Our New $10.00 Per Month iPhone Plans

After more than a decade of enjoying mobile phone plans that were subsidized by various high-tech companies, Mrs. Money Mustache and I were finally brought back down to Earth this month as she shed the last remnants of her cushy part-time job.

This meant that suddenly we were paying for our own double iPhone habit out of our own pockets, which at $110 per month combined, was a pretty Antimustachian thing to leave on the books. Sure, we can afford it and they are still used mostly for “work”. But it is an inefficient way to handle our communications, since neither of us is a heavy phone user. Our existing carrier (AT&T) did not offer any reasonably priced plans for light users (the mandatory data package alone runs $20/month for 300MB, whether you use it all or not). So we went hunting.

The goal was to combine the best aspects of mobile and smartphone ownership (nationwide calling without long distance fees, having your phone, email, internet access, recipe book, camera, video recorder, voice recorder, calendar, notepad, music player, virtual scratch turntable, etc. all in a single device that is always in your pocket).. with the minimal cost associated with a ‘dumbphone’ on a prepaid plan.

As I’ve learned over the past year from some of the MMM readers, nowadays you can do just that. You can take an existing smartphone (iPhone of any version, Androids such as the Samsung Galaxy, and many others), and by simply swapping out the SIM card, bring it to another mobile carrier. You even get to keep your old phone number when you switch companies.

Many of these new options are called Mobile Network Virtual Operators (MNVOs), and they are in fact just re-selling access to the bigger carriers’ networks. So you get the same reception, coverage, and reliability as you had before.

I’ll start with the juicy end result: Mrs. MM and I now have our iPhones running on plans that cost us only ten bucks per month. That includes any combination of the following:

• Up to 250 minutes of voice calling, which uses up your $10.00 at a rate of 4 cents per minute.
• Up to 500 text messages, which use up your balance at 2 cents per message (in either direction).
• Cellular Data (any that you use while not on a wi-fi network) is billed at 33 cents per megabyte.

If you use up your 10 bucks, you log into your Airvoice account and add another $10.  Note that there are currently some annoying glitches in the way their system works, described in footnote 1 at the bottom of this post.

The plan we’re using is called the Airvoice Wireless $10 Plan. It looks great on paper, but the company is just a bit new and flaky at this point, so be warned that it might not be quite as smooth an experience as your current Cadillac $120/month plan. However, being both Mr. Money Mustache and a retired software engineer from the telecom/datacom industry, I figured I’m up for a little Telephone Science Experiment. Especially considering the thousands it will save me (and the millions it could save the MMM readership as a whole)! By chopping a combined $100 per month from our monthly costs, we’ll end up about $17,300 further ahead every ten years after compounding, as noted in the old classic about Short-Termitis, the Bankruptcy Disease.

So let’s get into the details:

Looking at our phone use history for the past year, we found our habits would fit nicely into the new plan. My chitchatting has ranged from 58-234 minutes of voice and from 50-100 text messages per month. On top of this, most of the voice is done at home, which could just as easily be done on the computer using any of the free voice-over-internet programs including Google Talk or Skype (Google talk allows you to call regular phones for free, even between Canada and the US). And text messages from one iPhone to another don’t cost anything these days (they go through the “iMessage” feature). Plus even text messages to other non-iPhone people can be had for free, as mentioned in my Google Voice article.

