Last year, my goal was to live the good life on less than US$10,000. I ended up going about six hundred bucks over my target, but was pretty happy with the attempt. This year, I didn’t have any particular goal in mind. Since I’d already built a spreadsheet and got in the habit of tracking my expenses, I kept up […]
At the start of 2017, one of my goals was to try and maintain a flâneur lifestyle while living off less than US$10,000 (or NZ$15,000).
I’ve logged every rickshaw ride, every water refill, every bowl of noodles. Nothing escaped the merciless conditional formatting of my spreadsheet, which blazed a furious red whenever I overshot my daily or monthly spending targets. Now, with an entire year’s worth of spending data in front of me, it’s crunch time. Here’s how I did…
After I published my ‘coming out’ essay on the benefits of the frugal life, I got a message from an old school mate who’d been quietly following a similar path. While I was chuffed with hitting six figures by age 25, he totally blew me out of the water. Having successfully tapped into the property boom in our home city of Auckland, he’d managed to become a millionaire at the tender age of 24! Here’s how he did it…
The definition of net worth is simple: It’s everything you own, minus everything you owe. This number strips away the preening, the posturing, and the peacocking, laying bare your real money situation. There’s nowhere to hide. Growing your net worth over time – by reducing debt and building up assets – is the only meaningful definition of financial success. Here’s how to do it.
For the first time in my life, I have absolute freedom to only pursue the things that interest me. The last two decades have been an uninterrupted freight train of schooling and work, so it’s a pretty surreal feeling. There are moments of pure elation, and even the occasional faint trace of guilt. Did I cheat, somehow? Surely it can’t be this easy? I’m waiting for a giant skyhook to descend from the heavens and hoist me up by the seat of my elephant pants, violently jerking me back into reality. It wasn’t until 2013 that I even twigged this was an option…