​How Big is your Circle of Control?​

That recent article on the Low Information Diet (which I probably should have called the Low Irrelevant Information Diet) stirred up quite a debate.

While some readers offered their double high-fives of agreement, others came out with pitchforks and torches, scolding both Mr. Money Mustache and any who dared to agree with him for “Celebrating Ignorance”.

This response threw me off-balance, since the whole purpose of this blog, and most of my life in general these days, is supposed to be the opposite: Decreasing Ignorance, in the form of trying to educate the rich world about the consequences of our current lifestyle and its effect on the rest of the planet, and show an alternative way of living that leads to better results.

I can blame some of the misunderstanding on my own lack of skill – I try to write these things to be as clear as possible, and the success is measured by the percentage of people who write angry responses based on missing a key concept. And sure, we could dismiss a few other people as hopeless complainers who will whine about anything – there’s no changing their minds without a good set of boxing gloves.

But among the intelligent dissenters, the biggest part of the chasm of misunderstanding seems to be coming from a hole in their grasp of the ideas of the Circle of Concern, versus the Circle of Control.

These terms come from Stephen Covey’s ridiculously powerful classic called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s a book so old, so wise, and so essential that you are probably living a pointless life if you have not yet internalized its concepts.

I first read this thing about 20 years ago, and I’ve reviewed it about ten times since then*. The concepts are so religiously ingrained in my mind at this point, and have proven to be accurate through so many real-life tests, that I tend to go into a mouth-frothing rant if I see someone not following them. Whether it happens in my comments section or at the table in my back yard surrounded by beers and fellow liberal-minded hippie do-gooders earnestly repeating conspiracy theories, the offense is equally severe.

“What nonsense is this Infidel spouting before me?

This foolish assertion directly violates the First of the Seven Habits!!“

So here it is in a nutshell:

You will have a much better life, if you focus your mental and physical energy ONLY on the things you can personally influence.

Everything else is a distraction that pulls you away from running your life properly.

But quite counter-intuitively, this smaller focus does not shrink your influence and your ability to do good. It causes these things to increase.

Covey calls the range of everything you spend time thinking about your Circle of Concern. Similarly, everything you can actually influence is called your Circle of Control. For most people, the two circles look like this:

Yikes, look at that. The Circles of the typical News Watcher. Many worries are buzzing around in his mind, and yet they are things he cannot control. Whenever you read complaints on a blog or a news article, they are usually targeted at these red boxes.

Even a beginner can take control over many things, which are highlighted in green boxes in the middle. But any time and effort spent on the red boxes subtracts directly from time you can invest into the green ones.

If you live your life in this manner as most people do, you become a reactive person. Life throws stuff at you, and you must react to it. Crappy weather shows up, and you react with a bad mood. A traffic jam snarls up your commuting, and you react by honking the horn and complaining to coworkers when you finally arrive. A health condition develops and you react by typing Mr. Money Mustache angry messages about his health insurance calculations.

Although this is the default human condition, there is another way to live.

It is to shrink your circle of concern (ignoring the daily news and concentrating on deeper sources of information), while using the newly liberated brainpower to work only on items within your circle of control. This is called taking a Proactive stance.

To accomplish this, it helps to start from the beginning and work outwards. And the very beginning is your goal in life.

For me, this exercise might look like this:

Goal:

• To lead the happiest life possible.

How to Reach Goal:

• Live a long and healthy life.
• Have plenty of close and happy relationships with fellow humans.
• Make a difference whenever possible by helping others.

With these directives, it becomes much easier to decide what to include in your Circle of Concern. You simply identify each concern in your life, analyze it and decide if it is something you can affect, then either ditch it or get to work on it. For example:

Concern: The weather sucks today. I wish it was sunny and warm so I could get out and ride my bike.
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Analysis:

• How does this relate to my goal? It is part of Directive #1: Health. Riding a bike is a key to this.
• So I am correct to seek out a way to bike today? Yes.
• Is the local weather in my control? No.
• Does complaining about the weather increase my control of the situation? No.
• So willI choose to waste anyone’s time by issuing complaints? No.
• Is it possible to still ride a bicycle when it is 34F with a light mist falling? Yes.
• What is required to do this? Get out a hat, gloves, and a waterproof coat.
• So will I go to the closet and get out the hat, gloves and coat? Yes.

In other cases, the revelations can be deeper:

Concern: I try to keep up with the daily happenings around the world, and what I hear worries me quite a bit.

Analysis:

• Why do I feel that watching the news helps me to be a better human? Because I want to stay informed about world events.
• How does this help me with my goal of helping people? By allowing me to understand their suffering, like what’s going on in Syria.
• Does understanding the details of each instance of human suffering help me alleviate it? Well, no.
• Has war and suffering been a permanent fixture of human civilization since before we had swords? Umm.. I guess so.
• Would you rather save 10,000 people by focusing on the details of one war, or save one billion people by reducing on the causes of war and other suffering? Shit, what kind of question is that?
• What has been the cause of war in general? I guess it would be inequality, poverty and the struggle to survive, oppression, insatiable desire for power, religious conflicts, and a few other things.
• Do these general causes of war change with the daily news? No.
• How can you have the largest effect on the number of people who suffer due to war?
  ​Hmm.. I guess I might work on poverty since greater wealth and productivity has caused a pretty dramatic reduction in violence between the wealthy nations. After all, Germany hasn’t sent out any fleets ofattacking submarines in an awfully long time!

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But what will I do, if I’m not busy being concerned with things outside of my control?

Now here’s the reason this counterintuitive mind trick works: By deliberately limiting the irrelevant things you do and think about, you automatically become much, much better at the relevant things on which you spend your time.

The increases in your health, wealth, focus, network of friends, and knowledge of relevant things from reading library books and talking with other Highly Effective People will have the following effect on your circle of control:

Wow, look at that. The circle of control has really grown! And when reviewing this new more advanced circle, we see that all sorts of fancy new options have been added in blue.

This person, while carefully avoiding the distractions of any of the irrelevant items in red, has gained influence over many more things. And thus things you could once only worry about, are now things you can control. Which is probably what you wanted in the first place.

Therefore, today’s assignment is as follows: over the coming fifty years, monitor both your worries and your words. If you catch yourself leaking out more than a tiny percentage of your personal power on things you cannot personally control, repair that leak.

Then find a way to channelthat awesomeness to somewhere it will make a difference instead. Watch the results, and write back to me only when you have realized how well it works.

*I have an audiobook version of the book in MP3 format, and at least once a year it comes up on random play on the digital memory card labeled “Cross Country Roadtrips” that I pop into the car stereo at the start of long voyages.

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This is email #29 of roughly 52 in the MMM "Just the Classics" boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​Get Rich With: The Position of Strength​

Mrs. MM destroys a portion of the house in a 2013 work session.

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A note from 2022. Hey everyone, I hope you are enjoying this boot camp series as much as I have been enjoying digging up these articles and dusting them off a little. Just for context, we are still working our way through in chronological order - and the following article was first published on November 11, 2013. While many details of life (and house prices) have changed since then, it's amazing how the core principles of living well just stay the same, from one decade/generation/lifetime to the next. Please read on!

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A few weeks ago, the MMM family lost about $12,000.

While this might sound like quite a bummer, the event wasn’t upsetting in the least. In fact, the days between that fateful event and today have been some of the most joyful and free days of our lives so far.

As you know, Mrs. Money Mustache keeps an old real estate license handy in her toolbelt. While she maintains the appropriate retired woman’s approach to the field, turning down business except in the case of helping the occasional friend who is buying or selling a house in our immediate neighborhood, she still finds herself helping out with a deal or two every year.

For the last few months, she has been touring houses with some friends who are currently renting a place nearby. They were shopping on the nicer side of our local neighborhood, which implies a 3-4 bedroom house in good condition at a price of around $400,000.

They shopped and shopped. Some places were perfect, but sold too quickly at a price just out of reach. Others were shabby and overpriced. There were various squawking battles from the colorful real estate agents and sellers involved in the process. Going through the all-too-familiar complications inspired my own article on how to buy a house.

At the end of it all, our friends decided to simply buy the nearly-new house they had been renting right in the same neighborhood for the past year. Their landlord had bought it just before the housing crash, and was happy to unload it now that our prices have recovered.

But the landlord proposed it as a private deal: cash would flow from buyer to seller, with no real estate agents on either side. With Realtors normally tacking a 6% commission onto every deal, this simpler arrangement would create a huge win/win situation for our friends and the homeowner.

The only problem was that Mrs. MM would no longer be eligible to receive her 2.8% paycheck, which is how a buyer’s agent normally earns a living. With a purchase price around $400k, this implies a loss of almost $12,000 in income. This fact was not lost on our friends.

“How should we handle this?”, they asked. “We don’t want you to get shafted after doing all this work – should we raise the selling price so you can get your commission? Should we renegotiate the deal harder so the landlord will pay you out of her cut?”

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“Bah… don’t worry about it!”, said my wife. “We’re just happy that you found a place you like, and that you are getting such a great deal on it. Enjoy your new freedom from the grind of shopping and moving, and congratulations!”

.

That night she told me of her decision, and we both toasted some heartily filled wine glasses and had a laugh over the whole situation. We were glad our friends had finally found a house. We both knew that they would benefit from the lower purchase price much more than we would benefit from an extra twelve grand of before-tax income. There would surely be other deals and other windfalls in the future. And more importantly, we value the friendship and were very thankful that the sticky issue of money did not have to get in the middle of it. Friendships, businesses, and even families have been broken apart over much smaller sums.

I share this story because it is a particularly sweet illustration of the Position of Strength. It is an example of why financial independence, freedom from an addiction to ever-increasing luxury, and when you really think about it, all forms of strength are such incredibly useful things to build into your own life.

Looking back at my list of all the articles, I am starting to realize that this isn’t a personal finance blog or even a lifestyle design blog. It’s a neverending sermon on the joy of strength. Strength, also known affectionately as Badassity, is at the root of most of the joy in a human life. And weakness, which also manifests itself as Complainypants and Wussypants diseases, is what makes you unhappy. The solution to leading a great life is therefore so simple, it is almost insane that our entire society is geared to run directly against it.

So let us browse through a few of life’s most powerful sources of strength to soak up its amazing connection just about everything:

• Money is the most acknowledged source of strength in modern society, for it gives you the power to get other people to serve you, and to do so with a smile.
• An Abundance of Money is even more powerful, because you no longer find yourself feeling the need to act like a weenie in the pursuit of more of it. With this Abundance power, you can properly align your earning and your spending with your values, rather than just seeking out the cheapest option or trying to squeeze more money out of your customers, employees, or fellow citizens.
• The Desire for Ever-Increasing Material Luxury is therefore a serious weakness. In the playground of life, there is a giant teeter totter. Mr. Abundance sits at one end of it, with his casually ripped physique, faded skateboarding shirt and scruffy facial hair. Mr. Luxury sits directly opposite him, clean-shaven in a 3-piece suit with those shiny pointy-toed business shoes and a rounded little beer belly tucked in behind a tight belt. You can never satisfy Luxury – there is always another level of fanciness to attain, and thus he can never have quite enough money.
• Giving is a form of strength. When you say, “I have more than I need, and thus my desire to take should fade away as my desire to help out grows”.
• Taking is therefore a form of weakness. On the playground, Luxury maintains just a little more desire to take, which competes with his desire to give. Meanwhile, Mr. Abundance is always working on needing less. The “taking” weakness continues to shrink, allowing him to invest more in his “giving” strength.
• Health is a form of strength. With health comes a clearer mind, more energy, a greater range of options and comfort zones, and a longer time alive to enjoy the offerings and mysteries of this planet. Life can dish you a blow, and you can get up and get back to work.
• Physical Strength is the part of health that is mostly ignored in the United States, yet it is the most useful and efficient component. Sure, aerobics and bicycling can keep the worst effects of early decay at bay, but lifting heavy old-fashioned barbells and dumbells is a much faster and more thorough way to keep all of your systems in working order and create a foundation for the rest of your life’s strength.
• Skills are a form of strength. Each thing you learn to do improves your quality of life in astonishing ways, because it makes you stronger. If you are good at your job, you have the ability to earn lots money. But if this is your only skill, you need to outsource your food preparation, transportation, relationships, entertainment, and the repair and maintenance of everything you own including your own body. If your money supply fails or your hired specialists don’t do their jobs perfectly, your life falters. By insourcing all the basics required for happiness, you build a self-reinforcing resilient mesh of power that makes you happier, wealthier, and more interesting as well.

By now you are probably pretty excited about the Position of Strength, and you are ready to step into it. But there one point that underpins everything above, and it is the one our marketing engine works so hard to hide from you.

• Voluntary Discomfort is the secret cornerstone of strength. We build our whole lives around increasing comfort and avoiding discomfort, and yet by doing so we are drinking a can of Weakness Tonic with every morning’s breakfast.

Discomfort is generally regarded as a bad thing. If you’re a mother of five in a developing country and you run out of food, or your children are injured or killed by disease or war, saying it absolutely sucks would be a great understatement. This is involuntary discomfort at its worst, and the resulting unhappiness makes perfect sense.

But when you, as a privileged rich-world resident walk into hardship and discomfort willingly, the feeling is completely different.

My favorite part of every weekday is cycling with my son to school. The morning temperature at this time of year is right around the freezing mark, and I make a point of wearing just a bit less warm clothing than I need for complete comfort.

“Don’t you need a bigger coat?”, my wife asks. “It’s freezing out there!”

But the feeling of cold wind on my skin is exactly what I need to feel alive in the morning. Pushing the frontier of comfort is a simple way of building strength, preparation for the coming winter, and by extension, happiness.

After all, my son and I could just as easily drive the car that 0.77 mile distance to the school, thereby avoiding all discomfort completely. Heck, I could start driving for all my errands around town just like a Car Clown. I could avoid the burning sensation of trying to lift the barbells in my garage and be more comfortable too. Sitting in my office typing thisblog article is much more comfortable than lying in the crawlspace under my new house welding up the new structural supports, and it pays much better too. Perhaps I should also outsource the hard physical activity to a specialist. A 2014 Mercedes would be more comfortable than my 2005 Scion, a $2000 bike would out-cozy my $300 one, and in the summer my house would be more comfortable at 75 degrees than the 86 level where I currently consider turning on the air conditioning. It would be more comfortable to have a housekeeper and a chef, a private driver and a gardener, and these days we could even afford to add these comforts to our lives without the discomfort of having to work.

And yet we continue to not purchase any of them, and to do quite a bit of unnecessary work. Why? Have we developed some sort of insanity?

The answer is exactly the opposite: If you go back and look through those points which define the Position of Strength, you see that every bit of the conventional and comfortable path undermines that position.

Our entire culture teaches us to seek out all possible comforts, and to be unhappy when we don’t have them. And thus, it dooms us to a life of permanent involuntary discomfort, and therefore permanent weakness.

Living a life of weakness is not fun

Living a lifestyle of strength is extremely fun.

The only insanity is the fact that almost nobody chooses this option.

This is email #30 of roughly 52 in the MMM "Just the Classics" boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​Predictably Irrational​

Author Dan Ariely

As an Economic Unit in a Capitalist Economy, you probably spend most of your time scurrying about Maximizing your Utility. Right?

You buy things which give you pleasure, or sell them when the cash you’d receive is greater than the pleasure of keeping them. You choose the job that offers the best tradeoff between things like pay, stress, and time consumed, in an industry you chose based on the same criteria.

Even your leisure time is rationally allocated, optimized to get the most happiness from a finite amount of time, with cost factored in and weighed against the amount of extra work required to pay for leisure spending.

Although you’re probably having a good laugh at my deliberately optimistic oversimplification, this is the basis of free-market capitalism itself, and to a certain extent it works. In fact, most of the good aspects of our great leaps forward since the industrial revolution are byproducts of this free enterprise and trade. Neat inventions in food production, medicine, clothing, and everything else that brings us long lives and comfort, are side effects of the incredible ingenuity unleashed by setting smart and hard-working people free to run.

If that were the whole story, we could just shut down the government and sign an Ayn Rand novel into law and be done with it. But anyone with a deeper understanding of the market system is probably waiting to point out the other side of it:

Most of the bad aspects of modern society are brought about by the failure of humans to properly maximize their utility.

In other words, we make some incredibly stupid decisions. And the byproduct is pain, untimely death, and inefficiency.

The standard opinion on this inefficiency is that it’s just a few bad apples in an otherwise good system. Most of us do well at running our lives, don’t we? We know what we want, and our system is good at delivering it to us. But I’d say there is more to the story.

Most Americans, for example, are deep in unnecessary debt, overweight and poorly nourished, inactive and stressed out, and self-sentenced to a mandatory career of unsatisfying work just to stay afloat. We constantly buy things we can’t afford and don’t need, and the majority of the trading we do does not increase our net happiness.

We’re so easily manipulated that advertisers and politicians can pull our emotional strings with ridiculous ease just by replaying the same transparent ruses day after day, decade after decade.

• “This $60,000 truck will bring you power and freedom to escape to the Hills of Freedom while towing your bigass boat.”
  ​
• “This $60,000 SUV will keep your children save while adding a nice veneer of prestige and quality to your suburban life”
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• “Vote for my political party, and I’ll protect you from the other side who wants to drive this country into the shitter, attack your most core values, and take away all your prosperity for themselves.”

And all of this is done with virtually no awareness of how we are affecting our own ecosystem – the tiny veneer of air and plants that is the only thing between us and the lifeless vacuum of space. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a less efficient way to maximize “Utility” than what the modern consumer does.

Given all this freedom, why do we screw things up so royally? Is there a way to maintain the power of the market while getting around the general idiocy of our own species?

Fortunately, the answer is built right into you, in the form of the genetic program you received at birth. The reason we suck at running our own lives is that we are evolved and programmed for a completely different set of surroundings. But this handicap can be overcome: by learning about our own weaknesses, we can compensate for them and lead much more productive, powerful and happy lives.

This is where the title of this article comes in. I recently read the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely at the recommendation of some readers. It’s not often that I find a book that crystallizes so many interesting concepts in one swipe, but this book does it. Everything the author proposes just makes so much sense. But as an MIT behavioral economist with mutiple books and over 75 published papers on his resume, these are not just the blowhard opinions of a financial blogger – the man actually does his own research and has an uncanny way of sharing it with the world with perfect accessibility.

There were a few key lessons that stuck with me after finishing this book. They are useful not just as curiosities of human nature, but as practical tools for overriding our innate ridiculousness and learning to live life more sensibly. When applied to personal finance, this equates to easily amassing way more money than everyone else.

And then of course, using that wealth in a more rational way in order to have a much more fun and generous life.

Relativity

Humans make decisions in relative terms, rather than absolute ones. Given a restaurant menu with varying prices, people tend to avoid the most expensive item, but are very comfortable choosing the second one on the list. Restaurants have learned this, so they will often insert a “decoy” expensive dish (which may cost no more to prepare than the others), which allows them to raise the price of everything else, making all alternatives look like comparative bargains. The same thing happens when shopping for clothes, cars, or television sets.

Rationally, we should be comparing list prices to all other ways of meeting the same needs, and to our own income. But our genetic wiring wants us to make quick decisions and move on, and in prehistoric times, comparing in relative terms was the way to get this done.

But this built-in flaw has implications on much bigger things than restaurant choices. We design our entire lifestyles by looking around us to see what everyone else is doing. Most of us position ourselves in the middle of theherd, and start feeling deprived if we sense we are near the bottom. The problem arises when the herd is comprised mostly of sheep, responding blindly to their own irrational instincts. So as a society we have a tendency to automatically run ourselves straight off of the nearest cliff.

Market Norms vs. Social Norms

Most of us know that it is socially inappropriate to ask our friends to cough up money when we invite them over for dinner, or to offer money to a romantic partner in exchange for sex. But if you take those exact two human needs and reframe them differently: it is normal to pay for a meal at a restaurant and the world’s oldest profession continues to thrive.

This is the core of the distinction between “market” and “social” norms. As it turns out, humans obey different rules when operating in a business environment, than they do when they perceive they are among friends and family.

We are more generous when we are reading from the Social Norms playbook, and we enjoy our lives more when doing it. This is why countries and cultures with stronger family and friendship bonds tend to be happier than the cold and impersonal market-driven ones – even if their incomes are lower.

