This blog will help you get rich, lose weight, quell a receding hairline, get more women or men (as you may prefer), and eat more Twinkies.
Or at least the Twinkies part.
Let’s try this again.
This is a personal-finance blog aimed at helping people reach their financial goals—particularly goals like accumulating wealth, building a secure retirement, or reaching financial independence—especially while still working their regular jobs. (Or maybe new jobs that pay a little better than their previous jobs. But still jobs.)
I'm in my late 30s; I'm married with two young kids; and my wife and I are both professionals with strong incomes. Our jobs have nothing to do with finance, and we do not use a financial planner. So all we know about personal finance is from TV, books, magazines, and—you guessed it—blogs.
My financial goals include “getting rich”—which for me means “financial independence.” I'm pegging financial independence for me and my family to mean a net worth of around $3-5 million. Why those numbers? Good question. But that encapsulates a lot of my financial planning—careful and disciplined saving and investing combined with more capricious analysis, risk-taking, and swinging for the fences. I’ve figured out a fair amount of the conventional wisdom in personal finance and have used it to help us achieve some early and significant success. But I’m riddled with human faults—and that little gleam, that wondering whether there’s a shortcut (even a mild shortcut).
For more about me and how and why I started this blog, here's an excerpt from my first post:Here's a link to the full post:In thinking about our finances, I’ve often looked back and thought the all-too-common refrain of “If I knew then what I know now…” I’ve also found that I find it extremely important that we teach our kids about money—so that they can have a clue earlier than I did. Still, we’ve done okay. Better than okay.
Neither of us ever started a company that went IPO, won the lottery, or tried a get-rich-quick scheme that actually worked. (My wife does pretty well at charity raffles though, and we’ve walked away with prizes such as signed cookbooks and restaurant gift certificates.) But our net worth passed $1 million while I was still 34. Now that included the appreciation in our home. It was between one and two years later that our net worth went over $1 million, excluding the equity in our home.
On the same principle of “If I knew then…”, I’d like to share what I think I’ve learned—and hope that others will learn from what we seem to have done well and what we seem to have screwed up in reaching whatever success we’ve managed so far. I’ll also be chronicling our going-forward attempts and thinking about trying to reach our current financial goals. For me, that would be financial independence by, say, age 50-55. And sooner would sure be nice.
How Did I Get Here? My Personal-Finance Origins.
E-mail: blogmaster(at)canigetrichonasalary.com
(Thanks to Linda at RS Designs for this design.... she did the current design of this blog template, so check her out at RS Designs!)
First, Kill All The Lawyers
No financial, investing, legal, insurance, tax, accounting, retirement, estate-planning, or any other such advice, information, facts, data, or lies is or are being given by, at, on, around, within, throughout, or sitting on top of this blog in any way that you should rely or base any decisions of consequence upon. Any real advice would and should be tailored to your individual circumstances by a professional or you thinking really hard about it. Not me. Not a blog.
Advice given here regarding eating Twinkies or nurturing Chia Pets is entirely sound and may be relied upon in your sole and absolute discretion, with the understanding that this blog, its author, any guest authors, and anyone standing anywhere in their vicinity disclaim liability for any associated weight-gain, ill effect, or harm to any aforesaid Chia Pets.
