I haven’t updated my blog roll since the last presidency and the only blogs I read these days relate to sailing and woodworking. However, given that a good way to learn about new blogs is to go through the blog roll and then go through the blog roll of those blogs, it’s time for some leads.

Let me know which relevant blogs you recommend in the comments. There’s only one rule: You can’t recommend your own blog. (Trying to avoid a conflict of interest.)

Originally posted 2011-04-02 15:35:50.

Here’s a long list of introductions from ERE readers all around the world. The complete list given in the link.

Canada, Arizona, Finland, California, Portugal, Canada, Belgium, Minneapolis, California, California, California, California, North Dakota, Kansas, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Canada, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Denmark, Massachusetts, Canada, Belgium, Australia, Japan, Iowa, Canada, New York, Maryland, United Kingdom, New Jersey, Illinois, Philadelphia, Missouri, California, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa

Here are the introductions according to age. It seems that most concentrate in the 25-30 range. This may simply be a result of being regular users of forums although it’s also the conventional target group of ERE—what makes it “extremely early”, not that it depends on age.

18, 26, 18?, 30, 41, 34, 32, 29, 27, 37, 25, 45, 28, 47, 26, 26, 26, 65, 39, 23, 44, 28, 48, 37, 26, 36

I also figured, I’d make a list by personality type, but I soon realized how uniform that would look. In terms of gender, the distribution is about even.

You should definitely check out the individual journals as well.

Originally posted 2010-09-23 12:18:21.

When someone posts a link to earlyretirementextreme.com, wordpress usually picks up a backlink which I usually delete since it is usually always spammers. However, I also enjoy what one could call backstalking, that is, watching the refering link on sitemeter when someone actually clicked into the blog. This mostly leads back to an interesting/relevant blog post or forum discussion. I am glad to see these references appearing, especially in forum posts as it shows that the message is getting out there. Now all I need is a backlink from the N.Y. Times or WSJ

Here is what I have collected over the past month or so since I started the list. I hope most of it is as interesting to read to you as it is to me.

http://socyberty.com/work/early-retirement-extreme-the-solution-for-all-your-troubles/

http://www.plantingdollars.com/2009/12/18/how-to-retire-in-5-years/

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/978071/?start=120

http://escrevalolaescreva.blogspot.com/2009/12/um-louco-ensina-se-aposentar-cedo.html

http://chezceridwen.blogspot.com/2009/12/tools-early-retirement-extreme-by-jacob.html

http://lisasonorabeam.com/2009/11/04/minimalist-lifestyles-artistic-flotsam-how-to-deal/

http://www.doomers.us/forum2/index.php/topic,50286.0.html

http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=28077094&sort=whole

http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=27446845&sort=threaded

http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=28077484&sort=postdate

http://flightplanforretirement.squarespace.com/journal/2008/6/9/early-retirement.html

http://www.city-data.com/forum/frugal-living/835498-living-comfortably.html

http://cpastories.com/2009/10/09/cpa-money-friday-early-retirement-extreme/

http://baglady.dreamhosters.com/2009/12/01/revisiting-the-goal-of-financial-independence/

http://www.wellheeledblog.com/2008/02/26/xtreme/

http://happytexasfarm.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/a-post-from-another-blog/

http://www.retire2india.com/2008/09/10-alternatives-to-retiring-abroad.html

http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=483630

http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=36897&highlight=

http://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/addfr/askfrugal_hey_guys_anyone_with_knowledge_or/

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1124172&page=2

http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f38/retirement-personality-type-44723.html

http://www.canadianmoneyforum.com/showthread.php?t=214

Enjoy the reading!

Originally posted 2009-12-24 11:32:12.

Kevin@InvestItwisely just published his list of plugins he uses on his blog. I think this is quite useful, especially to new bloggers. I know I didn’t waste a lot of time in the beginning because I found a couple of long lists from experienced bloggers on which plugins and services to install and use.

Instead of discussing all the plugins I use, I’ll just discuss three I have installed to which I attribute a 50% traffic increase. You can see the stats here. The first plugin was installed in January. The second plugin was installed in June. The third was installed in July.