You can use this to your advantage. By bringing more social exchanges into your life, you can live more happily and build a safety net that protects you from the sharpest edges of the market system. I saw a nice example of this about a year ago, when a close friend stopped by and saved my house from flooding as part of a routine visit to water the plants. Invite your neighbors over for dinner, share children back and forth for babysitting, and loan out your tools, lawnmower, and weekend labor as much as you can.

And if you run a company, bring some social norms into the way you treat customers and employees. Instead of dinging people with every conceivable fee or squeezing employees with the lowest legal level of vacation allowance, expand your trust and generosity towards them. Watch as their dedication to you grows and provides benefits much greater than the costs.

Loss Aversion and Overvaluing What We Have

When I wrote the opening story about ‘losing’ $12,000 in an earlier article about Strength, I took some heat in the comments about it:

“You did’t lose the twelve grand, Mustache, you just didn’t get the money in the first place! Totally different.”

But that choice of words was deliberate. I work hard to remind myself that although it feels different to have a brand-new $12,000 car roll off a cliff because I forgot to set the parking brake, or have an expected $12,000 deal fail to materialize after doing all the work, the financial effect is exactly the same, and thus I should not worry about either of them.

In everyday life, loss aversion messes with us more than we realize. We hesitate to sell things we are no longer using, because we become attached to them.

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“I can’t sell my pickup truck for $12,000 – I paid $30,000 for it just a few years ago!”

“I don’t want to invest in stocks, because there might be a big crash which causes me to “lose” money. I prefer to keep the money in savings where it is guaranteed not to fluctuate.”

“I am afraid to seek out a new job or find myself a new home closer to work, because I might lose some of the comforts that I have grown accustomed to in the current situation”

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The way to get around thisis to recognize your own irrational loss aversion, and work to compensate for it.

For example, I keep a Craigslist app on my phone and fairly ruthlessly fire out ads to sell unused things when I stumble across them in the storage area of our house. I try to replace emotion with the more rational friend of statistics when deciding whether I should invest money, buy a more full-coverage type of insurance, or take any other form of risk. And in our upcoming move where we are “losing” over 1000 square feet of living space, I remind myself that there is no fundamental rule of humanity that dictates three people will be any more happy with 2600 square feet of interior space than they will be with 1532 square feet. I program myself to feel the “ChaChing!” instinct, which creates immediate gratification in the event of good monetary decisions, to compensate for my natural tendency to want shiny things NOW instead of investing for later.

Marketing and How it Plays Your Ass Like a Puppet

The thing about all of these cognitive biases is that even if you don’t round them up and get control of them, somebody else will. For over a century, the field of Psychology has been unearthing these things and studying them rigorously, discovering the joys and hilarious downfalls of the human animal. And for almost as long, marketers have been picking up the research and honing it for their own advantage. I recently read a quote from the head of one of the country’s largest ad agencies, which went something like this,

“It is generally understood in our industry that we aren’t fulfilling wants and needs – we are creating them. A new product first needs to create a market for itself, before it can be sold into it.”

Isn’t that revealing? I still admire many of the funny and creative people of the advertising industry and my own Dad worked most of his career in it, running his own one-man agency for much of my childhood. In fact, some of the lessons of that industry have surely soaked into my own approach, and you could view thisblog as an ongoing Anti-Advertisement which aims to apply some of those principles in reverse.

But by golly, if you are going to be out there trying to kick ass in life and as an Economic Unit, you’d better go to battle with proper armor. And that means understanding your evolutionary weaknesses so you can avoid their tendency to turn you into a Consumer Sucka. We are all idiots at heart, but the more successful among us learn to compensate for our idiocy.

So I’d like to give my thanks to Dan Ariely for writing this book and his amazing contributions to society so far – I’m off to read the rest of what he has written.

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This is email #31 of roughly 52 in the MMM "Just the Classics" boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​It’s Not a Contest​

A few weeks ago, I was in downtown Denver at the conference center, as one of the parent volunteers my boy’s the elementary school Robotics Club. We were there to watch an international competition, where kids from around the world had brought along robots they had built to be squared off against each other in various events.

After an exciting drive down to the big city, we stepped off the school bus and made our way though the various bridges and corridors of the gleaming glass facility. When we arrived outside the designated ballroom, we were greeted by one of the teachers from our school district. He addressed our group of about forty kids:

“OKAY GUYS! Before we go in, I wanted to remind you of one thing. There are two types of people in the world today: those who create technology, and those who consume it. Only one of those groups gets to cash the check, the other has to write it. Apple Computer didn’t get to be the richest company in the world by buying a bunch of phones – they had to do the hard work to develop those phones.

So when you go into this room, I want you to look at the teams and where they are from. You’ll notice most of them are from Asia. Because over there, they take this stuff – science, technology, engineering, and math – much more seriously than we do. The kids your age are already starting calculus, and they program their own robots and do events like this every weekend. They are way ahead of us, and in a global world, it’s blah blah blah…”

At this point I tuned out, because I could see where the guy was going. And while his pep talk was meant to be inspirational and he had some valid points, I also think he was missing the bigger picture.

However, I was happy to add this experience to my collection of stories about a common theme these days: the concept of artificially imposed competitive worry.

These scary little talks pop up in all areas of life, and with them we are creating a dog-eat-dog world in the middle of a very comfortable and well-appointed dog food factory.

You’ll see this phenomenon in varying degrees in the school system: At one end of it, my own family has become curious about the hippy free-for-all concept of Unschooling, while traditional schooling methods are more rigorous. And the trend seems to intensify in the Northeastern United States, where many of the wealthier residents are afflicted with Ivy League Preschool Syndrome). Further East, some of the Indian and Asian cultures value education highly, but often under a very strict regime of long hours, reduced leisure, rote memorization and a focus on competition.

Unfortunately this phenomenon does not end on graduation day. The nature of large-scale capitalism is competition and survival of the fittest, which I believe can be a good thing overall. But when you apply constant competition on the level of individual humans in a win-lose battle, the results are not nearly as good.

Most of us seem to come pre-packaged with a desire for more. If something is good, more of it must be better. A 4-cylinder car provides amazing transportation options, so people naturally try to get more of that amazement by buying 8-cylinder trucks. A few hundred square feet of interior space is a very useful form of shelter, so given the resources some of us will amass tens of thousands of these square feet.

But the phenomenon of more extends even further than material conveniences. It leaks right into the way we live our lives and perceive our value as human beings.

If you enjoy your job, you may find yourself advancing relentlessly until you become the CEO. If you own a business, you might find yourself growing it just because the customers and the money are there and you don’t want to waste the opportunity. If you like jogging, you might start escalating the hobby into being a competitive athlete, and end up spending every weekend training and traveling and getting tendon surgeries without even stopping to ponder if even more running is what was missing from your life.

But what if higher status and accomplishment and higher income were not the things you really needed to achieve a happier life? You would end up trading precious time and life for something that really delivers no value to you, because you had enough in the first place.

Some people call this tendency mindless accumulation. This bad habit is built right into us, as you may have seen in the recent psychological study described in the New York Times. In that rather amazing experiment, researchers found that people were willing to endure annoying noises for far too long, just to accumulate chunks of chocolate that they knew they would never be able to enjoy. This tendency was more prevalent among high-achieving and high earning people like you.

You might think that a fake self-discipline guru like Mr. Money Mustache would be immune to this effect, but unfortunately this is not the case. I still get little thrills every time I earn an extra chunk of unnecessary money, and strive irrationally hard to avoid the pain of losing any of it. People with an even stronger version of this tendency will tend to work in unsatisfying jobs much longer than they need to.

Several MMM readers have shared stories in the past about reaching multimillionaire status and yet still feeling compelled to accumulate more. And just to prove they are not that unusual, a 30-year-old described the addictive process that led him to be unsatisfied with a $3.6 million annual bonus. He used the very appropriate term “Wealth Addiction” to describe his condition. The underlying brain chemicals probably function in just the same way as many other compulsive habits.

I find that the tendency to mindlessly heap more onto our plates even occurs with life experiences. I had a very happy life even back in 2011 before starting this blog. As it took off in subsequent years, more opportunities popped up as more wonderful people were brought into my life through the magic of the Internet. There were chances to go on more trips, speak at schools and conferences, meet people for lunches and dinners, write books and make videos.

This all sounds like very fancy stuff – the type of opportunities one should not squander, because they are not offered to everyone. But at the same time, every activity you add to an already-full life means that something has to fall out the other side (unless you can cut out sleep, which unfortunately is not an effective strategy). So I feel opportunities slipping away every day. I see how much more I could get done if only I would work harder and become more efficient at everything.

But then I calm down and remind myself, just as I am reminding you today, that it is not a contest. Life is not a contest, and we get more out of it by cooperating wholeheartedly with each other rather than beating each other’s asses at everything.

The young students should be encouraged to become scientists and engineers if they love the field as I did, but being artsy and creative, insightful and broad-thinking, or optimistic and good with people are equally valuable and rewarding skills. After all, Apple didn’t revolutionize the world of technology by adding more features and buttons than its Korean competitors – it did so by paring things down to a simpler and more human form.

Companies don’t pay the highest salaries to those who can memorize the most arcane technical details or work the most hours – those dollars tend to go to those who can inspire and influence the most people. But you can take any strategy that works for you, since making the highest salary should not be anyone’s goal anyway.

And you and I, as well as our kids, won’t attain the widest smile on our deathbeds by racking up the largest bank balance or longest list of countries visited. This achievement will probably be earned through a more balanced life.

Slow down and take the time to look around you. If you are a chronic lifetime overachiever, give yourself permission to accomplish a bit less. You might just find you are living a bit more.

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This is email #32 of roughly 52 in the MMM "Just the Classics" boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

Get Rich With: Moving to a Better Place

If you’re like me, you currently live somewhere. But can you explain exactly WHY you live there?

For most people throughout the history of our species, the reason they have lived somewhere is because they were born nearby. And the reason they were born there is because their parents were born nearby.

Very rarely, a brave and enterprising person will make a big move to a whole new place in search of wealth or happiness. Some of your ancestors did that, forming an interesting chapter in your family history. And maybe even YOU have done that in your own lifetime, and you’re currently living far from where you were born, probably because of a bold personal choice you made. And if so, good for you!

I’m bringing up this topic because I am often amazed at the sheer disparities in niceness between different regions here in the US, despite the fact that it’s all one country which makes it very easy to move around. There are some areas which have drastically better weather, or landscape, or outdoor recreation, tax rates, job possibilities, mountains, ocean, lakes, beaches – you name it. And yet, as I study the areas with the best attributes, the cost of living in these areas is often completely uncorrelated with how nice they are.

I like to make fun of the New York/New Jersey region, because it is just amazingly expensive and crowded, and yet it is completely unremarkable compared to the rest of the United States – humid summers, rainy and cold winters, limited access to wide-open natural areas. All wrapped in a package of heavy regulations on small business owners like myself and shocking property taxes (annual tax on a house like mine would be over $12,000 there vs. $2300 that I pay now, even while the house itself would probably be a one-bedroom shack in my price range).

It is true that some people make ridiculous salaries in New York City, and for those people it may be logical to live there for a short time to quickly sock away a freedom fund before escaping. Others actually like it there, and of course many are tied by strong family bonds, which are very important too. But after we set aside those groups, there are still millions of people who are just there because they are there, living a crowded and expensive life just because they haven’t realized how liberating and energizing it can be to MOVE.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen a lot of other parts of the US on my many road trips in the years I’ve lived here. When visiting Tucson, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was astounded by the gorgeous scenery, never-ending clear blue skies, and the extremely low cost at which you can pick up a stylish stucco house on a palm-treed lot in nice parts of town near the university. Although my own region near Boulder/Denver Colorado has grown quite popular (meaning expensive), the whole Mountain West still has plenty of affordable towns and presents a nice balance of culture, recreation, and reasonable outdoorsy year-round climate.

Update: this article was first written in 2011, and the US has been on a non-stop house appreciation binge since then. So, although many cities in my country remain very affordable, other prices are pretty out of date.

But more recently, an MMM reader developed a global search tool to help seek out cool, inexpensive places to live around the world. It’s really well done and still expanding: check him out at The Earth Awaits – https://www.theearthawaits.com/​
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In Las Vegas, you can often get much more for your money than other major cities – especially during recessions as the prices tend to fluctuate like a gambler’s fortunes. A stylish condo near the strip which you can rent out to tourists for massive profits as a vacation rental, or a spacious modern house with a pool out near the foothills where you can swim and hike out of your back yard, and never see winter again.

You won’t care about the housing market or even the job market, because your cost of living will be so low that you may be able to retire a decade earlier than normal! The same story of palm trees and never-ending warmth combined with reasonable living cost persists throughout the desert Southwestern towns of Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and even the less famous parts of California.

In the Pacific Northwest you can live affordably in the land of Beer and Beards in hip towns like Corvalis, Oregon or Bellingham, Washington. You can even live on a rainforesty island in the nearby San Juan Islands, and spend many of your days exploring coastlines by kayak.

In the 200-mile-stretch of beach cities around Miami, you can sometimes pick up a luxury house, or a snappy condo complex with a sweet pool and spa, or a skyscraper overlooking the beaches and turquoise waters, for less than you’d think thanks to bank foreclosures during each housing downturn, making a waterfront tropical beach compound less costly than a vinyl-clad shack in a Toronto suburb.

Ahh, Toronto, the Big City near my birthplace. It’s the Canadian version of NYC. People pay fantastic amounts for modest houses that are buried in stale brown snow for several months each year, and commute 40 minutes each way through a 16-lane traffic jam to get to their jobs. Or Fort McMurray, Alberta, where people pay Toronto prices to live in a Mosquito Tundra near the arctic circle, just to plug themselves into an above-market income stream from the Saudi-Arabia-sized Oil Sands project that is cranking out fossil fuels there …. for now. What kind of life is this!?!?

Canada has the fantastic Oceanside Cliffs of the Maritimes, where everyone is friendly, houses near the sea are nearly free, and the parties are legendary. It has the Sunny Granola/Marijuana hippy belt in Interior BC and the Okanagan valley. There’s the Hong Kong Cosmopolitan buzz of Vancouver, with its non-snowy winters, or the Indie Rock/University Town/Island vibe of Victoria.

I also love Australia and New Zealand, where pleasantly different and fun-loving cultures combine with much more Ocean and noticeably cheaper Food and Beer – all in a gorgeous climate that rivals the best parts of North America.

With the increasing number of careers and entrepreneurial businesses that can be done from ANYWHERE thanks to remote working, and the fact that an ambitious person can carve out a job for themselves in almost any city, I think that moving is often a fantastic idea, and it is mainly fear of the unknown and fear of change that is holding people back.

When I graduated from Engineering school, I moved 300 miles away from my hometown, because that was the location of the best jobs that I knew about at the time. It was also where my wonderful sisters and my girlfriend lived. But as my career progressed, I learned about the work opportunities South of the border. They sounded fantastic, as did the increased choice of geographic settings, versus those available in my native Ontario (“Smoggy metropolis”, “Mosquito Forest”, or “Mosquito Swamp”).

I did the research, got the interviews, fought for the work permits, and BOOM, here I was in a fantastic new land of untold adventure. I can’t even express the joy this decision has brought to my life since then.

This seems like a strange contradiction to the principle of Hedonic Adaptation, because I cannot deny that regardless of where you move, you are still the same person. So some would suggest that you should be equally happy regardless of your surroundings. But it doesn’t seem to work that way for me. I think that for some people, there really is A BETTER PLACE.

For me, it was the vast increase in Nature and Sunshine, with just enough city thrown in to make life convenient. And the odd combination of culture in the Boulder, Colorado area that starts with an entrepreneurial and educated base, but throws the whole Workaholic thing out the window and seeks quality of life instead.

And Let’s Not Forget the Money

For me, the irresistible combination of higher income, lower taxes, and a lower cost of living was the thing that allowed me to retire so early. If I had not moved here at age 24, I’d probably still be working an increasingly monotonous tech worker cubicle job to this very day back in Canada. Mr. Money Mustache might not even exist yet!

What would your own financial picture look like if you could cut your living costs by, say, $4000 per month while keeping (or possibly increasing) your salary?

What About Family?

I do miss my family, especially when I read the emails about casual get-togethers that I missed out on because of living 1700 miles away. But we were always a far-flung family who got together only a couple times a year anyway.

Even more important is what most people overlook: when you lower your cost of living, you don’t have to work as much, and you get to retire earlier. And when you live in a nicer place, you will generally be in better spirits. This means that you can make longer visits with more relaxed schedules. Since retiring in 2005, we’ve been able to spend entire summers with the family back in Canada, rather than having to pack the visiting into occasional weekends and holidays as non-retired people have to do.

Moving is especially easy when you’re young, fresh out of college, and with no kids. Considering new cities is like reviewing a broad and exciting variety of new dishes and deciding which one to eat, so I highly recommend doing this type of dreaming and strategizing before deciding where to settle down. Binge on those “Best Places to Live” lists, tour the country and the world in person, and fly around virtually to check out the terrain and the bike paths using Google Earth (and the house prices and ‘hoods using real estate sites like Zillow and Realtor.com).

The Ultimate Human-friendly city in my own view is one with a population between 50,000 and 200,000, in a compact and bikeable footprint, separated from neighboring cities by Actual Cows And Fields, as opposed to the suburbs-that-are-named-as-if-they-are-actual-cities that exist by the dozen on the sides of giant metro areas.

This “Distinct City” status ensures that you’ll have everything you need right in your own town, and yet you’ll be able to hit the streets and very quickly end up in the country soaking up open vistas and black starry skies, without even having to resort to car transportation. Your phone will have proper reception, and Amazon will still deliver your packages efficiently. But yet you’ll never find yourself paying to enter a parking garage or waiting in an endless line for a restaurant. There is space for everyone in these person-friendly cities.

For slightly older and more settled folks like me, moving is temporarily off of the menu – we decided to give him a stable upbringing in a stable place where the faces and friends stay the same from birth until high school graduation, and even the trees and hills and seasons become familiar through the span of his childhood.

But I’ve already got some more Adventure Moves planned for the many decades to follow in the future. Tropical winters and phases of Van Life and “Carpentourism” trips in various exotic locations, and eventually some sort of intentional community where lots of friends all get to live together in beautiful surroundings.

You should live in whatever place works best for you. But you should be able to prove to yourself that it really is the right place – instead of just being the place you happened to be born.

This is email #33 of roughly 52 in the MMM "Just the Classics" boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​Why We are Not Really All Doomed​

Behold, the almighty Nail Gun. Symbol of human ingenuity and productivity, and also builder of my new house.

This particular one, my trusty Ridgid R350, has blasted just over 10,000 large nails into the framing members of this residence, and perhaps 100,000 additional ones into the other houses I have built or worked on since 2006 when I first bought it.

At the time it cost me $300, or about a single day’s wages for a self-employed carpenter. It seemed like an incredible bargain back then, since it can pay for itself in saved labor (compared to hand-driving those framing nails) in less than one day. And since 2006, the price of this machine has dropped by a further 25%, even as the prices of oil, steel, and even labor rates in China where these things are made have all risen.

As recently as my own childhood, nailguns were incredibly rare and expensive, and much bulkier – used only by large construction companies. Nails were driven with hammers, because nobody could afford the gun.

Today, I personally own five different sizes of nailguns, because the boost in productivity and work quality greatly outweighs the cost or the loss of manliness caused by the automatic driving of fasteners. In turn, I am using the time saved by these nailguns to write this article for you.

This example, although rather specific to my own favorite hobby, is the perfect illustration of why we are not all doomed. And the more thoroughly you understand and celebrate this phenomenon, the richer your life will be. Richer in monetary wealth, happy experiences and a lifetime of inner peace. And richer in an intellectual sense too, since everything makes more sense when you understand the true nature of how the world works. So let’s dig a little deeper.

The Doomer culture is alive and well in the peripheral areas of the mainstream media and the Internet. Crash predictors moan about the unsustainable levels of debt in this country or another one. The crazier ones turn to gold and silver, or ammunition and tinned food as their first and last line of defense. Even here in the intelligent confines of this blog’s Forum section, people wonder whether an upcoming financial crisis will wipe us out*.

If we’re not fearing financial market collapse, we are fearing cultural destruction. The middle-class isbeing milked by the capitalists and will eventually crash and revolt, or the most productive members of the world are being suppressed by an ever-more-burdensome state, depending on which side of the political aisle on which you sit.

