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  • #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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#1: The correlation between having money, managing it well, and living a good life

21st September, 2020

PreviousWhole-Brain Personal FinanceNext#2: Don’t know where to begin sorting out your finances? It’s not where you think it is

Last updated 4 years ago

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Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter. The newsletter that bothers to check if what it does all day, every day, is actually worth it.

This week: becoming wiser with money by understanding that how you allocate your money is the worst possible thing to do blindly.

There is no correlation between having money and living well. However, when it comes not to what people have, but how they are with what they have, there sure as shit is.

Personally and professionally, I’ve been inside the heads of the people that other people think they want to be (or rather that have what other people think they want to have).

Business folk, film folk, sport folk, idle posh folk… from the boardroom to the pages of Tatler, I’ve examined a circus of rich people’s relationships with money, even if they couldn’t be bothered to do it themselves.

And yet in the context of living, rather than simply existing, what more valuable act could there be?

Socrates’ assertion, when on trial for his life, that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ may be the most famous line in classical philosophy. But what does it mean?

Socrates is saying that he would rather die than live a life governed by self-deception. He is on trial for seeking wisdom, for trying to understand what is real and living in alignment with it; for seeking to establish a rational basis for what to care about, and what to do. For seeking to express his authentic soul through his societal self.

Aligning what we do with what we (deep down, undistracted and undeceived) care about, rather than with what unreal deceptive influences tell us to care about, is what joins up having resources with living a good life.

It was so important to Socrates that he rather died than be prevented from doing it. So should it be for the rest of us. There’s bugger-all benefit in being rich if you use those riches in a miserably misaligned manner.

None of us is going to be forced to knock back a happy-hour hemlock. Sadly, our fate is worse. Because it’s all too easy to ignore. The slow suicide we don’t see, that hides in the unexamined, unchallenged, wiring of our minds, is far more dangerous.

I’ve seen what works, and what doesn’t. The ways that work are the same, and the ways that don’t are too. It is simple, and systematic.

Focusing on embracing what works and shunning what doesn’t should be everyone’s aim. Yet if anything, because of the way we’re wired, because of the way society is set-up, and sometimes because of the way the people we pay to help us are incentivised, everything gets flipped: we embrace what doesn’t work, and shun what does.

Often this is as easy as just asking if what we do blindly we’d still do consciously. This is a central principle of the book.

This needs to change. For the stakes – your life savings, if not your life – couldn’t be higher. And the application – you’re thinking about money right now, and you’ll be spending some soon – could be neither more incessant nor more immediate. A poor relationship with money leads to poor money decisions leads to wasting money. And time. And energy. It leads to wasting your life. It leads to expressing yourself in ways that don’t feel right, but that you can justify in the short-term, conveniently overlooking the ability of the short-term to turn into the long-term when you’re not looking.

When the stakes are high and you’re busy looking elsewhere, it can be tempting to hire some help. Unfortunately, the obvious place to turn often doesn’t help at all. More on that next time.

Money misleads us into believing it will bring us what we want, when in reality it is only a well-disguised substitute. […] What is very bad indeed is when we try to meet ‘being’ wants with ‘having’ answers. If anything feels more like something you have rather than something you are in the process of becoming, it will never feel real […] becoming who you want makes having what you want happen by accident. The reverse is not true.

This book should be seen in a symbolic light. A tempting beam from a brighter future that draws you along your own path to becoming a financial sage. That shines lights on previously unexamined aspects of your financial life, to inspire examination in a way that gradually changes how money is represented in your mind, in an ongoing virtuous cycle.

Asking ‘Does it work?’ is the bridge between the theoretical and the practical, and the inspiration for this book. If the screwy way most of us obsess over money, and the gap between its accumulation and its application in service if the Good Life actually worked, there would be no need for me to write, nor for you to read, this book.

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