Apr 18, 2021
So it looks like my 15-year-old is officially a high-school dropout. Halfway through ninth grade, emboldened perhaps by the taste of freedom that Covid-era remote learning had provided, he realized that the whole system was just too slow and inefficient for him, and was “Getting in the way of his work.” So as it looks…
There have been a lot of big bills coming across my kitchen table recently. Property taxes, car registrations, income taxes, things for the school orchestra in which little MM plays the standup bass. Plus the usual credit card bills for all my spending on groceries and not-all-that-rare luxury indulgences. There’s nothing bad or unexpected in…
Dearest Readers, I’ve been waiting to tell you this with considerable excitement for a whole year, but the sales contract prevented me from doing so until this moment. And as of April 1st, 2019, I’m officially free to reveal that: Mr. Money Mustache has been sold! Yep. I’m not sure if it’s the age-old truism…
Even in the most carefully run and financially independent of lives, there will be some wrenching twists and turns. Friendships and businesses will fail. You or your loved ones will get sick and some of them will die. Kids will have plenty of trouble on their long road to adulthood – if they even make…
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…
If you ask a modern member of today’s American Elite to review Mr. Money Mustache’s childhood and educational history, the report would probably come back dripping with sympathy and disdain. I went to public school (the only school, really), in a lower-middle income small town. I didn’t join many extracurricular activities or attend any private…
As a retiree, I have a special place in my heart for Monday mornings, because that’s when I would have had to go back to work if it weren’t for the joy of early retirement. Despite the option of complete leisure, I woke up at 5:30 this morning because the sky was starting to brighten and…
It was a black and frosty night, sometime in the dead of winter 2007. I was in the rocking chair holding my baby son, who was about one year old at the time. I was offering him a bottle and I knew he needed food, but he was upset and had been screaming for much…
In our last episode, we reviewed a particularly spirited example of the classic battle over frugality, cheapness, and the freedom to spend one’s own money the way one sees fit. Some version of this same clash is surely occuring a thousand times over in every city of the world on a continual basis, for it…
The following is an actual conversation from my email. Abridged a bit for sanity and privacy. An Enraged Reader Writes: I was both interested and amused by this submission from a non-reader. While there were definitely some misinterpretations and complainypants in there (especially with that incorrect attitude about biking), I also thought I sensed some light-hearted…
I suppose I can’t blame him, because this IS pretty nice. It’s Monday morning, and I just dropped him off at school, rode the mountain bike and trailer back home through the deep and fluffy remnants of the latest snowstorm, and settled in with this laptop and my sunny, empty house to compose my thoughts…
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,…
Although I talk quite a bit about things like frugality, investing, bicycling, cars, and the ridiculousness of our society, it’s not actually what I think about for most of the day. Mrs. M. and I still consider our main task to simply be child-raising, since it takes more time and energy than the rest of…
One of the big inspirations for my recent article on Complainypants Disease was the comments section of a mainstream newspaper article about some semi-early retirees that was recently forwarded to me by a few readers. Don’t waste your time reading through more than a few of the comments, because they’ll make you punch a hole in your…
I originally started this blog to both Ridicule and Educate the rich and privileged group of people known as the American middle class. Being a newly minted member of this group myself, I feel that we are all living large, and the vast majority of our financial problems are of our own making. Thus the…
Eliminating Lady Temptations: Avoid the Urge to Buy for Baby by Mrs. Money Mustache Congratulations! You’re having a baby! Ah, babies… so small, so cute, so sweet, so…. expensive? Why is there a common misconception that having a baby costs a ton? How much does it really cost? Answer: not much. Yet, us ladies just…
