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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.
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  • #21: The merits of money are negative
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  • #24: My favourite way to think about investing, part 1
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  • #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
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  • #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)
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  • #45: The ABC of money, part 10: what meditation isn’t
  • #46: The ABC of money, part 11: what meditation is
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  • #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
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  • #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
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  • #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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  • Meditation is a life skill
  • Fasting is a life skill
  • Expenditure fasting is a life skill
  • Typical approaches to budgeting are bullshit

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#74: Kondo your credit-card statements

14th February, 2022

Previous#73: I, Robot? Money and the misleading mechanisation of life choicesNext#75: The rule of 72 (and its oft-overlooked implications)

Last updated 3 years ago

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Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that the weirdly overlooked purpose of money is to make your life better, including:

  • That some of the best skills in life can be cultivated for free.

  • How typical approaches to budgeting are useless.

  • And Kondo-ing your credit-card statements.

To make more skilful life choices, cultivate more life skills. Too often, the focus for cultivating financial life skills is to do what you’re already doing more efficiently. However, the best skills, financial or otherwise, start with challenging the stories that govern your choices. Don’t worry… challenge doesn’t necessarily mean change!

‘One day,’ wrote the queen of sorting people’s shit out, Marie Kondo, ‘I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted.’

In a scene that could qualify as the quaintest ever psychedelic revelation, when Maria came to, she heard a mysterious voice, ‘like some god of tidying telling me to look at my things more closely.’

This self-avowed obsessive tidier realized she’d been making a big mistake.

‘I was only looking for things to throw out. What I should be doing is finding the things I want to keep. Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying.’

Marie was onto something.

There’s a great difference between the processes of scratching stuff out and building stuff from scratch. It’s why Kondo’s approach to tidying is magical compared to those obsessed with ever-cleverer storage solutions. And it’s why typical approaches to budgeting are bullshit.

Time spent tidying, however clever, is wasted when the stuff being tidied up would have been better ignored or discarded.

Meditation is a life skill

I’m always on the lookout for foundational life skills. The sort of stuff that makes it easier to glide past life’s little (or large) frustrations, rather than slaving away getting better at dealing with them.

Like meditating.

Not only does being able to meditate mean you’ll never be bored, but there’s also more than a grain of truth in Blaise Pascal’s quip that ‘All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone’. Developing this ability is therefore at least moderately handy.

Not to mention good for your eyes, your posture, and your bodily tension.

Odd, then, that humanity’s made such an effort, not to make it easier to sit still, but to enable excuses not to.

Fasting is a life skill

Another foundational life skill is fasting.

Aside from the myriad health benefits, fasting is freeing.

Fasting frees you from your gut hijacking control of your body and your brain.

And from being so desperate for a feed that you’re unable to focus on anything else.

From becoming hangry.

And from being forced to eat crap because you’re sure you need ‘something’ but find yourself in a nutritionless desert.

Most importantly, fasting frees you from the story that a hunger pang is an indication that you’re hungry. This simply isn’t true. And its implications for your financial choices are huge.

If you’ve ever fasted for more than three days or so, you’ll be aware that hunger pangs arise around the times you typically eat, and fade quickly after. Between about three and five days they disappear altogether. They’re mental expectations, not physical danger signs.

The more easily you can thank the hunger pang for its reminder and reassure it that all is well, the more easily you can take control of your priorities.

This is an incredibly useful thing to understand. With implications that extend far beyond your stomach.

For example, that pang you feel upon encountering a problem that a solution must be for sale somewhere. Maybe it is. But maybe it’s a costly reflex that serves not to make your life any better, but to distract you from the stuff that actually would, born of reflection rather than reflex.

If you’ve never missed a week’s worth of food, you’re missing something far greater. And yet the vast majority of people haven’t voluntarily gone so much as 24 hours between meals. Plenty object to the very idea by flapping about with all the grace of a portly pigeon on a windy day.

Expenditure fasting is a life skill

Like food fasting, expenditure fasting is also a life skill.

Go for a week deliberately trying not to spend money on anything.

Maybe combine it with a food fast. That’ll sure make it easier, and more beneficial.

Just as the chief benefit of food fasting isn’t losing weight, the chief benefit of expenditure fasting isn’t about spending less money.

It’s about challenging the fundamental stories that rule your life, possibly in reeaaaaaallly unhelpful ways.

Fasting forces you to pay attention.

It forces you to identify what really adds to your life, rather than what merely doesn’t obviously detract from it. The difference between the two is huge.

Typical approaches to budgeting are bullshit

As we’ve noted many times before, one of the most important things you can internalise about personal finance is that we’re not crap at knowing what we want, as is often claimed. We know what we want when we pay attention. We’re just crap at paying attention.

Totting up money in versus money out isn’t paying attention.

That would mean that anyone earning a fortune would be spending their money wisely, whatever they did with it. Which is obviously insane. But this is the world we live in – that we choose to construct. Most expressions of the belief that all consumption is good consumption are a touch more subtle, but they’re no less stupid, psychologically speaking.

Nor is categorising expenditure based on where it was bought paying attention.

Nor is setting an amount you’re ‘allowed’ to spend on certain things by starting from your current expenditure paying attention.

That would mean not challenging your current choices but entrenching them – the opposite of what you want to do!

*

Meditation and fasting are both brilliant tools because they both challenge the incredibly common, but unfathomably unhelpful story that the best solution must be for sale.

And they’re tools that, while you will benefit from learning to use them better, everyone already possesses, and can pull out instantly, at any time.

And – most importantly – (and , in explaining why meditation isn’t relaxation) your ability to pay attention to how you pay attention is fundamental to making better financial decisions.

That would mean that meals out with friends whose company leaves you walking on air had the same effect on your life as those with . Or that the first glass of wine that lubricates a first date is the same as the tenth glass that ruins it. Or clothes bought because you were replacing something beautiful and/or functional were the same as those bought as a hopeful but ineffective form of therapy. And so on.

as we’ve seen before
insurance salesmen
Screenshot credit:
https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1436394176728289280