Idiot Money
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  • 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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#3: Your relationship with money is complex. But it needn't be complicated.

5th October, 2020

Previous#2: Don’t know where to begin sorting out your finances? It’s not where you think it isNext#4: Spending £450k on being bad parents

Last updated 4 years ago

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Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter. The newsletter that would rather get comfortable with complexity than seek simplistic succour.

This week: becoming wiser with money by understanding that success with money isn’t about knowing how investments ‘work’, what to invest in, or whom to delegate that stuff to, but understanding money’s role in your life and how to live with it every damn day.

Whenever you hear someone praised for being ‘good at explaining complex ideas in simple terms’ what you are hearing is a piece of crap. Grasping why is fundamental to financial advice.

People seek financial advice because they think – or rather believe – that finance is complex, that the complexity is numbers-based, and that therefore it’s worth paying someone who understands the numbers to make the complexity go away.

This is thrice-flawed. The numbers bits of finance that are relevant to you are simple, the complexity comes not from the numbers, but from the narrative of your life, and complexity by definition cannot be made to go away.

True complexity is irreducible. When people see scary numbers-based ‘complexity’ in finance, what they are seeing isn’t complexity, but complication. Because people are either being stupid or trying to sell you something, simple things are made complicated such that we praise those who cut through the crap, rather than blaming those who put the crap there in the first place.

While complications can be dissolved, to ‘simplify’ a complexity is to distort it, resulting not in simplified, but simplistic. It’s comforting, but crap. Simplistic versions can be stepping stones – children read Dahl before Dostoyevsky – but they’re not substitutes. Retweeting a conclusion hasn’t saved you the time taken to understand something, it’s wasted the time you could’ve understood it in.

By all means break a life down for analysis, but if the aim is the living, not the analysing, don’t forget to put it back together again.

Unfortunately, complex and complicated (and simple and simplistic) are hard to distinguish. Yet the distinctions are important. Because scared minds – as ones thinking about money often are – are so desperate for simple answers that they beg to be sold them, blind to the fact that such answers not only don’t work, but can’t work.

When we talk of ‘knowing’ about money or investments, it’s crucial to understand what we really mean.

Simple and complicated can be reduced to propositions and procedures: statements of fact and technical know-how. Complex requires a knowing that is perspectival and participatory. That understands ideas in the context of the life they are symbiotically serving.

What you do with money is irrelevant unless it’s making your life better. You can get rich and stay deceived, and those riches won’t mean shit. Think about money more clearly, and not only will you use money more meaningfully, but you’ll get richer as a side-effect.

When someone claims a complex idea is being explained in a simple way, what they mean is a simple idea has been stripped of its traditional covering of unnecessary complication. Complex processes may end up with simple conclusions, but to jump to them is to trivialise them. And trivial is not transformative. It’s a self-deceiving trick to make you feel you’ve solved something despite knowing in your soul that you’ve done no such thing, and wasted time in pretending otherwise.

Often a simple version of a complex thing, or a conclusion with a cursory understanding (so-called) is all you need. But when it comes to how you interact with money, be it by its direct input into decisions, or just thinking about it, nothing so obviously or so frequently shapes and expresses who you are: it’s not the time to be taken for a ride.

There are four ways we can ‘know’ about money. We talk about the two that don’t really matter, and ignore the two that do.

We see all things financial as complicated and scary and in response cover our eyes. When a well-meaning, well-heeled helper offers to sell us a guide dog, we’re so grateful we barely pause to consider how much it costs, or how effectively it works. And it never occurs to us to just uncover our eyes. We remain money blind.

Believing simplicity automatically equals sophisticated is dangerous. It deceives us into perceiving profundity when presented with triviality, and teaches people to. A byzantine recipe could be because of Heston Blumenthal, but it’s usually because of some idiot inflating their own intelligence and importance. In financial advice, it allows con-men to create unnecessary complications and charge for removing them.

Most investment advice rightly knows it has to combat the perceived complexity of finance, but focuses on painting prettier pictures of clarity and simplicity, forgetting that the audience still needs to go to the gallery, still needs to remove their hands from their eyes, and still needs to learn how to see what they’re looking at.

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“optimise for solving easy problems in ways that make it harder for them to think about the hard ones”
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