Idiot Money
Go to the bookTwitterSign up for updates
  • 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
Powered by GitBook
On this page
  • 1. Start with soul, not stuff
  • 2. Wherever you’re going, beware the Arrival Fallacy
  • 3. Aim not for financial freedom, but financial enlightenment
  • 4. What’s stopping you making more of your money?

Was this helpful?

#100: Where to start, where to go, what to do about what’s stopping you

15th August, 2022

Previous#99: Is what you’re doing for and with money working?Next#101: The life cycle of a financial idiot

Last updated 2 years ago

Was this helpful?

Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter.

Every tenth week, we revisit some stuff from the earlier days. These clip shows are grouped .

Usually this involves extracting a selection of especially striking sentences. However, the newsletters this clip show covers are so damn densely packed, they demand a slightly different format. I suggest skimming the summaries and reading whichever resonate best.

1. Start with soul, not stuff

Through your attention, you create both your self and your world. Paying attention to the right things is a prerequisite to taking the actions that lead to a Good Life. However, money hijacks this attention, so we start not from what stirs our souls, but from proxies built on the bullshit promise that price tags are a shortcut to what we should care about, and care for.

2. Wherever you’re going, beware the Arrival Fallacy

3. Aim not for financial freedom, but financial enlightenment

4. What’s stopping you making more of your money?

Financial enlightenment sounds great! It’s eminently achievable with far fewer resources than most people reading this already possess. So what’s getting in the way? Of course it’s a deeply rooted malfunction of your money mindset. Understanding this malfunction means understanding addiction: how the story we’ve all been told of addiction is all wrong, and how, admitting that when it comes to money you too are afflicted by addiction, far from being a death sentence, is the key to your treatment.

In , we looked at why plans never work, the one thing that best differentiates goof financial planning from its salesy evil twin, being moved by what moves you, how living an examined life isn’t about what we examine, but an entirely different way of seeing the world, and the vital role of our language as the building blocks of our worlds.

And in we looked at the importance of doing what only you can do, the two main reasons people visit a financial planner (and how they’re both bullshit), the roots of this bullshit and how you’re definitely prone to believing it too, how you can bribe people to do anything except live in a world where bribes don’t work, and the greatest value a financial planner has to offer… if you can find one able to give it.

In , we looked at possibly the commonest mistake people make with money: the Arrival Fallacy. We looked at how everyone recognises its ghastliest expressions, but how the subtler versions screw people up way more… including some headline financial big-hitters.

In we asked: how much does it cost to keep you happy? And then walked through the implications asking this question (and considering the Arrival Fallacy) has for how you make financial decisions, including why most budgeting advice is backwards, and how most notions of ‘financial freedom’ are missing something huge.

In , we looked at how, for such a common dream, the reality of financial freedom is poorly understood and how thinking instead of financial enlightenment can help correct this error. We covered how the brain is a prediction machine, and when it comes to predicting how to live with money, the machine is malfunctioning. And how to remain unenlightened about something is to remain, in an important psychological sense, a child, and how the way to grow up is not to crave certainty and simplicity, to cultivate the courage to challenge shitty self-deceptive beliefs to become comfortable with increasing levels of complexity.

In we looked at how, when challenged, no one even knows what financial freedom means, which is a pretty good indication that no one knows what they’re doing when they say they’re pursuing it, even if they sound all clever when talking about things like ‘the 4% rule’.

And in , we looked at the three types of freedom: freedom to, freedom from, and freedom for. If you read no other post from this selection, read this one.

In , we looked at what addiction really is, and the common financial expressions of it, including the amazing story of Rat Park, and a quite magnificent Bond/Blofeld joke.

And in we looked at how to treat these addictions – these regular patterns of resource allocation that don’t make life better.

Idiot Money #51
#52
Idiot Money #53
#57
Idiot Money #54
#58
#59
Idiot Money #55
#56
here