Is This Blog More Powerful than Doubling your Salary?

“Spend Less!”

“No, Earn More!”

The battle goes on, with scathing mockery volleyed between the opposing camps.

Mainstream personal finance pundits like Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman advocate lower spending for those in debt. Yet they have an apparently unlimited upper ceiling on how much increased spending can still lead to happiness, as evidenced by the high-spending lifestyles they are living today.

Here in the sensible middle, Mr. Money Mustache recommends both paths: earn as much as you can, but never sacrifice your soul to do it. At a certain level of income (which I feel is around $100,000 per person per year), the time to financial independence becomes so short that it becomes increasingly futile to earn more – that’s just how the math works out.

But all the earnings in the world are useless if you never know the meaning of the word “enough”. So get that concept in place right away – before wasting your time with increased income. Otherwise very little of that increased flow of cash will find its way into your ‘stash.

To illustrate this point with sparkling clarity, I am happy to share a neat little story and graph based on data provided by an MMM reader. He says this:

Comments: Your blog > Doubling my salary
Dear MMM,
I’m sure you receive many “thank you” emails a day for teaching your Mustachian values, but I bet you don’t receive “thank you” proof too often. I wanted to show you a graph, but I didn’t know how to attach it, so the following data will have to do (you should graph it if you get a chance).
The data below is my monthly net worth (according to Mint). When you graph it, you can see two distinct slopes. In both cases, my net worth is increasing, but my rate of wealth accumulation more than doubles at one point (Jan 2012). It goes from $600/mo to $1600/mo. What astounds me is that in March 2011, I doubled my salary and you can’t really tell. But in the months after I started reading MMM, my net worth starts increasing like crazy.
I believe that this is proof that reading your blog is more powerful than doubling my salary! Isn’t that nuts??? It certainly took a bunch more research/changes, but your blog is was the impetus. This rate change should take me from retiring in 30-40 years, to retiring in 10-20!

Following his advice, I graphed his data, added annotations, and this was the result.

The Effects of Mustachianism on Net Worth (click for larger)

I was naturally both pleased and intrigued by the result, and so I wrote back and asked our friend for more details on exactly how he accomplished these feats: both doubling his salary, and increasing his savings rate. The answer (note that I added a few links to relevant MMM articles based on his list):

So here’s how I was able to double my salary. Right after graduating college with a bachelors in mechanical engineering, I started graduate school. Tuition was waived, and I got a research assistantship making about $25,000. That seemed to be plenty to live on, but the research was boring.
In March of 2011 I quit grad school because I got a job at a giant company working in their corporate sustainability department. It’s a dream job because they actually pay me to calculate/analyze their carbon footprint! It’s great!
Anyway, my salary increased to about $50,000. it’s hard to admit, but I went through some major lifestyle inflation. I moved to a big city, which is 30 miles from where I work. I started spending money like it was my job to fill the new apartment with furniture, drive to work every day/upkeep the car, shop at Whole Foods, buy lunch at work every day.
I took some expensive trips across the country and I started spending more money on christmas gifts and charities. This all seemed like a great idea because as long as I had a fairly positive savings rate, I figured that that what I was supposed to do. I never took on debt/car payments/ credit card balance, and I tracked my finances reasonable closely.
So in December 2011, while searching for this article Men With Mustaches Make More Money, your blog popped up. Although I never found a post related to that news article, I knew I’d struck gold. I read every post you’d ever written in about a month. After that I read many personal finance books/blogs as well as investing books. It all started to become so obvious to me. Here’s a list of the changes I made in a relatively short period of time:

Started taking public transportation to work
Started biking anywhere within a few miles
Stopped buying extra stuff (tech gadgets, extra clothing, impulse Target buys)
Food:
switched to a super cheap Bosnian grocery with great produce
made lunch every day
cooked more meals
cut monthly grocery budget in half
Bought dry goods in bulk
fell in love with oatmeal
opened online savings account
opened Vanguard IRA (simple index funds)
got a 1% cash back card
opened a Vanguard taxable investment account (simple index funds)
Ditched Cable
Started doing home energy audits for friends/family ($100 each)
got a 4% raise because I “exceeded expectations” at work
increased my gas mileage from 24 to 27 mpg by slowing down
use gasbuddy.com to find cheaper gas
bought all LED light bulbs (got them super cheap through my work)
I can’t point to any one thing that accounts for the slope change. I just started making changes and they kind of built on each other. Now I get really excited when I get interest from my online savings account or reinvested-dividends from my index funds. I know my net worth is small now, but the slope is certainly heading in a better direction.
Use whatever info you’d like, and let me know if you’d like to know anything else. Also, if you ever have any energy efficiency/corporate sustainability questions, I’d be happy to help you out.

I’d like to thank this reader for sharing the happy story (he wrote it a little over two months ago). I can type to you all day about the counterintuitively large effect of making a bunch of small conscious improvements in your spending.. and indeed, some days I do just that. But until you see it applied to a real life like this, where the graph of your wealth takes a sudden bend and your mandatory work career is suddenly chopped in half, it can be hard to convince people of just how useful it is to understand your spending, instead of just endlessly chasing more income.

A Positive Attitude: The Essence Of Good Manners [BLOG]

As an etiquette instructor, most people think my instruction revolves around lessons in poise and posture, the importance of a firm handshake, and proper table manners. What they don’t realize is that, before I get into any of the manners skills training, I begin each and every client session with a very frank conversation about the importance of a positive attitude as being essential to having good manners.
Learning how to be more positive actually led me to my interest in teaching manners in the first place. As a New Yorker, I was born with the natural tendency to look at the more cynical side of everything, often viewing the glass as half-empty rather than half-full. Growing up in a household with an unhappy parent certainly didn’t add to my ability to look on the brighter side of life. It certainly hasn’t been an easy road, however, I had the good fortune to marry someone who is eternally optimistic and has inspired me to move forward in the right direction.
A positive attitude has no prejudice. It is not bound by color, race, or religion. It does not care if one is rich or poor. Anyone has the right to display a positive attitude, and it makes that person much more attractive to others. As far as making a good first impression, a positive attitude (coupled with an ear-to-ear smile) is a sure-fire way to show others you are likable, friendly—and a full participant in your life.
When I decided to immerse myself in manners, I thought long and hard about this concept of a positive attitude and how it can affect our relationships, our interactions, and our everyday circumstances. I began to look at people of all ages and noticed how many walk around with what I call “mad on” faces, like they have the weight of the world on their shoulders, barely able to crack a smile. And I realized that having a positive attitude—like having good manners—is a choice, and requires discipline and practice.
Here are two pieces of etiquette advice that I share with my clients, and that I aspire to live by on a daily basis.

Possess a great attitude!When you wake up each morning, choose to be upbeat and positive, as this helps to set the tone for the day. Life is one giant possibility, so why not embrace it with an open and willing attitude to try new things and take risks. You only have one lifetime, and there is no point in wallowing in negativity. Make a conscious choice to enjoy a happy and successful life.

Don’t Forget to Smile.A smile is critical and often overlooked. Find something to be thankful for each day and put a smile on your face. This will win allies and attract friends. A smile is the most inviting of all gestures. If you smile on the outside, your insides will follow suit. Practice your smile each day in front of the mirror when brushing your teeth, and in no time you will have a perfect, authentic smile.

How To Get Rich [BLOG]

That’s what so many want, right? I’m not going to lie and say it is not a whole lot better having lots of money. I had a whole lot of fun and loved my life when I was eating mustard and ketchup sandwiches and sleeping on the floor of a three-bedroom apartment that housed me and five buddies.

