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Does the world of personal finance need more politics?

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Note: I've added a short addendum to this piece in an attempt to clarify some things. This may or may not have helped.

Earlier this week at The Washington Post, Helaine Olen wrote that the world of personal finance needs more politics.

Olen specifically calls out FinCon, the financial media conference I attended last week. I love FinCon. She doesn't. She's disappointed that so many members of our community emphasize personal action and responsibility instead of directing our efforts toward changing the systemic and societal issues that make it difficult for some people to succeed.

She writes:

Spending a few days at FinCon 2019 shows the limits of the nonpolitical approach to improving your financial life…Over and over again, the systemic problems facing Americans are simply accepted as a given and unfixable, and tossed back onto the individual for him or her to solve.

Rarely mentioned are the political system’s many contributions to common economic troubles.

Olen is concerned that there are larger societal and systemic issues that hold some people back and prevent them from achieving financial success. I agree.

I disagree, however, that FinCon is the place to address these issues. And I disagree that we, the financial media, should turn our attention from the personal to the political.

Personal finance is personal. It's right there on the label.

Does the world of personal finance need more politics? [Read more…]

Spare change: Awesome articles from elsewhere

How our homes shape our lives

How to save $1.5 million starting at age 40

Slow mornings may be the secret to tech-life balance [via Zach]

"My family has lived in the same house for 72 years."

How to complain and get results

FI stories from developing countries

To change a habit, get extreme. Slowly.

How to make $1000 per hour

The only reliable source of happiness

What is Slow FI? How is it different from other flavors of FIRE?

Find an archive of all past spare change links on Pinboard.

FinCon 2019 and the future of Get Rich Slowly

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After twenty-four days on the road, I'm back home in Portland. It feels good.

In mid-August, Kim and I flew to Italy. For the first week, we visited Florence and Rome on our own. We rode trains, drank wine, toured museums, ate gelato, and explored ancient Roman ruins. We also got sunburned. And we sweated from dawn to dusk.

J.D. and Kim at the Colosseum

Next, we boarded a small (680 passenger) cruise ship for a ten-day tour of the eastern Mediterranean. We spent a day on Corfu, visited a Turkish resort town, and wandered the walled city core of Dubrovnik (where Game of Thrones' King's Landing was filmed). Mostly, though, we saw more of Italy.

After a final two nights in Venice, we flew from Italy to Washington, D.C. for FinCon, the annual conference about money and media.

FinCon 2019

FinCon started in 2011 as a small(-ish) gathering for a couple hundred financial bloggers. It's now ten times its original size and draws legit financial journalists from all sorts of platforms. It also attracts some of the biggest names in the world of financial products — USAA, Ally Bank, Capital Group, etc. — plus plenty of new companies with cool ideas that may blow up in years to come.

For me, though, FinCon isn't about meeting brands or looking for new ways to make money. Some of that happens, sure, but I spend most of my time catching up with colleagues. Ten years ago, these folks were mostly strangers. Today, they're some of my closest friends.

Old friends having fun

It's fun to renew existing bonds, but I also enjoy forging new ones. Each year, I connect with new folks that I come to respect and admire.

In 2016, for instance, I met Marcus Garrett. We were paired as mentor and mentee for the week. I did my best to offer advice, but he and his partner have built their site — Paychecks & Balances — far beyond any tips I provided. They're killing it. This year, Paychecks & Balances won the award for best millennial blog (and was nominated for podcast of the year).

In 2018, I met Piggy and Kitty from Bitches Get Riches. It's no secret that this is my favorite money blog. It's smart, irreverent, and hilarious. I'm pleased to report that I spent more time with the bitches this year (and Kim hung out with them too). They're even smarter, funnier, and more irreverent in person.

Piggy and Kitty are on-brand

At this year's FinCon, I also spent some time with Julien and Kiersten from rich & REGULAR, Rocky from Richer Soul, Joshua from Radical Personal Finance, and Bianca from Miss Mazuma. These are all quality folks doing quality work.

