Idiot Money
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  • Hello.
  • Whole-Brain Personal Finance
  • #1: The correlation between having money, managing it well, and living a good life
  • #2: Don’t know where to begin sorting out your finances? It’s not where you think it is
  • #3: Your relationship with money is complex. But it needn't be complicated.
  • #4: Spending £450k on being bad parents
  • #5: Idiot Profile: Private-Jet Guy
  • #6: What the bloody hell is a ‘relationship with money’ anyway?
  • #7: What fund managers can teach us about what really matters
  • #8: “I want money so I don’t have to think about money”
  • #9: Idiot Profile: An oligarch with a gun
  • #10: If Kanye West were a financial adviser
  • #11: If all the world's a stage, then what does it matter where you stand?
  • #12: Financial Independence: An (Actual) Idiot’s Guide
  • #13: Let’s talk about money, baby
  • #14: New Year's Non-Idiotic Financial Resolutions
  • #15: New year, old message
  • #16: "Just tell me what to do"
  • #17: How to choose better investments
  • #18: You cannot count. This leads you to make idiotic financial decisions.
  • #19: What's your number?
  • #20: 7 magnificent money lessons that have nothing to do with money
  • #21: The merits of money are negative
  • #22: The psychoanalysis of money, or How to screw up your children’s financial worldview
  • #23: The ghosts of money... and how to bust them
  • #24: My favourite way to think about investing, part 1
  • #25: The ABC of money, part 1: the three self-deceptive poisons
  • #26: Consider the pineapple: the perfect symbol of idiot money
  • #27: The ABC of money, part 2: financial nobility, an overview
  • #28: My favourite way to think about investing, part 2
  • #29: The ABC of money, part 3: financial nobility, step 1
  • #30: My favourite way to think about investing, part 3
  • #31: The ABC of money, part 4: financial nobility, step 2
  • #32: The idiocy of ignoring impermanence (the ABC of money, part 5)
  • #33: The six financial stress responses: what's yours?
  • #34: My favourite way to think about investing, part 4: betting beyond the basics
  • #35: The ABC of money, part 6: financial nobility, step 3
  • #36: My favourite way to think about investing, part 5: cost-benefit investing
  • #37: The ABC of money, part 7: financial nobility, step 4
  • #38: The best diet advice and the best financial advice are the same
  • #39: The ABC of money, part 8: The Eightfold Path and interdependence
  • #40: The dance of becoming wiser with money
  • #41: Building a better money brain (the ABC of money, part 9: neuroplasticity)
  • #42: The dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in personal finance (part 1)
  • #43: The dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in personal finance (part 2)
  • #44: A story of lions and loss
  • #45: The ABC of money, part 10: what meditation isn’t
  • #46: The ABC of money, part 11: what meditation is
  • #47: Idiot Profiles: Lord and Lady Jewellery Addiction, Teenage Ozymandias, and me
  • #48: Living mindfully with money (the ABC of money, part 12)
  • #49: Give, give, give, me more, more, more
  • #50: Our most costly money problems are the ones we don't see
  • #51: Align what you care for with what you care about
  • #52: Do what only you can do
  • #53: Money for many means happily ever after… but after what?
  • #54: The ABC of money, part 13: financial enlightenment
  • #55: Identifying your hidden money addictions
  • #56: Treating your hidden money addictions
  • #57: Idiot Money Maths #1: How much does it cost to keep you happy?
  • #58: The ABC of money, part 14: the secret shackles of financial freedom
  • #59: The ABC of money, part 15: freedom to, freedom from, freedom for
  • #60: If you go there blindfolded, you probably won’t like where you end up
  • #61: Idiot Money Maths #2: What is your default unit of spending?
  • #62: Balance isn’t stillness
  • #63: A problem shared
  • #64: How to live well, even in a palace (the ABC of money, part 16)
  • #65: Denunciation is still attachment (the ABC of money, part 17)
  • #66: “What do Blackheath people do?” (a story about how not to do financial planning)
  • #67: The ABC of money, part 18: Addicted to a dream
  • #68: What hot new financial knowledge are you likely to find in 2022?
  • #69: Red Pill Financial Planning: Escaping the Money Matrix
  • #70: The nasty narrowness of number-governed living
  • #71: Getting into Financial Flow
  • #72: The ABC of money, part 19: Denunciation bad, renunciation good
  • #73: I, Robot? Money and the misleading mechanisation of life choices
  • #74: Kondo your credit-card statements
  • #75: The rule of 72 (and its oft-overlooked implications)
  • #76: Forget about improving your decisions. Focus on improving your decision-making skills
  • #77: Seeing your financial world more clearly (the ABC of money, part 20)
  • #78: How to lose 2 1/2 stone in 6 months: an intro to the best non-fiction book I've ever read
  • #79: Your money worldview is (literally) half-brained
  • #80: Cost-consciousness beats cost-cutting
  • #81: Financial change that doesn’t start from your financial worldview is selling you short
  • #82: The overlooked truth of reality that is messing up how you live with money
  • #83: How money hijacks your hierarchy of attention
  • #84: The value of (almost) everything to you is nothing
  • #85: Financial philosophy > Financial psychology > Hot investment tips
  • #86: Five regrets of the rich
  • #87: Sum malfunction: a sure-fire way to spot if you’re being a financial idiot
  • #88: The Micawber Fallacy, or what your Dickensian maths misses about spending wisely
  • #89: The tell-tale signs of a poor financial worldview
  • #90: Wanting wisdom, craving financial fortune cookies
  • #91: You don’t need a scammer to be scammed: your desperation for an ‘answer’ will do almost as well
  • #92: Are you reading the wine list the wrong way around?
  • #93: Some personal finance puzzles and how not to solve them
  • #94: The main reason your relationship with money is so messed up
  • #95: The tyranny of the takeaway
  • #96: Deep wealth v shallow wealth
  • #97: What seeing your financial life more clearly looks like
  • #98: Making more of your money isn’t a maths problem
  • #99: Is what you’re doing for and with money working?
  • #100: Where to start, where to go, what to do about what’s stopping you
  • #101: The life cycle of a financial idiot
  • #102: I can read your financial mind
  • #103: Don’t worry about playing a game better when there’s a better game to play
  • #104: Reflections on two years of this newsletter, and why I’m taking a six-month break
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  • A few popular posts
  • The clip shows
  • Five important points
  • Five silly stories
  • Post series