WWSGD
The What would Seth Godin Do-plugin is responsible for showing the box at the very top of the top. If you are a new reader, it will show you some of my most popular/captivating (according to what statistics tell me) posts. When people hit this blog the first time, odds are they will stick around to read those posts(*) and thus be more likely to come back compared to if they landed on the blog a day where I was discussing pancakes.

(*) The posts are how I became financially independent in 5 years and how I currently spend very little money. I also point out the 21 Day Makeover and link to the best posts of 2009 and 2008.

LinkWithin
LinkWithin is a plugin that shows similar posts to your current post. Most “similar post” plugins compares tags, but if you, like me, are not very good at keeping your tags consistent, the suggested posts won’t be very similar. Conversely, LinkWithin is eerily good at picking them out. The probably that someone clicks on a post is substantial.

Old Post Promoter
The Old Post Promoter promotes old posts (makes sense, right?) by sending them to the front page. This is useful to bring some of the old posts back to life. It seems to be a fact of life that readers don’t really care to comment on posts which are much older than a few days even if the content is evergreen/timeless. Since I hate repeating myself, why not let a plugin repeat it. This is also a way to recycle posts to new readers from a time when there were fewer readers. This solves the regularity issue and I can keep writing on top of the OPP. My old wish for the OPP is that there would be a limit for 730 days instead of the current 365 days. The plugin is somewhat delicate. I wouldn’t abuse it to repost midly aged stuff. Hence, unless your blog is at least one year old, I wouldn’t use it. I was and am concerned that readers would be turned off by old stuff, but so far I have only heard positive comments.
Also, it takes some pressure off from having to come up with new stuff day in and day out.

For new bloggers I also recommend installing a stat system like google analytics or sitemeter to see where people are coming from. You should also comment a lot. Old bloggers tend to be swamped in requests, etc. and don’t have the time (or energy) to follow every new blog in town. The way to get their attention is to write posts about their posts. A ping/trackback definitely gets mine. The second best way is to comment a lot. If you leave 5-10 quality comments on a specific blog per month, readers of that blog will notice you and click through to your blog. If they land of one of your great posts (that’s why you use the WWSGD plugin!!), they’re likely to stick around. Don’t constrain your commenting to one blog or a clique of blogs. Expand your horizons.

In general, it holds that the best networking is done by other bloggers who are about “your size”. Unless you’re a rock star, bigger blogs will not gain from collaborating with you, and conversely, you wont gain from collaborating with small blogs. This is simply due to everyone having limited time and a desire to maximize the return on effort seeing that there are more than 500 personal finance blogs out there and you probably not having time to work with all of them.

Originally posted 2010-08-01 13:58:17.

Based on the comments, I know some of you have been reading along for years, since the beginning. I love comments. Feedback is the reason I blog. If I was blogging in a vacuum, I would stop right now. Writing without being read makes little sense to me. That’s just a personality thing, really, nothing wrong with writing personal diaries to maintain accountability or as a way to maintain an archive of one’s work.

Emails are also great even though I’m terrible at responding to them. This is typically because they tend to very long and thus I feel like they require an equally long response, which takes energy away from blogging. (I still read an appreciate them even if I don’t get back to you. If you really want a response, try again with a short mail ).

Meeting people in person is the best part. I have met several for trips, lunches, and activities, which has been a lot of fun. We even had an ERE meetup last month. It was interesting how much we all have in common. It is perhaps not surprising giving the heavy selectivity that reading this blog must enforce. It is interesting because, at least for me, sharing goals and values with the average person is a condition that almost never occurs(!). We gotta have another meet up soon.

Controversial points (something that everyone can disagree on) typically get 50-75 comments, whereas surveys get 400-600 responses. Thus, I suspect some have also been lurking in the shadows preferring not to comment for whatever reason.

Here’s a chance t come out of the woodworks for the first time if you want to introduce yourself. Just leave a comment below and say hi.

If you don’t want to do that, I’d still be interested in how long you have all been reading along, hence the survey form below.