While FinCon is mostly social for me, it's not all about the friendships. I did meet with plenty of folks who want to advertise on this site, for instance. (Mostly, I said no.) Plus, I joined my business partner Tom Drake and a couple of other friends to present a panel discussion on collaboration.

And this year? This year, I actually had a huge take-away from FinCon, one that will shape the future of this site.

The Core Message of Get Rich Slowly

This year at FinCon, the opening keynote was presented by Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich. Ramit started as a money blogger, but has transitioned into a successful entrepreneur with a burgeoning business that helps people solve all sorts of personal problems.

Ramit giving his keynote

The core idea of Ramit's talk struck me hard. “Have a point of view,” he said. By this he means that we as content creators should stand for something. We should have a clear message. People should know what our sites or channels are about.

You know what? Not even I know what Get Rich Slowly has been about for the past two years.

When I started GRS in 2006, GRS was about my journey as I dug out of debt and built wealth. After I sold the site, the message became less clear. Eventually, I moved on, and I think GRS lost any point of view that it might have had.

When I founded Money Boss in 2015, that site had a very clear point of view. In fact, I named the site for its point of view. I wanted readers to act as the CFO of their household finances. I wanted them to accept personal responsibility for mastering their money — and their lives.

Because Money Boss had a strong point of view, it was easy to write. I always knew the angle for each article I started.

When I reacquired Get Rich Slowly in 2017, my first few months were very productive. I had lots of things I wanted to say. I had plenty of updates I wanted to share.

Gradually, though, I lost my way. I wrote less often. I didn't have direction. Why not? Because this site didn't have a point of view. It didn't have a central message. That's part of why things have been such a struggle for me this year.

Listening to Ramit's talk made me realize that in order for me to enjoy writing here, and in order for this site to be useful to readers, I need a point of view. I need to be clear on what my message is. Fortunately, I already know my message. My message is: You need to be the money boss.

I'm not going to rebrand Get Rich Slowly to Money Boss. That ship has sailed. Plus, I prefer the name Get Rich Slowly. However, I am going to deliberately steer this site's message toward my Money Boss philosophy. I subscribe to its ideals (you are ultimately responsible for your own financial success) more today than ever before.

Final Thoughts

So, that's the big news: After two years of drifting, I know what message I want to convey to you, the readers. I want to help you all become money bosses. Or to become better money bosses.

Meanwhile, the immediate future at GRS looks like this:

  • I had hoped to finish the site redesign before leaving for Italy. That didn't happen. Now I hope to finish it by October 15th at the latest. Earlier is better.
  • Today — if all goes well — I will sign a contract to produce a five-hour audio course about financial independence for the biggest audiobook distributor in the world. That's sort of vague (but not really). I'll offer actual details once the deal is done.
  • In just over two weeks, I fly out for another trip. This time I'm headed to Portugal for a financial independence “chautauqua”. (A couple of you have already told me you'll be there. Awesome!) From Porto, I fly to Joshua Tree, California for a Camp FI event.
  • Meanwhile, the pace of production around here will slow markedly as I put into practice my plan to dive deeper into subjects and not feel pressured to publish all of the time.

The bottom line for this blog: Quantity will decrease but quality should improve. Plus, I now have a clear editorial lens that should help me stay focused. Sound good? Sounds great to me!

Paula

Paula Pant hamming it up with me while taping an episode of Afford Anything

The flywheel of wealth (and the importance of patience)

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His name is Dave. A retired Naval officer, he’s written two novels and about to publish his third. His books (thrillers in the style of Dan Brown and John Grisham) have been well received and even won awards, yet he’s still a relative unknown in the competitive world of fiction.

Her name is Michal. She’s a residential and commercial painting contractor in central Ohio. She’s a natural artist, a trait she inherited from her father and passed on to her daughter. She’s truly gifted, yet has struggled to grow her young business.

His name is Rob. He wants to achieve financial freedom at a young age. Yet, fresh out of college, he has mountains of debt. He makes a good salary, but most of it goes to paying school loans and everyday expenses. He manages to save and invest $100 a month, but feels like he’s making little progress.

