Awareness Archives | Empathic Finance

The uncommon color of the swan

I don’t how to talk about the current health crisis better than anyone else, but I still want to acknowledge the reality we’re living in.

I don’t know if you know this, but black swans do in fact exist.

Unfortunately, so do “black swan” events.

Though really, do we need to call them “black” swans? Couldn’t we come up with any other color? Green swan? Burnt sienna swan? What’s the crayon that no one likes? Periwinkle?

Sorry, but I just had to add some color to the situation.

(Okay, I’m even more sorry. Not really, but read on for more.)

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What does the data say? Reading The National Study of Millionaires

Awareness

I review the National Study of Millionaires, the largest study of millionaires ever undertaken, by Chris Hogan and the Dave Ramsey team.

Not too long ago, I reviewed the book “Everyday Millionaires: How Ordinary People Built Extraordinary Wealth—and How You Can Too“.

You can read my full review, but to summarize, I found the arguments compelling and in agreement with my own beliefs, but I objected very passionately to the lack of concrete data presented in the book.

The data, based on what was known as the “National Study of Millionaires”, was discussed in detail, but there wasn’t anything in the way of raw data presented there. So one needed to take 100% of the results on faith.

That isn’t okay.

If I were to tell you that all of the people I’ve coached are immensely good-looking, this would of course be true, but naturally, you’d also want to know how this was determined. Also, was this a cause or an effect? Did I only work with good-looking people, or are the type of people who are interested in digging deep to learn and change their money story just really good-looking?

Claims aren’t enough. You have to back up the claims with data.

And there was nothing in Everyday Millionaires that backed up their claims.

Months later, that changed. The Dave Ramsey team, who undertook the study, released the full study to the public.

It was $10 and available as a PDF, and I was happy to buy it and see all that detailed data contained inside.

Read on to see what I found.

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How to create buckets in an Ally savings account

Awareness

Ally has just added the ability to create Buckets, flexible sub-accounts that allow you to save for particular goals. Here’s how to use them.

I guess you could say that I’m a pretty big fan of Ally.

Maybe it’s that I like their marketing campaigns. Maybe I like their activations at conferences at FinCon (like when they gave out 3-D printed piggy banks).

Maybe it’s that they are so fundamentally better than my other online savings bank experience.

Maybe I just like the color purple.

Ally isn’t without its faults. The biggest fault, historically, has been the difficulty in setting up multiple savings accounts.

When I first signed up, the process was laughably complex. They eventually made it a little easier, but still, the process was pointlessly obtuse. I don’t want multiple savings accounts. I want a single savings account and I want to be able to subdivide it into buckets.

Well, seems they’ve finally listened. I don’t want to take all the credit, but I did talk to them at an event to register my grievance, so I’d like to think that I had some effect. #influencer.

An email I received about buckets and other less-relevant things

Ally is now using buckets. Let’s take a look.

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Don’t let money be your excuse

Awareness

Not having money can make things more difficult, but you can modify your goals to be more achievable, once you know what your excuses are.

I’ve long wondered whether you don’t really like to travel as much as you say you do.

Travel is one of those aspirations that everyone seems to say that they wish they could do more.

But I wonder. And I don’t just wonder because I seem to be the only person who doesn’t loathe the actual process of traveling. (Seriously, if you hate the process of travel, then what part do you love? The actual being there? That’s such a small part of the experience!)

I wonder because the people I talk to don’t seem to have a strong sense of what they would do if they were traveling. If travel is what you’d like to do more than anything else, then don’t stare blankly at me when I ask you where you wish you could go.

(And don’t just say Hawaii. Which island? What would you do there? What time of year? Why?)

No, I think people don’t travel more because, well, they don’t want to. But it’s an easy thing to say that you wish you could do.

But what’s more interesting to me is why people say that they can’t.

Often times, it’s the money. But is it?

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Course review: How to Win the Game of Advanced Personal Finance

Abundance, Awareness, Decisions, Radical Finances

I review “How to Win the Game of Advanced Personal Finance”, an online course by Ramit Sethi (from I Will Teach You Be Rich).

A while back, I talked about purchasing a personal finance course.

In response to the obvious question, I never want to feel like I know everything, and always want to remain open to new ideas. Also, over the past few years I feel like I’ve advanced pretty far in my goals toward financial security, and want to know if my financial future looks just like my past, or I start to do things differently at some point.

So when Ramit Sethi started advertising his course “How to Win the Game of Advanced Personal Finance“, I was interested.

Interested enough to spend the $497 to enroll.

Well, I’ve since gone through the course, taken lots of notes, and put some (but not all) plans into action.

