.The Money Middle Way: My Evolving Relationship from “Money Pay” to “Metapay”

By Kyle Kowalski

Naval Ravikant, who apparently has a net worth in the tens of millions, says:

“When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place.”

Jim Carrey, who apparently has a net worth in the hundreds of millions, says:

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

Over the last decade—and especially the last few years—I’ve noticed an emerging evolution in my relationship with money toward what I describe as the “money middle way.” I’ve received some questions about my relationship with money, so I figured I’d finally cover this part of my journey. Each phase below includes an overview of some milestones and highlights to bring it to life.

.How to Curb Emotional Spending

by Jessica | Aug 17, 2020

Making the decision to work part-time was a hard pill to swallow. I decided to give up 50% of my income to work 3 days/week at a less stressful job. I was sure that it would greatly improve our lives. Given my mental health challenges, living a happier and healthier life was the highest priority. Speeding up our timeline to reach financial independence was lower on the list. I had no idea how much this decision would improve our lives.

I went from working 50+ hours/week at a toxic job to 24 hours/week in a great work environment. I cut my commute in half and no longer needed to face traffic, as I started taking public transportation to work. I now have 30+ hours of my life back every week!

I have been able to: Focus on my mental and physical well-being (including sleeping 8+ hours per night); Learn to manage my anxiety; Work on passion projects; Focus on my relationships with friends and family; Not feel like I needed to rush through everything just to get onto the next thing; Over the course of a year, I completely recovered from burnout.

.Take It Slow

Adam M. Grossman

ONE DAY BACK in 2012 I received a life-changing windfall. Contrary to what you might imagine, however, that day was not very different from the day before it, or the day after. It went something like this: Woke up. Went to work. Came home. Thought about ways to splurge. Ultimately gave up and went to bed.

In other words, there was no visit to the Ferrari dealership, no trip to Las Vegas, really no dramatic change at all. It was, on the surface, a very ordinary day. And the next day was pretty much the same as well.

Don’t get me wrong: Over time, I have made a few changes. My family moved to a new house, we take nicer vacations and we give more to charity. But on that first day, and even in that first year, we did very little differently.

.Risk Is Never as Simple as It Seems

Posted August 18, 2020 by Ben Carlson

“The financial models many banks used gave them a false sense of security leading up to the Great Financial Crisis. Garbage-in, garbage out is the same for financial models as it is for your sink.”

A number of years ago I was packing up my bags on a Sunday morning to fly out to an investment conference when my wife told me we had a plumbing situation. Water was coming up out of the drain in the shower. And the kitchen sink was backed up. That’s not good.

She was scheduling a plumber to come to the house as I walked out the door to hop on my flight. As my flight touched down I called to see what the verdict was. The news was weirder than I expected. So what’s the damage? I asked.

Well it’s not great she told me. When the plumber put his snake video device into the pipe that runs from the kitchen sink to our master bathroom he discovered it was full of eggshells.

.Price Is What You Pay, Value Is What You Get

August 15, 2020 · by The Escape Artist

Imagine that Bill and Ted have gone trekking in a remote corner of the Death Valley National Park in the USA.

They’ve been backwoods camping and were carrying all their own food, tents and equipment.

Unfortunately some coyotes stole all their stuff a couple of days ago and its taken 2 days to walk back to the edge of the national park towards the car park. Their water ran out a day ago and they’re still a full days hike in the hot desert sun from where their car is parked. Without water they won’t been able to keep going much longer.

As luck would have it, they then turn a corner and see a lemonade stand that has been set up by some enterprising kid. What a relief!

Then they see the price: the mini-entrepreneur is charging $10 per cup of lemonade when they know perfectly well that, at home in the suburbs, the normal going rate for a cup of lemonade is $0.50 a cup.

