifteen sets of rental house tenants, selling a car and a motorcycle, buying a different car and a minivan, plus an untold number of furniture and tool transactions. One time I really liked a person who came and picked up some free chairs from me – we are still friends today. Another time I wanted to learn how to re-roof my own house, so I posted an ad asking for an experienced roofer to come work alongside me to teach me how to do it. I got a reply the same day and hired the guy – That roof came out great, saved me $3000 over a roofing company, and I’m still friends with that roofer as well. Later he gave me a kiddie pool for my son and helped out on several other construction jobs in my circle of friends as well as offering work to me.

So I view Craigslist not just as an Environment Saver – by preventing the unnecessary manufacturing of a bunch of new stuff – but also a Community Machine – connecting millions of people to do real activities together, as opposed to the soul sucking model of big corporations stamping out stores across the world, staffing them with minimum wage workers, connecting them to a stream of wasteful products flowing straight from China, and having us all drive into the big boxes every day to bring home SUV-loads of it which will soon end up buried in a landfill.

But even I am just a casual Craiglist user compared to some. You can also use it to find a job, a lover, or even to make money as a reseller. Some people with an eye for value and a mouse finger built for speed search each day, finding undervalued or free items, scooping them up, and then re-selling them at higher prices on Craigslist or ebay. Arbiters in the world of used goods.

But since it’s not retail, there is actually some skill involved in being a truly successful Craigslist participant. You will do much better if you do your buying with real manners and your selling with real marketing. For this reason, we will conclude the article with

Mr. Money Mustache’s Guide to Great Craigslist Success

Selling:
Always take the time to properly stage and photograph whatever you’re selling. Clean it up, put it in front of a nice background, position the camera in a useful and dramatic way, and make sure the damned flash is off. Take ten photos, and post the best four (or whatever the maximum allowed is) on your Craig’s posting.

For rental houses, link to an external website with at least 20 pro-quality photos, every room from every angle at a minimum. This technique alone lets me charge at least 10% more for my rentals than similar-quality homes with crappy Craigslist ads!

Use loads of descriptive text, including full specifications, measurements, emotional descriptions of the benefits of owning this item, and include the price it cost new, to illustrate how cheap your asking price is by comparison.

Have a catchy headline that includes the brand name and something like “high-quality”, “Fancy”, or “luxurious” in it. Silly old advertising words still work well, since they have a nice vintage feel to them, as if being spoken by a 1950s man with styled greasy hair.

Buying:
Respond quickly, with a polite and intelligent inquiry by email. Not, “U still hav ur speakrs?”,  but rather, “Hi, I saw your ad from Tuesday on Craigslist for the Polk Audio speakers – I’m right near you in Longmont, are you around this weekend for me to check them out?”

Once you have contact, make your offer in advance by email or phone, “I’d be interested in those speakers if you can let them go for $200. I understand that you might want to hold out for a better price, but email me back in the future if you decide this will work for you”. Once you are at the person’s house, your position is weakened since they know you drove there probably willing to pay the full price.

Overall:
Just like the real world, Craigslist is full of both wonderful and useless people, so you can hone your interpersonal skills by seeking out the former and learning not to waste time on the latter. But in general, I feel that the more of your business you can do locally on a person-to-person basis, the better off you’ll be in life.

Thank you Craig Newmark!

Ahh, Building Things.

It’s a hobby I have talked about many times before, but a recent experience has completed the transformation of carpentry from “enjoyable pastime” all the way up to “Lifetime Religion” for me – something that deserves its own article and its own place on the bookshelf of Top Ways to Be a Happy Early Retiree. Not everyone is born with the urge to build or create physical things, but a surprising number of people do have this desire, sometimes hiding unused beneath the crispy exoskeleton of consumerism that has been burned onto most of us by the Crème Brûlée blowtorch of modern marketing.

It was about 1:00 AM sometime last week. I was alone in an under-construction cottage sitting atop a steep hill overlooking a peaceful and almost mirror-smooth lake. The full moon’s reflection shimmered just slightly in the tiny surface ripples. All windows were open and the cool midnight forest air streamed into my bright work area where I was carving out the hinge recesses on some new pine doors to be installed into the bedrooms and bathroom. I had been working feverishly for about 8 hours at this point, and hours felt like seconds, and thirty-seconds of an inch felt as big as the universe, I had become so thoroughly sucked in. Great music played nonstop from my construction radio, which I keep stocked with about 300 albums worth of mp3s. The only interruptions were the occasional pauses to roll up and eat another burrito and input/output another quart of water.