Originally posted 2010-07-19 14:20:36.

In trying to change people’s behavior when it comes to personal finance, I have come to believe that it is not so much for the lack of “great posts” or wonderful insights as much as it is a question about the right person reading the right post at the right moment in time.

In exobiology there’s an equation used to estimate the number the advanced civilizations in the galaxy. (Our galaxy is the only one of relevance… the nearest other galaxy is 2 billion light years away. In between galaxies, there’s mostly a whole lot of “empty” which excludes hopping from star system to star system.) It goes like this:

Multiply the rate of star formation per year in the galaxy (large!) by the average number of planets per star (0-15 or so) multiplied by the fraction of those which can support life (?) multiplied by the fraction of those which will develop life (?) multiplied by the fraction of those where life is intelligent (?) multiplied by the fraction of which develop an advanced civilization emitting signals (we do) multiplied by the number of years such an advanced civilization lasts (300-1000 years?).

It may easily be that such a number decreases rapidly due to low probabilities.

For blogging, the odds of a “conversion” can be written in a similar fashion, namely

Multiply the rate of people becoming interested in personal finance by the fraction of people on the internet multiplied by the fraction of those who read blogs multiplied by the fraction of people who is reading a particular blog multiplied by the number of posts multiplied by the fraction of posts the person has read multiplied by the fraction of posts the person is in a frame of mind to accept the message in given post multiplied by the numbers of months such a person stick around reading the same blog.

From such a perspective, it’s interesting to note that most factors are actually out of my hands. The only two variables I control or influence to some degree are

• The fraction of people reading a particular blog.
  
• The number of posts.
  

I can influence the first variable by advertising on other blogs, guest posting, and participating in carnivals. I can control the latter by writing more posts.

Of those two, I have clearly done more writing than advertising. I note that advertising can also be indirectly influenced by writing good posts are relying on word of mouth from “the mouths of others rather than your own”. This seems to be a quality condition rather than a quantity condition though—the equation be easily be expanded to include those factors.

In both cases, the equations can be used to fully realize just how many variables enter the equation. More importantly, it provides an alternative way of framing the question: What makes someone make a decision based on something they just read?

Originally posted 2010-09-22 00:27:37.

I burned a feed for the forums so you can subscribe via RSS (google reader et. al).

Lots of good info there. In the slightly less than one month, the forums have existed, they have grown to

• 228 topics
  
• 2405 posts (77 per day)
  
• 180 users
  

They include topics I don’t normally cover on the blog, such as specific countries, which states are best for early retirement, careers, etc.

You don’t need to register an account to read the forums, but you do need to register an account to post.

The forums are also the best place to ask if you have a specific question—”I am NN years old and have $XXX,XXX dollars invested in X, Y, and Z, my plan is … what do you think?”—instead of sending it to me (I have an embarrassingly large back-log of e-mail messages).

Incidentally, it is also possible to subscribe to all the comments on the blog or even subscribe to the blog—quaint, I know.

Originally posted 2010-08-20 13:04:18.

Personal finance blogs primarily fall in three major categories. First, there are the “getting out of debt” blogs. Second, there are the “just got out of college” personal finance blogs. Third, there are the “career track” personal finance blogs. Of course there are more categories such as retirement blogs or I-won-the-lottery blogs, but these are the biggest.

Drawn below is a graph depicting this triad.

Originally posted 2008-02-28 07:18:59.

Note: The numbers below are dated. Late 2011 number have roughly 3000 visitors per day and the same level of engagement. Visitors spend a combined 13000 minutes/day on the blog.

I do not find normal blog rankings based on popularity or traffic like Wise Bread’s list very useful. Ranking by popularity or traffic is like ranking companies based on stock price and trading volume. You can generally see a strong correlation between a sustained professional writing effort combined with targeting the largest consumer segment and being (randomly) discovered by an established source early on.

