Actually, the world doesn’t need another personal finance blogger – it needs a new perspective on personal finance.
There’s an endless stream of “Get richer quicker!” platitudes, fads, gimmicks, sound-bites, rhetoric, one-offs, click-bait, etc. But, let’s be real, another article on the “10 best credit card deals” won’t help you understand how to adjust your finances to increase your financial well-being or achieve your retirement goals. Neither will knowing you’re spending an average of $627/month on groceries and $179/month on gas.
Our mission is to create a quiet, thoughtful and truthful space where you can focus on what really makes a difference in improving your financial well-being, achieving your financial goals, and ultimately enhancing your life. Our intent is to help you see the big picture, so you can operate above all the tricks, gimmicks, and breathless once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to attain real financial freedom.
Here’s how we propose we’ll do it:
- We’ll share how personal finance works and help put the other personal finance stuff you see out there in context.
- We’ll shed light on the hidden ways the system is working you over.
- And we’ll listen and respond to your questions and comments, and invite civilized discourse.
Our commitment to you is to provide the insights needed, so you can better understand and control your personal finance machine.
We’re not affiliated with credit card companies or travel sites, or brokerage houses or any other questionable influences. We’re just the two guys successful in our day jobs who wrote the book Manufacturing Wealth to explain what a personal finance machine is and how it works in hopes of helping at least a small minority of people achieve their short-, medium- and long-term financial goals.
We love this stuff, and we hope sharing what we know will help you. And if it does, please consider subscribing to our website and telling your friends about us.
Why didn’t they teach us this in school?
First: “This” = Personal Finance
Second: “Personal Finance” = What’s a credit card, what are stocks and bonds, how to balance a checkbook, what does a bank do, what’s compound interest, how much do groceries cost, etc.
Answer: They did – somewhere, sometime during the first 18 years of your educational life someone “taught” you about Personal Finance.
Unfortunately, what we learn about personal finance in high school or even in college tends to be superficial and, in practice, worthless.
Welcome to the first day of your new and improved class!
What we hope to accomplish here is to put what you already know into a framework that helps tie all the pieces together to give you an actionable frame of reference to achieve your financial goals.
First, please read the attached publication. While it’s a bit wonky, it covers the gist of how our personal finances actually work.
Of course, it’s not that simple. The framework is necessary to understand how your personal finances work, so you can consistently have sufficient funds to:
- Pay the expected and unexpected expenses that we incur every month.
- Go on vacation, live it up a bit, go out to eat, etc. so we don’t have to budget all the fun out of our lives.
- Replace, repair or update your stuff, like your car, home, etc.
- Afford longer-term financial commitments, like retirement and a college fund for our kids.
The recurring theme is to have sufficient funds in four different time windows: This month, this year, 3-5 years, 20+ years.
How do you do that? Simple in concept, hard in reality: Live below your means!
So, how do you go about living below your means?
Explaining the how is what we are all about, i.e. understanding and controlling your personal finance machine.
Read on.