Money Tips Network

J.D.'s Introduction
While reading an obscure book about retiring early to a life at sea — Voyaging on a Small Income by Annie Hill (1993) — I discovered a short story from a man named Joseph Weston-Martyr.

First published in 1932, The £200 Millionaire reads like “Mr. Money Mustache at Sea”. It's fascinating. Because today I start a ten-day Mediterranean cruise, I thought it'd be fun to share this story at Get Rich Slowly.

This is a long story. It contains 8001 words, which is 32 printed pages. I've formatted it for web-based reading (I don't think you want to read a 500-word paragraph on your phone!), plus added images and hyperlinks. Please enjoy it as weekend reading!

One of the most common types of questions I get from readers for the Reader Mailbag is product recommendations. People are thinking about making a significant purchase or are rethinking an ordinary purchase they make frequently and they want to know whether I’ve done the research myself on that type of product and what I’ve concluded.

What I usually do with questions like this is limit them to one or two per mailbag and then directly answer reader questions that go beyond that (provided I’m not completely swamped, of course). This means that there are a lot of specific recommendations that readers have asked for that simply didn’t make it into the mailbag.

One of the biggest subtle themes of this summer has been teaching our children a number of life skills and encouraging them to practice them. This includes ordinary household tasks like doing laundry, preparing food, doing dishes, cleaning rooms, vacuuming, and so on – things that we all have to do to keep ourselves clean, our clothes clean, and our home clean.

While my children are all several years from living on their own, Sarah and I both believe in the value of them being well-practiced at these life skills when they move out so that all of the other changes that will hit them when they live on their own aren’t nearly as overwhelming and they don’t fall into some bad habits and routines immediately.

Maria writes in with a great question:

I don’t understand why it is so hard to get ahead financially. We live in the most productive and prosperous era in human history. Why are almost all Americans living paycheck to paycheck? I mean, I get the easy answers like student debt and stuff, but why is this happening?

I’m going to give you a very simple answer: our brains aren’t wired for the modern, prosperous world. That is really what it comes down to. Our brains simply aren’t wired for much of what the modern, prosperous world provides for us. For the vast majority of people, getting ahead financially requires willpower, intense self-reflection, long-term habit building (which either rests on willpower or on how you were raised), and/or a lot of luck, because we’re working against how our brains are wired.

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Commenting on a recent article, Carmine Red asked an excellent question:

How do you evaluate the financial advice you get from other sources? Specifically, how do you decide if some piece of advice is for you, or if you should discard some adjacent advice. Is there an amount of pick-and-choose?

GRS definitely doesn’t seem like a dogmatic 100% one-way-of-doing things site, so I’d love to hear about the critical thinking you employ, and that I’m sure we can all use a little of since we’re getting bombarded by financial “do this!” or “don’t do this” instructions from so many different dimensions.

There’s nothing better than an unexpected positive event happening purely by chance. What’s even better? Serendipity when the price tag is very small or nonexistent, or when you’re able to multiply the value of your dollar enormously.

The challenge, of course, is to put yourself in situations where serendipity is likely to occur without inherently having to spend a lot of money. For example, you might experience serendipity in the aisles of an electronics store, but the price tag is going to be steep. As a frugal person, you’re better off seeking serendipity elsewhere.

So what can you do to open yourself up to frugal serendipity? Here are eleven things you can do to widen the possibilities without emptying the wallet.

Like a lot of people, I sometimes fall into periods of melancholy. I don’t view it as anything like actual depression, which is a serious mental health condition that deserves proper treatment by professionals, but it’s a sense of feeling sad about my life. I tend to let ordinary routines and habits slide a bit in those moods, I tend to become less productive, and I also tend to be much more prone to impulse buying and the influence of advertising. I am much more prone to these feelings during the winter months, as I think it combines with mild seasonal affective disorder (basically, the winter blues). In fact, I’ve written specifically about my seasonal affective disorder and frugal strategies for beating it.

[T]he taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly; and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement.
– Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth

There are some topics I don’t often delve into on The Simple Dollar, and taxes are one of them.

Yes, almost all of us pay a lot in taxes. We pay income tax each year to the federal government, sometimes to state governments, and occasionally to local governments. We pay property taxes. We pay sales taxes. We’re sometimes hit with other taxes as well, like usage taxes.