In investing ratings are a lot more interesting that absolute numbers as they provide a means of scaling the numbers relative to the size. Nobody in their right mind would think that a company trading at $100/share would be worth twice as much as a company priced at $50/share. However, by dividing with the earnings, say the former has $10 in earnings and the latter has $5 we find that both have a P/E of 10 and thus they are similar in terms of earnings efficiency. In investing you can build many more ratings than that to try to tell companies apart. You will find that companies in the same industry tend to have the same P/E values. If not, something interesting is going on and you want to look closer.

However, nobody seems to be doing it for blogs. Yet I’m sure advertisers would like to know some of these numbers, so here’s a business idea for some enterprising entrepreneur.

• Total eyeball time per day. To calculate, we use sitemeter’s summary page. Today, I have 682 visitors on average per day and they stick around for 4:26 minutes (266 seconds). I calculate 682*266/3600 (3600 seconds in an hour) to get 50.4 hours per day. This is how much time people have spent reading this site each day on average for the past week. I think this is a better measure for total impact than unique visitors.
• Page views per visit. This shows how sticky your blog is. Do people stay around after coming to your site. If the number is high, it could indicate that your content is interesting and that you have dedicated readers. It could also indicate a growing blog, since new readers tend to spend more time reading old posts. Or it could indicate that readers visit rarely and then have to read backposts for the past few days. If the number is low, your core readers are either dominated by google searches or they simply don’t stick around, which of course could be because they visit often instead like on heavily crosslinked blog networks. Regardless, this number does say a lot about reader behavior. My number is 2.5 views/visit.
• Visitor growth. Growth can either be organic or explosive if you get on digg or get a mention in a major newspaper. Here I tend to look at the histogram for visits and pageviews for the past 12 months. For my blog, you will see a spike for Sep08. That is when I got mentioned on MSNBC’s blog, twice. However, it seems few of them came back and the other months show a steady progression. To calculate the growth, you take the geometric average. I’m lazy, so I just take the first month and the last and calculate monthly growth as the twelfth root of 19996/10022 minus 1, that is, exp(log(19996/10022)/12)-1, so 5.9% growth/month. You can use the law of 72 on that. I have a doubling time of about a year.
• Feedburner numbers?. I do not find feedburner numbers that enlightening, primarily because I do not believe the numbers from the google reader component. As far as I understand google reader numbers are cumulative. Once someone subscribes via google that count never goes down. You have the person counted for life even if the person no longer reads along. You can get some insight in the impact of this, because occasionally feedburner fails to count google readers. You will then see the feedburner numbers drop substantially, like 30-50% for a few days. This is a better reflection of the true number of subscribers.
• Comments/post. I think this is a reasonably good way of gauging active reader “reach” or the intensity of your community relative to your writing. In other words: Are readers getting it? I get my numbers off of my dashboard. I have written 494 posts and they have gotten 4058 comments. Hence, I get 4058/494 = 8.2 comments per post.
• Comments/subscribers. This better gauges the form of your fan base. Do readers actively engage with your content or do they just click, read half of it, and then go away again. I use the 4058 comments from above and divide with my feedburner number of 1369, so I get 3.0 comments/subscriber.

Keep in mind that ratio building is not an precise science at all. You are not interested in knowing whether 2.9 is higher than 2.7. These are effectively identical. However, 7.4 is an outlier compared to 2.9. That is interesting.

For those bloggers who are reading this, let me know your stats either in a comment or by sending them to jacob@early… and I will put them in a list and link to you.

I have not found much enthusiasm amongst my fellow bloggers for making such a list , but it looks like I’m not the only one wanting to build alternative measurements. @kdpaine sent me this.
Take a look. It’s pretty cool!

Originally posted 2009-07-01 11:36:46.

After having using a tip-model for a while, I find that on average I tip 7-8 articles per day on a pretty consistent basis. This comes to a total of 35-40 cents per day or $10-12 bucks per month.

I think this is a fair contribution to support “quality programming”. It’s what I would be willing to pay for a print magazine that had all my favorite stuff in it.

The model I use is called TipTheWeb.org. I find this the easiest to use. If you click on the link, you see a button “Tip it!” which is dragged and dropped onto your bookmarks bar in your browser. Then whenever I read a good article, I click on the button, an overlay pops up, I click “5c”, I click “Fund now”, done. Very easy.