Switching from AT&T to Airvoice (or a similar MNVO) took some research and quite a few steps. But to make it easy for you, here’s the summary, based on a report fresh from the keyboard of Mrs. Money Mustache, who did most of the legwork:

Steps to Switch your iPhone from AT&T to a Prepaid Plan:(in this example, we refer to Airvoice, but other MNVO carriers would be similar)

1.  Check to make sure that your contract is up. If you just signed up for an iPhone5, you might be hearing the litle wah-wah-wah-waaaah trumpet song right now, as you are probably locked into a 2 year contract. Come back and read this later. You can use this link to check your AT&T contract start and end dates.
2. Next we’ll need to “unlock” your phone so it can run with other carriers. You only become eligible for an unlock when your contract ends. You can check unlock eligibility here.
3. Request a device unlock for your iPhone through AT&T’s online formhere.
   You will need your IMEI number, which you can get from your “settings->general->about” menu, or by dialing *#06# from your phone. You will receive a “IPhone Unlock Request Received” e-mail notification from AT&T.
4. If you are sure you’re eligible for an unlock, and you are happy with the Airvoice coverage area (see this map) go ahead and order your SIM card ($4 per card) from Airvoice Wireless here .
5. If you do not have a Passcode/PIN set up for your AT&T account, go ahead and set one up now with this link. You’ll need to give this PIN to Airvoice when it’s time to port your number.
6. Wait for your unlock request to get processed (it took 3-4 days for each of our requests). Once your unlock has been processed, you will receive an e-mail from AT&T called “How to Complete Your Authorized iPhone Unlock”.
7. The email will tell you to plug your phone into iTunes and do a backup and restore. Once you finish, iTunes should show a “Congratulations, Your iPhone is Unlocked” message.
   This worked perfectly for Mrs MM, while MMM had hacked and jailbroken his own phone earlier, so it became a can of worms. He never got the Congratulations message. But eventually we prevailed after further hacking. You can check your phone’s unlock status by typing in your IMEI at this website:  http://iphoneox.com/
8. Hopefully you’ve received your SIM card from Airvoice Wireless by now. Ours both came in the mail very quickly. Note: if you have an iPhone 4 or newer, you’ll need to cut down the plastic frame around the Airvoice SIM card with scissors to fit in the newer, smaller slot (as shown in headline picture for this article. See YouTube for examples. No need to do this with the iPhone 3.
   
9. You’re all ready to purchase a calling plan and port your number! Take a look at all the Airvoice plans here. As noted earlier, we chose the $10 Talk and Text Plan, but there are also plans for heavier users, and pay-as-you-go-plans for extremely light users (which cost more per minute).
10. Download any statements or other stuff you need from your old AT&T account. After step 11, your account will automatically be nuked!
11. Fill out the “Port Your Number” page on the Airvoice web site: . You can also call Airvoice at 1-888-944-2355. You’ll need to provide
    - your account number with AT&T
    -your PIN/Passcode from step 5
    - the number from the Airvoice SIM card you just got in the mail
    - your AirVoice Refill PIN Number (if you don’t have one, just put xxx in this field
    -  the type of plan your purchased
12. Put your new Airvoice SIM card in the phone. You can use the end of a paperclip in the small hole in the side of the iPhone to pop out the SIM card tray.
13. See if you have service! One of our phones started working immediately, and the second took and hour and required a phone reboot.

It was a long haul, but you’re finally done. In my case, I can look forward to a $1200/year savings, which translates into the cashflow generated by$30,000 of ‘stash at a 4% withdrawal rate.

Whenever you need to buy more airtime, you just use this link.  After purchasing, you’ll get a confirmation e-mail with an order number.

A few notes and observations on Airvoice:

Every time you make a call or send a text, you’ll get a very useful pop-up alert like the one in this picture to let you know the funds remaining on your plan.

Since data is more expensive with this plan, we now disable cellular data for casual use (settings->general->cellular->cellular data-> off). Text messages and wi-fi still work perfectly, and my own town is blooming with free wi-fi spots (all public parks, schools, and most businesses around here provide free access, not to mention the blanket of coverage in my immediate neighborhood from my giant rooftop wifi antenna). So the data plan is mostly for trips and adventures.

Apple’s proprietary iMessage system still works (no charge to message from one iPhone to another), which is a nice surprise.

You might want to set up Google Talk on your home computer so that you can easily make free calls from there. This will help reduce the number of minutes you use on your phone.