These are all true stories.

  • Dave is Dave Grogan, a friend of mine. You can find his books here.
  • Michal is Michal Cheney, my sister. She owns and operates No Drip Painting, a company that has enjoyed tremendous growth, but only after years of hard work that seemed to go nowhere.
  • Rob is, as you might have guessed, me — 25 years ago. What started as $100 a month turned into early retirement at the age of 49.

What do these stories have in common? The Flywheel.

A flywheel is a mechanical device designed to efficiently store rotational energy. Well, that’s how an engineer would describe a flywheel. I majored in English. To me, a flywheel is a wheel that’s really hard to get started. Once it gets going, however, it’s really hard to stop.

Anybody who has taken a spin class and tried to stop the pedals with their feet has learned firsthand just how much a moving flywheel wants to keep moving!

Today, I want to tell you about the flywheel of wealth. Like any flywheel, it can be slow to get started. But once it's moving, it's almost unstoppable.

The Flywheel and Business

Most young entrepreneurs experience the flywheel. The new realtor struggles to get her first sale. The second sale is just as hard. So is the tenth. As she struggles, she watches long-time realtors get new clients with ease.

An online entrepreneur struggles to get visitors to his new website. He publishes great content, yet watches as long-established websites, even those with lesser quality content, get gobs of visitors.

I can remember publishing my first article on my personal finance site, The Dough Roller. I was terrified. I knew that as soon as I clicked publish, the entire world could see my ideas, my thoughts, my opinions. How would they react? With adrenalin aplenty, I clicked publish and sat back and waited, and waited, and waited. Nothing happened.

In hindsight, my fear was comical. Why? Absolutely nobody, and I mean nobody, read that first article published on 27 May 2007. I was pushing against a flywheel that was at a dead stop. It didn’t budge.

Up at 5:30 am seven days a week to work on my blog, I kept pushing against that flywheel. On the subway going to work I pushed some more. I pushed against the flywheel at lunch. I pushed against the flywheel at night after the family went to bed. It didn’t move.

Then the inner voice we all have spoke up. “Keep pushing if you want, buy you’ll never get this flywheel to move. You don’t have what it takes. Just give up. Life will be easier and you won’t embarrass yourself.”

I kept pushing.

Adjustable Flywheel Patent

It took six months following this schedule before the flywheel begrudgingly moved ever so slightly. I kept pushing. And pushing. And pushing.

Fast-forward eleven years and what started out as a blog with one post nobody read had become a multi-million dollar business. The flywheel was humming along so fast I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to.

What accounts for the success? I didn’t quit. I kept pushing and, importantly, learning how to push against the flywheel. In my case, it was learning the art and science of online publishing.

Note: I sold the blog in 2018, but continue to record the Dough Roller Money Podcast. Here's my interview with J.D. about how to manage your money as the CFO of your own life.

The Flywheel and Financial Freedom

All of this brings me to the flywheel of wealth. I’m on a mission to motivate young people to save and invest. It’s not easy.

Many people in their twenties see saving money as:

  1. A huge sacrifice,
  2. Having no short-term benefit, and
  3. A long-term benefit they may never get to enjoy.

I challenge these beliefs in my new book, Retire Before Mom and Dad, which was published last week. [J.D.'s note: I read Rob's book a few weeks ago. It's fantastic!]

Here’s the thing. Most young people can’t see past the seemingly immovable flywheel of investing.

Let’s imagine you read my book and I’ve convinced you to start saving and investing today. Excellent! So you give up cable TV to save more money. You take the $100 monthly cable fee and invest it in a low-cost index mutual fund. You feel good about your decision, although you miss some of the shows you use to watch on TV.

Now let’s fast forward one month. You’ve suffered through withdrawals from the lack of cable. You’ve yelled at your kids a bit more than usual. Surly would best describe your “I gave up cable to invest” mood.

