How To Know If You’ll Be Successful
.How To Know If You’ll Be Successful
By Benjamin Hardy
Life is complex and messy. It can be extremely difficult to get traction, let alone find motivation.
But motivation is something you can learn to create at will. Becoming deeply passionate is also within your creative control. As a result, you can completely predict your own success. You can choose to become as successful as you desire.
Here’s how:
1. Turn Success Into A Game, Not A Grind
“Life is a game, play it.”— Mother Theresa
We hear a lot about people “grinding” these days. That sounds awful! Grinding day in and out is a path to burnout and misery.
The best performers in the world don’t grind, they game! For example, Warren Buffett became good at selling because as a child he would go door-to-door selling chewing gum. But he wasn’t focused on making money. Instead, he was fascinated trying to figure out which flavors sold best. Even back then, he was trying to make predictions. He’s still playing the same games.
According to author, Daniel Coyle, “If it can be counted, you can turn it into a game.”
Take Control of Your Money: What Does it Mean and How to Get Started
Take Control of Your Money: What Does it Mean and How to Get Started
By Cash For Tacos April 27, 2020
I like to say that my life changed when I took control of my money. And, more importantly, I want Cash for Tacos to help you take control of your own money and change your life as well.
But what the heck does it even mean to take control of your money? And if you don’t know, how can I inspire you to make changes? I think it’s a phrase worth taking the time to define. So let’s dive into what it means, why it’s important, and how to actually start doing it.
My Life Before I Took Control of My Money
Taking control of my money is what motivated me to start Cash for Tacos. The feeling I had once I took charge of my financial situation was nothing like I’ve ever felt before. I felt empowered and like I could accomplish things I had never dreamed of. But what did my life look and feel like before I took control of my own money?
My life looked like what I expected a “successful” life to be. I had a decent paying job, financed a nice car, went on nice vacations, and bought all the clothes and kitchen gadgets I wanted. I was making a life for myself as I thought I should be. But at the same time, I was constantly worried about whether I had enough money in my checking account to cover all of my bills.
Treasure Hunting
.Treasure Hunting
By Richard Connor June 5, 2020
Many of us have found ourselves with free time on our hands. I’ve read that folks are filling their days with shopping, baking, exercising and binge-watching TV. May I suggest another activity, one that may prove profitable?
Over the past few years, I’ve found significant amounts of money in unlikely places. These treasures often come not just with monetary benefits, but also great memories. Here are four places to look:
1. Forgotten savings bonds. I’m old enough to remember when paper savings bonds were a common gift for birthdays and holidays. Many companies also had savings bond buying programs, encouraging employees to invest and pitching it as an act of patriotism. If you signed up, the money to be invested was taken out of your paycheck.
It Should Be Obvious By Now -- It Really Makes Sense To Have a Plan B
.It Should Be Obvious By Now -- It Really Makes Sense To Have a Plan B
Notes From The Field By Simon Black June 8, 2020 Bahia Beach, Puerto Rico
There are undoubtedly countless people right now who can hardly believe what they’ve been seeing over the past few months.
Global pandemic, total economic shutdown, tens of millions of jobs lost, trillions of dollars of debt and money printing, and now, social unrest, including riots and looting, brought on by yet another harrowing murder at the hands of the police.
A poll conducted by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal last week showed 80% of respondents believe the United States is spiralling out of control.
And it all happened so quickly.
Does Our Personality Help Determine Our Financial Success?
.Does Our Personality Help Determine Our Financial Success?
Jonathan Clements June 6, 2020
Does Our Personality help determine our financial success? It seems it does, or so says academic research. Psychologists have zeroed in on five key personality traits: extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism and openness to experiences. Think of each trait as a spectrum from, say, very conscientious to not at all. Each of us sits somewhere on the five spectrums. Maybe we’re a bit of an extravert, somewhat inclined toward neuroticism, and extremely open to new experiences and ideas.
There’s a host of websites where you can take a relatively quick quiz and get scored on the five dimensions, including FiveThirtyEight, OpenPsychometrics and Truity. You don’t have to pay or give your email address to get the results at these three websites, though Truity has a more in-depth report that’s available for purchase. My scores from the three sites were remarkably similar, so taking just one test will likely suffice. What should you make of the five traits?
38 Secrets for Financial Success: My Personal Finance Manifesto
.38 Secrets for Financial Success: My Personal Finance Manifesto
By Len Penzo
Awhile back, somebody asked me to summarize my personal finance “playbook” in a blog post. Well … Here it is:
Debt is a form of indentured servitude where people agree to sacrifice a portion of their future earnings in exchange for instant gratification.
ATM machines are the Achilles’ heel of impulsive spenders.
History tells us that all fiat money eventually returns to its intrinsic value: zero. The US dollar is fiat money.
Given a choice, it’s always better to live your life anonymously rich, rather than deceptively poor.
If you have to ask your boss for a raise, then you need to find a new employer.
When in doubt, always choose credit over debit.
It’s almost impossible to effectively manage your personal finances if you don’t track your income and outgo.
