May 15, 2018
Kicking Ass with Money is much like healthy eating and joyful living. It’s a series of daily habits that get you ahead, rather than a one-time heroic effort that fixes all your problems so you can go back to whatever you were doing before. Because of this parallel, the subject of food is one of the…
If you ask a modern member of today’s American Elite to review Mr. Money Mustache’s childhood and educational history, the report would probably come back dripping with sympathy and disdain. I went to public school (the only school, really), in a lower-middle income small town. I didn’t join many extracurricular activities or attend any private…
As a retiree, I have a special place in my heart for Monday mornings, because that’s when I would have had to go back to work if it weren’t for the joy of early retirement. Despite the option of complete leisure, I woke up at 5:30 this morning because the sky was starting to brighten and…
It was a black and frosty night, sometime in the dead of winter 2007. I was in the rocking chair holding my baby son, who was about one year old at the time. I was offering him a bottle and I knew he needed food, but he was upset and had been screaming for much…
In our last episode, we reviewed a particularly spirited example of the classic battle over frugality, cheapness, and the freedom to spend one’s own money the way one sees fit. Some version of this same clash is surely occuring a thousand times over in every city of the world on a continual basis, for it…
The following is an actual conversation from my email. Abridged a bit for sanity and privacy. An Enraged Reader Writes: I was both interested and amused by this submission from a non-reader. While there were definitely some misinterpretations and complainypants in there (especially with that incorrect attitude about biking), I also thought I sensed some light-hearted…
I suppose I can’t blame him, because this IS pretty nice. It’s Monday morning, and I just dropped him off at school, rode the mountain bike and trailer back home through the deep and fluffy remnants of the latest snowstorm, and settled in with this laptop and my sunny, empty house to compose my thoughts…
Although I talk quite a bit about things like frugality, investing, bicycling, cars, and the ridiculousness of our society, it’s not actually what I think about for most of the day. Mrs. M. and I still consider our main task to simply be child-raising, since it takes more time and energy than the rest of…
One of the big inspirations for my recent article on Complainypants Disease was the comments section of a mainstream newspaper article about some semi-early retirees that was recently forwarded to me by a few readers. Don’t waste your time reading through more than a few of the comments, because they’ll make you punch a hole in your…
I originally started this blog to both Ridicule and Educate the rich and privileged group of people known as the American middle class. Being a newly minted member of this group myself, I feel that we are all living large, and the vast majority of our financial problems are of our own making. Thus the…
Eliminating Lady Temptations: Avoid the Urge to Buy for Baby by Mrs. Money Mustache Congratulations! You’re having a baby! Ah, babies… so small, so cute, so sweet, so…. expensive? Why is there a common misconception that having a baby costs a ton? How much does it really cost? Answer: not much. Yet, us ladies just…
Today is a memorable day in the MMM family, as the Mrs. and I took our precious Junior ‘Stash to start his first day of Kindergarten this morning. It was a wonderful experience, biking through the early morning’s leafy shade on our streets, and feeling the excitement and fear of the assembled crowd of young…