.Lessons Driving an $800 Car Can Teach Your Kid

August 15, 2020

Editor: Teaching a teenager to drive with an $800 dollar can create some real life lessons. In addition to just learning to drive, you can learn how to fix a car, and carE for something that may not have a lot of life left in it. It can definitely teach you to appreciate what you have! White Coat Investor shares all about his teenager’s experience in today’s Saturday Selection, originally published on The White Coat Investor.

[Update August 2020: Originally published in November 2019, Whitney and I teamed up for this post about this new (to us) car. It is now August 2020, and it is still running great and just passed emissions again and continues to teach Whitney important lessons.

Most recently she learned that a car will not run forever on empty and that if you do not turn the lights off when you get out, it will not start when you come back to it. She also got to learn how to jumpstart a car! This Spring she rattle-canned it and now looks like an Easter Egg. She is currently regretting that decision so it may be a new color soon.]

We decided to do this post interview style. Enjoy!

.Who Are You After Financial Independence?

Financial Independence, FIRE, Money and Life by Vicki Robin

Your Identity Closet: What shall you wear now that you are free?

When we discover the possibility of financial independence, we change our identity from working stiff to working towards financial freedom. It affects every choice. Not spending money isn’t deprivation. It’s saving our lives.

Saving money is not longer impossible, it’s easy. Getting out of debt is no longer a goal too far, it’s a fierce commitment to liberate ourselves from debt slavery. FI has nothing to do with being dutiful, with putting on a costume that doesn’t fit. It’s the most exciting prospect on the horizon and every actions conforms to it.

In high school all three sororities asked me to join – three different flavors of girls to giggle and gossip with. I must have joined one because my actual memory isn’t of joining. It’s of dropping out in protest to some clique cruelty. When offered options A, B or C – I chose D. Life went on. I didn’t make a habit of rebellion. In fact, I developed quite a High School resume of clubs, groups and honors. Yet I’d learned that you can step outside any box you want to – and survive.

.5 Pieces of Dumb Financial Advice That Most People Believe

By The Penny Hoarder Staff

Some of the links in this post are from our sponsors. We provide you with accurate, reliable information. Learn more about how we make money and select our advertising partners. When it comes to money, everyone likes to put in their two cents. Oh, you should definitely buy and not rent. Stay away from credit cards; they’re evil. Why are you so worried about your credit score? It doesn’t matter.

There’s a lot of — quite frankly — dumb advice floating around out there, and it can be difficult to figure out what’s up and what’s down. Well, we’re here to set the record straight. Here’s all the dumb money advice out there — and what you should do instead.

Dumb Advice #1: Put Your Money in a Savings Account

You’ve probably heard the best way to grow your money is to stick it in a savings account and leave it there for, well, ever. That’s bad advice.

.The Three Sides of Risk

Aug 8, 2020 by Morgan Housel

In investing, the average consequences of risk make up most of the daily news headlines. But the tail-end consequences of risk – like pandemics, and depressions – are what make the pages of history books. They’re all that matter. They’re all you should focus on. We spent the last decade debating whether economic risk meant the Federal Reserve set interest rates at 0.25% or 0.5%. Then 36 million people lost their jobs in two months because of a virus. It’s absurd.

I grew up ski racing in Lake Tahoe. I was on the Squaw Valley Ski Team, and it was the center of my life for over a decade. At a conference a few months ago I was asked what skiing taught me about investing. This was on stage, where you can’t ponder your answer – you have to blurt out whatever you can think of. I didn’t think skiing taught me anything about investing. But one incident came to mind.

“Well, let me take this to a dark and tragic place,” I said before telling a group of 500 strangers a story I hadn’t talked about much in almost 20 years. A dozen of us had grown up skiing together. Most had known each other since we were young children. By 2001 we were in our late teens, having spent the majority of our waking hours over the previous decade never far from each other. We skied six days a week, 10 months a year, spending summers on the glacier of Mt. Hood, Oregon and in New Zealand, where the seasons mirror our own. Skiing took precedence to everything.