Morning!

Hope y’all’s month is off to a good start! Just packing up like a mad man over here and getting ready for our move at the end of the month… Always forget how much harder it is with kids ;)

Still blogging my heart out in the meantime though, and continue to find great gems around the web! Here’s a list of them for you this week… Hope there’s something there that improves your life/wallet!

Things we discussed on Budgets Are Sexy:

• Accidental frugality
• The worst lullaby songs ever…
• Going from a Monk to a Money manager!
• My latest net worth report: $883,910.63 (-$40k)
• And our giveaway of a SAFE with $100 cash! (Still open for entering!)

Things I found interesting around the web:

This Mini Museum! –> MiniMuseum.com

This talk on why the Mini Museum was created –>  Why I Created Mini Museum (4:53 mins) // “I just desperately want people to appreciate each other. And the world. And all the amazing fun things we can learn – together. And that, I feel that we can – ONLY – enjoy all of this world if we can enjoy each other.”

This tip on picking up your phone less –> “I put a book everywhere I tend to want to idly check my phone.” David Cain, per his latest experiment notes.

This family who found out their £5 chess piece could be worth £1 million –> “An Edinburgh family discovered that a chess piece, which had sat idly in their home, is part of the famous medieval Lewis Chessmen, and has been missing for almost 200 years. The 12th century Lewis Chessmen, which were discovered in 1831 on the island of Lewis, are usually on display at the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland.”

This tip on decluttering –> How I Convinced Myself to Stop Buying Stuff

This tip on cleaning your credit cards! –> Clean Your Credit Card Because It’s One Dirty Little Thing

These gigs of the future –> 5 Future Jobs You’ve Never Heard of But That Your Kids Will Flock to

This insight by Austin Kleon – We are verbs, not nouns

That time Bill Gates and Warren Buffett worked at Diary Queen –> Grilling and chilling with Warren

And this reminder from @CollabFund:

“John D. Rockefeller was the richest man the world had ever seen. But for most of his adult life he didn’t have electric lights, AC, or sunglasses. He never had penicillin, sunscreen, or Advil. This is not ancient history: 1/30 Americans were born before Rockefeller died.”

Best time to be alive, folks!

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Happy last day of the month!!

Hope you got everything done you wanted to, but if not – a fresh new one starts tomorrow! Keep going! :)

Things we talked about on Budgets Are Sexy this week:

• Some interesting rules of thumb
• The parable of The King’s Highway
• A Q&A on investing, blogging, babies, Louboutins, and other random questions asked of me recently :)
• A round up of my favorite articles from the month
• And the news that we’re now homeowner’s again! (But it’s bittersweet…)

Things I found interesting around the web this week:

This term I just learned of –> Virtue Signalling

This idea on generational wealth building –> Investing for Seven Generations

This article on purpose –> Finding Your Purpose after Financial Independence

This Google tip –> How to set your Google account to delete itself after you die

These ways to grasp large numbers using dollars –> Grasping Large Numbers

This PSA that the original Blues Clues guy is *not* dead! ;) –> What Steve Burns from ‘Blue’s Clues’ is up to today

This rare look inside the West Point Mint –> “We’ve got approx. 54 million ounces here that we store, which is about 22% of the nation’s gold.” – Fox5NY.com

And this reminder from the Dalai Lama:

“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.”

XOXO,

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Morning!

Here are some good nuggets for your perusal over the holiday weekend…

Hope both you – and your wallet – are safe! :)

Things we talked about on the blog this week:

• Survival Numbers
• Debt-free stories!
• New financial apps & services on the scene
• Books we’re giving away (still time to enter!)
• Naming your goals something more fun and meaningful

Things I found interesting on the web this week:

This map of credit scores (good job, Minnesota!) –> The Average Credit Score By State

This amazing story of persistence –> “In 1978, Jadav Payeng began planting a tree every day for 37 years  – the results are stunning.” – Twitter (video)

This experiment by David Cain –> “I’m going to see if I can make my phone into the empowering digital supertool it would sound like to a 20th-century person. I want it to be as useful, and as boring, as I can make it. I want it to be attractive for intentional, practical uses, but not for a reflexive diversions—a Swiss Army knife, not a carnival, in my pocket. This is my latest lifestyle experiment. I will make my phone as utilitarian as possible, for 30 days, and see what I learn.”

These walkie-talkie “smart” phones for kids –> RelayGo.com (Maybe the antidote to the above experiment?!)

This prompt from Kathleen Celmins –> “When in doubt, create. It is so stupid easy to consume. We consume content as if scrolling is our job. But consuming content is not going to move the needle for any of us. Instead, when you’re feeling stuck, create something. Write a post. Record a video. Make the thing that consumers will scroll through. Take advantage of the world we live in and hit publish before you’re ready.”