To ease your pain, you decide to check your investments. You log into your account, and if we assume the month was an average month for the stock and bond market, you earned about one-twelfth of 8% — or .67%. (Over the long term, the U.S. stock market returns about 8% per year.)

Your $100 investment has turned into the princely sum of $100.67. The flywheel didn’t turn much!

At this point several things happen.

  • First you curse me and the day you bought my stupid book or read this article.
  • Second, you kick yourself for giving up a month of Property Brothers for a lousy 67 cents.
  • And you’re at a loss on how to respond to your significant other who went through his own cable TV withdraws and wants to know how the investment is performing.

Welcome to the world of investing. Yeah, it starts really, really slow. (Maybe that's why J.D. named this site Get Rich Slowly?)

Greasing the Flywheel

And that brings me to what I call the “Nine Year Rule of Compounding Magic”. Here it is:

It takes about nine years of investing the same amount each month for the monthly returns to equal the amount you've been investing.

Let’s use our example of investing $100 a month. If we again assume an 8% return, after nine years we’ll have $15,742.96. If on an average month we earn about 0.67% (which is 8% divided by twelve), our $15,742.96 will be generating an average monthly return of $105.48.

Magic!

Now our investments are generating more than our monthly contributions. And if we continue to invest our $100 a month plus the income generated by our investments, our wealth continues to compound . The flywheel picks up speed.

Now let’s take it to the next level.

It took about nine years at an 8% return for our wealth to generate monthly income of about $100. How long will it take to increase this income to $200 a month? If you’ve been following along, you know it will be fewer than nine years given the magic of compounding.

Let’s do the math. Using an Excel spreadsheet, we can quickly calculate that after another five years, our balance rises to $30,802.26. That amount of wealth will generate about $200 a month in income at an 8% return ($205.35 to be exact).

Magic again!

It took us nine years saving $100 a month to have enough to generate another $100 in monthly income. But it took us just five years to double the monthly income to $200.

We can keep going:

  • 9 years: $100 a month
  • 5 more years: $200 a month
  • 3.5 more years: $300 a month
  • 2.7 more years: $400 a month
  • 2.3 more years: $500 a month
  • 1.9 more years: $600 a month
  • 1.7 more years: $700 a month (26.1 years total)

Here’s the key point. The first $100 of income is the hardest. It took us nine years.

As the power of compounding grows, it gets easier and easier. In our example above, we jumped from $600 of monthly income to $700 in just 18 months. And in case you were wondering, our $100 monthly investment grew to $105,195.67 after 26.1 years.

Why is this important? It’s important because we need to set realistic expectations. M. Scott Peck in his bestseller, The Road Less Traveled, makes this point in a different context. He says that life is tough. And as soon as we realize that life is tough, life gets a little easier.

Building wealth is slow at first. It can even be discouraging at times. But once we realize this, once we set realistic expectations, it gets a little easier.

Keep pushing on that flywheel!

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How to make money fast: Quick ways to earn money in 2019

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Let’s face it. Most of us, at one point or another, have been faced with a financial emergency, or a plain, old-fashioned cash crunch. It’s definitely not a fun spot to be in. While there are steps we can take to avoid such situations (more on that later), that’s often the last thing on our minds when we need to come up with money — quick.

To assist, I’ve compiled the following list of money-making ideas. While some of the items included are more lucrative than others (you’ll never get rich taking surveys, for example), they all share a common theme: making money fast. Ready? Let’s dive in.

And before anyone mentions it, yes we're aware of the irony of publishing an article about making money fast at a website called Get Rich Slowly.

How to make money fast
[Read more…]

Six simple money habits that changed my life

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Habits play such an important role in every aspect of your life. And those habits, good or bad, are reflected in your finances.

Some of our habits are small, almost insignificant. Over time, though, they have a large effect. There are little things that I've done over many years that have had outsized results. Individually, they don't move the needle. But they're like little course corrections on the cruise ship of life. A little change early on, repeated and compounded over many years, can have a significant impact.

When you add them together, they can help you achieve things you never thought possible.

