We are buying things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t even know The Minimalists At last! I finally got round to watching the film “Minimalism” on Netflix which features Josh and Ryan aka The Minimalists. I loved the film and I’m fascinated by the overlap between minimalism and […]
I’m not sure if you noticed but I made a pretty big claim in my last post: This brings us to one of the great taboos of personal finance which is that most people are self-sabotaging. This inconvenient truth gets swept under the carpet in the earnest tone adopted in most personal finance content. This […]
Today we have some solid gold from Naval Ravikant’s twitter feed. For those of you that have not come across Naval, he’s a remarkable individual. He started off as a penniless Indian immigrant and ended up a wealthy American tech entrepreneur / investor in San Francisco. He’s the founder of AngelList and invested at an […]
This is the story of Ralph, taken from the book Why Men Are The Way They Are by Warren Farrell. Ralph’s story may not be normal – he was an unusually high earning lawyer – but it is representative. You can think of this as a parable about the trap of becoming overly focussed on status and […]
One criticism that comes up when anyone suggests getting better with money is that the author doesn’t realise how lucky and privileged they are. This may sometimes be true…but often not in the way that the commenter meant. For example, I never inherited any money and never went to an elite private school. The Escape Artist […]
Do you Remember Jason and Julie? They were the couple with the campervan who got to FI aged 43 and whose story I featured in Our Gap Year For Grown Ups. When the Daily Mail wrote about them in an article earlier this year, a troll-party kicked off in the comments section. A common theme was: […]
Is it easy to save money or is it hard? Well, that depends on your perspective. If you watch TV News (I don’t recommend this) you’ll pick up the idea that modern life is tougher than ever, the world is a dangerous and expensive place and there’s nothing you can do about that. If you […]
These people cannot be millionaires! They don’t look like millionaires, they don’t dress like millionaires, they don’t eat like millionaires, they don’t act like millionaires – they don’t even have millionaire names. Where are the millionaires who look like millionaires? The Millionaire Next Door So starts the book The Millionaire Next Door, the classic study […]
Last week I gave a talk to a room of people about 3 numbers that can change your life. I’d been invited to speak to a London team of an American multinational company by a reader who is a good guy and an unusually enlightened manager. He’d been struck by the lack of unbiased financial […]
One of the great things about a blog is the comments, emails and other feedback from readers. Best of all are reader success stories like the one I have for you today. Like everything good, the rewards of blogging are not always obvious at first. You share your insights and try to make the world a […]
The Escape Artist 