I have a whole lot more fun now. It doesn’t suck to be rich.
The question everyone wants answered, is how to get there. There are ways to get there. But there is not a template that works every time for everyone. Getting there requires being ready when opportunity presents itself.
Change and uncertainty create opportunity. Times like we are facing now, with complete financial uncertainty, are perfect times to start on the road to getting ahead financially.
First, here is WHAT NOT TO DO:
There are no shortcuts. NONE. With all of this craziness in the stock and financial markets, there will be scams popping up left and right. The less money you have, the more likely someone will come at you with some scheme. The schemes will guarantee returns, use multi-level marketing, or be something crazy that is now “backed by the US Government.” Please ignore them. Always remember this: if a deal is a great deal, they aren’t going to share it with you.
I don’t broadcast my great deals. I keep them all to myself. Also, if the person selling the deal was so smart, they would be rich beyond rich rather than trolling the streets looking to turn you into a sucker. There are no shortcuts.
So what should you do to get rich?
Save your money. Save as much money as you possibly can. Every penny you can. Instead of coffee, drink water. Instead of going to McDonald’s, eat Mac and Cheese. Cut up your credit cards. If you use a credit card, you don’t want to be rich. The first step to getting rich, requires discipline. If you really want to be rich, you need to find the discipline—can you?
If you can, you will quickly find that the greatest rate of return you will earn is on your own personal spending. Being a smart shopper is the first step to getting rich. Yeah, you have to give things up, and that doesn’t work for everyone, particularly if you have a family. That is reality. But whatever you can save, save it. As much as you possibly can. Then put it in 6 month CDs in the bank.
The first step to getting rich is having cash available. You arent saving for retirement. You are saving for the moment you need cash. Buy and hold is a sucker’s game for you. This market is a perfect example. Right at the very moment when cash creates unbelievable opportunity, those who followed the buy and hold strategy have no cash. they can’t or wont sell into markets this low, that kills the entire point of buy and hold. Those who have put their money in CDs sleep well at night and definitely have more money today than they did yesterday. And because they are smart, disciplined shoppers, their personal rate of inflation is within their means. Cash is king for those wanting to get rich.
The second rule for getting rich is getting smart. Investing your time in yourself and becoming knowledgeable about the business of something you really love to do.
It doesn’t matter what it is. Whatever your hobbies, interests, passions are—find the one you love the best and GET A JOB in the business that supports it. It could be as a clerk, a salesperson, whatever you can find. You have to start learning the business somewhere. Instead of paying to go to school somewhere, you are getting paid to learn. It may not be the perfect job, but there is no perfect path to getting rich.
Before or after work and on weekends, every single day, read everything there is to read about the business. Go to trade shows, read the trade magazines, spend a lot of time talking to the people you do business with about their business and the people they buy from.
This is not a short-term project. We aren’t talking days. We aren’t talking months. We are talking years. Lots of years and maybe decades. I didn’t say this was a get-rich-quick scheme—this is a get rich path.
Now you wait for times of uncertainty and change in your business. The time will come. It may  come quickly, it may take years and years. But it will come. The nature of our country’s business infrastructure is that it is destined to be boom and bust. Booms are when the smart people sell. Busts are when rich people started on their path to wealth.
You will know when that time is here for you because you will know your business inside and out. You will be ready because you will have been saving up for this moment in time.
With all the change and uncertainty in the financial markets, there are people right now making more money than they ever dreamed of. They are the ones who have been living the real estate market and the financing behind it and understanding what actually was going on. They’re the ones who understood the complexities of the credit markets. When everyone was following the crowd, they kept on saving their money and avoided the temptation of groupthink.
Boom and busts happen in every industry. The question is whether you have the discipline to be ready when it happens for you?
If you do, you will find out what it feels like to get lucky

Get Rich With: Blogging?