Six simple money habits

Small Habits Lead to Big Results

A prime example for me was gaining strength. I made a decision to build muscle but I didn't want to be one of those guys who spent hours in the gym. I learned that there are workout regimens that don't require a ton of time, but which still improve strength with just 20-30 minutes a session. These routines target several muscle groups at once. (The deadlift is a good example.)

Because these sessions only took 20-30 minutes, it was easy to make time for them. As a result, I started going to the gym more regularly. And once I was there, something funny happened. On some days, I did the workout and left. On others, I felt like I could do more. So, I incorporated other exercises that targeted smaller muscle groups. The promise of a short session got me in the habit of going to the gym. That was the hard part. Once I was there, I often did more than I had planned.

At first, I saw my strength increase until I hit a plateau. I talked with some folks and realized I had two non-obvious weaknesses: insufficient protein intake and grip strength.

  • For the protein, I added a bit of unflavored protein into my coffee each morning.
  • For grip strength, I started doing more dumbbell exercises in lieu of barbell exercises. The simple act of carrying the heavy weights to a bench helped increase my grip strength.

Both were small changes that became daily habits, which eventually had a big impact on my exercise regimen. Neither was difficult, I just had to discover them. And today, I'm stronger than I've ever been thanks to these seemingly minor changes.

But you're not here for fitness tips from me. You're here for money tips, right? Here are some simple habits I've developed that might not seem like much at first, but which have had a huge impact on my finances. Maybe they'll help you too. [Read more…]

The virtue of thrift

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My grandparents, Lola and NoahWhen I was a boy, we lived in the country. That is, we lived five miles from the nearest town (Canby) and 25 miles from the nearest city (Portland). We were surrounded by farmland. Life was quiet. Pastoral. Bucolic.

The road we lived on was especially quiet, with very little traffic. Even from a young age — five or six, I think — I was allowed to walk the quarter-mile to visit my grandparents. (My father's parents lived “next door” to us, but next door was across a large field.)

Visiting grandma and grandpa was fun. As quiet as life in the country was, life at their house was even quieter. There was a stillness in their place unlike anything I've experienced since. Their home seemed stuck in time.

Part of this stuckness stemmed from the things they owned.

They lived in a little white farmhouse built in 1920. My grandparents moved there in 1943 — two years before my father was born — then remodeled the place. Sort of. (Like all Roths, they left the job undone — for more than forty years!)

During the 1970s, when I was young, they still owned and used many of the things they'd purchased when they moved in.

  • They still had a big, white Kelvinator refrigerator, for instance, with a moving door handle and hardly any space inside. They called it the “icebox”.
  • They listened to hymns (sometimes) and radio sermons (daily) on an imposing wooden console “hi-fi” system as big as a couch.
  • They owned a long pink-ish, purple-ish “davenport” with scratchy, well-worn fabric on which grandpa would nap every afternoon after “dinner” (which was lunch).
  • They used a black bakelite rotary telephone on a party line.

My grandparents themselves were very much like the things they owned. They were old. (They were in their seventies when I knew them.) They were calm. They moved slowly during the day, and even more slowly at night. One of my fondest memories is sitting with them in the evening, watching as they sipped “sanka” and played Scrabble while a fire roared in the nearby woodstove.

For children, time always moves more slowly, but it seemed to me that nothing every changed in my grandparents' world. Their home was frozen in time. It was stuck. It was still. It was silent.

It was comforting, and I liked it. [Read more…]

The £200 Millionaire: An early retirement story from 1932

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J.D.'s Introduction
While reading an obscure book about retiring early to a life at sea — Voyaging on a Small Income by Annie Hill (1993) — I discovered a short story from a man named Joseph Weston-Martyr.

First published in 1932, The £200 Millionaire reads like “Mr. Money Mustache at Sea”. It's fascinating. Because today I start a ten-day Mediterranean cruise, I thought it'd be fun to share this story at Get Rich Slowly.

This is a long story. It contains 8001 words, which is 32 printed pages. I've formatted it for web-based reading (I don't think you want to read a 500-word paragraph on your phone!), plus added images and hyperlinks. Please enjoy it as weekend reading!

