Oct 22, 2011
In writing this blog for you, Mr. Money Mustache actually has three major goals: To make you rich so you can retire early. To make you happy so you can properly enjoy your early retirement. To save the whole Human Race from destroying itself through overconsumption of its own habitat. All three of these goals…
A Note from the Future: This article was first published in June 2017, and at the time of course we had no idea when the next recession would be. Some doomsday types thought it was imminent, and others thought the boom was just getting started. In retrospect, the correct answer turned out to be “33…
This year, I’ve been spending a lot more time at the local elementary school, as our boy has rejoined his friends in fifth grade after two years of homeschooling. Through the daily bike rides to and from school, and my weekly gig as a volunteer math/engineering teacher for a small group of boisterous advanced learners, I…
With this being the fall of 2016, I just passed the 11-year anniversary of my retirement from real work (Mrs. MM escaped her cubicle a few months earlier than me). Coincidentally, this Mr. Money Mustache gig just had its 5.5th birthday, which means that I’ve been writing about being retired for fully half of the…
Foreword from Mustache: Almost exactly one year ago, our Canadian correspondent Mr. Frugal Toque and his family reached a nice milestone: a mortgage balance of Zero. Although early retirement and financial independence do not strictly require you to pay off your mortgage (or to own a house at all) as long as you have other investments to cover your…
Every year right around this time, millions of consumers are tricked into a massive financial and lifestyle mistake as the natural incompatibility of snowy roads and safe driving take them by surprise. “I know Mr. Money Mustache insists that I drive only efficient cars, but that’s because he lives in the dreamy semi-desert of Colorado where…
A few months back, I joined in for an episode of a podcast called the Disciplined Investor. The host Andrew Horowitz and I were chatting about money, raising children, stock market crashes and so on, and then this question popped out of the void and really surprised me: For some reason, the question…
With over 500 articles published as of 2020 and still going, this has become a huge blog. But some people allege that it’s a good one, and thus they want to read as many of those posts as they can. In the olden days, that meant going to the first post, and reading and navigating…
Early in the life of this blog, several readers wrote to me to recommend a book called Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. I quickly biked to the library, checked it out, read it cover-to-cover, and found that I agreed fully with its premise. It has been part of this blog’s Book List ever…
As an Economic Unit in a Capitalist Economy, you probably spend most of your time scurrying about Maximizing your Utility. Right? You buy things which give you pleasure, or sell them when the cash you’d receive is greater than the pleasure of keeping them. You choose the job that offers the best tradeoff between things…
The highest form of payment you get for writing a blog like this is happy stories from readers. Although all this Sensible Living stuff becomes obvious after a while, there are still new people showing up every day with all sorts of monetary problems. The full-on crazy life with the double-financed-SUV-ultracommuting, insurmountable debt, and deteriorating…
An exciting event is coming up in my group of old friends: another one of us is approaching Early Retirement. Mr. Frugal Toque, whom you may recognize from his many comments and occasional guest posts on this site, is a software engineer in his mid-thirties living in the high-tech belt of Ottawa, Canada. We survived…