The idea is of course that if many people do this, similar to how most people leave tips in restaurants, bloggers would receive a great many small tips which would all add up. For example, if I write a post, then 3500 people will read it. If 10% of those 3500 like it and each donate a nickel that results in 350*0.05 = $17.50. If it was a really good article, then maybe 30% would deem it worthy enough to leave a nickel leading to $52.50. It should be obvious that if tipping was universal, then content writers could make a living from their tips and they would strive to write the highest quality material in order to get the most tips.

As it is with tipping not being widely adopted on the internet (for instance, I get about 3–8 tips per day or about 1 out of about 500–1000 visitors), content writers (and I know several who have to do this for a living and need to write 5-10 posts per day!) write posts not with quality or their readers in mind but with the goal to optimize search engine keywords because they make their money with advertising.

I think this is ultimately not the best solution for anybody other than the advertising industry.

TipTheWeb is but one model, there’s also readability.com, flattr.com, and others. These work a bit differently. On readability you decide how much to contribute monthly, say $10, and then mark articles that you think are good. At the end of the month the $10 then gets evenly divided between the marked articles.

One interesting problem that I hadn’t considered is that microtipping might not work as well because 1) the number of tippers is very small, and 2) those who tip will readily tip much larger amounts. This is a problem that the nonprofit world is struggling with. The argument is then that it’s better to ask the small number of people who already give for larger tips than it is to ask a larger number of people to tip a very small amount. This may be true in an expedient kind of way, but I still think it’s better that a larger number would contribute less than having a smaller number of people carry the whole load.

Thus I’m trying to “be the change”. If you’re a content producer, these guys (including me) may already be tipping you (see the sites I’ve tipped). Thus if you have a blog or a youtube account or somewhere else where you contribute to the net, you should definitely check into the sites above and claim them as yours (by inserting a meta tag identifier in your html header).

You might have tips waiting for you already.

Further discussion here.

As you know, the comments is often where the real action takes place. Due to popular request, it is, therefore, now possible to subscribe to ALL the comments as a single RSS feed. This feed is updated with new comments as they get in. Thus if you never want to miss a comment on any post, this method is safer than following the “most recent comments tab” in the sidebar.

Originally posted 2010-01-29 14:09:05.

You can find a similar list for 2008 here. To see the best of 2007 which is really only December, just look through that month. There are some good ones in there too.

January
Let me know which topics you would like to see in the future
Day 14: Investing for early retirement – Part 1
What is freedom?
A tribute to my pressure cooker
Productivity and the Goose that laid the Golden Eggs
Day 15: The first two weeks of the make over
My HDHP HSA and some comments on health care
Day 16: The stuff you actually keep and use
The consequence of finite energy
Changing habits or changing the habits
The best way to switch to a raw food diet
Stock returns in the long run
Tough to answer: What do you do for a living?
Early retirement extreme retirement plan
Children and early retirement

February
Music
Food and water supply
Symptoms and diseases
Personal finance development
Guest post: DW on how it is to live with me
The follow up
Why work?
The evolution of the meaning of money
Put some clothes on, damnit!

March
Simple personality types and their behavior
What’s the point of education?
Build a worm composting system
What’s the most economically inefficient gadget you own?
I retired from my career
Breaking up with your career …
What’s the difference between a frog and a modern human?
The virtue of discomfort
Quotes relevant to specialization

April
Pareto barriers
And so it begins …
On the universally declining standards of living
Speeding and transportation
My dream
Random musings on biotic potentials and interest rates
What did you want to do when you grew up
Tolerance ranges and cold showers
One week into “retirement”
The future of extreme early retirement
Day 17: Maintaining and repairing things
Day 18: Join a challenge
Ecological housing – consider an RV
Interview with Modern Gal
Today’s anti-consumer rant
Consumerism II
A different perspective
Three weeks after quitting my job
The paradox of thrift
A duty to work
25 things you (probably) didn’t know about me
Does money only exist to be spent?