Some images are obviously meant to illustrate the text. Others are from Michelle at Making Sense of Cents, who graciously agreed to let me use her photos here. She's been living on a sailboat since May 2018.

The £200 Millionaire

ZeelandMy wife and I were sailing a hireling yacht through the waterways of Zeeland last summer, when one day a westerly gale drove us into the harbour of Dintelsas for shelter.

A little green sloop, flying the Red Ensign, followed us into port. She was manned solely by one elderly gentleman, but we noted that he handled the boat with ease and skill.

It was blowing hard, and the little yacht ran down the harbour at speed, but when abreast of us she luffed head to wind, her violently flapping sails were lowered with a run, and she brought up alongside us so gently that she would not have crushed an egg.

We took her lines and made them fast, while her owner hung cork fenders over the side and proceeded to stow his sails. Urged by a look from my wife which said, “He is old and all alone. Help him,” I offered to lend the lone mariner a hand. But he refused to be helped.

Said he, “Thank you, but please don't trouble. I like to do everything myself; it's part of the fun. But do come aboard if you will, and look round. You'll see there's nothing here that one man can't tackle easily.”

We went aboard and found the green sloop to be one of the cleverest little ships imaginable.

Aboard the Green Sloop

It is difficult to describe her gear on deck and aloft without being technical; suffice it to say, therefore, that everything was very efficient and simple, and so designed that all sail could be set or lowered by the man at the helm without leaving the cockpit.

The boat was 30 feet long by 9 feet wide, and my short wife, at any rate, could stand upright in her cabin.

Her fore end was a storeroom, full of convenient lockers, shelves and a small but adequate water-closet. Abaft this came the cabin, an apartment 12 feet long, with a broad bunk along one side of it and a comfortable settee along the other. A table with hinged flaps stood in the middle, while in the four corners were a wardrobe, a desk, a pantry and a galley.

Abaft all this was a motor, hidden beneath the cockpit floor. A clock ticked on one bulkhead, a rack full of books ran along the other, a tray of pipes lay on the table, and a copper kettle sang softly to itself on the little stove.

“What do you think of her?” said our host, descending the companion.

“Before you tell me, though, I must warn you I'm very house-proud. I've owned this boat for ten years, and I've been doing little things to her all the time. Improving her, I call it. It's great fun.

“For instance, I made this matchbox-holder for the galley last week. It sounds a trivial thing; but I wish I'd thought of it ten years ago, because during all that time I've had to use both hands whenever I struck a match.

“Now I have only to use one hand, and you know all that implies in a small boat, especially if she's dancing about and you're trying to hold on and cook and light the Primus at one and the same moment. Then there was the fun of carving the holder out of a bit of wood I picked up, to say nothing of the pleasure it gives me to look at a useful thing I've made with my own hands. The carving brought out the grain of the wood nicely, don't you think?

“Now I'm going to make tea, and you must stay and have some with me.”

In the harbor [Read more…]

How couples can create a shared plan for the future

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J.D.'s Intro
Last December, I took a trip to Europe with my cousin Duane. Before I left, I received email from a GRS reader named Matthias. “If you come through Switzerland, let me know,” he said.

The stars aligned so that Matt was able to join us for several hours on a train across the Alps. He brought Swiss chocolate and a bottle of whisky. As we talked — and became pleasantly buzzed — he told me about how he and his wife tackle couple goals together via five-year plans for their future.

“I love this idea,” I told him. “Will you write about it for Get Rich Slowly?” He did. This is Matt's story about creating a shared vision as a couple. Enjoy!

J.D. and Matthias

In the spring of 2006, I'd been living and working in Taipei, Taiwan for two years and my contract was about to expire. Soon, I'd be returning home to Switzerland.

On a pleasant weekend evening in my downtown flat, my Taiwanese girlfriend and I were reminiscing about all of the wonderful memories we'd made. We waxed nostalgic about the two years we'd enjoyed together. But it dawned on us that if we didn't make some bold moves, our relationship might be coming to an end.

