Nov 28, 2012
So, here I am on a tropical island. It’s 4:06am local time. The only light is that of the moon peeking through the canopy of Monkey Pod trees that covers the entire property and the only sound is the rustling of leaves in the night wind. Temperature is in the bare feet with t-shirt range…
The real estate market has been pretty interesting in my area in recent months, and perhaps in yours as well. It’s a topic worthy of discussion on this blog, since many of us consider property ownership to be a key part of our early retirement strategy. If you live in an area where houses are…
Dear Boss, This is to inform you that an opportunity has come up for me to spend the next seven weeks in Hawaii, and thus performance of my regular work duties will become spotty and unpredictable during this time. love, Mr. Money Mustache I’ve been keeping this a secret from you for a while,…
“Spend Less!” “No, Earn More!” The battle goes on, with scathing mockery volleyed between the opposing camps. Mainstream personal finance pundits like Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman advocate lower spending for those in debt. Yet they have an apparently unlimited upper ceiling on how much increased spending can still lead to happiness, as evidenced by…
I, Mr. Money Mustache, am going to gain twenty pounds of muscle mass, AND set a lifetime bench-pressing record…by March 21st, 2013! You heard it here first, and now I absolutely have to get it done, to avoid an incredible public ridicule and loss of credibility. I’m both nervous and excited as I type this,…
Ahh, consumerism. The growing Mustachian Army fights and slashes away great swaths of it, night and day. We wake ourselves from the nightmare of our irrational desires for 400-horsepower SUVs and 4000 square foot houses.We advance further to slice the enormous lovehandles of fat from our daily routines. We disband our armies of domestic housekeeping…
Despite the fact that he wears mostly ripped jeans and installs his own sewer pipes, Mr. Money Mustache is occasionally accused of being a privileged upper-middle class elitist who doesn’t understand the problems of real people. So this week we look at a call for advice from a reader with more challenge packed into her…
One of the questions that comes up in the face of Mr. Money Mustache’s unrelenting optimism about the state of the world is, “Will human prosperity continue even as we run out of the cheap fossil fuel energy that has powered us for the last 200 years or so?”. In a nutshell, I always say:…
It’s finally November 1st, and it means that for the first time in history, the Money Mustache family is running on a fully unsubsidized health insurance plan which we’ve paid for out of our own pocket. Isn’t that scary? As noted in past articles, I’ve had a pretty cozy health insurance situation up to this…
“The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself” – F. D. Roosevelt, 1932 “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” – B. McFerrin, 1988 Most of us know enough not to disagree openly with unassailable pillars of wisdom like those above. But somehow, we also have a hell of a time putting them into practice in…
There are some pretty neat people among the readers of this blog, and they’re sending me great stories from their lives all the time. A few months ago, a guy named Franco shared the story of how he built his own house in the Pacific Northwest mortgage-free for $30,000, and now his family lives there happily.…
In the great transition from Clueless Consumer to Badass Mustachian, a person must first overcome a significant obstacle: the perception that Frugal, Cheap, Tightwad and various other words all mean the same thing, and that they are all nasty conditions that we should try to avoid. So I’ve been meaning to lay down the law…
Things have been a little quiet around this website in recent days, as Mr. Money Mustache has been lured away from the computer and out into the great outdoors for much of the past week. The weather has been outrageously nice, and the magical healing properties of Mother Nature have been working their magic on…
At the very center of Mustachianism Itself, lies the issue of What to Do With Your Time. Time is one of your greatest allies in getting rich, but it is also a constant foe, since we all have a limited supply of it. So it makes sense that Mr. Money Mustache would spend some of his time,…
A few weeks ago, a scary piece of paper came in the mail, addressed to Mrs. Money Mustache. It was an order that she report to the downtown Boulder courthouse for jury duty in early October. The letter was careful to remind us that jury duty is an essential part of our justice system. Without…
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to go out to lunch with a dozen of my old coworkers from the high-tech company. It was quite a reunion, as I hadn’t seen many of these gentlemen since September 2005 when I retired from my engineering job. Everybody seemed just like I remembered them.…