May
Price and value
What’s your financial independence target year?
How to change and how to fail at changing
How to deal with heat
My top 5 tips to becoming an extreme early retirement expert
Incomplete list of hobbies that could earn money
Which blogs do you read?
The three things I did right (and so can you)
Four requirements for change
The minimal number of tools
Unrecognized personality disorders
The wealthy shall inherit the Earth
Slaying the “I might need it someday”-monster
What makes me feel rich
Attaining the right weight
Complexity
When form follows function

June
My 4 hour work week
My list of financial freedom books
Does early retirement require a specific personality?
Things I would like to learn versus Things I could teach
The index vs mutual funds debate
I just started an exercise program – what should I expect?
How to spend very little money
The Tao of The Intellect
Twitter interview #1
Day 19: Getting rid of your TV (addiction)
The feeling of time
Teaching and talking
Utopia
Twitter interview#2
How to understand distribution
When does an emergency fund become superfluous
Day 20: Own classics
Being frugal beyond your means

Don’t forget that you can subscribe to the blog feed by using the buttons in the top right corner. You can also find ERE on facebook, and you can follow me on twitter as well.

Originally posted 2009-07-16 10:33:30.

Please rank accordingly, like, type 5,6,2,3,4,1 in the comments or something like that. That way I can run some statistics.

1. Specific how to – articles, like fixing my bicycle, recipes, etc.
2. General how to – articles that specifies different ways of doing things like owning less stuff.
3. Motivational rants, e.g. “This is how great your life could be”, “It’s not that hard to change”, .etc.
4. Demotivational rants, e.g. “This is how much consumer life sucks, you just didn’t realize it”.
5. Anecdotes, like … when I was your age, I lived in a box and ate rocks, …
6. Personal stuff, like what I ate for breakfast and what else I do in my life.
7. Models, philosophy, and strategy, that is, big picture posts, typically quite academic in nature. I notice that these do not get very many comments.
8. Me interviewing other people.
9. Other people interviewing me, like this.

In terms of advertising, I would also like to know how many of you are really interested in advertising links to debt relief, payday loans, credit cards, etc. or posts about paying off debt, etc. My guess is close to 0%?

Originally posted 2009-07-02 12:39:14.

Some strategies for discovering things that go unnoticed would involve ignoring the “junk mail” and go to the (usually smaller) shops in the side streets. These often offer better deals because they do not sell low margin junk and compensate for it by volume and advertising like the mass stores. Yesterday I alluded to the fact that search engines may have begun to suffer from the same problem by ranking according to popularity or by being gamed by specific writing styles (aka “marketing” in the real world). In other words, search engines show the main streets, first and foremost, and not so much the side streets. To wit, a search engine would show a main street shop if it had just one item of what you were asking for instead of showing a side street shop with more selections. New shops in particular have a huge problem since they are judged by the network rather than their inherent quality.

One way of discovering new blogs is to use other blogs as a reference. This, I think, does not work nearly as well as it could.

I do not think a blog roll is any substitute for that. Blogroll often turn into a mutual link exchanges (I thought of a different word for it, but it wasn’t fit for publication ), consequently grow huge, etc. They are often not reflective of what the bloggers actually read.

Maybe it is time to return to the roots: A blog is really short for weblog and in a blog one is supposed to write about what one did on the web on that particular day. It may be as simple as a rough edit of one’s browser history.

Originally posted 2010-02-02 10:06:36.

1. Subscribe to the blog. Believe or not, stats are important when trying to reach out. Popularity has value and popularity in the eyes of others is question quantity. More attention is paid to the person who has 50,000 subscribers than the person who has 50 even if their ideas are equally good.
   
2. “Like” my posts on facebook—if you like them. It seems to me that this number could be higher If I have 3,600,000 pageviews and 900 posts, it is reasonable to assume that each post has been read 4000 times. Thus unless they all suck pretty bad, maybe more than 3 people would like any given post
   
3. Become a fan/follower on the ERE facebook page. This is where I post links to interesting ERE-related posts. It’s easier this way than to write those dreaded “weekly round-up posts”. Anything I post to fb will get automatically forwarded to my twitter account, so you could follow me there instead.
   