This lady burglar and her mysterious trunk –> “Barbara Erni stole from countless inns thanks to a chest with a secret hidden within.” – AtlasObscura.com

That time someone sold me their coin collection ;) –> That Day I Sold My Coin Collection to J. Money…

And these thoughts from Peter Horsfield –> “In life I believe we are given signs. In fact I literally saw mine walking to work. “Better, Not Bigger” flashed before me as the bus turned the corner and speed off. Since then this “simple” message changed my perspective of life to its core; rippled through my business dealings, relationships, health, experiences and goals, to what I believe and doing so helped me to reveal the more authentic me.”

See ya back next week :)

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Happy Friday!!!

Here’s a bunch of fun stuff from around the ‘net this week, mixed with some of my own thoughts on money/life/retirement…

Hope they help :)

Stuff we covered on Budgets Are Sexy:

• Things that make your life better for under $50
• The history of how Money Wizard amassed $300k by his 20s
• A bunch of (FREE) debt free charts you can download!
• When Fidelity makes you challenge the Vanguard Faith (*gasp!*)
• And a reminder that your life doesn’t magically change when you retire :)

And then here are all the things I found interesting across the web:

This list of people’s salaries –> Ask A Manager Salary Survey 2019 // Where a columnist anonymously polled her audience on how much they make, as well as other stats, and then dumped it all into a spreadsheet! (Backstory: Should You Tell the World How Much Money You Make?)

This underwater (haunted) ghost town! –> “In northern Georgia sits Lake Lanier, a massive man-made lake with a dark history. In order to get it to the depth they wanted, the US Government bought or forced out over 250 families, 15 businesses, and 20 cemeteries so they could fill over 50,000 acres of prime farmland with water. At the bottom of Lake Lanier are entire intact ghost towns, left as they were when the government flooded them… Survivors of various accidents have reported feeling as if invisible hands were dragging them deep beneath the water.” – Ranker.com

This fact about San Francisco –> “San Francisco has the most billionaires per capita than any other city… For every 11,612 people in San Francisco, the study says, there’s one billionaire. And that’s a much smaller ratio than the second most billionaire-dense city. In New York City, there are 81,211 inhabitants for every one billionaire.” – Money.com

This great library thread via @GrumpWitch –> Things I have learned about the general public whilst working at the library

These productivity tips from David Allen –> “Your head is for having ideas, not holding them… We have a limited amount of mental bandwidth to give to whatever we’re doing—and we shouldn’t waste any amount of this bandwidth on storing information and unresolved commitments in our head. We need to externalize those into some sort of system.” – ALifeofProductivity.com

These thoughts from Paul Graham –> “It’s hard to beat someone at something if they enjoy it and you don’t. This is true for good things like writing and dancing and also for bad things like meanness and office politics.”

This 2nd edition of one of my favorite $$$ books that just dropped! –> “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” by Ramit Sethi (affiliate link)

And this Ariana Grande parody for broke millennials ;) –> Sa-Vings – an Ariana Grande ‘7 Rings’ Parody

Good luck getting that one out of your head!

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Morning!

Hope things are well for ya over there!

Here are all the things we discussed this week, along with my favorite nuggets from around the web… Hope they inspire some good change! :)

Things we covered on the blog:

• How we grew our net worth to over $900k
• A list of all the things we’ve said NO to over the years
• The personal finance history of Jimmy
• 6 more $$$ hacks to try out
• And the #OneGoodThing for the week

Things I enjoyed from around the web:

This new (to me) blogger –> TheFarmBabe.com

This musing on technology –> Phones smash, notebooks bend

This reason to travel more –> “When we stare at the same things we tend to think the same thoughts and feel the same feelings. When we stare at new things, new thoughts and feelings emerge. Disruption and dislocation are two spiritual principles in which I firmly believe. It may sound rather obvious to say, but if everything stays the same, nothing changes.” – Josh Radnor

This business competition you should apply for! –> “The 5 Minute Pitch is a Shark Tank like show where we’ll have 32 contestants pitch us their business for the chance to win $50,000 in prize money. But unlike Shark Tank where the sharks take a piece of equity in the business, we are giving $50,000 to one lucky company with no string attached!” – MyWifeQuitHerJob.com

This trend that dead Facebook users could outnumber the living by 2069: “The number of dead users on Facebook is growing at an unstoppable rate. In 2012, eight years after the platform launched, 30 million users had died. Today, it has over two billion users and an estimation of 8,000 users die every day. ”
– TheNextWeb.com

This wild stat on cell phones –> “At some point in the middle of this decade, the number of active cellphone subscriptions grew larger than the number of actual people on this planet…” – Quartz

The results of that misplaced GOT cup ;)  –> “Starbucks got an estimated $2.3 billion in free advertising from ‘Game of Thrones’ gaffe, and it wasn’t even its coffee cup.” – CNBC

The reason men don’t wear dress hats anymore –> “Until cars became the dominant mode of personal transport, there was no architectural reason to take your hat off between home and office. With Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway system came cars, and cars made hats inconvenient, and for the first time men, crunched by the low ceilings in their automobiles, experimented with hat-removal, and got to like it.” – NPR

And this new definition of retirement:

Happy resting :)

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