Either way, this is unsustainable and we are doing everything wrong, so we had best get worked up about it and post angry comments all over the Internet.

Doom, doom, doom. Sure, things may look pretty good right now if you look out your window. Sure, you’re reading this on a fancy-ass computer with a belly full of expensive food and nice clean clothes. But this is all fake. Tomorrow, the suffering begins.

I would like to present an alternative perspective, one with practical implications for good living for people of every wealth level.

Mr. Money Mustache’s Three Point Formula for Economic and Life Success:

1. Understand that everything is currently Fucking Great, and base all decisions on the general belief that things will continue to get more Fucking Great all the time.
2. Use this information as a happy basis to work hard, learn as much as you can, and deliver great value and help others as much as you can for your entire life.
3. Waste as little of the proceeds from this activity as possible, reinvesting them into doing more of step 2, further building and compounding both your strength and your happiness.

Yep, that’s all there is to it. It is bold, cheesy, simplistic and contains some profanity just to let you know I really mean it.

Yet it is oddly similar to the wisdom Warren Buffett just repeated in the 2014 annual letter to shareholders. In that classic, he compares market crashes and financial crises to a mouthy neighbor shouting his estimate of your farm’s value over the fence at you, while you are busy producing food from the land and the sunshine.

Humankind’s ability to live well and prosper depends at its core only on productive land, sunshine and our collective knowledge. While the first item on the list is currently under some attack, the second comes with a billion-year guarantee and the third is increasing so rapidly that it should easily be able to correct our current failures in the land department.

In fact, this whole website is one tiny contribution towards that correction – a chunk of human knowledge that grows over time and helps to solve an existing problem. Just like a nailgun.

So when you see people flailing their arms and saying things like

“We’re doomed! The Fed’s rate of QE is unsustainable and the resulting debt Armageddon is going to plunge us into hyperinflation!”

you could substitute the words,

“We’re doomed! China’s production of nailguns is unsustainable and we will all soon be plunged into hand-driving nails again forever!”

The nailguns are not going anywhere. We have figured out how to make them, and that knowledge will never be lost. This human invention has forever raised our productivity and can never be taken away.

Similarly, the financial system, another machine that greatly raises productivity, is just another human invention. Even in 2008 when things got hokey and a big house of cards collapsed, some humans just stacked up a few new cards in a haphazard way and we all agreed to continue using it, and thus we all remained happy and productive.

All of this will continue as long as most of us choose to remain happy, productive, and cooperative. This is inevitable, aside from those few doomers over there yelling stuff over the fence.

Wow. Inspirational stuff, Mr. Money Mustache. But how does this apply to me specifically in the area of getting rich?

In less fluffy and metaphorical terms, this means:

• Invest your money in index funds and real estate rather than “protecting” it while trying to predict the next collapse. You’ll still own your piece of land or your slice of thousands of businesses regardless of what the guy on the fence is yelling about what he would pay for it at the moment.
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• Invest your time in furthering your own education, health, and meaningful relationships, rather than drowning in worry, consuming passive entertainment, or protecting yourself from failure.
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• Produce value for the world much more than you consume things from the world. Producing is a happier activity, and the inevitable money surplus caused by this habit will allow you to capitalize on, rather than being crushed by, fluctuations in the general upward trend of those first two tips.

…

Are you going to be the one continually foretelling collapse, or will you spend the day out here growing some food for yourself instead?

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*Thankfully, the general consensus was that we’ll be fine, which is a good indicator for the future prosperity of those in the discussion.

But isn't it interesting to see that the forum discussion is from 2014, a full eight years before this article was renewed for this bootcamp series. The world has made incredible leaps in wealth since then, as has anybody who has remained fully invested in productive assets. And yet, people were worrying about the same things back then as they are today.

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This is email #34 of roughly 52 in the MMM "Just the Classics" boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​Necessity Is The Mother of Badassity​

By this point in our conversation, it should be pretty obvious that Badassity is a trait to be treasured and cultivated. Although it is only a fabricated word, the underlying meaning of bold determination and persistence in the face of difficulty is one of the most real and useful tools in the mixed bag of attributes they hand you when you sign up to be a Human being.

Living your life with a properly Badass attitude makes all the difference in the world when it comes to achieving anything worthwhile, or attaining any sort of satisfaction. Without this philosophy, you are stuck perpetually chasing temporary comforts and luxuries and never feeling quite satisfied because there is always more to chase. Your money is drained and yet your heart is never filled. With it, you can properly say “Fuck It” to all of those fiddly details and start getting something done at last.

But our society and its marketing engine work ceaselessly to program this toughness out of us, and offer us pampering instead. You need it. You deserve it. Here, lie down on this table and let us give you a massage and soda. Or maybe you’d prefer a massage table and a soda dispenser built right into your automobile?

You can see the results of this all around you in the types of lives it produces, and you don’t want those results. But perhaps you still find your own badassity to be lacking in some ways. How can you get more of the good stuff?

The answer is sitting right next to you right now. In fact, it’s packed around you as part of the very air you breathe. Because just like Oxygen, junk, household budgets, or any other free-flowing substance, Badassity Expands Automatically to Fill Any Space Made Available to It.

How is it that some people find that life becomes strained to the limit after their first child is born, but then manage to go on to produce and raise several other children simultaneously?

How do some runners that can barely jog out a few blocks go on to finish a marathon less than a year later?

How do some people go from married, affluent lives of comfort, through divorce and perhaps career loss, then rebuild everything from scratch better and simpler than before?

It’s all through the simple fact that these people were faced with a feeling of necessity.

Some of us are self-motivated enough to create this drive out of thin air, but most people need do be dropped into a cold pool of urgency before they respond. Either way, the necessity forced them into action, whether they were ready for it or not. Then they pushed and this action made them tougher, which made the next bit of action all the more effective, and so on. Before they knew it, each had become a badass in his or her individual way, and the benefits began to flow.

Let’s use a recent story to illustrate this principle at work in my own life:

The MMM family showed up here in Canada for our usual summer vacation just a week ago. In keeping with the tradition I call “Carpentourism”, I scheduled some work to allow myself to stay active and help out a few friends and family members at the same time. The big one this year is a replacement of the shingles on my Mom’s 150-year-old house in downtown Hamilton, and a new kitchen inside that same house. Both things have been crying for a rebuild for at least a decade.

Since it is my summer vacation, I figured I would be Mr. Executive Carpenter and make things easy on myself. We arranged for the invincible local rocker (and handyman) known as The Kettle Black to do most of the re-roofing work with the help of my brother and just a bit of guidance from me. Shingles would be delivered to the rooftop right on cue. Meanwhile, the cabinets would be ordered from Ikea well in advance, fully assembled by my equally hard-working mother (who is celebrating her 70th birthday in two weeks), and I would concentrate simply on rebuilding the kitchen, reworking a few electrical and plumbing fixtures and popping in the new cabinets. Piece of cake.

Of course, as with most construction projects in foreign territory, it didn’t go down quite so smoothly.

I secured my brother-in-law’s old VW Golf Diesel and filled it with tools for the 500 km trip from Ottawa to Hamilton. I found that the car had a barely-functional rear hatch, a cassette deck radio, noisy snow tires and broken air conditioning. So instead of my usual roadtrip style of riding in abundant comfort with a custom-crafted MP3 playlist, I had the opportunity to adapt to the vehicle’s 37C (100F) interior temperature and rely on my own singing and Kazoo playing for entertainment. Miraculously, I still arrived at the same destination, and in great spirits and with the benefit of improved heat tolerance. And I was going to need plenty of tolerance. Badassity Through Hardship: Score #1.

That cabinet pre-order never happened, as my Mom’s best efforts were thwarted by the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of IKEA’s kitchen department. We also had to start from scratch on the roofing – the color and style had been chosen from Lowe’s, but no materials were on site or in stock and the friendly but incompetent staff had no interest in getting them there in a timely manner. It was Wednesday morning and we were ready to rip off the roof, so a delivery the following Thursday would be of no use for us.

The Kettle and I left the Lowe’s parking lot in disdain but immediately noticed a smaller professional roofing shop right across the street. Within minutes of stepping in, the knowledgeable owner had our order completed and scheduled for a next-day rooftop delivery, at $300 less than we would have paid at the big box store. Now we had the roofing materials we needed, and an improved knowledge of how to do roofs in Ontario next time. Badassity Score #2.

So we hit the roof just a few hours later than planned and began to strip the crumbly old shingles, heaving them down into the dumpster. There was only a single layer of them and we were speedy and feeling efficient again. Until the following horrific scene confronted us:

Ho. Lee. Sheeyit.

So in other words, when this house was last reshingled sometime in the early 1990s, the previous guy who was obviously completely off his rocker,saw this same expanse of shitty 150-year-old wood and decided “yeah, that looks pretty good. let’s install some shingles.”

So the hardship had returned. We now needed 1400 square feet of 1/2″ OSB to build ourselves a proper roof deck atop this aging expanse of barnyard scrap. That’s 45 sheets, or about 2300 pounds worth, which is not going to fit onto the tiny roof rack of the Volkswagen Golf. And the clock was ticking as this area has a very temperamental climate with frequent torrential summer rainfalls.

I made some telephone inquiries around Hamilton to see if anyone could get it delivered by the next day. No dice. My distant second choice was to make the 10km trip up to Ancaster Home Depot and carry the sheets home in an HD rental pickup truck, so I headed up there at 7PM to avoid traffic. Only to find out that they wouldn’t rent the truck to me since I only carry a Colorado drivers license.

So my mother and I returned the next morning at 7am to catch the store opening and rent the truck in her name. Someone else beat us to it and rented the truck minutes before we arrived, but we were able to secure their van instead. Massive paperwork and delay ensued, but I rallied a forklift and some staff to help fill the van more quickly. I broke the rules and did the driving myself, since my mother had no interest in piloting the 7000 pound behemoth through the downtown streets and backing it into her steep narrow driveway. She did however help me unload the full metric tonne of wood sheets, the Kettle arrived at that moment and we were back on track. After just 6 hours of lifting cutting and nailing in the blazing July sun, our rooftop looked like this:

Badassity Score #3: This new OSB roof will permanently improve many aspects of the home’s performance. And the Kettle and I got an incredible day of weightlifting and more practice in production framing techniques as a side benefit.

At this point, we were finally able to get to work on the actual roofing job. Since we both have the same general attitude towards summer construction work (you get up at 6am, eat something, then work as hard as you can until just after it gets dark at 9:30 with occasional pauses only to drink gallons of water and barbecue a few pork chops), this part went quite smoothly.

We finished the thing just in time, at the very end of the fourth evening. The lines were straight and the ridge caps gleamed tidily in the sunset light. I woke up this morning to a heavy rainfall on the properly flashed skylight over my bed, and knew we had been wise to take on this job.

Experiencing hardship and the rewards that come from overcoming it are quite simply what makes life worth living. As an almost-40-year-old with some dough in the bank, I should be seated comfortably in a Lexus and cruising around between the golf courses and restaurants and starting to pile on the pounds and disabilities each year. Instead, I feel better than ever, and the extreme nature of this project coming right at the end of 8 months of construction on my own house has whipped me into the best shape of my life. (Badassity Score #4!)

But I still have much to learn by gaining inspiration from those more badass than me. The Kettle Black just turned 50, and while I went straight to bed after work each day, he went out tothe live music venues or worked on his own gigs through the night. 10 years older than me, he looks like this:

KB: A Canadian Badass at the half century mark

This week’s lesson? Plunge in over your head and do something you’re not quite ready for. With the right attitude, you can only come out ahead.

This is email #35 of roughly 52 in the MMM "Just the Classics" boot camp series. (Although it's looking like it might start growing beyond 35 because we're only up to 2014 and there are so many more Classics in the list!) You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​If You Wouldn’t Buy it, You Should Probably Sell it​

Dear Mr. Money Mustache,

I just came across your blog a few weeks ago after seeing a story about it on ABC.

While the idea of cutting back my lifestyle sounded horrible at first, once I dug in I saw what you were really talking about and it has been like a giant boxing glove hit me in the face. Until recently I thought we were doing pretty well. But suddenly I could see money leaking out everywhere in our lifestyle: the cable package, remaining student loans, restaurants, excessive driving, excessive air conditioning – everywhere.

My question is what to do about the decisions that are already “locked-in”. We have some expensive and not-that efficient cars (A fairly new Mazda CX-9 and also a nice Acura sedan), but at least they are paid off so we might as well drive them forever, right?

Also, we live about 15 miles from work in a house that is way too big for the four of us, but on the bright side we bought it eight years ago and the value is up about $200,000 since then.

Finally, and I have an old (2000) speed boat and a camp trailer we use occasionally in the summers – these are paid off as well, but they do cost something to store and maintain (about $2400/year).

We’ve started biking more and doing more local activities and the kids like it. I just wish we hadn’t locked in these earlier poor decisions.

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I still get letters like this one every week, and so many of them follow the same general pattern that I figured we could create a great lesson by breaking down this case into a big overall life lesson. And that lesson is the one right there in the title:

Don’t let the boat anchor of your past mistakes drag on you forever into your future.

Clinging to past behaviors is one of the built-in weaknesses (also known as Cognitive Biases) that we humans are born with. In this case, we’re talking about Loss Aversion and maybe a bit of the Sunk Cost Effect: we tend to value things we already have, and things we have poured a lot of money into, even if they are in fact pieces of crap when measured on an objective quality-of-life scale. So you end up with statements like this echoing through America’s suburbs, year after year.

“I’d hate to take the depreciation hit on this three-years-new Dodge Ram 1500 BigHorn after making almost $30,000 of payments on it!”

These prepackaged flaws are so powerful that we need to pull ourselves deliberately in the other direction in order to end up at a reasonable middle ground. Even when you think you’re living life in a reasonable fashion, this bias will still sneak up and bite you.

And it still bites me too – let’s look at another example from my own life right now. Do you remember that rental house I was so happy to have sold in the last article?

On paper, it looks pretty good: I was stuck with a supposed-to-be-$650,000 house back in 2010 that I was having trouble selling even with the listing price dropped down to $480k. Probably because the market value was more like 450. At the time, I felt stubborn and defiant:

“There’s no way I’m selling this prized bit of my work for $200,000 less than it is worth! I’ll just rent it out, collect some income, and ride the prices right back up. Then, justice will be served and my past mistakes won’t look so bad.”

However, and this is the key to this whole article, if the situation were reversed I would have given a completely different answer.

Suppose it was the year 2010 in a different universe, and I was not saddled with that house. I was retired, had that same $450,000 sitting happily in index funds, and looking out at the carnage in the housing market. If someone had suggested I invest in this house, it would be a different conversation:

Random Person: “Hey man, do you want to buy a $450,000 house in a high-end neighborhood with a strict Homeowner’s Association? It’ll give you $2400 in rent, plus whatever appreciation the housing market provides. Property taxes will run you around $3200/year and the HOA fees are another $960. And don’t forget maintenance!”

Me: “Are you Effing Crazy!? I’m retired! I don’t need some fussy high-end rental. I’ll sit back and enjoy my index funds, or at least get something like a 4-plex that nets $4000/month for that kind of money!”

But cognitive bias struck, and I decided to rent out the place anyway.

And sure, things turned out roughly as a reasonable forecast would predict: I put it up for rent, and collected over $144,000 in rental income over the next five years. On top of that, the housing market recovered so the house appreciated by an additional $115,000. A total income of $259,000, which sounds pretty good on a $450,000 investment, right?

But wait. Let’s subtract the taxes and HOA fees at $20,800 over those five years.
Then subtract my maintenance costs, which added to about $10,000 (most of it spent just this past May as I restored the house to its original sparkling condition for sale).
Plus an estimate of the value of my labor for managing and maintaining it: 200 hours at $40, or $8,000.

This yields a net profit of about $220,000, meaning my $450,000 grew to $670,000.

It still sounds like an amazing windfall, but that’s just because $450 grand is a lot of money, and five years is a fair amount of time. On an annualized basis, this is like earning just 8%. Yet another example of how your money can work harder than you can.

What if I had put this money into the plain old conservative Vanguard S&P500 index fund (VFIAX) instead, and allowed all dividend payments to automatically reinvest?

Plugging the dates into our amazing IndexView tool, I can see that a stock investment would have roughly doubled in that time period if you include dividend reinvestment. In other words, if I had ditched that house at $450,000 and just kicked back for the next five years, that chunk of money would be over $900,000 today.

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. The stock market could easily end up going sideways over a five-year period. Then again, so could the housing market.

But what matters is making the choice that is most likely to be the right thing for you. And that means thinking about today’s big decisions as if there were no past baggage attached to them.

In the introductory story, the brand-new Mustachian is currently burdened with a money-burning Mazda SUV, which would fetch about $18,000 on the used market. If she were starting from scratch with $18,000 in the wallet and no car, would she buy the same vehicle? Or perhaps the far superior 2015 Honda Fit which handles better, cuts the running costs in half, and costs over $3,000 less?

The $3000 cash difference plus a savings of $2500 per year in fuel, depreciation and maintenance will compound to a wealth difference of over $30,000 per decade, just from this one decision. Not many people realize the staggering effects of a poor vehicle choice, which is the reason SUVs exist in the first place. But now that the new knowledge has been acquired, it is time to act on it.

Since she wouldn’t buy the SUV right now, she should sell the SUV right now.

Similarly, moving a double-commuting couple 15 miles closer to work will save you close to $100,000 every decade in direct car costs alone, but much more than that if you factor in the value of your own time and health. Most people don’t realize the shockingly high cost of car-commuting. If they did, distant suburbs and the the entire phenomenon of “rush hour” would not even exist.

But once you do get the secret memo, it is time to act on it and move.

Lifestyle trinkets like motorboats and rarely-used cabins, ATVs and country club memberships seem like an harmless treat you indulge in when you get your first promotion at work. But they tend to add up and become a massive tax on your life – draining attention and cashflow to the tune of hundreds of thousands per decade. Once you realize that these little weekend amusements are equivalent to chaining yourself to an office for an extra 30 years, you might weigh the decision differently. And so you can change your decision. Right now.

But What about Transaction Costs?

The Economists of the audience are probably a bit annoyed right now: “Mustache’s examples don’t account for the time and money you need to spend to change cars, or change houses! Often if you take these into account it would wipe out the first several months of savings or more!”

They are right to a certain extent. But I encourage people to push through the pain and get the deals done anyway, because making transactions is good for you.

Transactions, deals, friendships, and other arrangements with other humans are the highest-paying and often most rewarding thing you can do with your time. Even the ones that don’t go perfectly build your perspective and your Badassity.

Most of us make far too few transactions, and this lack of experience keeps us in fear, so we avoid them even more with each passing year. Your skill and comfort with life transactions is reflected directly in your wealth and the quality of your life.

So even if it does take a few hours to photograph the gas guzzlers and get them onto Craigslist, and even more hours to search out a new ride, make the investment and get the job done. The momentum you gain will start a chain reaction that helps you clean up all your other past mistakes.

What would you do differently if you could go back to age 19 and design your wealthy dream lifestyle from scratch?

How many of these things can you change and improve right now if you really put your mind to it?

I’m looking forward to getting fewer excuses for the past, and more announcements of massive change in the present, in my future emails.

This is email #36 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​Happiness is the Only Logical Pursuit​

If you set aside your fancy adult concerns for just a moment and think deeply, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this entire world is really just a giant zoo. It is a giant zoo packed with silly animals, and we’re just the one who takes itself most seriously.

Every speck of life exists simply to make copies of itself, from the simple gooey process by which single-celled organisms split in half every few minutes, up to the angst-ridden mating dance of complex letters that tomorrow’s world leaders are currently crafting in their college dorms and emailing to their boyfriends and girlfriends if they have the courage to click ‘send’.

As humans, we’re stuck at the top of this pyramid. We have become so complex that the reproduction part is just a footnote in our lives, so we move on to get caught up in interestrate predictions, celebrity magazines, war, philanthropy or fantasy football. We have created all of this complexity, a sloshing sea of ideas and activities completely unrelated to raising babies, and it’s all because of one underlying thing we’re all born with: The Desire to Be Happy.

