Nov 23, 2015
It seems that every house I’ve ever owned has needed a new furnace. I mean sure, the old furnace was still there clunking along and producing heat, but it was always some embarrassingly old thing installed by someone that obviously didn’t care about energy efficiency (or it predated the invention of efficient furnaces entirely). But like…
I generally keep this place pretty well disguised as an Early Retirement Financial Blog, but secretly it is a Life Improvement Blog. The glitzy monetary veneer allows me to get lots of media attention and scoop in readers, because everybody wants to read about money, and everybody wants more of it. “Meet the man who…
I’ve been out traveling in Ecuador for the past two weeks, living in the jungle, climbing waterfalls and noting the cultural differences of a country set about 3000 miles South and 30 years back in time from my own. Every time I settle into life in a new place, I’m always amazed at how many…
Whenever something unusually interesting in the field of personal finance shows up in the news, Mr. Money Mustache hears about it. Our diligent network of Mustachian Volunteer Spies combs and filters the world’s information, both for pearls of wisdom and pellets of comically misinformed dung. Although I take steps to remain on a low-information diet,…
This year, rumors started circulating that Google itself was starting a phone service called Google Fi. I’m a long-time Google Fan and I get great life efficiency gains from their search, email, calendar, documents, photo, and map/navigation programs among others. So I had high expectations. Although the $20 per month base price was not the…
If you were to show up and gaze down on our planet as an outsider, you could easily get the impression that Dogs run the place, and we Humans exist only to serve their needs. We provide them with shelter, transportation, medical care and even grooming, in most cases going further into personal debt to…
Almost one full year ago, I built myself an experimental electric bike to see what all the hype was about. As a profanely vocal proponent of muscle-only transportation, I was skeptical of the idea at first. But in the spirit of a good experiment, I decided to just add the thing to my bike fleet and see…
Here in the MMM family household, we live a lifestyle that could be considered unrecognizably oddball, or classically familiar depending on who you ask. Although the fairly well-appointed house in an expensive area probably does a good job at reassuring certain neighbors that we fit in, our lives are pretty different. We spend most of our time…
Four years into writing this blog, I thought I had seen almost everything when it comes to the most common financial suicides committed by the middle class. But today I was hit in the head by a shocking realization: When choosing between buying versus renting a house or apartment, people are making much, much worse choices…
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…
This is kind of a special moment for me. Since the year 2007, which is eight years ago or 20 percent of my time alive on this Earth, I have been stuck with a less-than-ideal real estate situation. And it is just about to be resolved with the happy CHA-CHING! of a cash register. To…
The best thing about Mustachianism is that it cannot be defeated. When subjected to challenges, both the philosophy itself and the individual practitioners (YOU) just bounce back stronger and happier. Collectively, we are like a 300-pound heavy bag with a grinning mustachioed face painted on the front. We just keep absorbing punches and swinging right…
I’m not going to lie to you – being wealthy is a lot of fun. And I’m not just talking about novelty fun that you get from driving around in a fancy car. True wealth is more of a big picture thing – freedom from negative stress and a higher confidence about how great life is.…
Almost two years ago, I started getting reader emails asking me if student loan refinancing was a good idea, and if a company called SoFi was a good place to do it. Never having carried such a loan myself I wasn’t sure if I was qualified to answer, but other emails were coming in reporting…
To my Brothers of the construction trades, the oil industry, the armed forces, and even plain old civilian office jobs. I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, because I think we should all be free to make our own choices. But with the recent oil boom and bust, and the even bigger housing boom…
“If everybody retired early like those Mustachians”, the lament goes, “there would be nobody left to do the work.” We need people to do the hard, dirty necessary chores that keep society running. And we need other people to keep the innovation going, since technologies and ideas don’t invent themselves. And besides, even on an individual…