How to Invest a Million Dollars
.How to Invest a Million Dollars
September 4, 2019 By Machinist
An avid reader of the Perpetual Money Machine blog wrote in last week to ask the following question. Say you are 40 years old, you have one million dollars cash. How and where you should deploy your money to withdraw 4 percent (inflation adjusted) for next 50 years with a high probability of not running out. What type of asset allocation, funds you would go with? As I formulated my response, I realized that this question deserves an article of its own. Here is my response.
Thanks for reading and for your question. It sounds like you are in an enviable position, being millionaire at age 40. I am going to make some assumptions about the missing details of your scenario. Please let me know if I have assumed anything incorrectly.
Emotional Concerns About Timing
The first thing that strikes me about your situations is that investing a million dollars all at once could be an emotional challenge. What if you invest tomorrow and the market trends downward for the next few years? Would you panic and sell?
Permanent Assumptions
.Permanent Assumptions
Jun 4, 2020 by Morgan Housel
If you were told in January what April would look like, you wouldn’t have believed it. If you were told in April that in May we’d face a nationwide protest so important it would crowd out almost all Covid-19 news, you wouldn’t have believed it.
How do you analyze the world when everything feels broken? And how do you even begin to make sense of the future when things change so fast? Humbly, is the answer. But humility doesn’t mean clueless.
Some things are always changing and can’t be known. There can also be a handful of things you have unshakable faith in – your permanent assumptions.
Realizing it’s not inconsistent to have no view about the future path of some things but unwavering views about the path of others is how you stay humble without giving up. And the good news when the world is a dark cloud of uncertainty is that those permanent assumptions tend to be what matter most over time.
15 Things To Stop Being Scared Of So You Can Be Rich, Happy, And Successful
.15 Things To Stop Being Scared Of So You Can Be Rich, Happy, And Successful
May 11, 2020 By Michelle Schroeder-Gardner
Being scared is a natural reaction, but a lot of good things can and will be scary.
Often, people are scared when things are changing, like if you’re starting a new job, getting married, or any other major life event. It’s only natural to be a little scared about how things will turn out.
You might be scared when you are trying to do something that is difficult, like paying off debt. What if it takes you longer than you had hoped? What about the sacrifices you will have to make?
Being scared happens when you do or try things that are new or outside of your comfort zone, and everyone feels scared from time to time. You may not believe that you cannot achieve what you are setting out to do.
But, you have to push through these negative moments and realize that you are holding yourself back if you want to start overcoming fear and let yourself move forward and do something new.
I have had a lot of fears to overcome to get where I am today. I was scared to quit my job to blog full-time. I was scared to move from our regular house to an RV. I was scared to move onto our sailboat.
Being scared is natural, but if I didn’t address my fears in a positive way, I wouldn’t be living the life I am today.
Everyone is scared of something. However, it’s how you approach that fear that really matters. If you hide from your fear then you may be holding yourself back.
This can then lead to regret later, which often feels worse than being scared.
Whether you are wanting to tackle your debt, you want to leave a job you hate, you want to travel the world, and so on, you need to overcome the fears associated with these goals to live and enjoy the life you want.
Five Lessons from History
.Five Lessons from History
May 29, 2019 by Morgan Housel
“The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” – Niall Ferguson on the lessons of history.
“History never repeats itself. Man always does.”– Voltaire
The most important lessons from history are the takeaways that are so broad they can apply to other fields, other eras, and other people. That’s where lessons have leverage and are most likely to apply to your own life.
But those things take some digging to find, often sitting layers below the main story.
The Great Depression began with a stock market crash. October 24th, 1929. That’s the story, at least.
It makes for a good story because it’s a specific event on a specific day. But if you were to go back to October 1929, during the crash, the average American might seem unfazed. Only 2.5% of Americans owned stocks in 1929.
The huge majority of Americans watched in amazement as the market collapsed, and perhaps lost a sense of hope that they, too, might someday cash in on Wall Street. But that was all they lost: a dream. They did not lose any money because they had no money invested.
The real pain came nearly two years later, when the banks started to fail.
Just over 500 U.S. banks failed in 1929. Twenty-three hundred failed in 1931.
You Have To Live It To Believe It
.You Have To Live It To Believe It
Apr 9, 2019 by Morgan Housel
Richard Held and Alan Hein raised 20 kittens in pitch black darkness. Which is the kind of thing you should only do if it’s necessary to prove a point critical to understanding how the world works. Thankfully they did just that.
The two MIT cognitive scientists, working in the 1960s, showed that seeing the world around you was not enough to understand how it works. You had to actually experience that world to learn how to operate in it.
The scientists raised cats in total darkness to control the relationship between seeing and learning. Once a pair of kittens were old enough to walk, they were placed in a lighted box for three hours a day.
In the box was a kind of carousel, with each kitten placed in a harness. One of the cat’s legs reached the floor, and its walking movements made the carousel move in a circle. The other cat’s legs were restrained by the harness. It could see everything going on – the movement, the other cat walking around in circles – but its legs never touched the floor. It had no active control over the carousel.