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Hello.

In case you were wondering where you are...

NextWhole-Brain Personal Finance

Last updated 1 year ago

Was this helpful?

This newsletter has .

This archive will hang around for a bit. You can dance through via the menu on the left, or check out some highlights below:

A few popular posts

– The story of my favourite symbol of money idiocy, starring St Paul's Cathedral, prisoners rioting because of being made to eat lobster, and taking fruit for a walk.

– A mind-expanding story about expanding one’s waistline in Vegas with a not-very-subtle application to why we fail to make more of the money in our lives.

– Some super-important topics and some ways people typically approach them idiotically... or dodge the obvious idiocy but caught in clever traps... and what it looks like to act more wisely instead.

The clip shows

Should you be more into bullet points than arguments, some summaries of a bunch of posts at once.

  • – Covering #1-#9

  • – Covering #10-#19

  • – Covering #20-#29

  • – Covering #30-#39

  • – Covering #40-#49

  • – Covering #50-#59

Five important points

Five silly stories

Point and laugh at people doing dumb stuff with money.

Post series

Occasionally, I link a few newsletters together because I think an idea is too important not to cover, but too complex to cover in one go. Each post in a series contains a link at the bottom to the next one in that series.

Whole-Brain Personal Finance

Mapping the two best books I've ever read for understanding the world and how to live within it to how to make the most of your money.

The ABC of Money (using Buddhist philosophy as a framework for seeing money more clearly)

All investments are gambles (my favourite way to think about investing)

Idiot Money Maths

When it comes to using money in a meaningful way, the importance of the numbers, from using price tags as a measure of value, to fretting about growth forecasts, is grossly overblown.

We tend towards tunnel vision on the most misleading numbers (such as an investment-growth forecast, or a retirement ‘number’) while remaining ignorant of the insightful ones (such as the role of the unequivocal accounting record of our life choices in living an examined, wiser, life).

Some numbers, however, are actually helpful. This occasional series highlights the most important numbers for you to know.

(warning: tons of people have said this has most changed how they view the money in their life)

This series is important enough to get . Because paying attention to money with only half a brain is no way to live a whole life. Lesson #5 is a sort-of summary of some key points.

– Mental poisons and their antidote

– An overview of the Four Noble Truths

– The First Noble Truth

– The Second Noble Truth

– Impermanence

– The Third Noble Truth

– The Fourth Noble Truth

– The Eightfold Path and interdependence

– Neuroplasticity

– Meditation: what it isn't

– Meditation: what it is

– Living mindfully with money

– Financial enlightenment

– Financial freedom, part 1

– Financial freedom, part 2

– How to live well, even in a palace

– Denunciation is still attachment

– Addicted to a dream

– Denunciation bad, renunciation good

– Seeing your financial world more clearly

– The overlooked truth of reality that is messing up how you live with money

– Some personal finance puzzles and how not to solve them

– Deep wealth v shallow wealth

– What seeing your financial life more clearly looks like

– The importance of internalising the insights of understanding all investments are gambles

– The secret to successful long-term gambling and its application to choosing investments

– The starting point for choosing investments

– Investment options beyond the basics

– Cost-benefit investing

moved to Substack
#26: Consider the pineapple
#78: How to lose 2 1/2 stone in 6 months: an intro to the best non-fiction book I've ever read
#97: What seeing your financial life more clearly looks like
#50
#60
#70
#80
#90
#100
How some basic psychotherapy can save you wasting a ton of money
Why being able to afford something is an idiotically invalid reason for buying something
What a relationship with money is, and why it's so important to understand it before you worry about actually having any money
The threshold theory of good living (aka why the benefits of money are negative)
The three types of financial freedom
Famous Russian Oligarch guy wasting his life on a Scottish hill
Parents parenting very ineffectively
An idiot wasting his life on a private jet
Me wasting my life at a posh dinner with investment folk
Why peeking out of the curtains is not the place to look for investment advice
its own page
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16
Part 17
Part 18
Part 19
Part 20
Part 21
Part 22
Part 23
Part 24
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
How much does it cost to keep you happy?
What is your default unit of spending?
The rule of 72 (and its oft-overlooked implications)