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Greatest of the latest
- You Need Exactly 2 Income streams
- Saving $100,000 Is the Most Important Financial Milestone
- The Road to Financial Hell Is Paved with Beautiful Houses
Top 5 most-read stories ever
#5 — Passive Income Is A Lie, But Scalable Income Is Real
#4 — A Recession Is the Worst Time to Pay down Debt
#3 — The Financial Paradox of Owning a Home
#2 — The 5% Rule
#1 — Generating Passive Income Is Hard, Here Is a Better Option
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You’re not Warren Buffett. You’re you; and that is enough
“I’m new to investing, but let me give you advice about it anyway”
That sums up a lot of the articles I am reading from new personal finance writers these days.
I get it. You start investing for the first time, have success, and get really excited. Good, you should be excited. Investing your money and watching it grow for the first time is an empowering feeling. I understand the impulse to shout your excitement and success from the rooftops.
But there’s a right and a wrong way to express that excitement if you write about financial topics.
The cardinal rule of writing about money
After health…
No, you don’t have to save 25 times your income
During the pandemic, I’ve developed a simple definition of personal financial freedom:
Doing work you love without ever worrying about how you’ll pay the bills.
This the exact opposite of early retirement. In fact, once I achieve this definition of financial freedom, I plan on working as long as I can, just not as hard as I have been.
Achieving this definition of financial freedom comes down to a simple math problem, I call “the financial freedom equation.”
Financial freedom= (Investment income + income from work you love) > Your living expenses
The beauty of distilling financial freedom into a…
The Economics Of Climate Change
A brief explanation of carbon tariffs
The economics of climate change can be summarised in one sentence:
The most effective way to fight climate change is to put a price on carbon emissions.
If you hold that fact in your mind, it will be easy to understand what the European Union hopes to achieve with a new proposal that would add a “carbon tariff” on imports from countries with high carbon emissions.
Continue reading for a lesson in environmental economics 101, what the EU hopes to accomplish with a carbon tariff, why this might result in a trade war and why that may not be such…
The new reality of making money and investing
The stock market is blazing hot, and it’s distorting reality for a lot of new investors.
At the time I write this, the S&P 500 is up;
- 16.7% year to date.
- 87% since the market bottomed in March 2020.
- 27% since its pre-COVID peak in February 2020.
During this time, many new investors have piled into the market and gotten the sense that the stock market will always continue “to the moon,” for lack of a better phrase.
The past 18-months in the stock market have been anything but normal, and if history is any guide, the gravy train might…
I’m basically volunteering for an unpaid internship
I’m the owner and sole editor of a Medium publication with 20,700 followers. A lot of people think that makes me a mustache-twirling monopoly man or Scrooge McDuck diving in his pool of gold coins.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In reality, owning and running a mid-size publication is a lot like an unpaid internship. I spend my time helping others for no money. To be clear, when I say “no money,” I don’t mean a small amount of money.
I have never made a penny from running my publication.
The truth is that unless you are a…
Own your income, own your life
The first time you make a dollar from something you’ve created is one of the most powerful feelings in the world.
It’s also a dangerous moment.
It really can be a mind-expanding experience. You begin to imagine what life would be like to spend all of your work time creating things you care about. The first time I started to believe that could be my future, it lit a fire under my ass; I was ready to do whatever I needed to do to make that dream a reality.
The problem was that I had no idea exactly what it…
Because who would be better to ask than the people who read my work?
I am writing a book!
It’s the first of several books I have planned and this first one is a “beginners guide” to personal finance. I’ll also be writing a more “intermediate” book and then an “advanced book” where I nerd out on research from financial economists.
I am brainstorming ideas for titles and subtitles and who better to ask than you awesome folks.
Which of the two titles do you like better?
Title #1: Reaching Financial Basecamp
Subtitle: 8 Essential Money Moves on your journey to financial freedom
Title #2: Resurrect your money
Subtitle: Your 8 Step Plan to Breath life back into your finances
Which of these titles/subtitles do you prefer? Any other constructive feedback (be gentle, my ego is fragile) you want to share? Let me know in the comments.
…
Plus 10 rules to successful side hustling & The lie of a comfortable retirement
Welcome to the Weekly Dividend a newsletter from Making of a Millionaire, where we highlight the latest and greatest content we have to share with you from the past week.
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6 Money Rules I’ll Follow Until I Die
Lauren Como breaks down 6 money rules that she will live by for the rest of her life. …
It’s time to kill the office culture mindset
I only require three things to be productive at work; my laptop, cell phone, and coffee.
You’ll notice that none of those things require that my work be done in a specific physical area like say a cubical or even my home office. That’s why I was able to spend this morning working at a picnic bench overlooking my son and wife playing by the lake.
It was not only one of my most productive stretches in months but it was the first time in a while where I thought to myself;
I would be happy doing this for another…
Ben Le Fort
Economic policy wonk by day. Personal finance writer by night. I write about investing, debt, and all things related to money. Editor of Making of a Millionaire
