Apr 11, 2019
There have been a lot of big bills coming across my kitchen table recently. Property taxes, car registrations, income taxes, things for the school orchestra in which little MM plays the standup bass. Plus the usual credit card bills for all my spending on groceries and not-all-that-rare luxury indulgences. There’s nothing bad or unexpected in…
These last two articles have focused on how common it is for early retirees to continue making money after they say goodbye to the cubicle. I share stories like that because I’ve seen it happen in so many lives, including my own. Plus, if you do it right, work is fun. But the downside of all…
Well, shit. I’ve been watching this situation for a few years, and assuming it would just blow over so we wouldn’t have to talk about it here in this place where we are supposed to be busy improving our lives. But a collective insanity has sprouted around the new field of ‘cryptocurrencies’, causing a totally…
If you have more money than you need, you should start giving some of it away. That’s the lesson I learned about a year ago, when I took a gamble and donated $100,000 to a variety of charities, centered around the Effective Altruism movement. More on Effective Altruism: The Life You Can Save website,…
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…
Recently I’ve been getting a lot more emails that go something like this: While these emails are always a little bit unfortunate (because it means I haven’t done a great job making my investing articles easy to find), I’m actually thankful for the drop in my account value. And the even larger number of dollars…
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…
I’ve always been a do-it-yourself investor. This habit started around age 19 with a series of ridiculous speculative trades in individual high-tech company stocks. “This stock is sure to go through the roof”, I would think, “because their products are so great.” This is a terrible way to invest. But after a few early financial…
Good investing is really simple: get yourself into the position of owning a portion of a profitable business or property, keep it as long as possible, and live off the resulting stream of dividends and appreciation. For even greater wealth, just reinvest the earnings into still more profitable ventures. This high-level view is liberating because it…
One of the silliest objections I run across to the Mustachian lifestyle, is the concept that it is Extreme. Mr. Money Mustache needs to go out and buy more shit right now, because otherwise he’s depriving himself. And his family too. You only live once, and what good is money if you don’t spend it on…
Back in November, I read an article in the Economist with the tagline “House of Horrors: the bursting of the global housing bubble is only halfway through”. I usually pay close attention when the Economist calls a bubble, because unlike the daily rollercoaster of stock cheerleading and fear you read in most US newspapers, the…
What’s your style of investing: Stocks, or Bonds? And if you say “Stocks”, are you fond of Small Cap or Large Cap, and would those be in the categories of Value or Growth, and in US, European, Asian, or Emerging Markets? I’ve learned that readers of Mr. Money Mustache vary widely in their response to…
It’s time to tie up some loose ends in my reporting to you about the Foreclosure Project. In the previous article, I mentioned that we had rushed to finish the interior work as the house got snapped up by an eager family for a late December move-in. I posted some hasty photos from the few…
Hello everyone. MMM here. Over the next few weeks, we shall dive into the exciting field of Dividends – the magical stream of free money that companies pay you just for owning their stocks. In simpler times (i.e., those before 1960), this stream of dividends was the primary reason anyone would even consider owning something…
I have an irrational love for the subject of Economics. This strange love lay dormant in me for my whole childhood and high school career, because I incorrectly assumed I was born to be an Engineer – meaning I assumed that taking optional economics classes in high school would be a distraction. But in university,…
Mrs. Money Mustache forwarded to me an interesting video clip on YouTube with this wise old guy dishing out some very humble and sensible lessons for living a meaningful life. As I watched, I came to realize the guy talking was John Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Group, a place that has been leading…