The account options on the Airvoice website are pretty limited. You can edit your profile, change your password, and buy airtime, but you can’t view your usage or call history. Luckily, you get that information at the end of each call as noted above. You can also use your phone’s built-in statistics as a backup tracker: Settings – General – Usage – Cellular Uses (at bottom) – Reset Statistics.

We’ve only had this service for four days so far. And so far, so good. But as problems crop up, I will note them at the bottom of this article.

And now I’d like to turn it over to the readers: Airvoice is just one of many low-cost phone options besides the expensive main providers. Thousands of readers are probably already using other alternatives, perhaps better ones than the plan I chose for this article. Share them, give us all the details and links, and we’ll build an even better guide to killing the $100-per-month phone bill.

Alternatives include:
AT&T Operators

• Airvoice, Black Wireless, Fuzion Mobile, H20 Wireless, Straigh Talk

Sprint Operators

• Platinumtel, Ting, Republic Wireless ($20/month for unlimited everything)

Verizon Operators

• PagePlus Cellular, Walmart Family Mobile,  Straight Talk

T-Mobile  Operators

• Spot Mobile, GoSmart Mobile, PlatinumTel, SIMPLE Mobile

More of these MNVOs are opening (and closing) every month. Luckily, a reader later pointed out that there is now a Wikipedia page that tracks all of these : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mobile_virtual_network_operators

(…more to come…)

Footnotes:

1 – The Airvoice $10 refill glitch:

Update as of March 29, 2013: It looks like this has been fixed – the company now offers automatic renewal and credit card billing at the end of the month, just like every other monthly service in the world. So it’s convenient at last.

Here’s the old problem, which has now been solved, just in case it comes up again:

When we first learned about Airvoice, the $10.00 plan worked exactly as you’d expect it to: you can pay $10 for 30 days, or you can buy multiple $10.00 credits and have them stack up in your account, and at the end of each month (or when your 250 minutes gets used up), you automatically move on and start nibbling upon the next $10.00 credit with a fresh 30-days-later expiration date. It would make sense to buy at least a few months at a time, both for efficiency, and because of the following inconvenient policy on the Airvoice site:

To avoid service interruption, you will need to add a new refill card to your account before your airtime expires. Once your airtime expires, you will have 30 days to add a refill card. If no card is added, your account will be canceled. You will lose your phone number. If you wish to restore service after your account is canceled, you will need a new phone number and a new Airvoice SIM card.

However, they recently changed it so that if you buy a $10.00 credit, you get extra minutes, but your account is only extended by 30 days from the date of purchase. So you are doomed to having to log into the site manually to purchase airtime every single month. No automatic renewal, no possible way to make it convenient to give the company your money. Is this company run by former Soviet administrators!?

I couldn’t believe such a change would happen. So we contacted their headquarters, told them we were writing an article, and received this response:

We are consulting with our IT department and are working on reversing this change that has occurred. Hopefully, within the next couple of weeks, the plan will revert back to the original policy, where each $10 refill will provide an additional 30 days. For the time being, however, the expiration date will only extend as far as 30 days from the present date.

We appreciate your patience and understanding on this matter.

Thank you,
Airvoice Wireless

And therein lies the challenge of this whole operation. These little companies are small and disorganized. Airvoice has some of the most poorly written and inconsistent sets of plan options and marketing documents I’ve ever seen. And most of the other ones, such as H20 Wireless, are in the same boat. Even the slew of options available from the big incumbent providers are sprawling, and as confusing as spaghetti*. The only carrier that does it right is the upstart Republic Wireless, which is why I’m rooting for them.

Luckily, the phone service itself is still fairly reliable and the telephone customer support from Airvoice has been excellent… so far.

 *Hey Airvoice.. need someone to rewrite your materials and plans so they no longer suck? Get in touch!