People do things, whether it’s making a baby, upgrading a pickup truck, or researching vaccines, because they think it will make them happy. Whether you’re just following a strong and sexy animal impulse, or giving away some money so that people on the other side of the world can live longer, the behavior comes from the same place – a desire to feel good. But our feelgood activities vary widely because our complicated brains get pleasure for a wide variety of reasons.

Although it’s a little spooky to think about, it is essential to start with the biology: a realization that you are nothing more than a complex machine made of meat. Fleshy chunks, tubes, hormones and electrical signals are the underlying stuff that powers your deepest insights and emotions. So, in much the same way that fear is just a chemical, so happiness is mostly a squirt of Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and maybe a few Endorphins. If you’ve ever consumed mood-altering drugs including caffeine or alcohol, or found yourself in an inexplicably bad (or good) mood, you have already felt these things in action.

It is very useful to know all this stuff, because it helps protect you from taking your own moods too seriously. Even the deepest depression is just an unfavorable mix of brain chemistry. But it’s a poor gamble to try to solve all of life’s problems with prescription medication alone, when you can get more consistent and powerful happiness by going out and enjoying life in the real world.

When deciding how to make the most of this, it is usually helpful to look at the surprisingly insightful triangle known as Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Figure 1: Maslow’s Excellent Triangle

I first learned of this thing in history class when I was about 13 years old, and ever since it has been popping into my mind at the strangest and most useful times. While it was impressive even to my teenage self, I notice its wisdom seems to grow even more with each passing year.

It’s useful because it is so true. The first pleasures in life are the physiological ones that keep you alive: food, sleep, breathing, and so on. If you don’t have these, nothing else really matters. But if you have enough of them, you quickly start looking up the pyramid for the next level: security, or things that help save you from worrying too much.

If you have basic security, you are finally happy enough seek out family, intimacy, and friendship. From there, you move up to confidence, and earning and cherishing the respect of others. If you are lucky enough to have all of that going on, you get to roam around in the exotic land of self actualization, being creative and moral and working on personal growth.

How Consumerism Chips Away at the Pyramid

Oddly enough, the flaw in our rich world is a tripwire that we have set up way down at level 2: security. Our consumer culture encourages us to look upwards and earn respect, sexual intimacy, confidence, and even self actualization with the new Toyota Highlander or Ford F-150, when doing so actually destroys our security. By draining our money, luxuries like cars make us desperately insecure and dependent on constant employment. And by keeping us seated and inactive, they drain our strength and health so our lives become even more precarious.

Figure 2: Effect of Ridiculous Vehicle Purchases on your Happiness Triangle

This is why Mustachianism is mostly about money and health – it’s supposed to be a bridge over the traps laid out by consumerism, so you can step over and move on up to the happier parts of the pyramid: family, confidence, and self actualization.

If you understand all this, you can start to really understand human happiness. To extract the most happiness from your life, your job is to intelligently press the reward buttons at each level of Maslow’s pyramid.

• You get your first reward (level 1 of the pyramid) by eating enough nutritious food to maintain a healthy body. But you get no more by gorging on dinner and dessert every night in expensive restaurants.
• Your next reward comes from ensuring safety and security for yourself and your loved ones. But there are no additional happiness points for owning multiple houses and boats scattered throughout the world.
• Family and friends are the core of happiness for most of us, but there is a limit to how many people you can be truly close to. This is why fame and celebrity status don’t help us with our close relationships, (although they might help as a crutch for increasing self esteem at the next level).
• At the top level, things get really wacky: some people give away significant portions of their time and money in the interest of helping others. It sounds noble, but it’s actually just another way to press your own reward buttons: by feeling helpful and essential, you complete your own life. The effect is so powerful that even people struggling in the bottom levels of the pyramid feel the joy of generosity. But on average, as we all become more secure, we have less interest in theft and more motivation to be kind to others.

In other words, because full-pyramid happiness automatically includes both feeling good, and being good, it makes sense that happiness is the best thing to work on in life.

But How do I Press The Buttons?

I found that just understanding Happiness 101 as I presented it above is a gigantic shortcut to living a happy life. Suddenly, you can start weighing every decision against that simple chart. On top of that, you can check your decisions against the wisdom of ancient philosophers, who were simply happiness researchers from the era before formal science.

To illustrate this compressed jewel of an answer to the Entire Purpose of Life, let’s throw it into the test arena with some real world scenarios:

Badassity and Fitness vs. Convenience

When raking leaves one fall day, you start to feel sweaty and tired. As if by magic, a Home Depot flyer comes in the afternoon mail which advertises gas-powered leafblowers at 50% off. You are tempted. But will this purchase make you happier?

If you are currently more muscular and lean than you’d like to be, and you have been searching for ways to reduce your fitness, then the leaf blower may be a great choice. On the other hand, if you have a shortage of health (which is pretty fundamental down at level 2 on the pyramid), you will generally find more happiness from any activities which increase it – raking, cycling, foregoing all elevators and escalators, and so on.

And physical fitness is not just an optional goal – it’s a fundamental creator of the happiness chemicals noted above. A simple daily walk is more powerful than most prescription antidepressants and artery-scrapers.

That’s an obvious example, but it translates to something much more emotional: the car. Upgrading the reliability of your car might indeed provide an increase in life security. Likewise, getting a more efficient car boosts your financial security, while also providing the self-actualizing benefits of “being less of an asshole to other people”. However, most car purchases are done for the opposite reasons – initial thrills aside, a full-sized pickup truck will bring only pain in the long run.

Novelty, Complexity, and Gadgets

What about novelty, like you buying an Apple watch or me buying a Nissan Leaf? We can justify it under the guise of “learning” or “streamlining our lives with efficient new apps”, but once again, it helps to check if we are really fixing anything in the pyramid.

Learning about a new gadget keeps you on top of technology and may speed up things like checking your heart rate or translating phrases during international travel. But does your life currently suck in any way due to the lack of heart rate data or the difficulty of using Google Translate on your existing phone? If not, you are unlikely to see a happiness boost.

My often-cited Craigslist electric car shopping mission is another good one to test. Buying an electric car would eliminate my spending on gas. But is my gasoline spending currently something I think about? No. It would also provide silent, speedier acceleration. But do I have a problem with the noise and rate of acceleration of my Scion xA? No again. In fact, my only justification for a Leaf is the self actualization it might provide when I wrote about it on this blog and heard that other people had replaced serious gas powered commutes with clean, cheap electric ones. But does my life currently suck due to a shortage of self actualization? That’s the only question I need to ask when deciding if I should buy this car.

In one sentence: Happiness Boosts come mainly from reducing Life Suck.

Producers Have More Fun Than Consumers

Which would you rather be: a dedicated fan celebrating your favorite band by lining up for $100 concert tickets, or a member of an amazing band, feeling the love of thousands of people as you share the grooves that you and some of your closest friends create together? If you’re not that into music, try the same trick on professional sports, founding a great company, writing, art, carpentry or gardening. Creativity sits right at the top of that pyramid, which means the rewards are high. Bonus: producing stuff earns you money, while consuming it costs you money.

Stoicism: The Surprising Life Boost from Embracing Voluntary Hardship

As these techniques get more advanced, you’ll find we move from changing your daily actions, up to training your mind. Stoicism is an easy form of mental barbell lifting that reminds you to appreciate what you have, and make a point of venturing out into unknown adventures and difficult conditions occasionally, just to refresh your appreciation of how good your life currently is. You can start your training on Stoicism by right clicking this article and opening it in a new tab for later reading: What is Stoicism and How Can it Turn Your Life to Solid Gold?​

Buddhism: the Advanced Mental Ninja Leap Over Maslow’s Entire Pyramid

Saving the strangest but most powerful happiness booster for last, we arrive at Buddhism. I’m only a few books into this study, but its ideas are valuable even if summarized in one paragraph: Happiness comes from reducing your suffering. And suffering is what happens when you cling desperately to thoughts and observations and wish they were different, rather than just accepting them and letting your inner core remain content.

Another way to put this is in an equation: Suffering = Expectations – Reality.

For example: The beginner would say, “I’m cold! I don’t want to be cold – this sucks!”, while the Buddhist would think, “I feel a cool sensation on my skin. My body registers this as discomfort. That is all.”

Both beginner and Buddhist have thoughts flowing through their heads all day, like waves coming in to crash on a beach. But the beginner notices the negative thoughts and dives in, trying to fight them back: “I have to go to court next week! It’s scary! I might lose! This sucks!”, whereas the Buddhist would think, “There goes a thought about mangoes. And one of opportunities. And one of my court appointment next week. Like waves, each of my thoughts comes, and goes.”

Despite the obvious wisdom of older philosophers, I remain fully engaged with the world, enjoying table saws and craft brews and stock markets along with everyone else. But by simply pausing before each major life decision and comparing it to our real goal of a happy, satisfying life, we can keep the ship moving in a better direction and thus get more from life.

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This is email #37 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

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Further Reading: several people in the comments have asked about recommendations for books on Buddhism. I’m a big fan of The Art of Happiness, because it combines a mildly scientific approach with the badass calmness of the Dalai Lama. The link above is to a batch of used copies on Amazon, but you can also get Kindle versions and of course your first choice should be checking if there is a copy at your local Public Library.

Making Space for Badassity

If you’re going to become rich, you need to either earn way more money than you spend, or spend way less money than you earn.

This is the basic math of it, which even the worst complainypants cannot dispute. The whining usually starts when Mr. Money Mustache starts talking about how to implement the ideas above.

For example, observe the following simulated but very typical conversation as I counsel Joe and Josephine Consumer on how to escape from their current situation (buried under a mountain of debt with no hope for retirement before 75), and instead reach early retirement before their young kids even finish high school.

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Mr. Money Mustache:

So, Joe, you tell me it’s hard to pay the bills. But I can’t help but notice this nearly-new Chevrolet Silverado 4×4 pickup in the driveway of your home here in the suburbs. That was a $50,000 truck when you bought it on credit. It costs 8 times more than any reasonable vehicle given your financial situation, consumes 3 times the fuel, and depreciates twice as fast.

It’s like pointing a firehose of your hard-earned cash, straight at your toilet while holding the flush lever down, 24 hours a day. So we’ll need to sell that on Craigslist – tonight.

Joe Consumer:

But…But… All my friends at the law firm will think I’m a sissy if I show up with a little Honda Fit! Plus, I need a reliable vehicle because I have to drive to meet clients. And I once hauled a dishwasher with this thing, and was thinking of getting a boat to tow with it since we’re looking at buying a cottage this year.. Plus, I’m underwater onthe truck: the loan is bigger than what any dealer would give me for it, and I’ve never bought or sold anything on Craigslist before because I’m scared of talking to strangers and don’t know who I can trust, and (voice fades into background)…

MMM:

Right. Well, guess what? None of this matters, because you won’t even be driving to work any more – that’s a sucker’s move. Y’all are moving to a smaller house within 8 miles of your workplace, and biking to work from now on. As a bonus, that’s right next to the university where Josephine teaches, so she can walk to work.

Josephine Consumer:

Now hold up Mr. Money Mustache. We’re all settled in this house in the suburbs. Plus, our kids are starting school soon and this school district is better than the one downtown. And I’m not walking to work – winters are cold and slushy here. Nor am I biking around town with my kids – I don’t even have a suitable bike and it’s dangerous to ride bikes in the United states and (fades out)….

MMM:

Got it. So anyway, we’ll start cleaning up and staging your house tonight so we can have it photographed for sale next week. You’ll start by moving to a rental downtown, since renting is a better deal than buying here in Expensiveville. Later, you can buy a fixer-upper four plex and renovate it yourself over the next fewyears as you develop your DIY skills. Also, why the hell do I hear your air conditioner running in the background when it’s only 80 degrees outside, while you keep the daylight out with curtains and use antique 60 watt heaters instead of LED bulbs to light your indoors? And why is your clothes dryer running simultaneously as this beautiful sunshine shines down upon your back porch? This casual waste of electricity is burning about $15,000 of your wealth per decade.

We’ll fix this, then move on to your food, entertainment, child-raising activities, vacations, phone service, and soon enough you’ll have a reasonable 60% after-tax savings rate and be set to retire in your 30s.

J+J (in unison):

Gaaah! We can see your wisdom, Mustache, but this is all too much for us. We’re not really in good enough physical condition to ride bikes. We don’t even know how to change a faucet, let alone DIY-renovate a 4-plex. The kids are crying, dogs are barking, our garage is piled high with boxes and broken items, and we have daycare schedules, trips coming up for friends weddings, golf games and happy hours, ski passes and TV series to watch. There is just no time to handle all these changes you want us to make!

Mustache (turning to face you, the audience)

See, this is what it really all boils down to: Time. Energy. Mental and physical overload. When your life is already overfilled, it is very difficult to gain the power to make the major, positive changes you need to actually get somewhere.

In other words, if you want to create more wealth and happiness in your life, you might need to clear some space for it first.

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The MMM Family’s Secret Frugality Weapon

When people encounter this site for the first time, they usually see my family’s $25,000 annual spending number and assume that we have an extremely frugal lifestyle.

“My family could never be as radical as those guys – Mustache’s ways are extreme!”, they say, “but we’ll implement a few small changes in our own way.”

This frustrates me to no end, becauseI don’t even try to save money any more – all I see is an abundance of luxury in every direction when I gaze out my kitchen window. But I’ve recently come to realize there is one way that we are extreme when compared to other families of similar background: we schedule a lot less stuff into our lives.

While others will buy an unlimited annual ski pass and ride the mountains every weekend, I’ll get a four-pack of lift tickets and make a single weeklong trip with my friends. Others will buy a cottage and split their time between two houses, I’m happy with one. While others will start with a cat, then have a kid, then adopt a dog, then another dog, then create second, third, and fourth kids, I’m feeling plenty busy with just my boy.

None of this is done with money in mind – it is done out of a desire for balance, free time, and a safety margin in life. By keeping our non-negotiable commitments to only 50% of our time, we leave the other 50% open for growth, self-development, and an ability to work much harder to deal with the black swan events that life inevitably serves up.

While others might imagine we’re missing out on life by not stacking it up with more activities, I feel we’re allowing ourselves just the right amount of space to actually live it. And of course, the side effect this has on the money side has been very large as well.

I think this difference in life planning style might boil down to my slightly compulsive tendency to think of future consequences.

When I was a 26-year-old deciding between BMW and 401(K) as the destination for each financial windfall, I always chose the more responsible option because I predicted my future self would appreciate it. Even today, when I open the fridge at dinnertime and face the tempting selection of ice-cold Colorado microbrews laid out in front of me, I usually leave them untouched, notbecause I don’t crave one, but because I don’t want the future me to have to deal with a flabby beer belly.

The same thought process applies when I consider signing up for a big future commitment, like a busy weekend trip or yet another well-meaning project related to this blog, or even adopting a cat: sure, it sounds lovely in theory, but will my future self appreciate having that much time taken away from him, when he might have other plans?

Of course, you can take future fixation too far and end up with a boring life today, but I correct for this by imagining a future me regretting a boring youth, and do my best to strategically misbehave at optimal levels today. So far, so good as I do not lead an overly pure or monk-like life.

Getting back to the point: To become richer, you need to make changes in your life. But changes take effort, and to perform this effort you’ll need to free up the time and energy to become powerful enough to do it.

How to Make Space for Badassity

When find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. In the world of gaining more leverage over your own life, this means to stop adding complexity. To get you started, here are a few tips from my own book of rules.

Discover the Power of No

For the next several weeks, say NO to all optional plans which are outside of biking distance of your house. If you don’t have a bike, make that walking distance. You need to start focusing your lifestyle on your local radius. Try having a weekend with nothing planned except catching up on things around the house and exercising right within your neighborhood.

Next time someone other than your very closest friends or family invites you to a distant wedding, make up an excuse and give yourself the gift of staying home instead. Save that energy for the people nearer and dearer to you – including yourself.

Institute a “Purchase Procrastination Program”

Pause any and all research and shopping trips besides food, and make do with the things you have at home. If you have a vacation coming up, promise yourself you’ll get that special purchase made after the vacation instead of before it. If you’re working on a major life goal, delay the purchase until after you achieve it.

Clean, Cancel, and Declutter

By now, you’ll already start having more free time. Use it to attack your garage, your closet, your kitchen junk drawer. Sell stuff on Craigslist, recycle, give away, and trash anything not important to you. Note the new breathing space that opens up in your mind, and even your lungs.

And of course, if you haven’t done so already, cancel cable TV and stop consuming the daily news.

Sharpen the Saw

The most efficient thing you can ever do with your time, is to make yourself a better person. So spend some of your new free, quiet time by starting each morning with a 45 minute walk in the quietest local area you can find. If you’re already knowledgeable in weight training, do a bit of it each day. If not, at least do some push-ups and Yoga for now. Learn about basic meditation, and do it.

And Then,

If you follow these steps, within a week or two you will have roughly doubled your free time and energy, which gives you the power to start really making the more difficult changes.

Sell your expensive cars and replace them with efficient ones at least ten years old (which is still plenty new). Get a bike. Find a smarter place to live that is closer to work, or a smarter place to work that is closer to home (and get a raise for yourself while you’re at it – the US labor market is quite literally at its strongest point in most of our lifetimes).

Look through this blog’s list of all posts and implement all of the ideas from the early articles, one by one and watch how your life expenses peel away.

None of this is all that difficult – at this point millions of people, many with far fewer advantages than yourself, have done exactly this and have drastically changed their lives for the better.

If you’ve been poking around here on this site for a while and, still find that major change and plentiful surplus money is in short supply, stop struggling and start by slowing down.

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This is email #38 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​Efficiency is the Highest Form of Beauty​

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This year, I’ve been spending a lot more time at the local elementary school, as our boy has rejoined his friends in fifth grade after two years of homeschooling. Through the daily bike rides to and from school, and my weekly gig as a volunteer math/engineering teacher for a small group of boisterous advanced learners, I get to meet a lot more new people from the community than I had in the preceding two years.

As a not-all-that-normal person, it is always a delicate challenge to spark up casual relationships with brand new people. For one thing, there’s the whole issue of being 11 years into semi-retirement, which makes any discussion of work schedules, mortgages and debt, or even overall goals in life a challenge: you either make up a superficial cover story or you open up a huge can of worms that will take an hour to explain.

Unless you are lucky enough to be conversing with another highly abnormal person, this conversation can quickly turn to a blank stare – those “normal” people don’t quite understand the idea of deliberately working hard even if you don’t have to, or not buying stuff even when you can afford to buy it. When you get the blank stare, it’s time for a quick, cheery wrap-up with a reference to the weather or how great the school staff is this year.

So the superficial story usually wins:

Random other parent in the schoolyard: “So what do you do?”

Me, when trying to keep it simple: “Well, these days I’m mostly a Dad, and I do some carpentry while he’s in school.”

But an even bigger disconnect comes during my travels around town. Strangers don’t seem to know quite what to make of the slightly imposing flannel-shirt man in his 40s who is always zooming around on a bike at the highest speed his legs can manage at any given moment. Usually with a slightly overstuffed backpack that might be filled with cucumbers, 10-packs of electrical outlets, beer, or even smooth rocks from the creek for use in ornamental gardens. On special occasions, maybe even a trailer with some lumber.

“Is he homeless? A hooligan? He’s definitely not as well-off as me, as I hold my mobile phone like a tray in one hand and use the other to operate the steering wheel of my GMC Envoy.”

At Home Depot I sometimes slip up and start discussing my unorthodox plans for the materials I am buying – perhaps an off-grid charger for an electric car, or a collection of heavy scrap metal pieces to weld into a homemade barbell set. But that blank stare comes back to remind you that this is not the place to open up such a can of ideas.

Personally, I enjoy this little disconnect between me and most people. There are enough friends around here (and Mustachians out there) for all of us to find plenty of community as well as plenty of time to dabble in our own little science labs.

But what I don’t enjoy, is how the rest of our society is missing out on the beauty of this endeavor.

It bugs me to see people standing on the airport escalators when they could be sprinting up the adjacent stairs with a suitcase in each hand. I’m annoyed that people still trundle around in cars they can’t afford, wasting fuel and asphalt that wrecks all of our living spaces, just because they can’t be bothered to swing their leg over a 25 pound aluminum sculpture with wheels that makes most of our fattening 20-trillion-dollar urban infrastructure unnecessary. Then they fight, with lobbying groups and misinformation, if anybody dares to tell them there’s a better way.