At long last,  after finishing an enormous swath of flooring, cabinetry, door installation, and miscellaneous side projects, I started to get somewhat delirious and ready for some sleep so I unbuckled the toolbelt, and surveyed the day’s accomplishments.

“Holy Shit”, I said, “I sure do love building things.”

And then I passed out on a mattress and slept for about 9 hours before beginning the cycle anew.

Some budding Carpenter Retirees among you have picked up on my love for the craft and asked me questions in private emails asking how I got into it. The question comes up often enough that I thought it would be worth sharing here.

Personally, I became hooked as a kid building my first science fair project somewhere around age eleven. It involved a wood and glass terrarium with a hinged lid which was far more fun to build than the ensuing experiment involving growing bean plants.

From there I moved on to start building various pairs of speakers in the tragically small and cramped cellar of my parents’ old Victorian house. (I think this trauma is what caused my current love of big, clean, open rooms – especially basements and garage  workshops).  Later I renovated the attic of that same Victorian house to create my Teenage Bedroom, which provided years of fun. All of this early work would look flimsy and ridiculous by adult standards, but it sure did get me hooked.

Then there were the Dark Years – four years of getting a university degree, and an additional four of living in apartments and shared houses, moving frequently, and focusing mostly on being a normal office-working engineer.

But in the year 2000, I bought my first house. A comical 1978 fixer-upper complete with brown wood paneling, leaky aluminum windows and plenty of vinyl and carpet flooring throughout. Over the next five years I spent most of my free time ripping out or refinishing every single visible surface inside and out, and scrapping all of the unnecessary walls as well. I got to learn most of the construction trades by rebuilding it to meet my own fairly modernist/nature-inspired tastes.  My wife and I loved it there. There were  frequent House Parties in those childless twentysomething days and it was fantastic to get to give tours of the house and all of the finished projects.

From there the hobby grew further, when in 2005 I started a small housebuilding company to build modern Earth-friendly houses in a local neighborhood called Prospect New Town, and did most of the carpentry work on the two houses built by the company. I had hired this great old carpenter to do the framing on the first project, and I worked side-by-side with him from the sill plates right up to the last pieces of fine wood trim on the interior, an experience which really gave my skills a boost.

The building company died a painful and unprofitable death in the housing crash of 2007-present,  but the desire to build lived on. Since then I have become a freelance carpenter and specialized in the field of Anything Interesting – kitchens, fancy bathrooms, full remodels, and plenty of projects on my own house and rental houses of the past and present.

Overall, this hobby has contributed somewhere between $200,000 and $400,000 to my current ‘stash, between value increases on houses before selling them, higher rental income, free renovations for myself, and getting paid to build things for other people.  But far beyond money, it has provided a foundation for self-sufficiency. It is so reassuring to know that even if my house sank into the ground tomorrow morning, I could be out there by lunchtime beginning the enjoyable journey of building it back better than before. In an existing house, if I want a new window or a door somewhere,  anywhere, I can just grab the toolbox and start cutting and framing. If I need extra cash (at an hourly rate that is at least four times what I’d get for working at Home Depot), I can just do these things for other people. In any town in the country! Thank you, carpentry, I love you.

Finally, I will reveal my Ace-in-the-hole carpentry moneymaking technique to you. This is the way you can combine a whole spectrum of skills to make a six-figure income while rarely leaving your house and legally paying no income tax. Check it out:

You buy a very dated house in a great and hip neighborhood. The more expensive the ‘hood relative to your Dog House, the better. You will be buying the place all the wealthy yuppies are skimming over, because they want something that is “move-in ready”.

You move into the house, and start fixing it up. Use your skills, use great design principles from library books and even HGTV shows. Use Craigslist and recycled building materials shops to get the materials at a steal. You take your time and do a good job, and lead a real life on the side. After two years, you finally finish the job.

