What is it with Bloggers & Traveling?
Well-Heeled had a great article on traveling as the Spending Holy Grail . The post got me thinking, “what is it with personal finance bloggers and traveling?”
We rant and rave about the envy surrounding material possessions, the vanity of keeping up with the Joneses, and the evils of debt – yet most, if not all, of us has written at least one article about some planned or actual trip without concerning ourselves over the cost (or at least trying to justify them).
Just like JD Roth, the thrill of traveling comes from the experience itself, the people you encounter, and how you grow from it. He chronicled his journey through Africa and what he learned while there. Notice the focus on the people he met.
With our 1-year anniversary coming up this weekend, I reflected upon our own excursions. Since we’ve been married, my wife and I have been to Belize (honeymoon), Iceland, Niagara Falls, and will be going to China this November.
We’re months away from our trip, yet are already discussing “what’s next”. Curacao or Hawaii are potential options right now, though we’ve mentioned at least a dozen other countries!
A review of incurred costs reveals traveling is quite the expenditure for us. Sure, we are saving aggressively. We never carry a credit card balance. We have zero debt. We have a robust net worth for our age, but does this qualify us to spend indiscriminately on travel?
There’s a saying I’ve heard which goes: “You can have anything in the world, but you can’t have everything”. I absolutely love the sentiment because it doesn’t limit you in what can be obtained, but rather forces you to recognize choices must be made.
Ramit Sethi championed this idea with the term “conscious spending”. He outlined the habits of friends who spend $5,000/year on shoes and $21,000/year on going out and how they are justified in their spending.
Instead of thoughtlessly spending money on whatever crosses our paths, people engage themselves into determining what it is they truly value. What you personally decide to spend money on doesn’t particularly matter, so long as it’s what you decide is important and not what you think others are expecting you to spend on.
Even with billions of dollars, you could have anything in the world, but not everything.
How You Treat Your Goods Could Reflect How You Manage Money
Disposable. It’s a word used far too often in describing items we view as single-use and easily replaceable, like disposable utensils or razors.
Reduction in material quality, craftsmanship, and of course, labor rates has super-charged almost all durable goods – making them readily available and extremely affordable. As a result, we’ve grown out of the smaller disposable items like diapers and napkins into larger products like toasters and microwaves.
Hard to believe for $10 you can buy a toaster. For that small cost, it’s not “worth” the time to fix a broken one and instead we default to buying new, allowing the product to become disposable. Once that happens it’s near impossible to realize the product’s full potential. We’re constantly replacing the item before we squeeze out all of its usefulness. Continue reading “How You Treat Your Goods Could Reflect How You Manage Money” »
Save with One Hand, Splurge with the Other
Do you know what type of spender you are?
Did you even know there were different categories?
Just do a search for any combination of: spending, personalities, or habits and you’ll be rewarded with dozens of links to quizzes and descriptions of the different categorizations. Probably the most entertaining breakout I found was over at Smart Cookies.
Turns out… I’m a YO-YO SPENDER.
Saving aggressively day-in and day-out, all of my efforts to maximize value and never pay full price can be undermined by these splurges. Continue reading “Save with One Hand, Splurge with the Other” »
Great Expectations: Ignore Social Norms Save More
“More money begets more spending” seems to be an underlying result of success many people accept. In other words, the more money you make, the more you spend. Quite often, it’s the expectation of the money you should spend.
In most regards, we judge people based on our expectations of them. Generally speaking, people of certain social status or professions are elevated to higher standards.
Think about it. If your doctor showed up in an old, rusty car, it would probably give you cause for concern.
“Hey, wait a minute, what kind of quack is going to operate on me!?!?”
Continue reading “Great Expectations: Ignore Social Norms Save More” »
Managing Fear and Expectations
Recently I’ve been reflecting back to March 2009. My interest in behavioral finance probably stems from the technical confusion with markets. From the collapse of Lehman on, another engineering friend and I traded daily emails attempting to make sense of what was happening. As news continued to worsen, we threw our hands up and proclaimed:
“TOO SCREWY – INCONCLUSIVE!”
Although I anticipated the answer, I needed to find a chart graphing historical events against the stock market. As you would imagine, the more severe the news – the more the market plummeted.
Back to 2009 – equities were at fire-sale prices, yet my urge to grab everything under the sun was relatively low. My wish list grew daily, but my executed orders were close to nill. Simply put, my brain was outputting conflicting messages. How could this be given I knew the Buffet adage, “Be fearful when others are greedy, be greedy when others are fearful”.
Mulling over this relationship, an interesting thought surfaced. Maybe it has less to do with
FEAR & GREED and more to do with
FEAR & EXPECTATIONS.
Financial Lessons From Running
If you read my 3-month performance review, you’d know I’ve been training for a 10-mile race along with fellow blogger, Paranoid Asteroid. The race has come and gone, and its time to reflect.
Overall, the race went well and I did better than expected. Previously, I’d set a goal of 80 minutes for completion. Ended up beating that goal, coming in under 76 minutes or 7:35/mile.
Earlier I did a post on Financial Lessons From Engineering. The response was positive and many people agreed how other aspects of life, and their lessons, can be applied to personal finance. Unable to resist the urge to do one for running, maybe this will turn into a mini-series!