It also bugs me that high spending is still considered a desirable thing, and that living on less money is assumed to come with a reduction in happiness. When really, measuring life by your spending level is like judging a town by the size of its parking lots. Is your goal to maximize the amount of asphalt and SUVs you can spread out across the land, or would you rather just get into that damned grocery store so you can get yourself some nice stuff for dinner?

Spending is a skill: a Mustachian can buy the same lifestyle with $25,000 that might cost a Consumer Sucka $100,000 per year. If you can cultivate this skill, the Art of the 75% reduction, at any income level, you can go from a lifetime of being in debt, to being rich enough to retire in less than 10 years.

Similarly, a company that can operate with this level of skill will quickly become the most successful company in history, and a similarly efficient government would find the world sitting peacefully in its palm.

The reason I pursue and love the idea of finding new ways to live life in an industrialized world, is the same reason I love music, and art, and writing and all of the beautiful, advanced, inspiring things that people do. It’s because Efficiency is Beauty.

Think about it. What is it that has allowed humans, despite our soft and weak bodies, dull noses and eyes, inability to swim or fly, and mostly-hairless skin that is only really comfortable unprotected in the tropics? Tigers, Owls, and Sharks would mock us ceaselessly if they were smart enough to open Twitter accounts. But of course they cannot, because we are the only ones with these kickass brains that have allowed us to overcome all obstacles to take over this entire planet – with more planets eventually to come.

This domination has been entirely the fruit of our efficiency. I mean, sure, monkeys will seek out straight sticks and use them as tools to harvest bugs from a nest, but early humans sought out even more specialized sticks, arranged them into better shelters, weapons and animal traps. We caught animals and used every part for ingenious purposes, to create even more advanced tools, weapons, and methods of preserving information.

On and on through the generations, our survival and advancements have been won only as we became more efficient with our resources. Even our ability to create art, music, literature, and the social structures like laws and governments that allowed us to stop killing each other so often, was only made possible by buying ourselves free time – by efficiently securing food, which gave us time to play at night.

This uncontroversial history lesson could have come straight out of the pages of the Duhh Journal or Obvious Magazine. But yet, the idea of efficiency has been consistently ignored in our more recent society, and this is the source of most of our current problems.

For example, the accepted norm is that as we get richer, we spend more, borrow more, and work harder than ever to beat each other in the highly-competitive economy. The richest people earn the right to consume the largest share of natural resources.

However if we still valued our efficiency, the very thing that got us here and the biggest gift of being a human, the opposite would be true: The wealthiest people could afford to be the most efficient.

These wealthy people (you and me among them) would find ways to have the largest amount of fun, but with the added dimension of seeing nothing going to waste. We could live with a zero or negative environmental footprint, and enjoy this incredibly prosperous, engaged lifestyle without even needing to step on anybody else’s head to enjoy it.

The added dimension of knowing we were accomplishing this rich life on two dimensions would take the satisfaction level to a new level as well.

While the beginner rich person is a corpulent businessman who buys himself thrones and treats to emulate the life of ancient kings, the advanced rich person is one measured by how much better they left the world, after subtracting any value they destroyed along the way.

In a more efficient, rational world, the rich people would be the ones least concerned about advancing or preserving their own personal wealth, because that is obviously not an efficient use of time when you’re already rich.

Yeah, But How Could We Actually Create Such a World?

I can see you nodding there, but you don’t really think this is possible. If you’re a scientist and into evolutionary motivations, you will remind me that efficiency is only a human priority in times of scarcity. After that, we branch out because it is actually more efficient to chill out, and in fact making a show of waste is a show of genetic superiority.

“Look at me! I can afford to grow all these impractical colorful feathers! Or dump water on this big green lawn and pay servants to water it, and I’m not even here because I’m in Monaco this month. Now, come have sex with me because you know you want some of these superior genes!”

This is indeed a problem, and it’s what drives most of the ugliest problems in the world. The world wars and the cold war. Dictators and politicians who seek personal power over society’s advancement. Certain CEOs and their followers who teach themselves not to understand climate change because they fear it would hurt their superficial profits.

It’s all the byproduct of when we throw our energy into our simpler ape-like instincts, instead of the more beautiful instinct of Efficiency that got us out of those tree branches and into this much richer life in the first place.

But rather than surrendering our world to the simple dictators who cater to their own ape-like instincts, we canactually hijack their weakness for our own benefit. Because in a world where our material needs are met, the ultimate competition is for status. And status means emulating the richest, most powerful beings of your particular species. If you happen to be one of the richest and most powerful beings, this means everybody else will emulate you.

I hereby suggest that you, the self-selected curious and generally very wealthy people that happen to be reading this article, represent a significant portion of the world’s most powerful people – the ones with the status. People are watching you, wondering how you got all that money, maybe how you manage to run such a successful company, and why you seem to have your life together, with free time to spend with your kids or the motivation to stay in such good shape. They want what you have, and thus they will do what you do.

If you happen to agree with me that efficiency is beauty, the world would be a better place if we became more efficient, and that most of our biggest problems come from too many people missing that obvious fact, you can fix the whole problem by doing just one thing: demonstrating and celebrating efficiency in your own life.

As your peers and the more junior members of your tribe see you riding your bike to work, not moving to an even bigger house, playing with your own kids in the public park and raking your own leaves, and packing up your hiking boots and a tent instead of getting picked up by an airport limousine to begin every vacation, that’s the life they will want for themselves.

You’ll note the obvious similarities to the Tesla Motors master plan here, which the company has used to go from a 3-person garage experiment to the world’s most sought-after luxury automaker, while simultaneously ditching the 150-year tradition of the gasoline engine all in only 10 years: Start by attracting the top of society, allow them to demonstrate that your idea is desirable, then watch the rest of the world follow.

However, as a collection of the world’s highest-status trend setters, we can outdo even Elon Musk. Rather than just upgrading our existing infrastructure to be more efficient, we can upgrade the entire culture.

Instead of just building a billion autonomous electric cars to drive (or fly) us through our trillion dollar sprawling networks of concrete, we can choose to live closer together in the first place in beautiful, verdant neighborhoods that can be traversed in bare feet. Instead of just building solar arrays and storage batteries to cleanly power our gluttonous yet slovenly and unsatisfying lifestyles, we can upgrade to badass, muscular outdoor lifestyles of deep human and natural connection – while also putting up as many solar panels and batteries as it takes to keep the good music playing all night long.

And as we dance in this utopian environment, we’ll note that efficiency has again proven its beauty. Because while it is brilliant and noble to strive towards advancing the efficiency of our technology, it’s even more efficient to directly to change our culture.

I can’t do that all by myself just by riding my bike around town. But you can.

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This is email #39 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​There Are No Guarantees​

You know what I have come to realize is almost always ridiculous? Contracts.

Contracts, paperwork, and bureaucracy. Guarantees, warranties, and excessive caution in an attempt to ensure a trouble-free future. Not all of it is bullshit, but the older I get, the more I realize that a surprising portion of it is.

I mean sure, if I’m Tesla and you are Panasonic, and we’re partnering to build the world’s largest structure and produce the majority of the world’s energy storage products, and we each have thousands of employees involved in the process, we can write up a contract and sign it.

But if I invite you over to my house for one of our customary Sunset Beers in the Park events tonight, how appropriate would it be for me to send along a little PDF contract with five places for you to sign?

I, Jane Mustachian, agree to arrive at the Mustache residence between 5 and 6PM, and consume between 1 and 5 servings of beer and/or wine, over a period not to exceed six (6) hours, to convey myself to and from the event using only muscle-powered transportation…

….blah blah any food served may or may not contain nuts or gluten…

…agree to not to hold Mustache family liable for any injuries...

and so on.

You’d think I was crazy, and find another place to have your beer tonight.

We understand this at the social level, and even at the small business level, if we feel a high level of trust. But as soon as we lose our trust and get overly fearful, we start breaking out the lawyers and the contracts and the stifling formality.

It is at this point, I argue, that life starts to suck.

It’s also the point at which a company starts to suck – that moment when it loses itssoul and its freewheeling joy, and starts pushing for profits above ethics, and the lower level employees are not empowered to do what they know is right because their boss would have to ask the next level boss and the request would die before it reached someone with enough authority.

This is also the point at which I try to avoid doing business with a company if at all practical, and find a smaller one who could use a new customer.

And therefore I think we can make our lives better if we raise that threshold of fear a little bit, and start running our businesses and our lives as if we were big boys and girls.

Here’s another story which illustrates this point:

On the “contact” section of this website, I have a little note that says people should not email me with requests for marketing partnerships, TV shows, book publishing, etc. Through experience I learned that those activities not nearly as fun as they sound.

But one guy snuck through the gates – “Hey man, I work for Sony Entertainment which is a big company but don’t worry, I’m cool – I just have some ideas for a TV show about Mustachian lifestyles and wondered if you want to talk about them.”

So we talked on the phone, and he was indeed cool. It was a nice concept and a respectable company and they had done other successful stuff. So I said I might help out with the project occasionally, as time permitted.

Suddenly, a completely unrelated person from their legal department started emailing me contracts and agreements and such – pages and pages of them! The contracts contained obligations, promises, and bullshit galore.

And here I was just naively thinking I’d have a beer with this creative writer and laugh about some ideas for a TV show. We had already agreed on the phone, that if the project ever ceased to be completely fun – for either of us – then we’d just drop it. Retirement is is too short to engage in non-fun projects, because there is already an enormous queue of extremely fun projects that I haven’t even had time to start yet!

So I told the lawyers thanks, but I wasn’t interested in contracts. But I’d still be happy to help out just as I had originally offered.

And I never heard from anyone at the company, or the creative guy, ever again.

I felt like I had been stood up – the whole thing had been a small waste of time. But I was grateful that I hadn’t actually dug in on a big project with an organization that works this way – for that would have been a much bigger waste of time.

Let’s contrast this with a a few other business arrangements.

Figure 1 – Camp Mustache

I have fixed up plenty of houses with local friends, with many thousands of dollars at stake. Sometimes even lives or limbs, as we scrambled around like monkeys to cut down tall dead trees. No contracts, just plenty of dirt, scrapes, laughs and good times – and profits, too.

I’ve done several interviews and trips with Jesse Mecham, founder of You Need a Budget. Significant value accrued to both of our businesses from these collaborations as thousands of YNAB customers became Mustachians and vice versa, and yet somehow it never occurred to us to make up a contract.

Next month I’m traveling to Portland – first to visit Treehouse founder Ryan Carson and do some social stuff that might also have promotional value for his business. Maybe record a video and a podcast, and even host a gathering of Mustachians right in the courtyard of their central Portland building. With beer!

No contracts, of course.

Then on to Seattle to attend Camp Mustache – something that is now a popular recurring event. Although there are tens of thousands of dollars involved in putting it on, it’s an informal not-for-profit arrangement and the organizers and I have never signed a contract.

But What if the Other Person Breaks their Promise and I Get Screwed?

You may think I’m painting an unrealistically rosy picture here. Not everything always turns out for the better, right? Business partners sometimes turn evil, tenants stop paying rent, girlfriends or boyfriends dump you, products break, stock markets crash, bones break, and fatal diseases strike your loved ones.

I agree – life has been known to serve up the odd Platter of Shit from time to time. Every one of those things above has happened to me. And yet in zero of the cases could I have protected myself with a contract or warranty and come out ahead.

I’ve been to court a few times. In some cases, I was the landlord and the tenant wasn’t paying rent even though we had a contract. The judge ordered the tenant to pay. The tenant, who had long since left town, didn’t even know there had been a court case. And yet life went on, and the inconvenience was soon forgotten.

I retired early, invested too much in a house building business, then lost a bunch of money in the ensuing great financial and housing crisis. No contract could have protected me from these market realities, and yet somehow I survived again and life continued to get even better.

I’ve had products malfunction while under warranty, and in most cases the warranty department was so clumsy and incompetent (ahem, Samsung, Nissan) that I just gave up and fixed the product myself.

The point is that in almost all life decisions, the stakes are actually very low. Here in the rich world, the majority of our catastrophes have the following consequences:

• You might feel “inconvenienced” and experience a frowning face for a short period of time.
• Some numbers stored in a computer, which represent your wealth, might temporarily decrease.
• You might have to move your body around – and possibly even experience mild heat, cold, or muscular exertion.
• You might have to speak some words into a telephone or press some buttons on a computer keyboard to resolve a problem.
• In more extreme situations, you might even have to speak to one or more humans in person.

Are these consequences really worth worrying about – or potentially even missing out on the chance to do something great?

What does This Have to do with Early Retirement?

Every week, I get at least a few emails from people who have more than put in their time. People in their late 30s and beyond who have worked multi-decade careers, paid off the house, given their kids a good start in life, stashed seven figures into retirement accounts, and long since grown bored of the big-company life.

But they are still working one more year, to add that last bit of safety margin padding, fill up that last college fund for the last kid, max out that health savings account just in case. Some of them have more savings than my family has even now, even though we’ve been retired (and continuing to accumulate wealth) for more than ten years.

And they’re still afraid to retire.

You Become Free Only when you Acknowledge That You Cannot Control Life

You can’t control the random bits of misfortune which may strike you. You can only control your responses.

If you are following the Principles of Mustachianism, you’ve already taken all the preventative work that you need to take: optimizing your habits to maintain a healthy body, mind, and bank account.

These are not a formal insurance policy, because formal insurance is nonsense.

They are a statistical prevention policy, a way of tilting the odds in our favor. And even more important, a response policy – a recipe that ensures that even when shit does hit the fan, you can clean it up, resume your prosperous life, and learn something in the process.

The lesson? Instead of working endlessly to build a glass shield around yourself, start enjoying life right now and just keep a mop handy.

—

Further Reading: In his joyful short book “Anything you Want” on founding a really successful business, DerekSivers argues the same thing about contracts – just skip them if you can possibly do so, because people will either keep their word, or they won’t. If you bring it to court, everybody loses, and all a contract does is give you something to show in court

​

This is email #40 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

Staying Fit With No Gym in Sight

If you look around on the street these days, you might get the impression that it is really, really difficult to stay in shape beyond the age of about 30.

Sure, there are a few competitive athletes, movie stars and Navy SEALs around that still manage to keep in strong form, but if you are not willing to devote your entire life totraining, you might as well just head straight for the stretch pants, right? Older age strikes and there is nothing you can do about it.

Oddly enough, if you could peer at the financial statements of your fellow citizens, the story might be similar: consumer debt is normal, the bills keep piling up, and only the movie stars and athletes (and corrupt CEOs of big banks, of course) make enough money to actually get ahead.

These opinions are widespread, and often fiercely defended as Truth. This is why I have been happily surprised over the years as I discovered that the prevailing wisdom is completely wrong: it’s not only possible to become wealthy on an average salary, it is just a natural byproduct of living a healthy life. Similarly, you don’t need a crushing workout schedule, a $250 per month gym or a team of professional trainers to be in very good shape. You just need to focus on the basics and avoid the worst pitfalls.

But as the years go on and I talk to more and more people, I realize that very few people even know these basics, and they think some of the pitfalls (for example drinking a big glass of orange juice with breakfast) are actually healthy life choices. So with New Year’s Resolution time approaching, I thought we could dish out some of this old school knowledge right now.

Let’s use plain old Mr. Money Mustache as an example. I’m an average 42-year-old white nerd who has never played a competitive sport in his life. I made my career in office work and enjoy beer a bit more than I should. And yet I feel great – despite the fact that I keep getting older and live a deprived life without the personal trainer or private chef that every wealthy person really deserves.

Even worse, I don’t even have a gym membership, and the months I spend away from home every year have been compromising my access to even the basic backyard barbell set that comprises my only fitness equipment. I have spent about 2 of the past 5 months away from home, which means a lot of time with no gym in sight.

All of these factors, yet all systems seem to be better than ever. Returning from the latest travel binge, I found roughly the same level of strength and bodyfat while keeping the same overall weight on the scale. How can this be?

Fitness as a Part of Life
​(rather than something you do at the gym)

Far too often in modern life, we cut an artificial line between the ideas of getting in shape and everything else we do. People train for Ironman events, but then drive a car for local errands. They use the stair machine in the gym, but then take the elevator up to the 12th floor in the office building. They claim that getting in shape is important, but then drive their kids to school in the morning in one of the world’s most ridiculous spectacles of Car Clown behavior.

We sit still at work, sit in automobiles, and stand still with rolling luggage on the airport escalator to avoid the strain of the staircase, and hire contractors to take care of our lawns and shovel our driveways. And then we wonder why we get fat, or injure our knees and backs, or get any other less-than-satisfactory performance from our bodies. Only the most dedicated workout junkies (rebranded as CrossFitters these days) seem to get anywhere, and even they often fall off the wagon and become mortals eventually.

I feel that there’s a better way to get good health results, but with much more efficiency than what most people achieve right now. You could boil it down to the philosophy of “use it or lose it”.

Principles of Efficient Physical Fitness

Not everybody likes the act of exercising itself, but everybody likes being in shape. The key to getting the latter without having to commit your life to flawless execution of the former is to understand the concept of exercise efficiency – getting the best results with minimum time and minimum risk of failing due to bad habits.

Principle Zero: Moving is Normal, Sitting Still is Hazardous​
Before we even begin, we need to make a change to the most basic paradigm of modern life. Most of us sit or lie down almost constantly: to sleep, eat, work, drive, and even (shudder) to watch TV. Instead, I like to think of sitting as something you do as a short breakfrom your real life. And you should feel just a bit uncomfortable when sitting down, because it really is a hazardous activity.

Whenever you get a chance to move, take it: get up and pace around while you read books. Attend your conference calls with a mobile phone headset while out walking along the river. Cut your own lawn. Walk the 5 miles across town that you would normally drive. Always, always take the stairs. Never, ever use a drive-through. You can even try taping your laptop to the drink platform of a treadmill and working as you pace slowly along at 1 MPH (I have tried this and it is amazing).

If you’re thinking of taking on a job that requires more than a few minutes of car driving per day, consider this equivalent to accepting a job in an Asbestos mine or an old Russian nuclear power plant. You might still do it, but only if the benefits greatly outweigh the obvious costs. Similarly, if you’re considering spending an afternoon on the couch watching football, pretend that you have to wear an inhaler that dispenses just a tiny dose of Cyanide into each breath. With this comparison in mind, you can decide if you still weight the passive entertainment more highly than, say, taking your kids out to play in the park.

On really good days, I might spend 4-10 hours walking or biking around for various reasons like errands, carpentry, and just plain old strolls, and these really good days result in incredible happiness. On days when I fail to obey this Principle of Constant Movement, I instantly devolve into a more average and grumpy person.

I don’t have room for an indoor home gym at the moment. So instead I keep this squat rack just outside my back door, to eliminate psychological barriers to the most important exercise. Mud, snow, hot, cold – it’s all good for you – just do some damned squats, at least a couple times per week.

Principle #1: Building Muscle is Far More Effective than Cardiovascular Training​
I think the most common beginner fitness mistake in the world might be when people decide to start jogging or other aerobic exercises as a method of weight loss. Double Fail Points if you go for a treadmill or a stationary bike while watching TV inside a smelly commercial gym.

So many people slave away at these cardio-related things like aerobics classes and treadmills and still look almost the same several months later. Most of them end up quitting as they lose motivation in the face of the poor results. And then the weight loss industry is right there waiting, saying they must have just bought the wrong diet shakes. Or the “accept yourself as you are” movement tells them that body composition change is impossible, so you should give up.

The real reason for the failure is that cardio training activities (while great for your heart) are very poor at triggering the growth of muscle tissue. You pump the heart and breathe vigorously and burn a few calories during that brief session, but then the session ends and you’re back to your regular self.

On the other hand, people who lift or move heavy things get triple benefits:

• The same heart and lung bonus up front as they lift weights and break down existing muscle tissue.
• The massive calorie implosion required to rebuild those muscles to a new, stronger size.
• Then a permanent ongoing burn required to maintain that fine new stronger form.

As Tim Ferriss demonstrates in the Four Hour Body, it is possible for a relative beginner to trigger over a pound of muscle growth (3500 calories of body composition change) with just one brief session of barbell squats.

Let me repeat that in different terms: you exceed the calorie burn you’d get from 4-8 hours of riding a stationary bike in the gym, in about 4-8 minutes, by warming up your legs and then performing a few sets of 5 squats, working up to a weight that is fairly difficult for you.