The house is now worth $230,000 more than you paid for it. You only spent $30,000 on the materials, meaning you earned $200,000 for your work. But because the US government does not charge ANY income tax on capital gains you make on a primary residence if you own it for 2 years or longer (up to a profit limit of $250k), you have just made $100 grand per year with ZERO taxes!

You can repeat this trick every two years for as long as you care to keep making money. If the cost numbers are different in your neighborhood, feel free to adjust them for your own situation, but in most prosperous cities, there is still great profit to be made from renovating your own house with your own hands in the more desirable neighborhoods. And this situation will only improve as the current foreclosure hangover inventory from banks clears out, which is artificially depressing current prices, making now a better starting time than usual to begin such a scheme.

So there you have it – the long-awaited Carpentry article. It may not be for everyone, but for some of us, it can be Everything.

Yesterday I ran into a friend while perusing the Yogurt section of the local grocery store. It was around noon on a Thursday, and my friend explained to me that he had just come from his office job to grab a few necessities for lunch because he had forgotten to bring anything to work that day.

I was glad to see my friend, and also impressed that he had decided to hit the grocery store instead of a fast food joint. A Fairly Mustachian Move, compared to most people, who go out to lunch almost every work day, spending about $12 including food, drink, tax, tip, and car expenses. Plus an hour of otherwise productive time that could be used either to get ahead in their careers or go home earlier that night.

But I have a secret for you that is a thousand times more powerful than even a trip to the grocery store: The Secret Mustachian Under-Desk Food ‘Stash.

You see, I have an unusually high need for food. As a tall man without the food-conserving advantages of Car Transportation or Television Leisure, I burn through a good number of calories each day.. which means during my career as an office worker, I had to become quite an expert at Delicious In-Office Eating.  Each day I had to plan for a good Second Breakfast, Mid-Morning Snack, Lunch, Afternoon Snack, and Pre-biking-home Snack.

The solution I found was keeping a permanently stocked fridge hidden under my desk.

So here is how it works: You get a nice little bar fridge from your own basement, from a friend, or from Craigslist.

Stock the fridge with a loaf of whole wheat bread, natural peanut butter, a jar of good jam, some bananas, apples, carrots, cucumbers and any other snacking vegetables, almonds, hot sauce, cheddar cheese, nice yogurt, and even some Beer for when you work late with the coworkers. Also bring your own plate, cup, and cutlery.

Each Monday when you begin the workweek, bring in groceries to re-stock it as needed. If you ever forget this step, there are enough long-lasting items in there to allow you to improvise a lunch to get you through until restocking.

And Pow! You are suddenly on the career fast-track! You are always in a good mood at work because your mind and body are constantly kept in perfect running order with the utmost in nutrition.

You have freed an hour of each day to work smarter, and the $12 of savings per day will compound to about $45,000 over your ten year career. It would be more over an even longer career, but YOU will get to retire and move on to eating from your real fridge at home as I do.

I donated my own office worker fridge to a friend in need and I hope it is now contributing to someone else’s early retirement.

What will YOU keep in your own secret food ‘Stash?

Imagine a device so advanced that it can keep any boy or man, from birth to beyond age 100, looking trim, clean and handsome for life. It can sculpt, trim, shape, or completely remove any hair on your body. It will save you hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours of time EVERY YEAR, forever. Over thirty thousand dollars over a lifetime. But yet this device costs less than $50.00.

“Is such a thing possible?”, you may ask.

Well thanks for asking, yes it is!

OK, I will admit I am not the first person to come up with this idea, but I am still its most enthusiastic supporter. You see, I was once your average pay-for-a-haircut type of guy myself. Throughout my childhood, my Mum would take my little brother and I to the barber shop for haircuts every few months. As an older lad, I would walk alone to the manly establishment downtown to get the mop chopped.

I was always quite excited immediately after a haircut because this was when I looked my best. I felt more confident and did more posing in the mirror. But within a few weeks the hair would grow in and I’d lose my edge, and the waiting game would begin – when would the hair be big enough to justify yet another expensive professional haircut?

But then at last, my pain came to an end. A friend informed me of the existence of the Universal Men’s Grooming Device. It turned out that they had been selling these buzzing hair trimmer machines in stores for years, and I just didn’t know about them. I bought one, and I started cutting my own hair immediately and frequently.

