Good morning!

Two quick announcements before we get to this week’s best articles…

#1. I’m sexy!

Errr… let’s try that again. You already knew that ;)

#1. There’s a new FIRE documentary currently being cast for! It’s for a MAJOR streaming platform, and they’re specifically looking for couples in the Denver/Boulder area (ages 23-45) who are ready to embark on a financial transformation… If you’re selected we’ll all get to watch you, and you’ll be personally coached by the one and only Mr. Money Mustache, lol…

#2. Just came across this search engine and it looks promising: Ecosia.org. They use the profit from everyone’s searches to plant trees where they are needed the most, and they’ve already planted over 123 MILLION! Haven’t tested it enough personally to compare it to the big G yet, but maybe you have and can share more? Killer idea and LOVE that it’s a non-profit 👍

Okay, to my favorite articles from the week! Hope you all are well!

I’m still alive and kicking (quite literally!) as I skateboard now for at least an hour a day! Dropped $200+ on a new board and shoes too this week – somebody stopped me!!!

Your friend in finance,

PS: I still find it SO fascinating that there’s an ENTIRE culture like skateboarding out there that you’d never know about unless you accidentally stumbled upon it or purposefully went searching for it… Makes you wonder about all the OTHER communities out there too we’d find and learn about if we weren’t so stuck in our own bubbles!  Maybe a good challenge for the weekend is going out of your way to find a new one yourself and just practice *observing*? Perhaps you’ll accidentally find yourself changed unexpectedly as I have!

PPS: Another skateboarding observance I’ve had at skate parks – going in the mornings you’re surrounded by kids and moms, but going in the evenings it’s teens and tattoos (and weed), lol… So the time of the day can greatly affect your perception of these niche communities too :)

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Favorite posts this week:

The Joy of Decluttering via No Sidebar — “My powder blue vest and purse, and the curious series of coincidences with these items, have permanently changed the way I see all of the things that live unloved and unused in my home.”

A False Sense of Purchasing Power via Becoming Minimalist — “Remind yourself that net worth is not the same as income. Net worth is only what is left at the end of the month. Inflating your expenses or credit line, just because society allows and your bank or credit card say you can, is rarely the best step forward.”

Are You Waiting For an Elevator? via 5AM Joel — “Most people wait their entire lives for elevators to pick them up. They want an express pass to success. But elevators to success are extremely rare, and sometimes nonexistent.”

Show & Tell: Chase’s Silver Collection via Coin Thrill — Cheating and putting my own post here :) But for any of you silver hoarders you’ll probably enjoy this one! A nice easy way to diversify a little!

The Best Items to Resell for Profit via Flea Market Flipper — “With freight shipping oversized items, I am able to find some really great items on local apps to flip… I have been able to go from part-time flipping income of $42K to $133K in our first year of flipping full-time! Freight shipping changed the game for me and has been consistently providing great income for my family ever since.”

Put Your Ladder on Your OWN Wall via Property Update — “Most put their ladder on their parents’ wall and spend much of their life climbing that ladder. At some point, they come to the realisation that they are unhappy doing what they are doing. This leads to a feeling of despondency about the work they do and the life they are living.”

Video of the week:

“This is why we can’t have nice things” via YouTube – A wild video on how stuff we buy has purposefully been designed to be obsolete… (Did you know there’s a light bulb that’s been continuously running for over 100 years????!)

Quote of the week:

Caught this a handful of days ago and haven’t been able to get it off my mind!

“Design a life you are inspired to live.”

– Annette White

Something to ponder as we head into the weekend… :)

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Good morning!

Hope y’all are well over there!

Got my 2nd vaxx shot yesterday and about to close on some pretty important real estate (my cemetery plot – hah!), so feeling pretty good over here ;) We did miss out on what we thought was our dream home this week (beat out the other bidders but had to bail after a pretty scary home inspection!), but outside of that its been a great week to be alive…

If you can believe it, this 41 year old even hit up a skate park for 3 hours the other day!! And didn’t break any bones! My boys forced me to take them after we stumbled across it a bit ago, and little did I know how much I’d enjoy it… they had to drag ME away instead of the opposite! 😂

When did us adults get so grown up and forget about stuff like this?! My skills were severely lacking compared to those circling me, but it was nice having confidence in myself as an “old” and not caring what others thought every time I fell… A far cry from how I was 20 years earlier, so getting up in the years does have its advantage! :) We’re going back this afternoon and I can’t wait.

