Personal finance blog that makes you save or earn a little at the time. Simple frugal living.
Instead of thinking of life as a series of goals or accomplishments, I also like to think of life as a collection of memories. I ponder what kinds of memories I’d like to add to that collection as I age. This helps me get past overly abstract goals and focus on the experiential nature of…
Read Collecting Memories by Steve Pavlina
In February 2018 filmmaker Kevin Smith (aka “Silent Bob”) suffered a massive heart attack and underwent emergency surgery. He’s less than a year older than me, so he was only 47 at the time. Afterwards he switched to a vegan diet and dropped more than 50 pounds. In his latest film Jay and Silent Bob…
Read Gentle Wake-up Calls by Steve Pavlina
In the months and years leading up to my bankruptcy in 1999, I was very resistant to going broke. I kept sinking further into debt year by year, and bankruptcy was becoming increasingly inevitable. I kept doing whatever I could think of to stave it off, including selling off lots of items and trying to…
Read Fear Is Boring by Steve Pavlina
If you predict what you expect to happen next in the world or in your life, does that mean that you’re also putting out an intention to make it so? Here’s how I like to frame this: A prediction is an acknowledgement and mental exploration of an existing offer. This could be an offer from…
In November when I did four days of ayahuasca ceremonies in Costa Rica, the first night was really rough. About an hour after drinking the tea, I started feeling very strange, and this feeling continued to intensify. My body began to feel really heavy, and after a while I felt like I was mostly paralyzed…
Read Trusting the Virus by Steve Pavlina
As much as you’ve seen unfold this month already, this is still the early game for the virus, so there will be even more changes coming up quickly. The last 10 days of the month could be even bigger than the first 21. With so much uncertainty, how can you still feel grounded? Is that…
Read Feeling Grounded in the Midst of Spiraling Changes by Steve Pavlina
This will be a quick add-on for the recent post on framing the coronavirus. Obviously this situation has derailed many people’s plans, some more than others. So how do you frame a situation like this where reality seriously derails your plans? First off, reality can do that, as it’s obviously demonstrating right now. This is…
At the individual level, you have many options for how to frame the coronavirus situation. You could continue to see it as some meaningless objective event, remaining detached from assigning any meaning to it. It just is. A virus is simply doing what a virus does. And people are reacting to it as people do.…
The latest news in the world reminds me of this scene from Airplane 2, when a host of problems culminates in panic. Today the we have the coronavirus spreading rapidly, the stock market plummeting to the point that trading was halted, and the usual sexist egotistical lying hypocritical bigot making it all worse. These are…
One thing that people have observed that’s a bit unusual about me is that I use such a wide variety of models and tools in my work, and I don’t seem to have a problem when the rules of reality that those models are based upon seem to be in conflict. For instance, I can…