From that point on, I never had to lose my edge! I never had to waste time sitting awkwardly around in the barber shop, watching the old dudes talk about hockey. I had gained control over my own ‘Stash of hair.

As I grew older, I realized the UMGD  is the ideal machine for Mustache and Beard work as well. A man can easily carve out a nice choppy set of sideburns, or a flowing Circus-Performer Mustache, or a zig-zag Statement Beard in just minutes at any time of day or night. And there’s more! If he should decide upon the clean shaven look, the UMGD will instantly lop off all facial hair, leaving only a very fine, uniform and protective Manly Stubble across the target region. So much better than the artificial and painful Girlyman Smoothness produced by razors! And so much more Mustachian, both because of the preservation of a base layer of armor, and the savings of an additional layer of cash from the Gillette Marketing machine.

Again we find ourselves at a crossroads in the article. There are a group of you, probably mostly ERE readers, who already cut your own hair and laugh at my naivete for thinking a tip like this could be useful for anyone.

But I still had to write the article, because I’ve seen another side of humanity. I have seen adult men from my own group of friends, not rock stars or presidential candidates, but engineers and everyday office workers, who actually pay to have their short basic haircuts maintained. And lest you assume they must be trust fund billionaires or dot-com angel investors, they are not – these are working people with non-infinite money, some even with car loans!!

I know, I know.. it is hard to believe that precious money could be squandered in such a carefree manner, but I live in a wild area where anything goes, and I haven’t even told you the half of it yet.

So, if I did surprise you with this lesson about the amazing Grooming Device, you might want to pick one up instead of your next scheduled haircut. Watch a video on YouTube if you need a quick lesson on technique, or get your wife or roommate to help you.

I have deliberately left out the Lady’s Perspective on the matter, because I don’t know much about it, but I HAVE heard that it is possible for ladies to cut each others’ hair in a non-salon environment, enabling both bonding and enhanced riches. I may even have a few pictures of this happening in my collection.

But for now, MEN: You have been saved from a lifetime of haircuts, razors, shaving cream, and time-wasting. The only grooming products you will ever need for the rest of your life are: this one single device, a bottle of shampoo, and a good stick of deodorant. The rest of the multibillion dollar industry can completely fade away now and the airwaves can fall silent because there is nothing left to advertise. And you will be more handsome and manly-looking to go along with it.

Congratulations again. Send us pictures of your fancy new Mustache!

We’re diving into a fundamentally new field here – the field of actually increasing your income, which is quite different from the cutting your spending I usually advocate.

For most people, the cutting works much better because they already have a shortage of free time, and a surplus of income compared to what is actually needed to live a reasonable life.

But for those rare people, perhaps the young and ambitious, or those without children who need all of your free time, it is possible to raise your income considerably while keeping your day job by using the time-honored method of becoming a landlord.

To some people, it sounds like a hassle not worth even considering. To others who have read the Get Rich books on the topic or met a self-made multimillionaire who became wealthy using rentals, the idea is intriguing and desirable. As a small-time landlord myself who has rented out four houses over the years and still has one rental today, I would say the truth is somewhere in between.

Here is a real-world example with some numbers showing the fundamental reason that these things make you money:

- In my town, I can buy a 3-bedroom house in a fairly good neighborhood for about $200,000. I would put $40,000 down on it, and because of of today’s insanely low interest rates, my monthly costs for the $160,000 loan including insurance, property taxes, and a few bucks for maintenance would be about $950/month.

- At local rates, I can rent this house out for about $1200/month.

So every month I am getting this benefit:
$250 of actual cashflow from the rental
$230 of principal on the mortgage gets paid off.

The net profit is $480/month, or $5760 per year. That is a 14.4 percent return on my $40,000 investment, right? Double the MMM official figure for stock market returns?!

But no, it’s not quite the same, because you actually have to do WORK to buy the house and take care of the tenants. I find that if you do a good job getting nice responsible tenants, the total amount of work required for each rental house averages about 1 day per month, or 96 hours per year.

So your hourly rate of pay is about $60 per hour, right? Well, again not quite, because you would have made half of that money if you had just put the $40k into an index fund at an average of 7%. Accounting for that, you’re getting $30 per hour for managing the property, which is still reasonable pay for anyone who is willing to work for $60k or less per year.

