money

A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned.

It's so simple: you spend less than you earn. Invest shrewdly. Avoid toxic people and toxic activities. Try to keep learning all your life. And do a lot of deferred gratification. If you do all those things, you are almost certain to succeed. And if you don't, you'll need a lot of luck. And you don't want to need a lot of luck. You want to go into a game where you're very likely to win without having any unusual luck.

It could be that financial success breeds bad health habits.

He has “learned to be fair” about money, and sees it only as a tool for life planning. “Some people make too much of out of it, some make too little of it, but they have to realize, money isn’t the goal.” For him, it’s activity and contribution that matter.

Financially effective people tend to hold themselves to certain rules about money. I don’t borrow money for anything smaller than a house. I ledger every dollar in or out. I live on 80% of my income and invest the difference.

Fit, energetic people tend to have personal rules about health. I run or walk every day, rain or shine. I fill half my plate with vegetables. I don’t keep junk food in the house.

Productive people keep personal rules about work. I’m always at my desk at seven sharp. I clean out my inbox out every Friday. I don’t use social media before five o’clock.

So, as long as you aren’t a Consumer Sucka, commuting to work in a bank-financed gas-powered racing sofa and borrowing money for furniture and appliances to outfit that last spare room in your suburban mansion, recessions are a great thing. Housing and profitable investments become cheaper, insanity and speculation is reset, and people actually start living more frugally again, getting back to the roots of what living a good life really means.

Frugality is not about depriving yourself of what you want. It’s about figuring out what you want and then figuring out how you can achieve that.

Nobody listens to me in real life, but on the Internet everyone does. People need to be told to get to work on things. They need a boss so they stop making excuses.

“He seems uncommonly attentive to his son’s whims and moods, but he freely admits that it is a burden to have a child. This is not a value judgment but a statement of fact with regard to money, energy, and time.”

On Mr Moneymustache

Paying for parking is a sign from God that you’re in an area not designed for a car. You are fighting the design of your city.