Well, there goes another million.
Sometime last week, this blog reached the “two million page views” milestone. It took less than three months to get that second million, compared to nine months for the first one, which I wrote about on December 10th. I remember we all thought we were pretty big business back then, but by any measure there are now more than twice as many Money Mustaches growing out there as there were when we blew past the first million mark!
Blogs that talk too much about blogging can get pretty boring, so don’t worry, I’m not going to write an article like this for every million. But today I thought it would be worthwhile because there are several interesting lessons that I’ve learned from this writing hobby that I’ve wanted to tell you about. Hopefully they will be useful for the many other blog writers that hang around here, as well as for writers of other stripes and even regular Mustachians.
Lessons Learned:
1 – It’s really hard to understand exponential growth.
Even though I occasionally like to write equations and draw graphs in my spare time, I still find that I have the natural human weakness of thinking in linear rather than exponential terms. When I check this website’s statistics page each night, it looks like readers are just trickling in at a steady rate, like guests to a nice party. But when you look at a graph that spans several months and divide out the numbers, you can clearly see that an exponent is at work. The exponent always surprises you.
This has applications in any internet-related business or creative venture, since the pool of people on the internet is effectively infinite. If you can get something started that has a positive growth rate, that tends to grow all by itself (by word of mouth, or search engines, or viral-style-forwarding), you can end up with some very interesting results. The Honey Badger video that we all like to quote from is up to 40 million views. A friend’s internet-based sales business is making tens of thousands of dollars per month in sales, just because of a bit of self-perpetuating exponential growth.
It also has applications in saving for early retirement. Beginner Mustachians are occasionally blown away by the numbers we throw around here. “Nobody could save hundreds of thousands of dollars!”, they say, “I’ve only got a few hundred bucks and it was damned hard to save that much!”.
I felt much the same way when I was younger. The problem is not with the numbers, it’s just with that tricky exponential function again. Today’s hundred-dollar-saver can invest his savings even as he improves his skills at efficient living and increases his employment income over his working career. When you combine all of these effects, you will see strong exponential growth in your savings. The hundreds of today can quite easily become many thousands per month in the future, until in the years just before retirement, many people are easily increasing their wealth by over $100,000 per year – sometimes more than their entire gross pay.
2 – People can actually make money with this blogging thing.
When I started writing these articles, I assumed I would only be entertaining myself and a few facebook friends until I ran out of stuff to say. The writing habit proved quite addictive, however, and the number of fun and enthusiastic readers grew. So I upgraded my goal slightly to “Saving the Entire Human Race from Destroying Itself”. But even at that point, I never thought I’d earn much more than the cost of paying the web hosting fees.
But one day, I had a look around at some other personal finance blogs. It turns out that these things are serious business. Sites that rank in the top 20 on the Wisebread list are routinely bought by internet marketing companies, often for over a million bucks. One clever guy named Pat Flynn who runs smartpassiveincome.com is an expert at generating income from websites. Last year he raked in over $400,000 from his carefully designed portfolio of sites. Get Rich Slowly, possibly the biggest blog in this niche, sold over three years ago although the sale was a secret until recently.
The most surprising part is that MMM already has a larger amount of traffic than some of the big-name websites at their time of sale. I don’t know exactly why this has happened, since we have done almost no promotion of the site. But I like to chalk it up to the fact that Frugality is the New Fanciness. This is an idea whose time has come.
In the right hands and with enough flashing credit card ads, a site this big could probably already earn more than my software job used to pay. You can tell from my feeble attempts at revenue-generation that income is not one of the main goals of this blog. But I will still proudly note that we earned $500 last month, and the income graph also has one of those sneaky exponents at work!