But I’ve left out an important part of the equation: Appreciation on the rental house. Because you only put 20% down on the house, you basically own an investment that is leveraged at 5-to-1. That is potentially risky, as many US landlords found out when the property values dropped in recent years. But on average, the statistics say that over the long run your rental house value will go up with inflation: 2-3% per year. So let’s re-run the numbers using a conservative amount of appreciation:

Cashflow and Mortgage Payoff: $5760 per year
Appreciation on House ($200,000@2%): $4,000 per year.

Now you’re getting paid $9760 per year in exchange for investing $40,000 and putting in 96 hours. Doing the same stock-market-equivalent subtraction above, you are earning about $72.50 per hour. Unless you make more than $144,000 in your day job, this should start to sound pretty exciting to you. And if you have the skills to expand your empire to include multiple rentals, you can put in quite a few hours at your new $72.50 rate.

If you collect several houses, you can even quit your day job and have a more-than-full-time income for less-than-full-time effort. At $72.50 per hour, you can earn a comfy $40k family living wage with about 10 hours a week of effort.   Several people I know have already done this.

If your area DOES ever have a property boom and home values go up faster than inflation, you can make some even bigger chunks of easy money. In my best experience, I made about $50,000 in appreciation over five years on a rental house, and in my worst experience, I lost about $10,000 over five years on another one (I bought that one in the 2005 housing boom and had to sell in 2010, still part of the current slow period).

And if your area has a higher rent-to-price ratio, sometimes referred to as the “cap rate”, the plan can be even more attractive. In the example above, the rent of $14,400/year divided by the $200,000 price gives a cap rate of 7.2%.  In expensive cities, the cap rate is much lower, making rentals a bad idea. But in some cases you can get a much higher cap rate – it usually works out better the less expensive the dwelling is, which is why condos make good rentals. This economy of scale continues all the way to the ultimate rental tool – the apartment building, which can have cap rates over 12%.

The bottom line is, it’s just another way to trade time for money. But if you have the enthusiasm for knowing the good neighborhoods in your own city, finding a good deal on a house, doing minor renovations and maintenance, and interacting with tenants who you reel in with an expertly-crafted Craigslist ad, it can possibly be the highest wage you’ll ever earn – and thus the fastest way to get from Enthusiastic Young Office Worker to Retired Senior ‘Stash.

This is just an introduction to the topic. There are loads of books about this in the library if you want to learn more, or if you want to hear more details from me, think up a question for the comments section!

Just over ten years ago, I was happily living in my first house. This house was within easy biking distance of work (9 miles) and the grocery store (2 miles), and walking distance of the city’s Recreation Center (1 mile) which I enjoyed visiting for workouts about three times per week.

I was especially pleased with this Rec Center because the membership dues were only about $25 per month, much less than the private health clubs I had been visiting for the ten years prior to that.

A triangle of the Big Three: all the main places a person has to visit on a regular basis, available without having to drive. What could be more frugal or efficient than this?

But then one day I was doing my monthly stock-up of bulk groceries at Costco, and there was a special item on sale: A full 300 pound set of Olympic plates and bars, including collars, clips, a long bar and a curling bar, for $99 bucks.  Next to this in the display area was a complete bench and squat rack set – a nice bench with adjustable angle, curling platform at the end, and a superb squat rack. Also 99 bucks.

I was only a Junior Mustache at the time, but I could already tell this was a great opportunity. I loaded up the whole system onto a flatbed cart, bought it, and stuffed it  all into the 1993 Civic Hatchback to rush home and assemble it.

Because of this $198 investment, I am almost $9,000 richer today. And probably a lot less flabby.

You see, having this simple but complete weight set has allowed me, my wife, and even occasional visiting friends to get amazing muscle-blasting workouts at all hours of the day, on weekends, holidays, during snowstorms, whatever. At a savings of $25.00 per month each! And that is assuming that we would never have driven to the gym for exercise, something that would have changed once we moved to our current town.

It’s incredibly motivating to have your gym at home too – there are no excuses about not wanting to go out or not having time. You just pick up the barbell and start moving. This feels good, so you put on some music and take up the intensity. Before you know it, you have done a complete workout and improved almost every aspect of your body and overall well being. The convenience is astounding.