To clarify this after many angry and skeptical comments below: YES, the squats themselves burn only a few dozen calories. But by breaking down the tissues of your largest compound muscle group including quadriceps, hamstrings, gluteus, and a plenty of assisting muscles, you force your body to rebuild the entire set bigger and stronger. This is an incredibly calorically-intense process which can take almost a full week to complete. Thus, the total net energy cost ends up being several thousand calories.

Calorie testing on myself over the years confirms these figures are roughly correct – hell hath no appetite like that of a person who has done his or her squats properly. As long as you refuel from this hunger in a strategic manner, you’ll find your fat reserves getting vacuumed away at high speed.

How do we take advantage of this? Start thinking about feats of peak strength rather than the conventional 30-minute periods of sweaty endurance training on a stationary bike.

Principle #2: Every Bodypart, Whenever Possible
​

These are your muscles. Understand the big groups, then work them regularly.

Most people think of exercise as all one big interchangeable thing: “I get plenty of exercise walking my dogs and gardening”, or, “I was able to drop my gym membership because I bike to work now.”

This is the wrong way to think about it.

Sure, mild exercise is still far better than sitting still. But you get much better results if you think about each muscle group and make sure you have overloaded it recently, thus sending it the message to become stronger.

As a start, you could think of your body as having five groups:

• Legs
• Back
• Chest and triceps (your “pushing muscles”)
• Upper Back and biceps (any time you find yourself “pulling”)
• Core (all the complex muscles that hold you together at the middle)

Now, how will you overload each group at least a little bit, every day or two?

If you like to go to a gym, and you use the free weight room instead of the inefficient cardio stuff, great. Through my teens and 20s, I was on this plan and it went well. But after getting married, then becoming a father, I found that long stretches of time would pass as I became complacent and made excuses. This is not great – to improve from wherever you are now, you need every muscle group to be blasted down with reasonable exertion (enough to cause at least a tiny bit of soreness) – every week.

To translate the vague concept of muscle groups into practical exercises you can do in many places, here’s a guide of my favorite exercises. You can look these up anywhere to get the basics of how to do each movement safely. For example, Google “How to Do Squats”.

Legs:

• Squats (with just your own weight when getting started. Then with barbells, or one-legged if no barbells available)
• Deadlifts
• Jumping on or off of anything (including boxes like this one)
• Running up and down stairs
• Sprinting around anywhere
• Urban Parkour-style hooliganism with friends when visiting any city
• Note that my daily cycling doesn’t count as a real leg exercise, since it’s a heart-building rather than muscle-building exercise.

Back:

• Pullups from any bar or overhanging surface. You can assist yourself with your legs if you’re not yet strong enough to do real pull-ups.
• Barbell or dumbbell rows
• Pullingany heavy item from the ground to your chest while you’re bent over.
• Snow shoveling, digging trenches, chopping wood, moving bags of concrete
• And anything else that feels like hard work is probably good for your back.
• The Deadlift, mentioned under “Legs”, is also great for your lower back.
  But build this strength up slowly if you’re untrained – we’ve all heard stories about unfit people who “throw out their backs” when lifting something after years of deadly inactivity. The goal here is to make your back unbreakable – for life.

Chest and Triceps:

• the Clean and Press (lift a barbell from the ground to over your head – my second favorite exercise in the world after squats).
• bench press
• dumbbell press
  (these first three are generally only if I’m lucky enough to be at home)
• dips
• pushups
• On the road, the barbells are unavailable so I try to increase to 100 pushups per day, and using any available parallel surface, inside corner of a kitchen countertop, or pair of posts for dips.
• To increase resistance, you can get a friend or loved one to sit on your back during pushups: 8 insanely hard pushups are better for you than 50 easy ones.

Core:

The benefit of doing real-world exercise (especially sprinting) instead of lame treadmills at the gym, is that it forces you to flex and stabilize all your abdomen and oblique muscles and make them stronger. But you can still target the core directly with a few of my favorites:

• Planks (hover your body flat and still with only forearms and toes touching the ground for 60-300 seconds)
• Leg-raises while hanging from a bar, tree branch, or anything else
• Twisting or jumping motions of any sort
• Situps and abdominal crunches

Important note: core and abdominal muscles do not help you lose abdominal fat any faster than any other exercise. The fastest way to lose fat (after fixing your diet) is to accelerate calorie burn, which means triggering muscle growth. So if you want better abs, do squats.

Principle #3: Resisting Heavy Motion Delivers The Results

​
​Consider the following counter-intuitive trick: walking down a flight of stairs delivers much better strength and muscle-building results than walking up that same flight of stairs, even though going down is much easier. I learned this amazing shortcut just a few years ago, but it has allowed me to get better results in less time ever since.

To put it into practice, you can bend your legs more deeply when going down stairs or hills, lower your body more slowly during pushups and pullups and weight exercises, and in general think about fighting loads as the chief source of strength.

For example: riding a bike won’t build much leg strength because it’s all concentric (pushing) with no eccentric (resisting). Adding in a few lunges as part of every day (or deep jumps, or squats of any form) will massively increase the benefits.

Principle #4: Turn The World Into Your Gym
​

With these basics covered, we can move to the real world to find ways to apply them. You will never miss a workout again, because from now on the entirety of every day you live will be a workout. With your eye on potential ways to overload your muscles, opportunities will come out of the woodwork. So let’s make all this work in Real Life:

Walk and Run for Transportation- and Borrow Bikes when you Travel​
Sidewalks and roads. Curbs and airport and hotel staircases. These are all amazing fitness machines, disguised as boring urban infrastructure. By seeking them out during travel, opportunities to stay fit magically materialize.

For example, when visiting people I make a point of borrowing one of their spare bikes if available. You can also install the Spinlister app on your phone, and rent bikes from locals – instead of cars from bland international rental car chains – whenever you’re on a trip.

As a result, I have enjoyed bike tours of dozens of US cities and even a good number of international spots that were often the highlight of the entire trip. If you seek to maximize your effort, the benefits come quickly.

Lunge Whenever Nobody’s Looking
​You can transform the mild benefits of walking into a shockingly fast muscle builder you can do anywhere, just by learning how to lunge. The effectiveness comes from the fact that you’re causing peak muscle overload in a mostly-eccentric (downward) motion. I recently did one lap of deep lunges around a soccer field (which took all of about 90 seconds), and it was enough to give me pleasantly sore legs for two days.

Even better, you can explain that paragraph above to your friends, and challenge them to lunge a block together on as part of an evening outing – for example on your way out to happy hour. You’ll love the fun of doing this ridiculous thing together in public, and the reactions you’ll get from the strangers, almost as much as you love your new <arnold voice> sculpted and bulging quadriceps and buttocks muscles </arnold>. Pain equals gain!

Sprint Whenever you Can​
Performing just a single 10-second sprint across a park or a parking lot can change your body for the better. But you can also apply this principle on the bike, or during a set of pushups, or even when shoveling a driveway of snow. Any time you want to become better, challenge yourself to max out for the next ten seconds!

Whenever you go to peak exertion, you are telling your body it is time to grow. If you stay within your comfort zone, the body decides it is fine as it is. Sprinting will send your body this change signal, in almost every situation.

100 Pushups per Day​
Or even 10 pushups if you’re new to the pastime. I love this exercise because it is so efficient: If I move as quickly as possible, I find it takes only 15 seconds to do 25 pushups. Since it is such a small commitment, it’s easy to keep to it four times throughout the day, resulting in a reasonable strengthening of the chest and associated muscles with a total time investment of one minute.

Pro Tip: I make myself drop for 25 or 50 pushups every time I am going to indulge in something questionable like a beer or a high-carb snack, to help compensate for the negative effects before they happen.

Playgrounds and Gym Poaching

Saving the best for last: although your own fancy gym may be far off in another country when you’re traveling, there is almost always a public park with a play structure that can provide many of the basics for free. You can sprint and do pullups, dips, jump off of high things and land dramatically in the sand, do situps, chase kids around, and generally get a surprisingly good workout.

Bonus Principle: Sugar is the Devil, Fat is your Friend

The tips above will make a huge difference in any life that is currently too sedentary. But your body will fight to keep its fat reserves, and it will win this fight, if you obey its requests for constant sugar and carbohydrates.

For details I will refer you to Mark Sissson’s primal blueprint, or Tim’s Slow Carb Diet. But for me the basics are really simple: I avoid bread, pasta, and any desserts or sugary drinks including fruit juice. And the idea of buying soda for home consumption or even ordering one at a restaurant is as horrifying to me as drinking drain cleaner. If your goal is fat loss, Do Not Drink Calories!

Instead I eat mostly vegetables, nuts, eggs, oils (mostly olive but with no rules against butter and coconut oil!) and an average amount of minimally processed meats and dairy. It’s your basic low-carb diet, and I’ve found a 100% correlation between bending the rules of this diet (occasional pizza and beer), and the rapid softening of my waistline. If you haven’t tried this way of eating yet, you might be pleasantly surprised with how easy it is.

Related Article: The Amazing Waist-Slimming, Wallet-Fattening Nutrient​

That’s it. Sure, there is much more to fitness than these five principles, but they are big ones, and enough go get started. This is infinitely better than not getting started, so let’s go.

Further Reading:

The New York Times, on why exercise should be a rewarding part of your daily life, not just a chore you treat like a health prescription.

Gary Taubes writes and rants about how our high-sugar, high-carbohydrate diet is the source of most of our problems. I saw some of his articles in the NYTimes, then moved on to read his book “Why We Get Fat.” I’m torn on this, because there is still scientific debate on the ideal diet. But my own results and a recent rigorous blood test are good enough to keep me very enthusiastically on the high fat, high-vegetable, low-carb diet.

​Klaus Obermeyer, now 96, inspires you by refusing to age, citing benefits of keeping active as the decades pass.

This is email #41 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​Great News: There’s Another Recession Coming​

A Note from the Future:

This article was first published in June 2017, and at the time of course we had no idea when the next recession would be. Some doomsday types thought it was imminent, and others thought the boom was just getting started. In retrospect, the correct answer turned out to be “33 months”, as the Covid Crash of March 2020 caused the fastest and deepest recession in history … which also turned out to be one of the shortest lived. At the time, many worried experts predicted years of high unemployment and economic carnage. And again they were wrong.

The lesson? Predictions and pundits are useless. The only advice that works is to understand that this is all an unpredictable, repeating cycle. So you should prepare accordingly as described below. And with that, we will climb back into our time machine and pop back to 2017.

—

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the US economy in recent years, you might notice that things are looking pretty darned rosy. Unemployment is at its lowest level in 40 years, wages are rising, and house prices have not only recovered from their fiery crash of 2009 – they have had several years of record breaking prices in most regions, just like the stock market.

A current snapshot of how expensive the stock market is – not in sticker price, but in the more instructive price-to-earnings (P/E10) ratio. In all of US history, it has only exceeded this expensiveness once – for the late-1990s bubble. Not something that should make you sell your index funds, but probably a clue about an upcoming bubble-based recession. Image source is the very useful site multpl.com www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/

In short, today’s situation is very similar to what Mr. Money Mustache, despite no magical forecasting skill, forecast back in 2013, in an article called “How to Prosper in an Economic Boom“. In that post, I suggested that we were in for some very good years, which made it a good time for getting ahead – make hay while the sun shines!

It’s a lot easier to fix your problems right now, with a stiff economic tailwind at your back, than it will be in just a couple of short years (or less?) when the high seas and lighting bolts and whirlpools are ripping at your pockets. Fair weather preparations include:

• Rake in your big paycheck while it lasts and don’t blow it on temporary luxuries
• Keep your living footprint efficient – in expensive cities this is a great time to rent, and not a great time to spring for the sprawling home of your dreams on a big mortgage.
• Eliminate any last shreds of consumer and student loan debt​
• With the stock market at higher price-to-earnings ratio than usual, there is less harm in paying off your mortgage earlier, keeping six months of living expenses in cash or money market funds, and other non-stock investments like rental properties in low-cost cities (where reliable rent is over 1% of total property price per month).
• Design your career and your self-employment side gigs so that they are resilient: multiple streams of income from different sources, and an easy answer for “What would I do if my job or industry ceased to exist?”

Of course, becoming less dependent on a steady job is always a good thing – it just happens to be much easier to build that independence if you’re surfing atop a giant economic wave like this one.

So, Here We Go:

With all those preparations in progress, I hope you’re ready, because there’s a recession on the way.

I can say this with confidence because there’s always a recession coming – we just never know exactly when. About the only thing I can guarantee is that we are about four years closer to the next recession than we were when I wrote that optimistic earlier article.

But it is very important to remind yourself of this, because when we get to this rosy point of the business cycle, things have been so good for so long that we forget that crashes are even possible. If you’re a sagely 27 years old right now, you may have never experienced a recession in your adult life – all you have ever seen is the good times. You’re in for an interesting surprise.

However, on top of that folksy “It always happens” wisdom, there are a few other clues that suggest the time is approaching:

Household debt levels have risen back to their pre-crash peak, and with an even worse composition: more student loans, and a record level of auto loans, the most ridiculous and self-destructive piece of personal finance outside of mortgaging your shins to a loan shark to afford tonight’s cocaine.

Image from the very good Zero Hedge article linked above.

Consumer debt shouldn’t really exist at all – it’s simply a house of cards that allows impatient people to pull their consumption from the future, just a teeeeny bit forward into the present, in exchange for spectacularly bad costs, stress, and wrecking of lives. But because it exists and is profitable, a huge ($1.3 trillion in 2015) financial industry has sprung up to originate, multiply, and churn this debt.

Just like 2007, the financial industry is on top of the world again, with lots of easy money flying around into things like “subprime auto loans”. The Great Recession of that era was caused when the wild packaging and reselling of mortgage debt combined with a false sense of confidence that the party would go on forever.

The final piece of evidence comes from just how long the present party has gone on. If you look at the history of economic expansions – how long we have gone since the last recession – we are currently enjoying the third longest one in history:

When we put all Good Times since WW2 into a graph, you can see just how exceptionally long we have been riding high.

So we’ve had a good run. If we go on to tie the Clinton-era record, that still gives us a maximum of two years until the trouble hits. And if you happen to think that economic success correlates with the level of brainpower currently in the White House, then, hmm.. you can make some adjustments based on that as well.

“OK, But What Actually Causes Recessions? And What will Cause the Next One?”

In succinct terms, recessions are caused when a bunch of people lose confidence all at once.

Usually it starts with a mini-crisis: the prices of stocks and houses have been going up for so long that people forget the opposite can happen. A bunch of testosterone-fueled betting and speculation (often by overconfident and under-regulated junior hotshots on Wall Street) ensues. And in general, speculation is a dumb thing.

If you have ever heard of someone buying something, not because they actually want it or because it produces income, but just because they think it will be worth even more in the future, that’s speculation. When people buy apartments in Toronto and leave them vacant (or rent them out at a loss) in hopes of later selling them to an even Greater Fool, that’s speculation. Speculation leads to bubbles, and bubbles always pop, because there was no rational reason for the prices to get that high in the first place. They also happen frequently in the stock market.

When prices hit some random limit or wobble a bit, the bubble often pops. It happens as a fairly predictable cascade of events, usually something like this:

• Everyone gets scared and rushes out to sell before the price drops even further. Which makes the price drop even further, and with breakneck speed.
• Suddenly, over-leveraged novices can’t repay their oversized loans, whether those are mortgages or margin loans, so they start missing payments.
• Banks get scared of losing all that money, so they tighten up lending
• Which causes businesses to scale back hiring and expansion
• leading to layoffs
• which cuts down on consumer spending
• which cuts down business profits again
• leading to even more layoffs and even lower prices for stocks, houses, and other assets
• and so it goes on, with the problem feeding upon itself

Eventually, the prices of these valuable assets gets low enough that people with actual money like you and me perk up and start scooping them up at a discount. A pristine apartment building here, some shares of a few thousand established, profitable companies there via an index fund over there. This puts a floor under the dropping prices.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve Bank also steps in, lowering interest rates and flooding the system with cheap money to encourage people to start buying houses again and businesses to start expanding to soak up the pool of unemployed people. Everyone gets back to work, and the recession ends. Usually very quickly – most recessions last less than one year.

So, as long as you aren’t a Consumer Sucka, commuting to work in a bank-financed gas-powered racing sofa and/or 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.

Most people who are wealthy today, achieved it by building and acquiring profitable investments in the past, when they were on sale. A recession is just a big sale – on almost everything.

“So, Should I Be Worried?”

No, of course not! This is just money we’re talking about, and you should never be worried about money.

One of the joys of Mustachianism is that it makes you immune to the business cycle. You immediately stop living beyond your means, so you have stepped back from the cliff. Then you start to build a resilient mesh of skills, health, money, friendships, and peaceful personal badassity which further protect you from trouble.

After all: who cares about the price of gasoline, or affording cholesterol pills, or how to make the next truck payment, when you’re a wiry and muscular Mustachian, riding your swift and sensible bike a few miles to work and banking almost all of your enormous paycheck every two weeks?

Then as you live this joyful existence for however many years it takes, the final stage of complete financial independence arrives automatically, and you are absolutely invincible.

Whether it comes in two weeks or four years, I hope all of us are prepared for next hill on this roller coaster – it’s a lot more fun when you know it’s coming.

—-

In the comments: do you care for a wager on when the next “crisis” will hit and we’ll fall into recession again? What will be the thing that gets us this time?

This is email #42 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​Seek Not to Be Entertained​

I was enjoying a walk downtown with my son recently, when I noticed something wasn’t quite right. A man was emerging from the background of other pedestrians, trying to make eye contact. We kept walking.

“Excuse Me! Gentlemen! How much are you paying for your Cable TV right now?”

I could now see that he was carrying handful of glossy flyers for one of the monthly television subscription outfits – Dish network or Comcast or whatever. The same stuff that floods my front mailbox in far greater quantity than my ability to use it as kindling to start the woodstove on winter evenings.

“Nothing”, we both said almost in unison, “We don’t have TV.”

“No TV? What about Netflix? Hulu? TiVo? Google or Amazon? We can beat ’em – first month is FREE!”

“Nope – none of it. Sorry, we gotta go but good luck with your work today!”

The solicitor was left slightly speechless. To be fair, my last line was a slight lie just for the sake of getting out of the sales pitch. We do rent movies from Google Play occasionally, but this mildly stressful street scene made me realize two things:

1. Fuck, when are these slimy cable TV companies going to let up on their relentless burying of our world in their misleading “first month free” marketing campaigns? The level of promotion is always inversely proportional to the underlying usefulness of the product.
2. Man, am I really that much of a weirdo, not subscribing to any of these things that everyone else seems to use? Am I depriving my son of a normal upbringing?

But this bit of introspection goes along very well with a few other things I’ve noticed over the course of this summer. I think of them as a contrast between Mr. Money Mustache and “normal” people, and I have been pondering them for a while, deciding if I should consider becoming more normal myself.

Should You Strive to be Normal?

Normal people seem to be on a constant quest for action and activity. They’ll plan three lunches with friends for next week, and a weekend of drinking and motorboat riding. Every night they’ll watch TV, and on special occasions they will go out for movies, concerts or dash off to the next state to catch a football game or an eclipse. A really successful normal person is almost never at home.

I can definitely relate to the desire for activity. I’m incapable of spending more than an hour on the couch or sitting at the beach. During vacations, I have to find physical work projects to keep myself happily occupied. I’ve discovered that even one day of zero productivity is bad for me: if I stop doing things, I stop wanting to do things, and pretty soon I’m just lazing around on the couch or taking 11 am naps. For me, inactivity leads to a depressive boredom.

Perhaps this is why normal people strive to keep themselves so busy. If you had a choice between “depressed naps on the couch all day” and “busy day including shopping, a lunch date, front-row Denver Broncos seats and then catching the late show at the movie theater”, you might choose the second option.

And even if you don’t have the time or the cash for a big expensive day like that, you might choose “A few hours of highly engaging strategy video games” or “Game of Thrones binge with my boyfriend” over the depressing alternative of Nothing.

Mr. Money Mustache’s Shocking Abnormality

As part of a great shared day of leisure, a friend and I recently dug out and cleared the sewer line at MMM-HQ. To relax afterwards, we upgraded the front door with a fancy wi-fi enabled door lock.