We opened a bottle of fine wine in order to enhance the depth and wisdom of our conversation. Before long, we'd switched from sweet nostalgia to dreaming about our potential future — together.

How to set couple goals

Imagineering the Future

My girlfriend had just graduated from college and was working in her first job. For my part, I’d just received an offer for my dream job — but it meant I'd have to move back to Switzerland.

The wine was an effective dream enhancer. We let our imaginations loose as we talked about how we could potentially live our lives together. The future took many shapes.

  • Where would we live?
  • What jobs would we work?
  • How could we both be as happy as possible together?

Honestly, it was overwhelming. Our lives three months ahead were like a blank slate. Everything seemed possible! Nothing was certain! Anything could happen!

In order to conceptualize our thoughts and concerns, we decided to write down all of our dreams and goals on yellow stickynotes. This mother of all brainstorming sessions took us half an hour. We each wrote down what was important to us, stuff we’d like to achieve, skills we’d like to acquire — in short, what we’d like to do with our lives in the next few years.

Next, we organized those dreams in terms of feasibility, urgency, and requirements. (To meet certain goals, we had to accomplish others first.) During this process, we tried to keep things fair. We both got the same number of stickynotes. All goals were open to debate, yet at the same time we tried to figure how to best help each other achieving them going forward! Our aim was to work together as a couple.

Step three was to put up an A3 formatted white paper on the wall, draw a timeline from 2006 till 2011 – yes, we were going to plan out the next five years of our life! – and arrange our couple goals in a meaningful way to our life’s “game plan”.

The first five-year plan

Our dreams included things like:

  • Get married.
  • Move to Switzerland.
  • Save for a new home.
  • Learn German.
  • Start a business.
  • Become parents.

In a nutshell, nothing extraordinary — the things young people usually dream of. It was clear that some goals had to be achieved before others. We agreed that pursuing them in a specific order made sense. Then we arranged them accordingly on the timeline.

Becoming a Dream Team

Planning our future was an ecstatic activity. In fact, doing so was the defining evening for our relationship.

That very evening, we actually decided to get married. We decided to chase our dreams together as a team. She was 23 years young; I was 26. Little did we know that this shared activity would help us tremendously on the path to our dream life. We had become a dream team! [Read more…]

Which financial advice should you trust?

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Commenting on a recent article, Carmine Red asked an excellent question:

How do you evaluate the financial advice you get from other sources? Specifically, how do you decide if some piece of advice is for you, or if you should discard some adjacent advice. Is there an amount of pick-and-choose?

GRS definitely doesn’t seem like a dogmatic 100% one-way-of-doing things site, so I’d love to hear about the critical thinking you employ, and that I’m sure we can all use a little of since we’re getting bombarded by financial “do this!” or “don’t do this” instructions from so many different dimensions.

Carmine is right: GRS is not dogmatic. From the start, my top admonition has been “do what works for you”. By this I mean that you should test financial advice to see if it works for you and your situation. There's little (if any) advice that applies to 100% of people in 100% of cases. Life is messy. Money is messy.

So, how can you decide whom to trust? How can you evaluate a piece of financial advice to decide whether it has merit? And if the financial advice does have merit, how can you tell if it's right for yor life?

Today, let's take a deep dive into this question. Let's explore how to evaluate all of the financial advice you get — from the internet, from television, and in real life.

How to Evaluate Financial Advice

Before I answer Carmine's question directly, I want to approach it obliquely. If you find this section boring, please skip to the next one. I won't hold it against you!

In 1940, Mortimer J. Adler published How to Read a Book, which contained 400 pages of advice on doing something that most people would argue needs no instruction. In 1967, he revised the book and turned it into a little masterpiece.