In other news, Coin Thrill is back!! My old coin collecting blog that’s been ignored the past few years! Got two posts out the door this week so technically I’m out of blog retirement ;)

Here they are if you’re interested in any way:

A Coin Collection Story — A fun story from a reader on the days of finding silver coins in circulation. Something not too common anymore!

What’s This Coin Worth? – A new series I’m starting as I help people sort through their collections and/or random coins they have laying around ;). This is by far the #1 thing I’m asked, and while most times we don’t find anything *too*special, every now and then something surprises the pants off us. A couple years back I found a quarter in a friend’s collection that ended up selling for over $10,000 (!!!)

So if anyone ever needs help sorting through old coins or currency, be sure to give me a shout! I’ve helped inventory and liquidate over a dozen collections over the past 7 years, and it’s just as enjoyable to me as it’s NOT for others ;)

Here’s more about my services if you want to pass along to anyone:

J’s Inventorying and Liquidation Services

(I ask to get paid in “coins” instead of cash, lol..)

So yeah, busy trying to LIVE over here, but also fully aware (and planning) for it all to come to an end one day too! I told my wife that if I died at that skate park I would have been pretty okay with it…

I could def. think of worse ways to go :)

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Favorite posts from the week:

Sell Your Hot Dogs at a Loss via Incognito Money Scribe — “Participants in the study were also asked to rate their feelings of life satisfaction. What the study found was that participants who made purchases that most closely matched their personalities were more satisfied with life. What’s more, that personality spending-life satisfaction relationship materialized regardless of income, age and gender.”

Reflecting on Privilege and Perseverance via Saving Sherpa — “Today I earn a solid six figures, I have no children, I live in Boston, and am 80% of the way towards FI. I’m white, heterosexual, and Christian. A quick look at me today and things might seem so easy for me that you find me to be unrelatable. But you might be surprised…”

4 Famous Wills in History (And What They Can Teach Canadians About Estate Planning) via Boomer and Echo  — “Dogs who inherited millions, a will that inspired women in Toronto to have as many babies as they could, and why one Canadian wrote their will while eating a Big Mac.”

10 Great Money Choices for Every Stage of Life via Bitches Get Riches — “I wish someone had sat me down and compassionately explained that I didn’t have to do everything all at once. If you want to stay motivated and make meaningful progress on a goal, it’s so much better to focus on just one at a time.”

Evidence-Based Doomsday Prepping via My Money Blog — “Plenty of excited newcomers begin by shopping for ballistic vests and night vision goggles; they would be better served by grabbing a fire extinguisher, some bottled water, and then putting the rest of their money in a rainy-day fund.”

And lastly, the most surprising thing about humanity according to the Dalai Lama, via The Physician Philosopher:

Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

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Blessed weekend 🙏🙏

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Good morning, everyone!

Is it going to be a blessed day today?? (ANSWER: YES!!!)

I don’t know how or why, but they say you gotta put good juju into the world so that’s what we’re going to do :)

Lots of fun posts for you today so you’ll have plenty of good reading material over the weekend! Including a HELL of a story of a once-popular blogger who left the scene after hitting FIRE 6 years ago (Living a FI), only to come back and just POUR IT ALL OUT on the wreck his life has been since… It’s gut wrenching… And a solid reminder that there’s more to FIRE than just the numbers!

If there’s only one post you click on today, make sure it’s that one. Then come back and check out the others below :)

In other news, we’re hiring again for another position over at All-Star Money! If you know any Tech Leads/Coders shoot them our way! And then lastly, if you enjoy me in your ears more so than type, here’s another (short) podcast I was recently on:

J. Money Brings Sexy Back to Your Greenbacks

On it we covered:

• The value of tracking net worth
• What (doesn’t) happen when you become a millionaire
• The state of the $$$ blog community
• And my beloved Frankencaddy!! Who was an ACCIDENTal side hustler back in the day, almost paying herself off entirely due to so many insurance checks, lol… That’s her down below before she went out to the pasture, R.I.P…

(That’s a tail light there from a trailer to make her street legal 😂)

Now to my favorite articles from the week:

The 2021 Early-Retirement Update via Living a FI — The once popular blogger comes back to tell a tale of FIRE after 6 years away, and it’s not the *good* kind! “I retired on a sort of “lean-FIRE” budget, confidently told the world I’d be just fine, and five years or so later, I’m a wreck, I’d lost my partner, and I had to make sizable changes. I kept feeling that I’d failed somehow. Like I’d done something wrong — I felt guilty.”

