Saving is Imperative and Very Easy with the Right Mindset

I can’t stress this enough! We all logically know that if we make $60,000 a year and spend $65,000, we will be in trouble-yet, so many Americans do this. So much of this (in my humble opinion) has to do with mindset.

We save and invest very little because we are afraid of missing out. We worry about how others perceive us. We feel that personal finance is a foreign language, and developing a financial plan is too complex. …

For much of my career, I was a total procrastinator.

I’d have a work deadline creeping up on me, and I’d approach it like a college kid during final’s week; I’d wait until the days before complete all of the tasks that were expected of me.

Now, to be clear, I did complete my tasks and performed as per my manager’s expectations. I was always considered a high performer, but I knew I wasn’t giving my best, and I always felt like I had a lot more to give.

During the workday, I’d constantly catch my mind drifting off and…

It was 2016, and I was sitting at my desk at my corporate job in Silicon Valley when a news notification popped up on my MacBook that I couldn’t resist opening; it was about Liang Zhao Zhang, a janitor for BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), who made over $270,000 the previous year. That wasn’t a typo, and you read that correctly; a janitor in San Francisco makes over $270,000 a year.

Liang sometimes works 17 hour days and takes almost every single overtime slot available at his job; in fact, over $162,000 comes from working overtime.

If you haven’t been…

I think most of us can agree that it’s a blessing to have family members that love and care for you. Even though I don’t have my biological parents, I’m incredibly lucky to have other family members that support me. They give great advice (both solicited and unsolicited) and often provide an ear to listen when I need to vent.

Whether I have a question about a car problem or have a question about a family recipe, there’s always someone in my family that I can go to.

However, when it comes to finance…things get a bit “iffy.”

Now that…

It was 2018 and I was living in Silicon Valley and working in high-tech, trying to figure out how I was going to escape both the Bay Area and my corporate job that I didn’t love asap.

There’s nothing wrong with San Jose or high-tech, but it’s crazy expensive to live in Silicon Valley.

Sure, salaries are typically higher, but $120,000 per year with an average rent payment of $2,485 for an 886 sq foot apartment is not only illogical but insane.

I decided I was going to do the very “2018 thing” and start an online business. …

Five stars and 57 reviews; that’s how the shirt in the photo above ranks on Etsy. Some of the tags used to advertise the listing are phrases like “Anti-Capitalism”, which by textbook definition, capitalism is:

An economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

Thanks to capitalism, the Etsy shop owner (a private owner) can purchase t-shirts in bulk from China for a few bucks, add a margin to them, and sell them for $24.98 on the internet. …

1. We Have a Fast-Fashion Obsession

America’s addiction to fast-fashion is a more recent development over the past decade, which I’d argue is driven by a combination of the desire to constantly add new items to our wardrobe and the non-stop marketing from the Instagram Influencer community.

In 1930, well before social media, the average American woman owned 9 outfits. Today, the average American woman owns 30 outfits, which is almost triple the amount of clothing (according to Forbes). Fast-forward to the 1950s, if a woman wanted to purchase a ready-made dress, she could spend about $9 (or $72 in today’s dollars) to order an item…

1. Investing Time to Make More Money

This is my first investment pick given the potential for the huge ROI. I say this in almost every post single post because it’s true; if we all learned one thing from the pandemic, it should be the importance of generating additional income streams outside of our day job and becoming self-reliant.

You don’t need to build a giant YouTube following or film yourself dancing on TikTok to make extra cash outside of work. …