Feb 16, 2015
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…
Mr. Money Mustache can tend to get a little high-level at times, talking about all these feelings and philosophies that underlie the proper path to wealth. But you can’t just smile your way to the top – there are real numbers at work in the background, whether you understand them or not. These can gang up and…
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…
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…
Today our mutual friend J.D. Roth has stopped by to tell a story. I am happy to share this one with you because in real life he is the real deal and a very nice guy. If you weren’t already aware of his fame, this is the guy who who founded the blog Get Rich Slowly…
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…
Oh man. I was halfway through writing a nice, technical, do-it-yourself article about Radiant Heat for you, when the night sky over Longmont lit up with the giant ‘Stache Symbol*. It seems that our national network of Antimustachian Media Drivel detection volunteers sounded the alert based on this incredible doozy of an article about retirement in…
A few weeks ago, I was in downtown Denver at the conference center, as one of the parent volunteers my boy’s the elementary school Robotics Club. We were there to watch an international competition, where kids from around the world had brought along robots they had built to be squared off against each other in…
Canadian Retirement Investing with Mr. Frugal Toque – Part Deux Previously, on Canadian Retirement Investing with Mr. Frugal Toque (see Part 1), we discussed the two major investment vehicles that are available for private individuals who do not have company or government pensions available to them. Those were the RRSP and the TFSA. The key…
Today we bring back the ever-popular reader case study series with an interesting twist. First of all, our subject is a new reader, with sizable financial baggage from earlier decades, but plenty of potential for improvement. Equally notable is the fact that I have enlisted some outside help for the research and analysis. During a…
I’ve had the chance to go to lunch with quite a few visiting Mustachians of late, and a theme has been popping up in the conversations. Like my own family, many of these readers have been leading slightly-less-ridiculous-than-average lives for years, which has led to a considerable surplus of money. But amassing money is just…
Pretty much since I learned to walk, I have had an unusual disdain for waste. I noted the inefficient route of the school bus and wondered why it couldn’t just pick us up at a few centralized locations. Tracked my allowance with multi-year forecasts and kept the dollar bills organized in a photo album. Always…
In the quest to become wealthy on a finite income, your savings rate dominates all other factors. Because of that, this blog tends to fixate on living happily and efficiently, and the oddly magical lifestyle changes that allow you to drop your spending dramatically even while improving every area of your life. However, this can…
The Mr. Money Mustache you see today is flabby and weak. Although consumers often compare themselves to the Mustache family and determine they aren’t ready to become “so extreme”, in reality the only extreme thing is how far we are from living a truly frugal lifestyle these days. The reason for this is of course…
Last week, the unthinkable happened: Mr. Money Mustache experienced actual car trouble. In past articles, I have boasted about how by owning a reliable car and keeping driving to a minimum, you will find that car maintenance becomes almost negligible: an oil change every year or so whether it needs it or not, and simple…
What’s with Mr. Money Mustache and all his funny-business math? When you read the criticisms that sprout up around the web, you’ll often see people nitpicking over the accuracy of some of the numbers I present in these articles. You may even find yourself doing some of the nitpicking in your own mind. You might…
