Feb 1, 2017
Since 2014, I’ve been using the Betterment investing service for a growing portion of my own savings. I funded an experimental account with $100,000, and have had a monthly auto-deposit adding in an additional $1000 per month since then. The results have been documented on a page I call The Betterment Experiment. So far, the…
About three years ago, my family was happily living in a comfortable, mortgage-free house. There was more than enough room for everyone, it was in a walkable neighborhood, and thanks to some unexpected boosts in our family income, life was more affordable than ever. But suddenly, perhaps due to some combination of a romantic whim*…
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…
Beneath all the fluff, this blog exists for only one purpose: to encourage people to change their behavior. So naturally, I am very happy when I hear from people who are actually making big changes. And I’m even more excited to hear about people making big changes early in life, because then they get to enjoy…
If you’re going to become rich, you need to either earn way more money than you spend, or spend way less money than you earn. This is the basic math of it, which even the worst complainypants cannot dispute. The whining usually starts when Mr. Money Mustache starts talking about how to implement the ideas above.…
One of the biggest causes of my optimism for humanity’s future is something I call the Rise of the Benevolent Billionaire Nerds. See, in the olden days, it seems that the people who rose to great power were the most aggressive ones. Warlords and Imperialists. Then the steel and railroad titans, the Mafia, and more…
I’ve always been a do-it-yourself guy, and will remain so as long as I’m alive. The reason is not money savings but the fundamental recipe for human happiness: you must remain challenged and keep learning throughout your lifetime. People who miss this recipe end up chasing ever more desperately after passive entertainments and pleasures. But…
I accidentally began research for this article about 2.5 years ago, when passing through Chicago on the long drive home from a summer in Canada. There was a gathering of Mustachians downtown and we kept a pub and eventually the neighboring Falafel place open late. One of the group was a young attorney in a prestigious law…
Whenever something unusually interesting in the field of personal finance shows up in the news, Mr. Money Mustache hears about it. Our diligent network of Mustachian Volunteer Spies combs and filters the world’s information, both for pearls of wisdom and pellets of comically misinformed dung. Although I take steps to remain on a low-information diet,…
If you were to show up and gaze down on our planet as an outsider, you could easily get the impression that Dogs run the place, and we Humans exist only to serve their needs. We provide them with shelter, transportation, medical care and even grooming, in most cases going further into personal debt to…
Almost one full year ago, I built myself an experimental electric bike to see what all the hype was about. As a profanely vocal proponent of muscle-only transportation, I was skeptical of the idea at first. But in the spirit of a good experiment, I decided to just add the thing to my bike fleet and see…
Four years into writing this blog, I thought I had seen almost everything when it comes to the most common financial suicides committed by the middle class. But today I was hit in the head by a shocking realization: When choosing between buying versus renting a house or apartment, people are making much, much worse choices…
