Mindful Money Blog

Your financial road, like the rest of your life, is multi-dimensional. The path must traverse the many switchbacks of a steep and relentless climb. In financial terms, the difficulty of the climb is all about debt.

Financial security is not a commodity; it can’t be found in a product. It isn’t available for sale in any way. Financial security is a journey. It is a path of trade-offs, acceptance, self-reflection, and hope. Getting there will require some effort and no small amount of luck.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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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.”

You’ve heard me say it over and over… and over and over… and over and over again. Creating a retirement income that rises to match your rising cost of living and lasts the rest of your life, while at the same time creating a legacy that potentially lasts across generations, is possible – even for those who begin with very modest incomes. It requires three things: savings, equity ownership, and time.

We know – vividly – what has already happened. We can never know what will come next. The humble recognition of this truth should be the foundation of any long-term investment philosophy. The question is, “Given that we cannot know what comes next, how should we invest?”

I have been in financial services for over 2 decades, and there are 5 things I see (over and over) that take people away from their financial success. They are: Spend > Earn; Retire too early; Panic sell; Excited buy; No planning. We have designed two offerings to solve for these 5 mistakes.

These issues of “account minimums” and who has access to advice have been on my mind for years. They are the main drivers for both the book and the education courses. It was a conversation, about 6 months ago, with a business coach that helped the rest of my platform take shape.

There is a lot of negative news out there right now. Inflation is the worst it has been in 4 decades, there may be a recession around the corner, supply chains are still problematic. When will it end? I don’t know, but I’d be careful about getting overly swept up in it.

Because our educational system teaches next to nothing practical about personal finance, there are usually two ways people come to the idea of personal financial education. Either they are in a crisis of a particular kind, or they are finally realizing that some general financial education would be helpful as they go about their regular lives.

The best way to completely destroy any chance for lifetime investment success has historically been to sell one’s quality equity portfolios in a bear market. In Warren Buffet’s words, it is wise for investors to be “fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”

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Historically, it seems the primary function of financial journalism (perhaps all journalism) is to scare us out of our wits. We have been reminded of this almost hourly since the S&P 500 entered official “bear market territory” on Monday, June 13th by closing 20% below its previous all-time high set in January of 2022.

It is impossible to know where today’s 8.6% inflation will lead. If it hangs on for too long, it will begin hurting everyone’s retirement income plan. Our definitions of "money" and "wealth" hinge on successfully solving the retirement income problem.

If you have recently begun investing –OR– if you have recently changed your investing philosophy and a bear market arrives, it is very easy to become scared out of your process. Because…

Michael Sherlock of the Shock Your Potential Podcast interviews Jonathan DeYoe, author of Mindful Money