Only after carefully studying normal people have I realized my own abnormality. I haven’t had TV service since 1999, and I only catch the most highly-recommended movies from friends about once a month. I love books, but only get through about one of those per month as well – there always seems to be something more pressing than sitting down on the couch to read.

I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can’t stand tourist attractions, don’t sit on the beach unless there’s a really big sand castle that needs to be made, don’t care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing, and while I definitely get into live music, it still only happens about once every few months in practice.

Even wholesome outdoor recreation can be hard for me: I enjoy a good hike, but I’d rather hike around as part of volunteering to build a new trail or put up a yurt on a friend’s mountain property. I tried a day of wakeboarding with friends just recently and while it was a thrill to get up on that wave and swim around in the lake, my brain was calling me back to more productive (and less beer-soaked) pursuits the next day.

Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.

If I’m visiting your house, we’ll have a boring day if we play board games, but a great one if we rake the leaves and dig some trenches for an irrigation system. Even emptying out your closets so we can organize your stuff and maybe build in a few new shelves would rank higher than passive pursuits.

If you leave me alone for a day (unfortunately quite rare in my current family life), I’ll have a joyful time rotating between carpentry, weight training, writing, playing around with instruments in the music studio, making lists and executing tasks from them.

Ok – Fine for You, Weirdo, but what does this have to do with Me?

It’s already well-known that Mr. Money Mustache has unusual habits. They wouldn’t work for everyone. But you’ll note a few things that most of them have in common:

• they don’t cost much to do (and some of them even generate money)
• most of them tend to increase your physical health
• they’re also good for your mental health and sense of life satisfaction

So, if you already have plenty of money, you should go right on ahead and continue with the more expensive entertainment options. But if you have any use for more money, it could pay very well to at least consider some of the free or profitable things.

If your health and body are already exactly where you want them, it makes sense that you might continue your convenience-based habits like driving around in a car and hiring people to do the dirty work around your house.

Walking that 30 minutes a day on your lunch break is giving you exactly the physical results you want, right?

Or maybe not.

And if that’s the case, it would seem logical to re-evaluate that leisure time.

And perhaps you already get plenty of mental work done: your to-do list is always completely checked off, tax return is always early, and you understand all your financial accounts perfectly and where the money is going. Easy! And if so, it makes sense that you’d take a break and relax with the TV news, or perhaps the Game of Thrones or the Xbox.

If not, it would only seem logical to shut off this stream of interruptions and open up space for something else.

But Mr. Money Mustache, I Enjoy These Things! Don’t take them away from me!

This is probably the root of the problem, and the difference between an average life and a life of deep, radiant satisfaction.

It doesn’t matter what you enjoy. It matters what’s good for you.

I enjoy pumpkin cheesecake and key lime pie, but I only eat them a few times a year. I also like salads, but let’s be honest, they are not on the same level as Pumpkin Cheesecake. My heart is beating faster just thinking about it right now. But I eat big salads twice a day.

Yet the salads deliver much, much more happiness, because they allow me to continue to run around and explore the world, climbing trees and jumping off rooftops, while the cheesecake would have me in stretch pants and an extra-wide golf cart seat.

It seems obvious when you put it in terms of food. But the same tradeoff applies with all sources of recreation and entertainment. You don’t have to be as compulsive as me, but you do have to make some changes to your habits, if you expect your life to change.

Now with all this puritan advice properly laid down, we can all relax and realize that there are no absolutes – life is a balance. There is plenty of room in life for both productive and unproductive activities. The problem is that most people have the balance tilted too far towards the latter.

So if your life needs a boost, try giving up something you “enjoy”, and replacing it with something that improves your life.

This is email #43 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​Money and Confidence are Interchangeable​

So, I’m assuming you are here reading this because you want to get yourself some more money.

And since this is Mr. Money Mustache and not a standard financial publication, you’re willing to think about the bigger picture:

Not necessarily “Maximum money at all costs so I can have a nice, spendy retirement!”

More like “A good, fun amount of money so I can walk outta this cubicle with confidence and never look back.”

Making that mental leap is a huge one. It takes you from a life of permanent pursuit of the unattainable, to one where you get to the “Enough” stage pretty quickly. This alone will change the course of your life for the better.

But what if there were an even bigger mental leap that we were leaving out? One that starts with the hard-nosed math of living off of your investments, but then puts it on a more flexible scale that allows you take shortcuts and attain the freedom you want, much sooner?

Well, there is such a shortcut of course, and there is even a story right from my own life that illustrates it.

The Unnecessary Fears of Teenager MMM

Since I was a kid, I’ve always had confidence issues. I was afraid to attend the birthday parties of other kids, if there were too many strangers around. I was afraid to try new foods or join any teams. It took me a long time to become outgoing enough to start meeting girls in high school.

I compensated for these things by trying to be really good at everything, in an attempt to alleviate feelings of worry. Insisting on A+ grades even on the most pointless of assignments, just because I felt that “winning” was a safe defense against bullshit workloads.

I engaged in slightly compulsive weight training with a gang of close friends (and probably fellow misfits) until we were all well-dressed two hundred pound muscleheads, safe from the risk of bullying and gleefully (but needily) soaking up the status rewards of having fancier outer appearances. We would have all claimed it was for fun reasons or health reasons, but there was plenty of teenage insecurity driving up those barbell plates at 5:30am as well.

Even as a young adult, my desire to build up a massive financial surplus was probably at least partly driven by a desire to protect myself from things that could go wrong – like unemployment or being stuck in a job that I no longer enjoyed.

I’m not ashamed to admit all of this, because you need to see your opponent clearly in order to beat it. I went through this journey of insecurity and came out in a good place – in the safety of a well-designed life with lots of advantages. But since then, as I have spent the subsequent thirteen years learning more about that life, and meeting new people with entirely different successful lives, I have come to realize something I wish I could have known earlier:

I had nothing to worry about in the first place.

It turns out I didn’t need all that money, because my needs and wants will never be more than I earn from my natural desire to do useful work. You don’t need to be a musclehead in order to have friends or meet attractive people or deter bullies – normal fitness is just fine and being friendly and open is much more attractive – whether your goal is finding love or running a powerful enterprise.

You don’t have to OVERACHIEVE at everything you do – you can be strategically great at things you truly enjoy, carve the rest of the unnecessary crap out of your life, and spend your days in a much healthier balance of work and play.

Many of us are focusing our energy on building up the wall of protective money and insurance policies around us to ever-greater heights, working one last year and funding one last insurance policy against an obscure risk, when really our deficit is not in money. It’s in confidence.

And thus, it turns out that Money and Confidence are Interchangeable.

Figure 1: With no confidence, you need a shit-ton of money to feel comfortable. Find a smarter balance.

Think about it: It took me seventeen years of school and ten years of work to become an expert software engineer, making a growing six-figure salary and collect about a million dollars* of investments by about age thirty.

But then, years after retirement I started a carpentry business just for fun, and within just a few weeks of spreading the word, I had enough business to easily pay the bills with very part time work. And most notably, I still do some paid carpentry, just because it’s an incredibly fun and satisfying way to spend a few hours with friends, fixing up a house on a sunny day.

So, would a sufficiently confident carpenter really need to do the engineering career and save that million, in order to live a satisfying life?

In 2011, I started this website to write about money. Even without the lottery-like success it has lucked into, I would have still ended up with a writing career in a popular subject that was loads of fun and could again have easily paid the bills through things like consulting, advising, speaking, or connecting with new friends for business opportunities. And I’ve enjoyed writing since I was ten years old – with enough confidence, I could have started writing about money decades earlier.

So maybe a confident younger money writer with lots of drive is also already set for a great life, even if he or she isn’t sitting on a lifetime of investments?

In 2017, I bought a small commercial building alongside some friends and converted half of it into a coworking space, and it easily filled up with members. Despite charging only a third of standard rates, the income from this business could also be plenty to fund a happy family’s lifestyle if we managed it well.

If I had the confidence earlier in life, I could have shortcut the intervening work and achieved almost exactly my current lifestyle decades ago: no war chest of investments required.

More important than these examples from my life, are examples from yours.

Every day, I get emails from people describing their plentiful savings and unpleasant jobs, and then a description of the golden handcuffs or fearful assumptions that keep them working in their jobs.

They wonder when, if ever, they’ll be able to quit. When really, the problem is not the money, it’s the confidence. With confidence, they could quit right now.

Confidence allows you to change your current life entirely and instantly, without the need to change anything – because you’re just rearranging the feelings in your mind.

Imagine for a moment that you’re Jill CTO or Joe Attorney, locked into a prestigious firm and a two point six million dollar Washington DC dream townhouse. You’ve got an entire department reporting to you, your ex-spouse to manage, two kids in private schools, a standardized and rigorous vacation plan to address both sets of inlaws, and a comfortable, safe brand new Lexus Hybrid SUV that you use several times per day because although you agree with Mr. Money Mustache that more people should be riding bikes, it just doesn’t work with your lifestyle right now.

You’re a high achiever, no doubt about it. But what is all this achievement buying you in life happiness today? Are you selling off your current years of youth to The Firm, and putting off your happiness because in just another decade or so, once the kids are grown and things settle out, then you’ll give yourself permission to be happy?

If so, you may have confidence issues, just like the rest of us.

What if we could take all that complexity and ass-covering and self-protection in your current life, set it aside, and consider the following ideas.

In fact, let’s repeat all of this together in the first person so it sinks in for real:

A Recipe For Badass Confidence

​

• I will always be able to get a job if I need one.
• Billions of people are living far less expensive lives than mine, and yet many millions of these people are surely happier than me. What is their secret?
• While I don’t control the entire world, I am in control of my response to everything I experience. And my response is the part that determines my happiness.
• I am in control of my cost of living. Everything I do is a decision, and it’s made by me, not the world around me.
• I can always learn new things. With proper dedication, I can gain any skill that I want or need. This means when I depend on other people, it’s just a positive choice we are both making. When others depend on me, they are acknowledging my strength and I will choose to pass some of it on to them.
• My kids will be just fine. Just by giving them my love and support and being honest with them. They don’t need prestige and they don’t need the support of multimillionaire parents to prosper in life. Nobody does.
• Exotic Travel (just like any other luxury) is not a necessity for a happy life. At a moment’s notice, I could choose to spend the rest of my life within driving distance of this spot, and still lead a completely blissful existence forever.
• But on the other side of that same coin, I can always move. My current location is a mixture of chance and choice, but people move all the time and their lives are usually better for it.
• I can always make friends. No matter where you drop me in the world, I could build up a loving support network of warm and caring relationships. Because people are the same everywhere – we all just want to be valued and given some warm attention.
• I know that my real goal in life is happiness, and I will always have the right tools available to me to maximize my happiness. They’re everywhere, and they are free.
• Millions of others have achieved this before me, with fewer advantages and in harder times. I have more than enough personal power to get this shit done, in spades.

​

That collection of points above, is my personal version of what Confidence means. But you’re welcome to use it, adapt it, even turn it into a t-shirt or tattoo for yourself. Confidence is the opposite of fear, and fear is the enemy that stands between most people and greater happiness.

And because it’s interchangeable with the need for money, that dozen or so bullet points can easily be worth millions of dollars.

The biggest bonus about this multimillion dollar recipe? If you haven’t followed it before, your initial results will come strikingly fast and fuel your desire to get yourself even more of it. Confidence is addictive, joyful, and self-reinforcing.

What To Do With This Amazing Power

You now have two complementary tools in your belt: Money, and Confidence. Both of them are useful. But it would be foolish to develop one exclusively, while completely ignoring the other.

Most people work too much on the money and use it to compensate for a lack of confidence. To get to the next stage in life, you will need to stop doing that.

The Freedom to live happily is your goal. Confidence is part of the price of admission.

*based on 2005 retirement date inflation adjusted to present-day dollars

This is email #44 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​Hacking Hedonic Adaptation to Get Way More For Your Money​

After three years, wall-mounted toilet paper has become the latest thrill.

When I built our current house, I decided to do as much of the work as practical myself, because I learned years ago that this is the most satisfying way to live.

I love sitting back late at night, especially during cold winter nights or intense summer rainstorms, and looking up at the high ceilings and the ornately framed windows and thinking about all that structure holding itself together and protecting us so nicely inside. Satisfaction.

Sure, practicality also required somecompromises – for this particular house I hired out the big, repetitive task of drywall, and hired friends to work with me on the heavy parts like framing the roof.

But as soon as the house was even remotely habitable, with plywood kitchen countertops and no bathroom sink, we moved in. This allowed me to keep working on the place without being away from the family, and also to move out and stage the previous house nicely so we could put it on the market.

That was in early 2014, and true to my nature I’ve never really stopped working on the house since then. The first things were urgent, like quality countertops and sinks and faucets, appliances and light fixtures and functioning closets, so I did these things quickly. Then I installed a really nice woodstove before that first winter came, then built the second bathroom, and moved on to renovate our son’s room in the old wing of the house that had not been part of the fully rebuilt section. Then more closets, trims, cabinetry, little features here and there as the need arose, and even the rather major feature of the detached Rock’n’roll Studio.

There have been a hundred little upgrades, always arriving with random timing, as time permitted. And the interesting thing about them has been this:

Each little upgrade – whether big or small – has brought a similar amount of short-lived but genuine happiness.

When I upgraded the countertops from plywood to quartz, we were all thrilled at the new, smooth and easily cleanable nature of the kitchen. Then after a week or two, this thrill became the new normal, and gradually faded into the background.

But then, I added shelves to a closet, and fighting with piles of clothes in laundry baskets became a joyful flip through a row of hanging shirts and nicely folded pants on smooth wooden shelves. Another thrill! For another few weeks.

On and on these small upgrades went, each one accomplished by my own two hands, so that I got the satisfaction of a job well done, and also lived in a house that was constantly getting just a bit better every week.

Looking back, this has been so much better than just moving into a pre-made, perfect, fancy house that somebody else built for me, and doing it this way hasalso saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars at the same time. And even if you’re not a carpenter yourself, you can get the same benefits by understanding the human psychology at work here.

Hacking Hedonic Adaptation.

You may recall me cautioning you in this long-ago MMM Classic, to avoid buying yourself fancy shit, because the thrill of every new life upgrade – whether it is a nicer dishwasher or a faster Mercedes – always wears off, and your overall life happiness returns to exactly where it was. It’s quite an un-intuitive result, but if you watch yourself over time, you will notice it is uncannily accurate.

For example, I started this blog seven years ago in 2011, and distinctly remember being very happy with life, even way back then. Sure, I had problems just like everyone else, but on balance it was still a great life, because I was already pressing most or all of the actual buttons for human happiness​

Some of the recipe for happiness (a slide from my WDS talk)

Since then, I have stumbled into a few upgrades:

• A nicer house
• A nicer bike (several, actually)
• A nicer car​
• A nicer dishwasher
• Internet fame
• Several times more money than I had before
• A really fun new business (the MMM-HQ coworking space)
• And many, many other nicer things (clothes, electronic gadgets, interesting trips, and so on)

And yet, I’m still not reallyany happier than before, sitting here right at this moment. My life looks more prestigious and luxurious on paper, but since I was already pretty damned happy with life before, there was not much to improve.

This brings up a strange paradox. Because I also remember feeling quite giddy and thrilled with each of these upgrades as I made them. Those happy feelings were genuine. What Gives?

The Happiness Bump

The phenomenon at work was the temporary thrill of a new life upgrade. If we were to sketch it out on paper, it would look like this:

The Short-term Happiness Bump from lifestyle upgrades

As you can see, you make the upgrade, and you do get some genuine thrills for a short time.

The key thing to know about your happiness is that you have a ‘baseline’ level. Some of it is genetically inherited, but you can also have a strong effect on it yourself, by pressing the genuine happiness buttons in the diagram above.

Most lifestyle upgrades (cars, dishwashers, or even my new toilet paper holder) do not press these buttons, unless they truly address a shortfall in your previous life.

If your dishwasher was broken and tormenting you every day, then an upgrade may feel quite meaningful. But if the three year lease simply expired on your still-nearly-new Mercedes and you went to the dealer to swap it for an even newer model, you will likely get a far less significant buzz – because the old car was probably not causing you daily pain.

In the best possible outcome, you might make a life change that helps you gain new skills, increase your health, or improve your life’s core relationships. This could stretch out the shaded “Actual Benefit” part of the graph to be much longer, in the extreme cases for your whole life.

But in the typical outcome, most of us make changes that produce only a short bump, and then may even come back to haunt us with a payback time (which I labeled the “debt hangover” in the picture). Anything that puts you into debt, makes you less healthy or otherwise compromises your ability to live a happy life fits into this category.

Putting it into Practice

Your job as a wise, badass Human is to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and then arrange your life to make the best of things. The temptation to pursue shiny but useless upgrades is one of our biggest weaknesses. So try the following hacks:

• Consider each potential change (whether it is a purchase, a trip, or a lunch out at a restaurant) from the perspective of one year in the future. How much better will your life be in oneyear, if you make this decision right now?
• Delay everything and space it out as much as possible. The anticipation of a treat often provides at least as much joy as the consummation. Simply doubling your waiting period will cut your spending on this stuff in half.
• By cutting your upgrades into smaller pieces (as I did with the piecemeal home construction), you get to experience the thrill more often.
• Put your priority on upgrades that remove a strong daily negative or a barrier to happiness. Keep your existing cars, clothes, and furniture if they still work. But make a list of stuff that taunts and torments you every day – a messy basement or garage, perhaps, or a clunky bike or kitchen faucet. Since you use these things every day, you’ll get lasting satisfaction if you upgrade them to reliable, beautiful, painless-to-own condition.
• Find ways to modify each potential upgrade so that it presses more of your happiness buttons. Make it more challenging, do things that require you to learn or accomplish something first, choose things that allow you to create or strengthen friendships, and choose the healthier options out of any alternatives you are given.
• Use your temptation to buy or consume new things as a habit trigger: catch yourself in the moment of weakness (because this happens automatically and frequently), and use this to do something good for you instead. For example, every time I walk by my fridge and gaze longingly at the handle, thinking of pulling out a cold beer, I am reminded to go out to my back patio and do 100 push-ups instead. In really disciplined times (like the last few months for me), I back this up by also not keeping any beer in the house. But even if the end result is a bubbly reward, I have improved the reward bump by packaging in a permanent benefit (fitness) with the otherwise very short term reward of a drink.
• And finally, keep a list of your top life priorities on your fridge door, or your work computer monitor, or somewhere else that you see it many times per day. Stuff like better friendships, better parenting, health, financial independence, happiness, personal growth. Looking at this list before you decide to do anything – whether it’s planning a lunch or moving to a new house, can serve as a surprisingly powerful anchor to help you fine tune your happiness bumps – stretching out the good parts and eliminating the hangovers.

Happy Hacking!

In the comments: which life upgrades have you made that ended up producing neutral results or even regret, and which ones have provided more lasting happiness?

​

This is email #45 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​A Day In The Life of my Supposedly Frugal Stomach​

Kicking Ass with Money is much like healthy eating and joyful living. It’s a series of daily habits that get you ahead, rather than a one-time heroic effort that fixes all your problems so you can go back to whatever you were doing before.

Because of this parallel, the subject of food is one of the nicest examples of Mustachian living, and one of the most powerful and efficient things to master.

Your eating choices will drastically affect your budget (especially if you are raising a family), but they also affect your health, energy levels, productivity, and happiness. The path to a great life goes directly across your dinner plate, so it is important to take this shit seriously and not mess around with your nutrition.

I’ve written about food several times before, sometimes with a focus on recipes or costs or general principles. But people often don’t believe me – they think I am either lying about my family’s grocery spending, eating a diet that is poor in nutritional value, or at least spending an inordinate amount of time on meal planning and preparation.

The truth is none of these things, although the actual story may still surprise you. So I thought that instead of issuing vague commandments like the preacher I am, I could share my functional and (somewhat) affordable eating style, even though it’s unusual and surely not for everyone.

So I’ll lay out a single day’s nutrition strategy, and why I think it is a good one. And then you can choose whether to ridicule it on Reddit, or adopt any tricks from it that you like for your own family. Are you ready? Then let’s take a trip into the MMM kitchen!

Alongside the Table Saw, the Cutting Board is also a favorite tool.

The first bit of crazy is that when I’m home, I eat almost the same thing every day. My son eats exactly the same thing every day* for now, and Mrs. MM runs her own show, perhaps with a bit more variety than either of us. This is a unique situation in our family that is different from most, and it adds extra complexity but fortunately not extra cost. You play with the cards you are dealt.

