May 15, 2018
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…
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…
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…
The MMM Headquarters A Coworking Space in Downtown Longmont, Colorado What’s This? In early 2017, some friends and I shared the purchase of a dilapidated historic house in a great location on the Main Street of Longmont, Colorado, and then restored it into a pretty neat compound for holding all sorts of events. You can…
One day last week, the icy grip of a winter storm broke and the skies of Colorado returned to their normal state of deep blue with bright sunshine. So I decided to head out for a hike on the warm red rock trails just outside of Boulder. Taking a break on a big rock at…
If you have more money than you need, you should start giving some of it away. That’s the lesson I learned about a year ago, when I took a gamble and donated $100,000 to a variety of charities, centered around the Effective Altruism movement. More on Effective Altruism: The Life You Can Save website,…
About two years ago, I switched from taking my personal car to the airport, to hailing Ubers and Lyfts. The math of it was pretty simple: Uber was cheaper than paying for my driving and parking*. And that was before the considerable joy and time savings of not having to park in the airport lot…
Just a few days ago, I got a surprise in the mail. It was a very expensive registration renewal bill* from Boulder County, reminding me that my brand-new 2016 Nissan Leaf was already a whole year old. The car has now been through the full cycle of Colorado’s interesting driving conditions including blazing sunshine, blowing…
By this point you probably know all you ever wanted to know, and more, about Mr. Money Mustache’s long-ago path to early retirement. But my story is only one of an infinite number of possibilities, which means it is valuable to look around at how other people are doing it. Because of that, I’ve been…
Update January 2019: The HQ has been so much fun that we decided to quadruple our interior space and welcome more members – full details at our HQ Page or you can even Join Immediately if you’re feeling really bold! Almost exactly six years ago, I wrote a simple post about a pawn shop opening up…
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…
In this extremely wealthy country of ours, the chief barrier to wealth is often the information, or misinformation that gets stuck inside our own heads. People with the right knowledge can develop the right habits, and these habits lead them to accumulate wealth very quickly. Meanwhile, the majority of people pick up incorrect financial ideas and…
Well, I might as well come clean on our spending for last year. It either went up, or way up, depending on how you want to account for things. Every year, this annual report seems to come out a little bit later – mostly because I’m no longer all that interested in how much money we…
One of the joys and frustrations of being an engineer who is also a hopeless dreamer, is that you can see the beauty of what the world could be, while also feeling the burden of every single thing that is in the way of achieving that beauty. Envisioning this potential (and sometimes even having the…
Since 2014, I’ve been using the Betterment investing service for a growing portion of my own savings. I funded an experimental account with $100,000, and have had a monthly auto-deposit adding in an additional $1000 per month since then. The results have been documented on a page I call The Betterment Experiment. So far, the…
About three years ago, my family was happily living in a comfortable, mortgage-free house. There was more than enough room for everyone, it was in a walkable neighborhood, and thanks to some unexpected boosts in our family income, life was more affordable than ever. But suddenly, perhaps due to some combination of a romantic whim*…
