Nov 11, 2013
A few weeks ago, the MMM family lost about $12,000. While this might sound like quite a bummer, the event wasn’t upsetting in the least. In fact, the days between that fateful event and today have been some of the most joyful and free days of our lives so far. As you know, Mrs. Money Mustache…
Ahh, Delayed Gratification. It’s one of the defining advantages of humanity itself: the ability to put off immediate pleasure, for the purpose of getting even better results in the future. Compared to lower animals or insects, we’ve got this ability locked down. Leave a dog in a room with a piece of tasty meat and…
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…
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,…
In a recent article, I shared my enthusiasm for some of the confidence and hacking-the-system approaches covered in the Tim Ferriss 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. While it’s easy to misunderstand what Tim…
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…
If you’re like me, you currently live somewhere. But can you explain exactly WHY you live there? For most people throughout the history of our species, the reason they have lived somewhere is because they were born nearby. And the reason they were born there is because their parents were born nearby. Very rarely, a…
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…
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.! …
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,…
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…
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…