I just walked over and did a set of clean and presses in my own gym between typing the last sentence and typing this one, just to prove my point!

If a few pounds of steel is all you need to stay fit, why do our indebted countrymen spend $20 billion annually to accomplish the same thing in more complicated ways like <insert adjective>Yoga, bouncy aerobics and indoor bicycling classes? Why do they burn money in their cars doing unnecessary driving to go to gyms? This has always been a mystery to me.

When I ask around, I get misguided answers like ladies saying “I don’t want to bulk up and be one of those frightening women in Flex magazine”. Or men saying, “I don’t really know how to use free weights, I just want a circuit of machines I can work my way through”.

It’s wrong, all of it.

If you do the research and read a gigantic pile of fitness books and magazines*, you will come to the conclusion that Free Weights –  barbells and dumbells and that’s it – are by far the best way to get in shape, lose all your fat, build healthy amounts of muscle, and amazingly enough fix almost every other possible ailment.. reduce later-life incidence of arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, bone loss, many forms of cancer, all the common old-age injuries. You’ll live longer and healthier. Every person on the entire planet who still has control over their arms and legs should be lifting weights regularly – no question about it.

Ladies do not “bulk up” from lifting weights at a regular-person level. They lose fat, gain nicer curves, and accomplish everything that YogaLatesAerobics stuff does, in much greater quantities and less time.

Ironically, this best form of exercise is also the cheapest. Big gyms spend over a million dollars per location on stupid treadmills with LED television screens and fans built in, powder-coated and padded electronic pistony gizmos that let you wiggle your arms and legs around in strange patterns, while the only worthwhile feature – the barbells, benches, and racks – barely show up on the budget (and they get surprisingly light use too, unless the gym is near an army base).

If your monthly budget has any sort of health club spending on it right now, you should slash it, and take this opportunity to add yet another 10-20 thousand employees every 10 years to your ‘Stash. All you need is a 10 x 10 area of a basement, spare bedroom, garage, or covered porch out back to have a wonderful home gym. Find a big old mirror and set up a radio.  Check the book “Arnold’s Bodybuilding for men”, “Sculpting her Body Perfect” or another suitable title out of your library and take some notes. Shop on your local Craigslist for an olympic-style bar with some metal plates, a combination bench/squat rack, and some dumbells of varying weights if you can find them. These things never wear out, so there is no reason to buy them new. If you have a nearby friend who already works out at home, make a recurring workout schedule and you will both become more motivated.

If you are ready to get in shape but don’t spend money on health clubs right now, the decision is more tricky, because I don’t want you to increase your spending just yet. You can start with free exercises like taking every staircase you can find, push-ups, and solo skipping in your driveway.

And of course, biking – you are doing a lot of that now, since I published the article – aren’t you? Biking is perhaps the cornerstone of this whole operation. And my whole plan to save the Human Race. If you can start using a bike regularly, all other life accomplishments will flow naturally from that skill and you will join Me and all the Mightiest Mustachian Eagles as we soar daily through the skies above the Grand Canyon.

Are you ready to make another ten grand, feel and look better, and extend your youth by 20 years or so? Good – keep me posted on your lifting!

*From 1991-1993, I worked as a convenience store clerk in high school. During the slow evening hours at the store, I got to read every issue of Men’s Fitness, Muscle & Fitness, Flex magazine, and any other nutrition and bodybuilding book showed up on the store shelves.  That has turned out to be pretty useful knowledge over the years.

Here at Mr. Money Mustache, the word “Leisure” seems to come up quite a bit. This is not only because it is a classic and amusing old-fashioned word, much like “Fancy”, but also because it is at the core of what we are promoting – it represents the freedom to do things that make you happy.

But in our rich society, leisure time has become confusingly mixed with massive spending. Partly because it is a natural human instinct to show off one’s power and wealth, and partly because millions of clever companies are advertising to us every day that we need to buy their products in order to enjoy leisure time.

So let’s break it down logically. When you are not at work, you need to do SOMETHING with your time. The possibilities are endless.

You can eat and sleep and watch TV, which are very low-cost activities, but they can be depressing in large doses.

