Oct 1, 2013
The big news today is that the politicians of the United States just bumbled themselves into a Government Shutdown. Last night, a military friend sent a message mentioning the impending doom to me, which is the first I had heard of the situation. Unfortunately that triggered a late night of frustrated, sweaty reading on my…
When people write to me for help, I’m often confronted with a dilemma. Many of them are hardworking and intelligent people who are making reasonable financial choices, but due to the non-negotiable nature of Math, not ending up with as large a monthly surplus of cash at the end of each month as their higher-income…
Mrs. Money Mustache and I just had the pleasure of taking a nice grownups-only train trip to Montreal to celebrate her 39th birthday. We took an evening to meet up with a UK-born writer named Robert Wringham who happens to live there, because I’m a fan of his fancy square magazine called the New Escapologist.…
Of all the objections I get from people about why they can’t ride a bike to get around, perhaps the most frustrating is the claim that bicycling is too dangerous. According to this line of reasoning, we all need the protection of a two-tonne steel cage in order to survive the trip to the office…
A few years ago, I was helping a friend with some kitchen renovations. He’s a smart guy with a good career, and he likes to work hard on the weekends. He had done most of the carpentry himself, completely transforming a very small house to make it work better for his growing family and greatly…
Well, here we go again: it’s boom time. If you’re a US resident with a short memory (or a young adult who only recently started making a living for yourself), you might be under the impression that we live in a country with permanently high unemployment, a slow housing market, and mortgage interest rates that…
Ahh, money. The more you have of it, the more you get to spend, right? Everybody does it that way, so that must be the right way to do it. We all agree that, sure, the debtors and the flashy live-beyond-their-means club need to rein things in. But for those honest folks who work hard…
As a Mr. Money Mustache reader, you are on the straight and narrow path to considerable wealth. You’re actively soaking up financial knowledge and putting it into play in your day-to-day life. Unless you are very new here, you probably don’t need convincing of either the value of creating a golden financial situation, or the…
Adventurous readers may recall that we are in the middle of a Lending Club Experiment – on September 24th, I posted an article describing my first foray into peer-to-peer lending and promised to keep you updated on the progress of the investment. At the time I invested $10,000, and distributed it mostly among the higher-yielding…
Although the dead of winter is safely behind us, it is still looking pretty cold out on that North American weather map. Austin, Texas recently came close to freezing at night, although that temperature would have seemed warm to people from North Dakota, where it was -30C(-21F). My part of Colorado is going to reach…
One of the questions that comes up in the face of Mr. Money Mustache’s unrelenting optimism about the state of the world is, “Will human prosperity continue even as we run out of the cheap fossil fuel energy that has powered us for the last 200 years or so?”. In a nutshell, I always say:…
There are some pretty neat people among the readers of this blog, and they’re sending me great stories from their lives all the time. A few months ago, a guy named Franco shared the story of how he built his own house in the Pacific Northwest mortgage-free for $30,000, and now his family lives there happily.…
