You'll have to forgive the overt theme of today's post. I've been wanting to write about this topic for a while, but it's such personal issue that I've shied away from it.

But when I realized that this week's post would fall on Valentine's Day, I took it as a serendipitous opportunity to break out of my comfort zone and talk about something that scares me a little: my love life. Specifically, this is the story of my love life meeting my financial life. Oh, boy.

A couple of years ago, I met someone who changed my whole perspective. I started to not just think in terms of "me" but also "we." As these things go, we decided to share a life together. Sharing a life meant sharing an apartment. And sharing an apartment meant sharing finances.

For years, one of my goals has been to achieve a "pastoral lifestyle". This amuses my friends, but it's true. By "pastoral lifestyle" I mean that I want to create for myself a life that flows at a slower pace, a life removed from the concerns of the day-to-day world. What I hope to achieve is often called "voluntary simplicity", and there's a whole movement devoted to the concept.

Duane Elgin's Voluntary Simplicity is a cornerstone book to this movement, and I expected great things from it. I was sorely disappointed. Elgin begins with a nice explanation of voluntary simplicity:

We each know where our lives are unnecessarily complicated. We are all painfully aware of the clutter and pretense that weigh upon us and make our passage through the world more cumbersome and awkward. To live more simply is to unburden ourselves — to live more lightly, cleanly, aerodynamically. [...] The objective is not dogmatically to live with less, but is a more demanding intention of living with a balance in order to find a life of greater purpose, fulfillment, and satisfaction. Continue reading...

More about...Books

A couple of weekends ago, Kim and I enjoyed a short vacation on the Oregon Coast. She's been taking foraging classes, and she had an early morning workshop on harvesting sea vegetables one Sunday. Rather than wake in the middle of the night to drive out, we rented a small place in Tillamook and took the dog for an adventure. (The dog loves the coast.)

We let Tally lead us on a walk through town one rainy afternoon. Coming home, we cut through a trailer park. "We're in the poor part of town," Kim said.

"Yep," I said. "But look at that trailer house right there. That is almost exactly like the one I grew up in." Here's the trailer I grew up in:

There are a lot of great personal finance books out there -- here are a few of my favorites -- but despite the diversity of titles (and subject matter), they all share a remarkably similar format. These books are money manuals in which the author shares prescriptive advice. They tell the reader how to get from point A to point B.

From time to time, somebody will publish a book like David Chilton's The Wealthy Barber, which provides financial advice in the guise of a story, but these attempts are very, very rare. (It's a bit ironic that one of the oldest, most revered personal finance books -- The Richest Man in Babylon -- is story based, yet few have followed in its footsteps.)

All this is to say: For years, I've believed there's a hole in the market waiting to be filled, a place for a story-based book about money.

I used to be guilty of spending money on the life I thought I lived, rather than the life I was actually living. To illustrate what I mean, consider the following past expenditures:

• Snowboarding apparel, for my first and only snowboarding trip to date.
• Evening dresses from Bluefly.com. Yes, they were purchased at a big discount, but I had nowhere to wear them!
• A mountain bike. I was so dedicated to riding, for about three months.

Last week I read an article on the Psychology Today blog titled "What You Do Every Day Matters More Than What You Do Once In a While." Written by Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, the main point of the article is that people are happiest when they make decisions based on their daily life, not the life they lead every once in awhile. From the article:

In his fascinating book, House Lust, Daniel McGinn notes that market researchers use the term maximum-use imperative to describe the fact that people will often buy something to accommodate a use that they need only rarely...Along the same lines, I've noticed that when making decisions, I tend to give too much thought to what I do once in a while and not enough weight to what I do every day. For example, I wear running shoes 29 days out of 30 days a month, yet I have three pairs of black flats and only one pair of running shoes.

In November 2018, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper called "Saving Regret" [here's the full PDF version]. Once you wade through the study's academic language, there's some interesting stuff here about why people do and don't save for retirement.

Saving regret, the authors say, is "the wish in hindsight to have saved more earlier in life".

Obviously, you can suffer from saving regret at any age. When I met 31-year-old Debbie for dinner last week, her issues boiled down to saving regret. She wishes she'd saved more when she was younger. But for the purposes of this paper, the authors turned their attention to folks aged 60 to 79, people of traditional retirement age.

In a nutshell: By diligently applying four simple rules, you can move from being at the mercy of money to being a master of money.

In 2004, Jesse and Julie Mecham were twenty-year-old newlyweds trying to make ends meet. They lived in the 300-square-foot basement of a sixty-year-old home. He was pursuing a master's degree in accounting, while she was finishing a bachelor's degree in social work. Plus, they were planning for their fist child.

The Mechams felt flat broke.

Today, I'm pleased to present a guest article from one of my favorite money bloggers of all time: Jacob Lund Fisker. Fisker founded Early Retirement Extreme in 2007. It quickly became an influential voice for the nascent FIRE movement. In fact, I think it's fair to say that FIRE wouldn't be what it is today with his work.

Fisker retired from blogging in 2011. Since then, he and I have exchanged long emails on sometimes arcane subjects. Occasionally I ask him for advice. Recently, I asked him if he'd be willing to update people on where he's been and what he's been doing for the past decade. He agreed.

Here, then, is Fisker's story of life after Early Retirement Extreme (and extreme early retirement). Be warned: His story is not short.

A few weeks ago, I cataloged the difference between successful people and unsuccessful people. Based on my reading (and personal experience), I compiled a list of 61 habits that foster wealth and success.

While writing that article, I found one critical difference was mentioned again and again. Every author and expert on the subject shared some form of the following. Generally speaking: Successful people believe they control their destiny and unsuccessful people do not.

In Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, for instance, T. Harv Eker lists seventeen ways the financial blueprints of the rich differ from those of the poor and middle-class. Number one on his list?

I've lived in a small town for most of my life. The drive home includes steep hills with panoramic views and winding country roads that ramble past ranches and wide-open fields.

But I didn't always have positive feelings about the country life. In high school, I hated it. All of the action was in the city, where coffee shops, museums, restaurants, and concerts happened. When I moved to the city my freshman year of college, I thought that would be the end of country living — I was finally a city mouse.

As it turned out, after seven years in the city, I did move back. It began as a purely financial decision, and one that, at the time, made me feel a twinge of anxiety. I remember that as my husband and I were packing up our apartment in town to get ready for the move, I had a mini meltdown, asking him, “Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really sure you want to do this?" (He probably thought I was nuts since the whole thing was my idea, but he's a wise man and kept that to himself, simply saying that yes, he was sure.)