So many higher-achieving people take it up a notch and actually get off the couch.  They hop into their cars and head out to the shopping mall, the restaurant, the golf course, or the ski resort. Some hitch the powerboat or the trailer full of ATVs to the back of their full-size pickup and head for the lake or the mountains. The added challenge of any of these activities over watching TV is invigorating and it helps to make these people happy. Leisure!

The only problem is that expensive leisure activities like these will burn off your Money Mustache (not to mention the polar ice caps) faster than you can say “Louis Vuitton”.

What if there were a way to get the same happiness out of different activities? What if we thought about our leisure time as a blank slate on which to paint a picture of happiness, instead of just a clean lake through which to drive our motorboat? It is easier than it sounds. The key is to  make a list of all the things you think you might enjoy doing. I’ll try it out right now on myself.

Learning to fly an airplane
Playing in the sparkling glacier-fed local creek with my son
Surfing on Kauai’i's North shore
Carving through canyons on a silent bicycle
Downhill mountain bike riding at a ski resort
Renovating my own kitchen
Picking out a new outfit at a high-end men’s store
Planting a garden
Carving through canyons on a sporty motorcycle
Canoeing in the local lakes
Mountain bike riding in the mountains at the edge of town

All of the things above sound fun to me. But now I can sort the list based on how expensive they are, cheapest ones first:

Playing in the sparkling glacier-fed local creek with my son ($0)
Carving through canyons on a silent bicycle ($0 – $10 if you break up the cost of bike ownership across many rides)
Canoeing in the local lakes ($0 – $10)
Mountain bike riding in the mountains at the edge of town ($5 to cover round-trip car mileage)
Planting a garden ($100/year of plants and materials – averaging to $2 per hour of gardening)
Renovating my own kitchen ($4000 of materials but actually a NEGATIVE cost if you do a good job and eventually sell your house)
Carving through canyons on a sporty motorcycle ($100 if you average out motorcycle ownership costs and gas)
Downhill mountain bike riding at a ski resort ($100 for transportation and lift tickets)
Picking out a new outfit at a high-end men’s store ($400?)
Surfing on Kauai’i's North shore ($200/day)
Learning to fly an airplane ($300/day)

Wow, reviewing the list, I see that there are already more than enough activities in the first half of that list to use up ALL of my free time. But they are just as much fun to me as the expensive ones at the end of the list.. especially since I like things that are peaceful and give my mind a rest. And if you care at all about the Earth, there are obvious advantages too.

As an expansion of this idea, consider hobbies that actually EARN you money. If you like renovating or gardening, blogging to a big audience or selling stuff on ebay, you can actually reverse the treadmill of leisure spending. For example: over a five year period in the early 2000s, I spent about a third of my weekends remodeling my first home. It was incredibly fun and it got me started on the path to more serious house building work. But it also helped increase the value of this house, after subtracting materials costs, by about $50,000. I also moved out of this house and rented it out for five additional years, which brought some appreciation. All-told, this hobby brought in about $120,000 over ten years. And it provided countless hours of entertainment, which could have been spent in more costly ways like shopping or airplane-flying.

The mountains are amazingly beautiful. But so are so many other things, including the feeling of waking up on a Monday morning and realizing you don’t have to go to work unless you want to – today or any other day. So make your own leisure list. And share it with your fellow readers in the comments, if you like.

Hey there.. welcome to the first edition of the new “Get Rich With…” series. In these articles, we’ll analyze a bunch of ideas, both new and old, to see what kind of impact they can have on your life. (Hint: the impact will probably be a huge positive one, since these are all of my favorite moneymaking ideas). And this edition is about the good ol’ fashioned Bicycle.

The bike will probably turn out to be the best thing ever invented for humankind. It is taking us a while to realize this, but I think more people are coming around with each generation. You see, bikes were invented before they were truly needed, when the world was sparsely populated. When cars came along, they seemed like an improvement on bikes, bringing us great speed without any effort at all! Unfortunately, as a side effect they destroyed the whole fuckin’ world.. and made most of us dangerously obese too. With a new understanding of these side effects, the bike seems like an increasingly appealing alternative.

