Mindful Money Blog

As we all know, life comes with a fair amount of challenges. Your car breaks down. A tree falls on your house. You lose your job. The proverbial s#!t happens. But none of it has to get in your way – not when you have an emergency fund.

What Makes Life Meaningful? | Sunday Firesides: Everyone’s Just Trying to Make It in the World | How Emotionally Intelligent People Turn Frustration and Stress Into Fulfillment and Achievement | The Best Way to Deal with Dissatisfaction (It’s Not What You Think) | How To Want Less

Pain is Part of the Process | History Is In the Making | “Reality” Is Constructed by Your Brain. Here’s What That Means, And Why It Matters | Lessons From The Samurai: The Secret To Always Being At Your Best | The Universe in Verse (Video)

As I wrote this in the run-up to the holiday season, markets seemed to be on the mend from the bear that started January 3rd, the air was coming out of the inflation balloon, and talk of recession probabilities was the new crisis du jour (it ALWAYS has to be something). The biggest surprise to me is always that anyone is surprised by these things...

After 17 months of struggling unsuccessfully with emotional overwhelm, I finally have a set of simple tools that have made a huge difference for me personally in accepting, allowing, just being with difficult emotions. If you're curious about this or want to try meditation, let me know. I’d love to help you get started.

Doc G of the Earn & Invest Podcasts talks with Jonathan DeYoe of Mindful Money about how to be thoughtful about what our financial framework is meant to support. Jonathan takes us through his pillars of happiness and how to use them to create a financial plan that serves our unique goals in life.

“Isn’t Personal Finance Pretty Simple?!” | Men Are Struggling. A New Book Explores Why and What to Do About It | Wealth is Partly Imaginary | The Lonely Hearts Club Man | The Quality of Our Questions

To borrow from Churchill, “The balanced (stock/bond) portfolio is the worst form of investing known to man, except for all the other forms.” Those people who are suggesting – based on its immediate past 1-year performance – that the 60/40 portfolio is dead are probably trying to sell something that isn’t a balanced stock/bond portfolio.

Expectations and Reality | Life is Too Short? Bereaved Managers and Investment Decisions | Daily Meditation May Work As Well As a Popular Drug to Calm Anxiety, Study Finds | Rupert Murdoch Knees Trump in The Balls While He’s Doubled Over Coughing Up Blood | Ballerina Music Box

SVP Jonathan DeYoe joined the Smart Money Circle podcast to discuss how wellness and spirituality tie into investing your money and happiness.

For me, worrying isn’t just a sense of anxiety. It is a push to learn more. After I did some research and learned a little bit about how earthquakes work, I wasn’t worried about them anymore (or, at least, I worried less). Earthquakes and the fear of earthquakes are a pretty good stand-in for “market volatility.”

Stock selection is hard because leaders change hands. 25 years ago Apple was nearly bankrupt – and if it wasn’t for Microsoft’s last-minute investment, it would have gone under. Now it is the largest company in the world (by market cap). This is one reason that academics (and evidence-focused advisors like me) suggest that owning a broadly-diversified index of stocks in a low-cost vehicle like at ETF makes an enormous amount of sense.

Fast Unicorns Frequently Fade | An Epidemic of Delusions | The Right Way to Be Introspective (Yes, There’s a Wrong Way) | An End to Doomerism | Why Saving Is More Important Than Investing

In real estate investing, lack of financial literacy is deadly. Investors who don’t have a fundamental understanding of basic financial concepts like risk tolerance and return expectations are destined to make costly mistakes... or worse, to go bankrupt! But it's not all doom and gloom — financial literacy is something that can be learned.

Mindful Money - broadly sharing basic financial education and presenting the simple actions that enable and inspire wealth-building - is my "Second Mountain." This is the purpose of this reading list. These are the core books that have helped me establish my own set of financial beliefs and behaviors that can work for anyone who is climbing their own mountains.

The World is Awful. The World is Much Better. The World Can Be Much Better. | Incentives: The Most Powerful Force In The World | A Short Story of Men | How Do Americans Spend Their Money, By Generation? | Gardeners and Diners

Historical Roots of Economic Disparities for African-Americans | Your Explanations Are Not True | Validea: Market Valuation | Financial Bloodletting: Don’t Let This Happen to You | Tiresome Debates

The World Really Is Getting Better | Does Mindfulness Get in the of Making Amends? | 11 Ways to Encourage Mindfulness for Kids | Passive vs. Active Investing: Why Passive Wins | New Study Shows 20 Years of Failure for Active Managers | Mindful Investing: Better Investing Outcomes; Less Suffering

The great companies of the US and the World are on sale. That sale may (or may not) get better. If it does get better, it won’t get that much better. There will be some point in the not-too-distant future where we look back at today – the September retest of the June low – and say, “I wish I would have invested then.”

Five Lessons from History | How to Avoid the Envy Trap | Counting Another Person’s Money | The Effect of College and University Endowments on Financial Aid, Admissions, and Student Composition | We Don’t Have a Hundred Biases, We Have the Wrong Model | Key US Growth Measures Diverge, Complicating Recession Debate