Most Important is your Eating Philosophy

For most people, food is just an automatic routine. They eat whatever seems tasty whenever they are hungry. People with stronger passions (sometimes known as Foodies), spend a large part of their day and mental energy seeking out perfect ingredients and flavors and meals. And for many, eating is an addiction – food calls to them (especially desserts and snacks), and they fight this addiction with varying degrees of success. People with a busy urban social life like New Yorkers get most of their food from restaurants, which throws both the nutrition content and the monthly cost into a randomizing hat.

The problem with all of these philosophies is that each is a huge gamble, with your life as the stakes. Because depending on your body chemistry and the foods you choose, you can end up anywhere on the health scale – I have met sweating car bound 25 year-old office workers who could barely stroll from the parking lot to the building, and also know a ripped 65 year-old carpenter who can still frame a three-story house by himself. The difference in the diets of these two men is as stark as the contrast in their physiques.

So my eating philosophy has always been that of the Engineer/Robot. Design each meal and each day’s food intake, according to my body’s current needs. Since my activity level changes drastically (yesterday’s mountain hike requires several times more calories than today’s work on this blog article), the food intake has to change accordingly. And since I don’t always get things exactly right, the mirror tells me when it’s time to make adjustments.

And finally, I’m a big fan of high standards and not fooling yourself. Stay lean and keep your body in condition to work hard. Learn to use the mirror, the measuring tape, and the scale as allies rather than generators of guilt and fear. If you’re not there yet, keep yourself moving in the right direction rather than being complacent. For example, if my abs get paved over with fat, I’ll adjust the variables below to go into fat loss mode until the problem is corrected. On the other hand, if I’m getting too skinny and trying to put on strength and weight, I’ll add the extra meals back in.

The Weird MMM Meal Plan

Breakfast

I have come to think of Breakfast as the time of Breaking the Fast.. but by now we all know that fasting is good for you, right? So the design of your breakfast presents an interesting life-boosting opportunity: When you wake up, you’re already in a nice low-blood-sugar state, which means your body is beginning to think about burning fats as a source of energy (ketosis). This means that you can just prolong the fast by skipping breakfast and just enjoying some coffee or water, or take a softer approach and at least have a breakfast that is very low in sugar. So I do this:

• Espresso Coffee with Whole milk and Coconut oil
• A handful of mixed nuts
• A few squares of dark chocolate (85%)

Subjectively, I find this breakfast is satisfying and delicious, but also keeps my body in low-sugar mode so I can begin a day of physical labor without hunger – and potentially work as long as I want, even skipping lunch and running on stored bodyfat if desired. (Note, I make the coffee with this super cheap but super reliable espresso machine and heat/fluff the milk and coconut oil together to get the tasty results).

The end result is this nutrition profile:

note: all nutrient weights are in grams

At this point, you may be asking, “Wait, does Mustache really weigh and analyze his food?” – and the answer is “sorta.” While I endeavor to lead a relaxed, hippy lifestyle, the Engineer/Robot side is always in the background running the numbers. I don’t really measure my calories, but due to a lifetime of reading nutrition books and labels, I do always have a background idea of what I’m consuming with each meal.

If you have at least a rough idea of the nutrition content of what you are eating, you will have a far easier time getting the results you want.

Mid Morning Snack

After breakfast, I usually bike downtown to a mixture of construction and weight training in the back “prisonyard” of the MMM-HQ Coworking space. After a few hours of this, I am ready for a bit more nutrition:

• A giant salad
• Plenty of water, or even the indulgence of a second cup of coffee

These big salads are a big part of my daily food expenditure and effort, but probably an even bigger part of my health. So they are definitely worth it. I make it easier by making salad in bulk every few days, and starting with a base of a pre-made $2.28 Kale Salad Kit from Sam’s/Costco. This provides a bunch of greens and saves much chopping. But I discard the crappy sugary dressing that comes with the kit and use my own olive oil-based dressing, also made in bulk from high quality ingredients also bought in bulk, (like 3 Liter Jugs of olive oil!)

I may throw in a protein bar (30g protein, $1.00) to this snack, depending on the intensity of the work.

Lunch

After the midmorning snack, I am back out for quality time with the saws and ladders for a few more hours, which feels great on a relatively light load of food because the body is burning clean and lean. The low carbohydrate nature of everything I have eaten so far keeps the hunger level so low that I could even work right through and skip lunch if needed, or if I were trying to lose fat. But sinceI’m currently at roughly right fat level and not wanting to be anylighter than I am, I break at around 2PM for something like this:

I have been on a bit of a Tilapia binge in recent months, because they are almost tooconvenient and tasty and easy to prepare. So much so, that my friends and I jokingly refer to them as “marriage savers” – there is no need to fret over whose turn it is to prepare dinner, if something with such a good nutrition profile is always in the freezer and just 15 toaster oven minutes away from your tongue.

While the nutrition profile is good, they are still a bit of an expensive source of protein. $2.00 sounds like chump change, but the same protein can be had for under fifty cents from other sources like bean and rice combinations, eggs, or even whey protein supplements.

A cost difference of just $1.50 per person per meal, multiplied over a four-person family’s 372 meals per month makes a difference of $558 per month, or about $96,000 per decade after compounding.

Yes, that is a hundred grand, and this is just the difference between a semi-frugal $2.00 meal component and a fifty cent equivalent from, say, your crock pot.

Imagine, then, the effect that impulse grocery purchases like those little $7.49 packs of sushi would make, if you casually toss them in the cart on a regular basis? A decade of a family’s innocent-seeming Whole Foods indulgence could pay for a house outright, while leaving them no better nourished than wiser meal planning with bulk ingredients.

Put a crock pot and a Costco membership to good use, and just watch what happens to your bank account.

Now, I took that sushi picture on my own kitchen table, so we too are guilty of this indulgence. But we are long past financial independence, and even then it is a rare purchase. The overall lesson is just, again, to take this shit seriously – make sure you appreciate every food purchase above beans-and-rice level as a conscious luxury rather than just a habit. And if you are in debt, no sushi for you!

Dinner

Another typical dinner – main dish is based on potatoes/veggies plus fancy sausages baked into a cheese-laden casserole.

Around 3:30pm in the afternoon, I’ll walk or bike home from “work”, so I can be there when my son returns home from school – one of the biggest rewards of early retirement. One of us parents will cook him a homemade pizza at this point (I pre-make the personal size shells and keep them in stacks in the freezer), so he can recharge with about 480 calories from a delicious meal that costs only about 50 cents to make.

Then us Adults will usually collaborate to make something like pulled-pork tacos:

On the side, we might add chopped fresh vegetables, more salad, or something more substantial as the appetites require. Like the filets, it’s not the cheapest possible way to get a meal, but at least it is reasonable. Also, we are omnivores, which is a more expensive and polluting way to get protein – but if you’re not badass enough to eat vegetarian you can at least make a substantial dent in your eco footprint by making beef your last choice of meats.

Adding it All Up

Although it took me quite a few hours to collect all this data on what I eat and add it up in a spreadsheet, the results have been quite interesting because I had never done it before. With just the stuff described above, I arrived at this point:

And the numbers were a bit surprising to me, in the following ways:

• I am spending a lot more on food than I thought. If all three of us ate the way I do, our annual grocery bill would be $8600, not counting additional indulgences or food for parties. Since our real bill is closer to $6000, you can see that I am doing more than my share of the spending. Then again, I do weigh more than both Little MM and his mother combined , so perhaps this is fair.
• My base calorie level is about right for my age and height for a moderately active person, but on active days I need closer to 4000 calories (if you look up a 185 pound male “athlete” for the baseline)
• My base protein level is also about right for moderate activity, but on highly physical or weight training days I like to boost that to one gram per pound of bodyweight.
• So while everything in this article is detailed and accurate so far, I tend to eat a variable amount of additional food to meet hunger needs, scaling it all up and down depending on what the mirror says. I use one or more of the following boosts.

Boosts

• Handfuls of Nuts (1 ounce worth, 160 calories)
• Protein Smoothie (banana, peanut butter, plain yogurt, tiny bit of milk, ice, water, and vanilla protein mix – about 1000 calories and 40 grams protein)
• 2-3 simple eggs cooked in olive oil with a bit of cheese: 500 calories, 20 grams of protein, 50 cents or so.
• Avocado toast: 3 eggs, some shredded cheese, avocado, all on a piece of whole wheat toast with butter. A truly decadent weight gainer of a snack, although quite cheap. Leave out toast if you are not trying to maintain or gain weight. 1000 calories, plenty of nutrients about a buck.

Conclusion

Understanding the big picture is much more important than counting pennies and calories. Just gradually learn what is good (and bad) for you in general, and what is affordable versus expensive in general. Choose wisely on average over time, and watch as things just seem to work better over time – in both the beltline and the bank account.

*and while I won’t explain this in detail here, parents of children with his personality type will understand without question. It is something people do tend to grow out of as they get older and gain confidence with new experiences.

​

This is email #46 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.

​The Twenty Dollar Swim​

(photo: just a gratuitous mid-lake selfie from yet another day
of nearly-zero-dollar “motor”boating, earlier this week)

It was mid July, and I had just finished a sweaty run on the trails which criscross my older sister’s farm in Canada. I was overheated and heading straight for their swimming pool when she saw me walking across the lawn.

“Oh yeah, please do use the pool! You’ll help get my cost per use down because it’s still way up there in crazy territory”, she joked.

Moments like these are why I love being part of this family. The self-deprecating Spock-like humour where we can make fun of our own flaws and indulgences, while simultaneously enjoying them just as much.

But it also sparked an interesting conversation, because I knew they had been running this pool since the early 2000s, raised their two now-adult water loving boys in the house, and hosted gatherings for family and friends throughout every summer. And it wasn’t an exorbitant pool. Surely this was one of the more affordable indulgences, right?

“Has the cost per swim really been that high?”, I asked.

“Every jump into that pool has cost almost twenty bucks, if you average it out.” she replied.

“Wow, how could that be true?!” I mused.

So I did some rough calculations like those you see in the box below, which you can totally skip right over* if you just want the final answer.

​

• The pool originally cost $30,000
  ​
• But that money could have been invested instead, which would have compounded at 7% for these 18 years.
  ​
• $30k compounded at 7% (30×1.07^18) is an amazing $101,300!
  ​
• Electricity at 10 kwh/day x $0.20 at for 100 days per season is $200 per season or $3600 total
  ​
• Chlorine and other chemicals: $600 per season add to $10,800
  ​
• Maintenance like vacuums, nets, a new liner: $800 per season $14,400
  ​
• We’re already at $130,000​
  ​

Not even counting the hundreds of hours that went into scooping out bugs, spiders, mice, and even raccoons, and potentially higher home insurance premiums and water bills (in my region a 25,000 gallon pool costs $125 in water to fill – once!)

And how many swims were enjoyed in the pool? If every family member swam every day for every season, you’d still only end up at 18 years x 100 days x 4 people = 7200 swims.

$130 grand divided by 7200 is $18.oo

So the final number is about 18 bucks per person per swim, just as my sister claimed.

Looking forward to a refreshing dip with Mom and Dad and the kids? That’s $72 bucks that you ended up burning, by the time all the chips fell.

I know this is a strange way to think about a swimming pool. But this is a Mr. Money Mustache article, and this site is all about different ways to think about your life decisions.

Most people just say something like, “Well, we’ve already got it so we might as well enjoy it, right?”

The problem is that they also apply this to other purchases, even those they haven’t made yet. The richer our tastes become, the more likely we are to buy ourselves little upgrades “just because it would be nice”, or “just in case”, or because Joe Jones next door or a magazine article mentioned the idea.

“Okay Mr. Money Mustache, What Are You Taking Away From Me This Time?”

Don’t worry, I’m not necessarily going to strip you of your dreams of that swimming pool, or anything else. But I do want you to start thinking about these costs in a much more visceral and explicit way, so you can really make sure you are not fooling yourself. For example, let’s step through a few more common blunders. Note that these are real numbers that I can back up with a spreadsheet, but I’m just presenting the end results here so as to keep you awake:

• “We had a great time visiting the Smiths in their ski house last weekend – LET’S GET ONE OURSELVES!” – sure, as long as you are ready to devote your financial life to the activity and the activity is worth $890.00 per night you actually spend there. But if this number sounds like anything other than chump change, you and your friends might want to just share an Airbnb for your ski weekends, or even better, take up local mountain biking instead of far-away skiing.
  ​
• “I like these two houses equally, but one of them has a much bigger yard which is better for Junior to play in. They’re the same price and the bigger yard is just ten miles down the road!” – okay, but make sure that Junior’s time in the extra yard space is worth $150 per hour.
  ​
• “I’m thinking of springing for the $9000 long-range battery in my upcoming Tesla Model 3 order” – this one strikes straight at my own heart, because I crave a long range Model 3 myself. But even for a serious roadtripper, this works out to $125 per hour of charging time that you manage to avoid. Aren’t you willing to take a few minutes occasionally to walk around and admire your beautiful car if you get paid $125 per hour after tax for it? If you are, standard range will do.
  ​
• “I live in an area with snowy winters, so I need all-wheel-drive” since we already learned that all-wheel-drive does not make you safer, the only time it actually helps you is when it prevents you from being stuck. But this could work out to between $50 and $500 per time the AWD actually gets you out of a bind. Aren’t you willing to shovel your driveway a bit more thoroughly (or work from home on the worst days) for $500 a pop?
  ​
• “We’d love to have an extra bedroom as a way of accommodating Grandma’s Annual Visit” Sure, but if you spend $90,000 extra on a slightly larger house and use that guest room 20 nights per year, it’s about $210 per night that you use it.
  ​
• “I live in Chicago and we just love to spend weekends on the Boat.” Even if you go all-in and give up all your weekend activities on the land to maximize your time down at the marina, those nights in that little wedge-shaped cabin bed will average out to about $500 per night. Or more if you opt for a bigger boat or more time with the motor on.
  ​
• “We love to explore and be free for a few months each year, so we’re getting an RV and towing the car…” But a three month, 15,000 mile RV trip works out to about $200 per night that you sleep in that vehicle – why not pick up a fairly new Prius and a good tent and hit the road, and treat yourself to beautiful rental accommodation whenever you want it along the way?

We could go on and on with these examples, but the real thing to understand is that making commitments usually comes with a bigger cost than you expect. There are a shitload of dollars at stake, but also a substantial portion of your focus and mental energy which will go into furnishing, maintaining, insuring, and cleaning these pleasant weekend distractions.

“But How Can I do It Better While Keeping My Life Fun?”

As a Mustachian, you have way more options open to you than you realize. But to take advantage of them, you need to stop doing what other people are doing, and live differently.

At the most frugal level, you can just cut yourself off cold turkey. From now on, just start doing all leisure within biking distance of home, and preparing all of your own food – no exceptions. You can still organize and host parties, however.

If you’re in a stressful debt situation right now and want to be out of it, you should just do this right now as a mental reset and watch the incredible results on your wealth. Most people who hit this reset button end up between $20,000 and $100,000 further ahead within just the first year, with many happy stories to share about it, so if you’re in need of a quick life boost, do this instead of dilly-dallying around with my rich person suggestions below.

But if you’re a debt free person with higher income and just want to accelerate your path to financial freedom, you can still dabble in the spendier life and keep up with your peers, by simply shuffling the luxury deck a little bit differently. A few principles that can still cut your budget by 75%:

• Prioritize the healthy stuff first: It’s the weekend and you are ready to celebrate. But first, what’s on your to-do list? Are you fully caught up on your workouts, grocery shopping, and various nonsense with the incoming mail? If not, budget a full day for that rather than packing up the car for a road trip. How’s your yard looking? Have you fixed that door that doesn’t latch correctly? And OH YEAH let’s do one giant batch of your favorite dish and freeze it in portions so you’ll have easy lunches and dinners for many days to come. Well, look at that, your whole weekend is booked after all and you’ll feel better for it.
  ​
• Muscle over Motor: If you like being on the slopes, learn to mountain bike. If you like being on the water, try a big, cushy sea kayak complete with cupholders for your sunrise coffee or sunset beer. Invite your fit and funloving friends and start exploring waterways everywhere. Or if you want a night out on the town, choose somewhere close and grab your bike rather than somewhere far and looking for your car keys or your Uber app.
  ​
• Rent Instead of Buying: With Airbnb or even plain old hotels, you can still have weekend getaways when you truly deserve and can afford them, and yet the cost per use is much lower. The numbers will still look big, and that’s a good thing because you will be reminded that it is always expensive to leave your already-perfectly-good-home and go out to do even fancier things. When you’re living large, it’s best to joyfully acknowledge it rather than pretending it’s normal.
  ​
• Make Special Arrangements: If you like cottages, make yourself useful to a friend who owns a cottage, by always being the one to bring the food or the wine, or donating your time to help with the maintenance or renovations. I helped build a cottage for my inlaws in Canada a few years back, and have enjoyed the fruits of our combined labor ever since – at no cost to the MMM family. Similarly, if you like boats, volunteer as part of the crew on a real yacht. If you like houses, specialize in building or renovating them, or hosting paying guests in the unused portions. If you like cars, become a car expert rather than just a car consumer.

The Final Word:

If you’re already eating and sleeping well, chances are that you already have all the basic ingredients for a happy life. So as you go on to start adding some spices to the dish as all of us do, just be sure you look at the price tag. The advantage you’ll gain will last a lifetime.

Epilogue: Just this year, after her boys had grown up and flown from the nest and all the fun had been had, my sister filled in the pool and is in the process of replacing it with trees , a super-cool natural pond, and other landscaping instead. A bold move that few people would be rational enough to take – live long and prosper, Sister.

Extra Credit: Here are a few of the cost-per-use calculations I made for this article. Share some of your own in the comments!

Mountain house: $24,000 per year mortgage and/or capital cost, furnishings, utilities and maintenance divided by 30 nights per year. Plus $90 in car costs per roundtrip drive for a weekend.

Bigger yard: 1 hour per week of activities that really could not have been done in a smaller yard or an outdoor park, compared to 100 miles of extra driving ($50) and 3.5 hours of your time ($100) spent doing that driving.

Tesla Battery Upgrade: The only time you use the longer range is on roadtrips over 230 miles. If you do a 600-mile trip once every month, you have to make two extra 30-minute charging stops per month. Figure the $9000 battery costs you about $1500 in extra capital cost and depreciation per year, or $125 per month. However, if you are a Tesla fan like me and you want the company to make more profit to continue their mission, you may still opt for the extra options since you have nothing better to do with that money anyway.

All wheel drive car: if the car costs $5000 more up-front plus an extra $200 per year in fuel and maintenance, you could estimate it as about $500 per year more expensive to own. Then, how many times do you truly get stuck in a front-wheel drive car with really good dedicated snow tires on winter rims? (because snow tires always come before buying AWD!)

Grandma’s bedroom: a $30k more expensive house might consume about 2% of that extra cost in maintenance and taxes annually ($300), plus 5% annually in financing/capital costs ($1800), for a total of $2100 per year. Strangely enough, this extra bedroom works out to be one of the cheaper indulgences in this list, especially if you can use that room as an office too, or rent it out occasionally.

Boat: It costs about $15,000 per year to own, dock, store, transport, maintain, depreciate, and fuel a 26-foot motorboat with a little sleeper cabin in the front. If you spend each of the sixteen weekends of Chicago’s warm seasons exclusively in the boat, you’ve still done only about 32 days there, which yields the surprisingly high cost of almost $500 per night.

RV: Even a relatively small $50,000 RV depreciates about $0.50 per mile and burns fuel and oil and tires at another fifty cents. And that’s before you even pay for supplies, maintenance and nightly parking fees! Large RV travel is even dumber, financially speaking – note that the fanciest tour-bus-sized RVs you see cost about $500,000! The physics are simply against you if you are trying to travel in your own personal rolling building. Although stationary living in a not-too-expensive RV or trailer can be a highly Mustachian choice.

* I let you skip that one just so you would keep reading and see my point. But now that you see it, hopefully you also see that you do need to look at the numbers in life and figure this stuff for yourself, because it’s a way bigger deal than you might think!

This is email #47 of roughly 52 Classics in the MMM boot camp series. You can always find the original versions of any of my posts in this complete list of all posts.