The fundamental reason for the Bike’s status as the Greatest Invention of All Time is its unique combination of simplicity, efficiency, and incredibly good health benefits. Interestingly enough, those are the opposite of a car’s attributes. The Bike is simple with just a few moving parts, simple enough for most people to maintain entirely on their own without paying a mechanic.

It is efficient in many ways: bikes weigh only 20-30 pounds but they can carry ten times their weight in rider and cargo. They convert a slow human with a walking speed of 3.5MPH into one of the fastest creatures on land, with an easy cruise of 15MPH and a top speed of over 40MPH on level ground and 50+ downhill for athletic people. And the side effects are incredible.. vigorous biking can consume 1000 calories per hour, meaning you can burn off an entire pound of fat in one big 3 hour ride. This kind of exertion pretty much fixes up all the rest of your body for free too, clearing your arteries, polishing your kidneys and teeth, and giving you clean stylish hair and a better sense of humour, all after the first ride.

But another side effect is that bikes are good for your wealth. Let’s start with the bare minimum: any mileage you put on your bike instead of your car saves you about 50 cents per mile in gas, depreciation, and wear and maintenance. From this savings alone, doing a couple of bike errands per day (4 miles) in place of car errands will add up to $10,752 over ten years.

But the benefits are greater than that, of course. Once you get into bicycling, it may grow on you. You may be able to go without a car, or you might find, like me, that having an expensive car is no longer useful as a status symbol to you. This would allow you to keep a less expensive car (saving another $30,000+ over ten years). You might find that biking around becomes a source of leisure as well as transportation. This would displace other more expensive leisure activities. Driving to the stadium to watch a monster truck rally with the family ($100) could be replaced by biking along the creek path and wading around in the waterfalls ($0). Replacing even $10 per week of paid leisure with free biking would net you another $7680.

Then there are incalculable things like health and productivity. But we are bold enough to calculate them here. By riding to work instead of driving, you are boosting your mood and your mental focus. This allows you to work smarter and longer. It also makes you better looking. These factors will allow you to earn at least an average of 5% more than your unfit counterparts would after various raises and job switches kick in. For a worker at the $50,000 annual level, this is a $2500/year boost ($37,500 after ten years). Then there is the reduction of doctor visits and prescription drugs which will benefit you when you are older. This is a large future sum, but let’s set estimate the net present value to be about $500/year ($7500 over ten). And we haven’t even gotten into the effect of greater health on your overall enjoyment of life.

I’ve been a bike evangelist since childhood, but only recently did I discover the way to make your bike even MORE POWERFUL – with a BIKE TRAILER! In 2007 when my son was old enough to start riding around with me, I bought a trailer like this one* from the online bike store called Nashbar. This revolutionized my biking life, because suddenly my wife and I could get the little lad to most of the close parts of town with no car! When you leave the kid behind, these trailers can also carry a massive $150 load of groceries, or even a bunch of stuff from Home Depot like a few cans of paint and some light fixtures. I’ve put over 1000 miles on this trailer since I bought it, meaning it has saved over $500 in car costs alone.

The final issue to address is the “But I can’t ride a bike in my city/climate/physical condition/age” excuse that 99% of people over 12 in this country seem to cough up.
The answer is, in 99% of these cases: WRONG! Amsterdam is chilly and rainy, and this is how the bike scene looks there. In Hamilton, Canada, I rode year-round to get to McMaster University, through a dense downtown area in snow up to a foot deep. It was awesome. In Asia, the streets are packed with 90-year-old-ladies zooming along on cruisers with panniers full of chickens and such. If you are too heavy to look good on a bike right now, start biking and you soon will not be. JUST GET THE BIKE and you will see.

So, if you grow a big Money Mustache today and go out and get yourself a good city commuting bike – try one of these – then here’s what you will have in ten years:

- reduced mileage: $10,752
- less expensive cars: $30,000
- cheaper leisure: $7680
- increased income: $37,500
- reduced medical: $7500
Total: $93,432

That’s in only TEN YEARS!! A pretty good return on the investment in that $299 commuter bike from Nashbar, eh??

Footnotes:
* – Except I got my bike trailer on sale for about $80.. check your local Craigslist too

** Note – all multi-year figures are scaled to assume a 7% growth of the savings, if you had invested them instead of spending them on cars. But this effect is fairly small over 10 years. It gets bigger the longer you bike.