Morning!

Welcome to the first Friday of the rest of your life ;)

Here are a bunch of things I enjoyed reading and writing this week – hope it expands your brain! 🧠

Topics we covered on Budgets Are Sexy:

• All the ways kids can actually SAVE you money!
• All the random jobs I’ve had, and how much they paid
• A smattering of my favorite reads from the month
• My latest net worth report
• And a reminder that we all struggle. PLUS: my favorite hate mail ;)

Things I enjoyed around the web:

This history of how Kindergarten came to be –> “The word Kindergarten cleverly encompassed two different ideas: kids would play in and learn from nature, but they would also themselves be nurtured and nourished “like plants in a garden.”” – 99percentinvisible.org

This staggering fact about dollar stores –> “Four new dollar stores will open in the U.S. every single day of 2019. That’s a new dollar store every six hours. There are more dollar stores than there are Walmarts, McDonald’s and CVS stores combined.” – NPR.org, via David Perell

The reason most of our coins have ridges! –> “For centuries, coins were made of precious metals — gold and silver, often — and therefore, had intrinsic value beyond their stated denominations. You could shave a bit off the edge of a coin, keep the clipped-off piece for yourself, and use the almost-complete coin in a subsequent transaction… That’s the situation in which [Sir Isaac] Newton found himself as the 1600s came to a close: coin clipping had created a culture of counterfeiting. Curtail coin clipping and you’d stem the tide.” – NowIKnow.com

The mystery of the “Millionaire Hermit” –> “He spent years scrimping and saving. But without a will, where’s his money going?”

This philosophy of The Mindful Explorer –> “I have forced myself to live smaller, earn less and own less as I reached FI and must choose between not working and working. By having to work I can not do all the volunteer work that I do in my community, thus I tell myself others will not be doing as well if I act selfishly with my time. My time should be for doing good, not for making money to spend on myself.”

And this excellent reminder by English novelist, George Eliot –> “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

Happy becoming!

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