Morning!

Back from my summer break and ready to get the party started again! Y’all doing well and getting closer to those hopes and dreams??? Anything juicy happen while I was away?

You can see a little of what I’ve been up to here, but basically it was a lot of unplugging and a lot of living :) Mixed in with some ER visits and house repairs for good measure (hah).

I’ve got a lot of new ideas and mini-epiphanies to share with y’all over the coming weeks, as well as a pretty major announcement, but for now feast your eyes on a few recent thoughts I shared below on the blog, as well as a handful of my favorite reads from across the web last month.

Hope they help! And if you ever get tired of seeing these emails, just click the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of them and they’ll stop coming ASAP.

Articles on Budgets Are Sexy this week:

• Goood morning!!! I’m back!
• Net Worth Update: $940,412.06 [+$20,873.72 or +2.27%]
• This summer’s favorite reads + FinCon Next Month!! 💰
• A silly little trick I started doing to make expenses feel better… ;)

Things I found interesting around the web:

Doors and Windows and What’s Real @ Sivers.org — ”Like everyone, I live in a little house with many doors and windows. One door goes out to my neighborhood… One window looks out at the nature around me… One door is just for my son… But one door is really no fun to open. Whenever I do, I’m horrified at all the shouting.”

The Periodic Table of FIRE! @ Minafi — “When you first learn about financial independence it can be an exciting time. There’s a whole new world of finances, life planning and investing out there that you can take active steps to change your life forever. But there’s a lot to learn!… Below is an interactive chart I put together that focuses on some of the must-learn topics involved in financial independence and early retirement”

Pareto Spring Cleaning @ The Rabbit Hole — “To be conducted every 6 months or so in order to help you lock in and remove unwanted distractions…”

Surreal photos of the beach that briefly existed west of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, in the early 80s @ UrbanFoxxxx “The site, created out of landfill material from the excavations to build the WTC, would later become Battery Park City… On the same site, in the summer of 1982, conceptual artist Agnes Denes planted and harvested two acres of wheat for her installation ‘Wheatfield’ – one of the most memorable images of Manhattan ever created.“

The Thrill of Uncertainty @ Collaborative Fund — “Variable interval rewards are why we compulsively check email. Some messages are really important, but you don’t know when the important ones will come, so you keep checking and checking. Same with checking Twitter and Facebook. Or watching cable news. Or waiting for a boring meeting to end. Find something that captures people’s attention and turns them into crazed animals and you will likely find a variable interval reward.”

This Post Will Change Your Life @ Raptitude — “Every single thing that happens to you—your career, your ideas, your friends, your living situation—emerged into reality from its many parent conditions just like that rainbow did. In fact, nothing happens any other way: conditions give rise to a thing that wasn’t there, it’s there for a while, and then it disappears back into the mist of causality. Appreciating all this helps us remember the abundance of possibility we’re always living in.”

Happy August!

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