And don’t worry, I am not even thinking about selling this thing. Someone did send me an unsolicited offer once for something like $10,000, and I thanked him for the information. But it seems unlikely that anyone would want to pay in the millions for a blog, with the condition that the author can continue to write (or not write) whatever he wants and quit at any time without notice.. with anti-consumerism, political incorrectness, and swearing  being key parts of the message.
But I do love learning about this entirely new field, and I am pleased to see that writers now have a more democratic way of making a living than they did back in the old paper publisher days. Even big-time authors like Joe Konrath now publish exclusively in e-book formats, and they find they earn more money doing that then they could with big traditional book deals.
3 – It’s Time for Mr. Money Mustache to Get Off His Ass and Write.
The biggest thing I have learned from this Two Million Views business is that we are onto something big here. If this blog really is one of the fastest-growing things in the entire personal finance blogosphere, then maybe I’d better start taking it a bit more seriously.
So I’m going to set a couple of goals. I’d like to increase the amount of time I spend working on this site. Not to the point of burnout, but I’d at least like to get a chance to write up more of the 100+ draft article ideas that keep piling up, and  answer more of the emails that people send me. I’m going to talk to more people, take better pictures, start putting out the odd amusing educational video, do more science experiments.. stuff like that. I’ve even applied to be a speaker** at this year’s “FinCon” (financial bloggers conference) since it’s right down the road in Denver, and hey, I like talking.
I’d also like to set a goal of having this writing gig pay for my whole family’s living expenses. That’s about $2000 per month. Yeah yeah, we’re already retired and all that, but I think it would be nice psychological boost to be able to say that I’m supporting a family just with writing, and more importantly to share my thoughts on how easy or difficult it is to do without any soul-selling.
In reality, since we already have our consumption covered from other income and we have no desire to spend even more money, that means that 100% of MMM proceeds will in some way, over time, be used to improve the world. I’m not sure exactly how yet, but I still like the idea. Plus, as blog writing increases, my carpentry income has to decrease, which eats into my safety margin. By making a point of having the blog earn just a little bit of income, I can regain this margin.
We Mustachians are still a brand-new family. Most of the world has barely even heard of us so far. This site hasn’t even cracked the top 100 on Wisebread’s widely-cited blog list, since they aren’t measuring website traffic or even feed subscribers (if they did we’d be in the top 40 or better!).
That’s fine with me, since I’m here just to write to you and I have my own way of defining success. But if you do want to help out, here are a few ways to game the system a little bit:
Follow MMM on Twitter by clicking here.
Befriend MMM on Facebook by clicking here.
Become a RSS subscriber by clicking here.  Even if you usually read on the website (which is the way I prefer to read blogs), this helps boost the still-important Feed Subscribers number, and you might learn a thing or two about the convenience of RSS reading as well.
Hardcore readers can install the Alexa Toolbar* which will boost this site’s Alexa Rank.
Some generous people have actually asked me if they could donate to this blog just to say thanks. I have always said no in the past, but given the new goals above, I will now accept that generosity and see how it goes. This is of course fully optional.. if you just want to read for free, please continue to do so!
This Paypal Button

Or the Tiptheweb Service: Tip
Or the Flattr Service

In the long run, the biggest fundraiser for this blog will probably be the MMM Recommends Page and the Commission-paying Rewards Credit Cards list. I like that method, because those things are tucked out of the way, useful, and non-spammy.
That’s enough of this behind-the-scenes stuff, it’s time to get back to the real world. Thanks again for reading and I’m looking forward to taking it all up several notches as the blog begins its second year of existence in just a few weeks.
Yee Haw!!

*The Alexa Toolbar is a browser add-on which displays the ranking of any site you visit in a tiny bar graph at the top of the browser. The toolbar sends anonymous stats to the Alexa web ranking company, which in turn determine the popularity of that website. The only weird part is, only bloggers actually use that toolbar, so your Alexa rank is really a measure of how popular your site is with bloggers. But yet many people haven’t caught onto this weakness, so your Alexa rank influences your rankings in the top 100 list as well as how much you get paid for advertising spots.  If a significant number of readers could be enticed to run the toolbar… hoohoo, that would be funny. There are already blogger networks which do a good job of exploiting this loophole, although MMM is not a member of any, hence my less-good current rank.