Saving money is the secret to generating enough surplus capital to begin investing and building a better life for you and your family. These articles and posts involve saving money, such as ways to lower your expenses or the importance of living within your means.
In economics, it helps to ask the questions, “What is really going on? What is the heart of what we are discussing?”. It surprises me that things most familiar are most often taken for granted and, in many cases, not understood very well. By reframing things through that lens, decisions often become clearer. Consider the…
Saving money is important. Investing money is important. But if you don’t cash in some chips at some point in your life, all of your efforts will have been wasted because those claim checks on society will be taken by the government, spent by your heirs, or redistributed through fees and expenses by professionals such as attorneys left to sort out the inevitable lawsuits that result in the fight over your fortune after you’re gone.
Mental Model: The Micawber Principle In Charles Dickens’s novel, David Copperfield, published in 1850, the eternal optimist Wilkins Micawber was known for saying “something will turn up”. He was poor but lived in expectation of becoming rich, sometimes foolishly taking on debts due to the belief. We have Micawber to thank for one of the…
What does it take to be in the top 1% of wealth in the United States? Many of you write me and ask that question, hoping someday to make it into the top 1% of net worth but not sure where that line gets drawn. I thought it might be useful to provide a reference to which I could point people in the future whenever they write, as well as make for some interesting afternoon reading for those of you who are curious about the nature of the economic world in which we live.
The Internet is buzzing with a clip from Terrell Owens’ reality show on VH1. In a recent installment of the program, T.O. begins to cry about the money troubles he faces after discovering that his finances aren’t adding up, his credit score is in the 500’s, he has mortgages due on real estate and he…
I’m a big reader. Huge. My library consists of thousands of titles, mostly all of which are non-fiction (biographies, finance, business, economics, psychology, history, ethics, etc.) If I were to reproduce it, the cost would be somewhere between $12,000 and $30,000 depending on how difficult it was to get your hands on many of the…
[mainbodyad]It always struck me as particularly stupid when people complained about the cost of gasoline, even when I was a teenager with very little money just learning about how investing worked. It seemed perfectly obvious to me that if an increase of $1 per gallon cut into your standard of living, you were living so…
A couple of weeks ago, Kwame sent me a question. I’ll paraphrase here: Joshua you made a statement, “The people who continue to compound, like those who end up on the Forbes list, are motivated by building something rather than cash”. Many times I have read about great business people and one thing I hear,…
When I was a senior in high school, I bought my youngest sister a single share of Coca-Cola common stock for her 6th birthday. It’s been a teaching mechanism throughout her life; one that is far more important and beneficial from an academic and educational standpoint than any investment return it could generate.
Once you begin to have success, shopping for clothes is a very different experience.