Getting Rich: from Zero to Hero in One Blog Post

Hi there. If we haven’t met, my name is Mr. Jaskaran Singh. I’m the freaky financial magician who retired along with a lovely wife at age 30 in order to start a family, as well as start living a great life. We did this on two normal salaries with no lottery winnings or Silicon Valley buyout windfalls, by living what we thought was a wonderful and fulfilling existence. It was only after quitting the rat race that we looked around and realized why we had become financially independent while most people, even with higher incomes, end up stuck needing to work until age 65.

I figured a post like this was long-overdue, since about half of the readers of the blog are pretty new, and casting around wondering where to start on a giant blog like this with over 300 published articles. Then we can stick this article up in the menu for all future rounds of newcomers.

“I hear Mr. JASKARAN SINGH writes some useful stuff and many people are building happy, wealthy lives for themselves using his advice”, they are saying, “but I am a busy person. How can he make me rich Right Now!?”

Great question. Let’s begin.

For almost two years, I’ve been preaching a different brand of financial advice from what you see in the newspapers and magazines. The standard line is that life is hard and expensive, so you should keep your nose to the grindstone, clip coupons, save hard for your kids’ college educations, and save any tiny slice of your salary that remains into a 401(k) plan. And pray that nothing goes wrong in the 40 years of career work that it will take to get yourself enough savings to enjoy a brief retirement.

Mr. Jaskaran Singh’s advice? Almost all of that is nonsense: Your current middle-class life is an Exploding Volcano of Wastefulness, and by learning to see the truth in this statement, you will easily be able to cut your expenses in half – leaving you saving half of your income. Or two thirds, or more. Sound like a fantasy? Not to readers of this blog.

What happens when you can save more of your income? As it turns out, spending much less than you earn this is the way to get rich. The ONLY way. And the effects are surprising: if you can save 50% of your take-home pay starting at age 20, you’ll be wealthy enough to retire by age 37. If you already have some assets now, you’re even closer than that. If you can save 75%,your working career is only 7 years.

So remember my freaky magician story up in the first paragraph? There was not really any magic – I just saved about 66% of my pay without really noticing it, and in under ten years I woke up and realized I didn’t have to work for a living any more. Our son was born shortly afterwards, and he recently had his seventh birthday party. And we’re still going strong.

But how can you save so much?

The bottom line is this: by focusing on happiness itself, you can lead a much better life than those who focus on convenience, luxury, and following the lead of the financially illiterate herd that is the TV-ad-absorbing Middle Classof the United States today (and most of the other rich countries). Happiness comes from many sources, but none of these sources involve car or purse upgrades. No matter what the herd or the TV set tells you, this is the truth. Far from being a social outcast, this new perspective will make you a hero among your friends. This is not a fringe activity anymore – millions of people are fixing their lives these days. And the earlier you can accept it, the sooner you will be rich.

Is that all too fluffy and philosophical? OK, fine. Here’s how to cut your life costs in half. Start by getting rid of your Debt Emergency if you have one.Live close to work. Move to another city if you enjoy adventure. Don’t borrow money for cars, and don’t buy stupid ones. Ride a bike wherever you can. Cancel your TV service. Stop wasting money on groceries. Give your kids the opportunity to achieve greatness without being pampered. Lose the overpriced cell phones. Learn to appreciate the life-boosting joy of using your own body to get things done. Learn to mock convenience. Practice optimism.

That should do it – about half of your expenses, gone in one paragraph. Keep going, as many readers do, and you can save closer to 75% of what you make – especially for those with above average incomes.

But then what do I do with all the money?

You invest it. In stock index funds, in paying off your own house, in rental houses if you are interested in local real estate, and in other sources as you continue to learn about making money work for you. My own retirement income comes from a dead-simple asset allocation: one high-end rental house with no mortgage, and some 401(k) and taxable stock accounts which pay quarterly dividends. More recently I have started experimenting with peer-to-peer lending for higher returns on a small percentage of the portfolio, but that’s another story.