Reverse Wealth Transfer on Steroids via The Reformed Broker — “If you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook. But you didn’t. So the hoodie isn’t going to work. Watch how people deal with you when your shirt is tucked in and your shoes are shined.”

Everyone is Using The 4% Rule Wrong via Financial Success MD — “Ever since this 4% rule was proposed, people have argued whether the “right” number is a little lower or higher than 4%. But nearly every time I see this rule used to reverse engineer the amount one needs to save for retirement, the calculation is done incorrectly.”

Stop Listening to Grandma… and Everyone Else via Blogging Away Debt – “Life isn’t perfect and that’s OK. For those who are in the same boat, I feel ya. We’ll get through this. Power through. Stop trying to impress grandma (or whoever is the ‘grandma’ in your life). Stay the course.”

My Problems with #StopAsianHate via A Lawyer and Her Money — “To me the movements are counterproductive and rife with stereotypes that Asian Americans have been fighting for decades, if not centuries.”

Bitcoin’s Dirty Secret via Wealthy Retirement — “There are 195 countries in the world. Mining Bitcoin already consumes more energy than 160 of them do separately. The Cambridge study shows that currently, Bitcoin mining consumes more energy in a year than entire countries like Switzerland and Argentina.”

A Lot of the Woo-Woo Probably Works via Raptitude – “You’ve probably heard people say, “If alternative medicine worked, it wouldn’t be called alternative medicine, it would be called medicine.” This is poor logic — everything known to work was once not known to work… That’s a point the skeptical types sometimes miss: if it works, it works regardless of the state of the science on it. What the science does is help us waste less time on stuff that doesn’t work.”

And lastly, one VERY important PSA ;)

Krispy Kreme is giving away a free Original Glazed doughnut if you show them your COVID-19 vaccination card any day this year!!  No purchase required! (Thanks, for the heads up MyMoneyBlog!)

Happy vaxxing 🍩

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Morning!

Hope your lives and wallets got a bit more full this week! It does feel like things are finally starting to get a little better in the world, doesn’t it?? Even if it’s slow and gradual? :)

A quick note before we get to the articles this week:

We’re hiring at All-Star Money! We’re looking for a part-time Community Manager to join the team, initially helping us out with content creation/distribution and engagement across our social channels and newsletters, and then secondarily helping with marketing campaign development and execution.

And in a perfect world, this person will come from the PF Community here we all enjoy and love so much :) So if you’re interested or know someone you think would make a good fit, please pass them our way to apply! Details can be found here: https://www.fool.com/allstarmoney/jobs/

Also – if you’re into podcasts – I recorded one recently with Andrew Stotz whose entire show is all around investing FAILS, lol… How brilliant is that???! And of course many of you will know what my biggest one was, which later went on to completely change my life – and money, friends, career, mindset, everything! Proving yet again how fails aren’t always the worst thing in the world :)

You can listen to the story here, as well as other things I’ve learned about money and life over the years. It’s fairly short at 33 mins:

Ep348: J. Money – Break Free From the Crowd to Make
Better Financial Decisions

Now to my favorite articles from the week!

Sports Cards Collection: How To Inventory, Appraise, and Sell To Make Money by OMG My Money – This is part I of a 4 part series where a new blogger friend of mine is going to share the process of liquidating a card collection from start to finish! In particularly, MY card collection from when I was a kid!! Which I’ve been trying to get rid of for years now, but both emotional attachment – and not knowing the best way to sell them? – kept blocking me along the way. As soon as I saw this finance blog which also writes about collecting I knew there was hope so I reached out and now here we are! My guestimation was that the entirety of it all was worth somewhere around $500, so we’ll see how close (or not) I was! :)

What I Learned From Collecting Basketball Cards via Budgets Are Sexy — Going through the above reminded me of a post I wrote a few years ago on my cards (WOW – 10 years ago actually!!!). “GIVE YOUR MONEY A PURPOSE! Whether it’s for debt, college, a new couch – it doesn’t matter. If you can get into the habit of making your money do the things you want it to do, rather than lumping it all together just for the sake of saving, I think you’d come to have a much better appreciation for it like I did.”

How the Bottom-Dollar Effect Can Help Curb Your Spending via Money Ning — “Basically, when we spend the last of our resources on a product, we end up feeling much less satisfied with it. Here’s a breakdown of the bottom-dollar effect and how you can harness it to make better spending decisions…”

5 Lies About DIYing We’re Seriously Sick of Hearing via Bitches Get Riches — “This project can be done in a weekend! … A weekend on the Island of Mermaids, in Never-Never Land, where a single weekend lasts ten thousand years.”