And now it’s time for a review of the course.

So read on for a review of Ramit Sethi’s “How to Win the Game of Advanced Personal Finance”.

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How to determine if a purchase is worth deliberating over

Awareness, Decisions

If you cut down on time spent making decisions on things that don’t matter, you will have more energy for the decisions that do.

As you make more money, the way a certain amount of money will feel will change.

$2 will always be $2. But how $2 feels will change.

I was a total nerd as a kid, and I remember in eighth grade saving up for a modem for my computer so I could go on BBSs and talk with my friends. I believe that modem (at the blazingly fast speed of 1200 bps, for the nerds out there) cost me $40. And it took ages to save up for.

Meanwhile, last week, I went out with some friends and spend more than $40 in a single evening on food and drink, and didn’t even think twice about it. (I also didn’t use a credit card.)

Putting inflation aside (yes, that modem would have cost more today), it’s the same $40.

But it feels different.

It’s worth looking at how purchases feel, so you can know whether it’s worth expending energy on debating it, or just going with it. Because not everything is worth your time deliberating.

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Time to be intentional with your accounts

Awareness, Decisions

Verifying your accounts will keep your funds all accounted for, and will help you to decide if it’s time to change servicers.

It’s a new year, and with it the usual deluge of good intentions, lofty goals, and everything going more or less back to normal.

But with the new year, there are a few short financial tasks that I recommend people do now, sort of as a housekeeping ritual.

One of them is to make sure that you can access all of your saving, checking, and retirement accounts. That means logging into all of them, and then, determining what you’re doing with them.

The process doesn’t take long, and is important. Here’s why.

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Reflect on how much progress you’ve made

Awareness

Why and how to reflect on how far you’ve come, not just how far you need to go, so you can be stay motivated to continue.

I moved to New York City in 2003.

Life in NYC was hard, and my financial position didn’t make things much easier. I had some good months and bad ones, but I made $13 per hour in my first job there, which even in 2003 wasn’t very much.

Still, I kept track of my finances. I had to, as every dollar counted.

I have almost all of my notes to this day. But what I remember the most, what I can remember without even looking it up, is February 2004.

I remember that month because it was the hardest month for me, financially, in the entire time I lived in NYC, perhaps of my entire adult life.

That month, I recall I had less than $200 to spend. Total. For Expenses. On everything. On groceries, on visits to the drug store, on miscellaneous spending. Everything.

That’s $6 per day. In New York City. Where the sales taxes alone was upwards of 10%.

I remember how much I stretched everything that month. How I held my breath to make it work.

I had a credit card, and I confess that I could have charged a bunch on it to make getting through the month easier. But I knew how that movie played out. I would have to pay it back, with interest, making future months even harder. No thanks.

Now, I want to be clear: I never went hungry, I never was homeless, I never had any major life catastrophes like that.

I’m not even here to talk about how hard it was for me.

What I want to highlight is how far I’ve come since then.

And I want you to do the same for your life.

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Year in review 2019: Top 10 posts

Abundance, Awareness, Connection, Decisions, Movement, Radical Finances, Resistance

The top posts of the year on Empathic Finance, including both my favorites and the ones readers viewed most.

At the beginning of this year, I made a big change to this site.

After six years of blogging on a wide range of topics, not just personal finance but also technology and urban planning, I decided to relaunch the site as Empathic Finance, with a closer focus on emotion-focused financial literacy and healing.

I chose this mainly because this was the topic that I kept coming back to here, the one where I was the most passionate.

So I relaunched my financial coaching practice, and I also cut down to posting once a week, to allow for that and other projects.

But I’m still just as dedicated to this site as ever, helping you heal your relationship to money, and unblocking yourself from your goals.

So with the year ending, I wanted to take my yearly look back at some of the blog highlights.

In the past, I would devote one post to my top 10 favorite posts, and another to the top 10 most visited posts by you.

But since I’m only blogging once a week, I’m combining these this year to a single post and two “Top 5” lists. High Fidelity-style, if you will.

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Your income is not your value

Awareness

Our beliefs about income can be toxic. People who make more than you are not better than you, and they don’t have a higher value either.

I’m a huge fan of older video games, the ones made before 1990.

Some of those games, like Q*Bert, Ms. Pac Man, and Arkanoid, to name some of my favorites, my goal is simple: to get the high score.

There is something about seeing your name (or initials) at the top of the score board that I just love. Who would want to be at the top?

When you get the high score in Q*Bert. Source: Twitter

The problem happens when we extend this high score pursuit to areas where it isn’t quite appropriate.

Like your income. Which isn’t a score, although we often wrongly think it is.

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