In the revised edition, Adler argues that there are four levels of reading:

  1. Elementary Reading. At this basic level, the reader is able to answer the question, “What does the sentence say?” But reading at this stage is a mechanical act.
  2. Inspectional Reading. At this level, a reader's aim is to get the most from a book (or article) in a minimum of time. “Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically,” Adler writes. Your aim is to get a surface understanding of the book, to answer the question, “What is this book about?”
  3. Analytical Reading. At this level, you're doing the best, most complete and thorough reading of a book that you can do. Inspectional reading is done quickly. Analytical reading is done without a time limit. Its aim is understanding. This is the sort of reading that most of us do most of the time.
  4. Synoptical reading. At the fourth (and highest) level of reading, we read comparatively. “When reading synoptically,” Adler says, “the reader reads many books, not just one, and places them in relation to one another.” My ongoing project to read about the history of retirement? That's synoptic reading.

What has this to do with evaluating financial advice? Well, I think similar principles apply. When you receive a piece of financial advice from somebody, or you read a recommendation online, there are four levels of evaluation.

  1. Elementary evaluation. When you pick up a piece of financial advice, start by asking yourself “What does this advice say?” You're not trying to judge its merits. You're merely trying to parse the recommendation. Believe it or not, you can throw some stuff out at this level because it doesn't say anything. Or what it says is nonsensical. (I don't mean nonsensical as in “I disagree with it”. I mean nonsensical as in it literally makes no sense.)
  2. Inspectional evaluation. Next ask, “What is this advice about? What is the overall message? What is its core argument?” You're not trying to understand nuance here. You're trying to get the main point. For instance, in Mr. Money Mustache's popular article “The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement”, the core argument is “the more you save, the sooner you can retire”. The main point of the article you're reading right now is: “There are smart ways to evaluate financial advice. Here are a few.”
  3. Analytical evaluation. The biggest part of evaluating financial advice is taking time to analyze it, to examine the advice in detail, to really understand it. This usually means asking “why?” Why is the person giving this advice? What's their motivation and what does this advice aim to accomplish? (The rest of this article offers some tips for applying this step.)
  4. Synoptical evaluation. Lastly, if you're evaluating important advice (such as how much to spend on a house), you should make time to do some comparative evaluation. What do other people have to say? Why do they agree? Why do they disagree? How does this advice fit in to what you already know and what you're already doing?

Here at Get Rich Slowly, one of my primary aims is to “evaluate synoptically”. I don't want this site to be one-dimensional. When I write my articles, I try my best to draw from a variety of disciplines and sources. I look for differing opinions. Does that mean I stray from strict personal finance sometimes? Yes, absolutely. But it makes the writing more interesting for me and, I hope, for you.

Okay, that's some semi-helpful, high-level philosophical stuff about evaluating financial advice. Now let's look at how to put this into practice. How do you actually analyze financial advice to decide whether it's good or not?

I think it helps to ask four questions. [Read more…]

The best investing apps for 2019

written by — published (updated ) 27 Comments

J.D.'s note: This article marks the GRS debut for my business partner, Tom Drake. Tom's primary role is managing the technical and business sides of things, but as a long-time Canadian money blogger, he'll contribute the occasional article here at GRS.

It has never been easier to invest.

In only a few years, the rapid advancement of mobile technology has placed the power to invest at our fingertips and ushered in a wave of fintech startups, armed with new and innovative solutions for investors. Names like Acorns and Stash are now competing head-to-head with traditional brands such as E-Trade, and TD Ameritrade. (Imagine E-Trade being considered a “traditional” brand!)

With so many great options to choose from, it can be downright difficult to decide which investment app is right for you. To take out the guesswork, I’ve compiled a list of the best investment apps for 2019. From beginner investors to advanced traders, there’s something here for everyone.

Before we dive in, I should point out that this list of best apps is not a ranking. Instead, I’ve chosen what I believe are the best apps for a variety of situations – trading stocks, exchange traded funds (ETFs), no-fee, and micro-investing, you name it.

This means that the investment app I chose as best overall for 2019 won’t necessarily be the top pick for every investor. Rather, it’s the one that I feel most clearly meets the needs of its target client. With that in mind, I present to you the Best Investment Apps for 2019. [Read more…]

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