Why You Need an Untouchable Day Every Week via Harvard Business Review — “Some days it can feel impossible to escape constant meetings and phone calls that get in the way of your personal productivity. Here’s one method for getting back some of that precious time.”

Make Fewer Things Matter via The Finance Buff — “Making fewer things matter helps you zero in on things that really matter. It also helps you ward off FOMO and sales pitches. FOMO and sales pitches always try to grab your attention by saying you’re making a mistake.”

Why I Did My Own Death Cleaning at 39 via No Sidebar — “Death cleaning goes a step beyond decluttering in that once you decide the things that you want to keep, you provide guidance to your loved ones as to what to do with those items after you die.”

And lastly, a Financial Freedom Recipe by Penny Pinching Ninja ;)

• 1 Pinch: Not having debt
• 1/2 Dollop: Living below our means
• 2 Dashes: Consistently investing the difference
• Whisk all ingredients together and bake for 15 years.
• **For best results, bake for life!

Happy baking! 💰

// Cupcakes up top by Amna Wasim from Pixabay
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Good morning, friends!

Hope you had a fabulous week over there! It’s been quite eventful in the Money household the last couple of days getting surprise after surprise after surprise, and not all horrible ones! Haha…

First, Mrs. Money and I *both* got alerted that we could get the Covid vaxx out of nowhere when we assumed it wouldn’t happen until at *least* summer?! Then I get a note that a rare plot of land has opened up in the cemetery I want to be buried at (don’t laugh – everyone’s DYING to get in!!! 😂), and then literally hours later we find out that a house in our dream community is coming on the market soon and we might be able to get a sneak peek before the chaos ensues…

(And wow has the chaos ensued in the real estate market here in Virginia!  The last place we looked at had 8 offers come in within 48 hours, of which half of them got into bidding wars with each other AND were waiving home inspections and appraisals and even first born children! It’s no joke out there!! Lol…)

We’ll see how it all turns out, but as long as that Covid/Cemetery combo is a happy coincidence and NOT a premonition, I’ll be one happy dude ;)

But enough about me… Below are my favorite reads (and watches) from the week, and all of them give some dose of knowledge or entertainment or a little bit of both! My apologies in advance if you’re following All-Star Money and already seen half of these… I’ll continue to share non-$$$ articles in these newsletters as well, but now that I’m curating full-time there will probably be some overlap so I don’t burn myself out ;) They’ll always be stuff I love though, so hopefully you find them just as enjoyable!

Peace, love, and blessings ☮️ 💙🙌

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Favorite reads this week:

Money is Stored Energy via Monevator — “I think of money as stored energy. You work, beg, borrow, steal, or otherwise obtain money. You put it aside – store it. Later you discharge the power and make something happen.”

7 Ways We Misprice Purchases via Data Driven Investor — “Think of the number zero before considering any purchase — that’s the amount you will spend if you opt not to make the purchase at all. Doing so will prime your brain not to overestimate prices.”

The Power of Low Expectations via Get Rich Slowly — “Just as you can increase your saving rate by improving income and/or lowering expenses, you can deliberately increase your happiness by improving your circumstances and/or lowering your expectations.”

Ergodicity: The Coolest Idea You’ve Never Heard of via The Best Interest — “I have a 100-sided die. I’ll roll the die and you pick a number. If it lands on any other number than your number, then you win $1000. But if it lands on your number, then Mike Tyson punches you in the face and takes your money.”

Why “Can I Afford It?” is a Terrible Filter via Becoming Minimalist — We often find ourselves debating a purchase because we’ve considered what benefit the purchase will bring into our lives. But rarely do we take the time to honestly evaluate what benefits might arise if we said no.

The Effect of “Mental Subtraction” by VIA Institute on Character — “How often do you take time to “smell the roses” in your life? This means thinking about all of the people, things and experiences that make you happy and feeling a sense of appreciation for how they impact you. Want to know a great way to do this? Imagine your life without it.”

I Tried to Get Rich Off Dogecoin and All I Got Was This Lousy Blog Post via Government Worker FI — “I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and I don’t do drugs. Really, I’m a boring person. But now and then I like to gamble a bit. ”

Favorite video this week:

Turkish Garbage Collectors Make a Library Out of Trash via YouTube — Shout out to J.D. Roth of Apex Money for finding this gem!! What a cool way to literally turn trash into treasure!! :)

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