How long will the money last?

If you can get 25 times your annual spending saved up and working for you,that is enough to live off – forever. Don’t worry about the details – just do the saving for now, and watch as your lifestyle transforms and your worries about safety melt away. This blog is not so much a financial nuts-and-bolts blog as it is a story about lifestyle and attitude transformation. And believe it or not, your attitude determines your lifetime wealth much more than your knowledge of financial nuts and bolts.

So welcome! I’m glad you’re here, and let’s get started. For the long-time readers – let’s keep going!

5 Ways To Get Rich Online

To cash in online you need to be a game-changer. When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, there was nothing like it. He is now worth $17.5 billion according to recent Forbes valuations. DrewHouston saw money to be made in online storage, and co-founded Dropbox, the web-based tool that hit $240 million in revenue in 2011. Eric Lefkofsky spotted the potential inGroupon and gave $1 million to CEO and founder Andrew Mason. This year, Lefkofsky made the Forbes Billionaires list with a net worth of $2.9 billion. There are still fortunes to be made online, and we have found a few ways to do so.

YouTube has launched the career of many a musician, including Justin Bieber, the teen pop sensation who earned $108 million in the past two years. But have you heard of Karmin, the pop duo who signed a million dollar record deal after their Chris Brown “Look At Me Now” cover went viral? The duo, real-life couple Amy Heidemann and Nick Noonan, hit it big when the video gained over 68 million views after its upload in April 2011, propelling Karmin to a million dollar deal with label heavyweight Epic Records just a month later. “Brokenhearted,” the lead single from their debut album, has now gone platinum.

You do not have to be a singer to become a YouTube star. If you are lucky, you could shoot a video of your child, pet, or a double rainbow that strikes a chord and goes viral. YouTube might then get in touch asking you to become a partner, meaning the site will run ads along with your clip and share over 50% of the revenue with you. The father of “David After Dentist” has made more than $100,000 from YouTube ads alone. As well as advertising, viral video celebrities can diversify into TV appearances, merchandise and even iPhone apps, as the creator of “Charlie Bit My Finger” has done.

YouTube is not the only platform to launch the careers of millionaires. Sophia Amoruso, the founder of online clothing store Nasty Gal, started her business by selling vintage finds on eBay. After building a fan-base she outgrew the platform and created her own website. Nasty Gal is now worth $130 million, and is set to do $128 million in sales this year.

These days, there are many more online retail options on which to cash in. Alongside the tried-and-tested web marketplaces of Craigslist and eBay are stylish sites like Threadflip, a place for sellers to turnaround their used women’s apparel. ModCloth, which peddles vintage threads while carefully integrating social and mobile aspects has become increasingly popular, earning its 27-year-old husband-wife founders Eric and Susan Gregg Koger a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Bloggers can make it big, too. First, you’ll need to set up a site which will become your platform to write on music, fashion, finance or whatever your interest may be. Build a following and readership, and you could catch the attention of companies looking to acquire your site. In 2008, Johns Wu, the founder of Bankaholic.com, sold the site to Bankrate, Inc. for $14.9 million. Entrepreneurial tech site TechCrunch was acquired by AOL in 2010 for $30 million, making its founder, Michael Arrington, a wealthy man.

Fashion bloggers can also get rich. Just look at Leandra Medine, the woman behind the Man Repeller blog, whose site grew so popular it spawned two jewelry lines with Dannijo and a collaboration with Del Toro on $325 shoes.

Other ways to monetize your writing include selling affiliate marketing through programs such as Amazon Affiliates. Bloggers place an affiliate link for the product on their site, and whenever a visitor buys a product by clicking on that link, they will be credited with a sale and make a commission. Bloggers can also sell advertising space, earning higher rates for more visitors.

With a little creativity, you might just become the next Internet millionaire. So power up, log on, and start turning your talents into cash.

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.