4. Go through the reviews on amazon and vote on whether they were helpful or not. Most ranking systems suffer from the Matthew effect in that the most voted reviews are on top of the list and thus they’re likely to be voted on again which makes them stick even harder to the top.
   

As any college student knows, using cliche based material in a drinking game is a great excuse to get drunk, and what better way to find cliches than reading about lifestyle design, since these days pretty much every lifestyle is a design except of course those icky conventional ones that we are all trying to avoid in the same unconventional way.

Disclaimer: You can use whatever type of liquid you prefer. If you live somewhere where the legal drinking is more than just a suggestion, please follow all applicable laws, etc. “1 drink” typically means a swig or a gulp in the sense that the adams apple moves up and down once.

Various points of annoyance
Not to worry. Drinking will make it easier to cope.

• The post has a stock photo, take 3 drinks.

• Two different lifestyle blogs use the exact same photo to illustrate their unconventional lifestyle within days of each other, please feel free to drink as much as you need.

• If the blog has some form of popup that blankets out the screen urging you to subscribe to a newsletter or buy a product smack yourself on the forehead while making a stupid face and drink 10 times.

• The blogger has written a manifesto, like me, take 3 drinks.
  

Overused words.
Unless I am dreaming, lifestyle is all about using incredibly amazingly awesome words to describe regular things while loving it with a passion.

• The word “awesome” appears, so shout “awesome like a hotdog” and take 1 drink.

• The word “amazing” appears, so take 1 drink and look as if contemplating the taste of the beer and say “amazing” with a discerning look.

• The word “incredible” appears, so appear shocked and take 1 drink to calm yourself down.

• The word “remarkable” appears in the post. Whatever.

• The word “dream” or “dreams” appears, so take 1 drink and pinch your nose to see if you’re still awake.

• The word “passion” or “passionate” appears, so take 1 drink. You already know your passion is drinking.

• The word “love” or “loving” appears in the post, take 1 drink.

• The word “happy”, “happier”, “happiness” appears, take 1 drink.

• The words “lifestyle” and “design” appear in the same sentence, take 1 drink.

• Using the word “launch” about a product that will be “launched” at some point in the future or which has been “launched” by someone else. Take 3 drinks unless it is actually being “launched” today.
  

*Unconventional” spelling
Unconventional spelling is a great way to be unconventional. Have a drink for every manufactured novelty word that does not exist in the dictionary, in particular

• If “happyness” is misspelled, take 5 drinks.

• If anything is described and un-, non-something else, take 1 drink. (The first one to spot something like ununiform to describe their capris and purple tank top, please let me know.)

Comments
The comments are also a good source of general imbibing. The rules above still apply with a few extra rules thrown in

• If a profile photo in the comments is “clever” e.g. rather than a face it shows the face reflected in a mirror, a jumping person, a screaming person, … take 1 drink.

• If a comment says “Good post. I agree”, say “I too agree and therefore the post is good.” and take 1 drink.

• If a comment says “Bad post. I don’t agree”, take 2 drinks.

• If a comment claims that the post was timely, open another beer (in a timely manner of course).
  

Originally posted 2010-03-24 17:15:23.

This is a long response to the comments on a previous lifestyle design blog post for the few who aren’t yet passed out from drinking.

An economy based on selling ebooks to each other or advertising each others blogs is really no different from a service economy based on cutting each others hair. Both are unsustainable on their own. They require a “parasitic feed” from what could be called “the real economy” which really is the industrial part of economy. On the other hand, with technological advances, the industrial economy can get smaller and smaller relative to the service economy even though the industrial economy is still growing.

(Note that economists frequently conclude that this means that the economy is getting less resource intensive as more money is being made based on the same input. However, in reality, the economy is growing even faster, so now more resources than ever are used.)

I think we can agree that problogging provide some value. SEO optimizing, for example, has value, specifically it has value to whoever uses it and yet it decreases values for whoever uses search engines because SEO is essentially gaming the system … like advertising with a special dictionary. Similar to products, you don’t find what you really want or need by looking at TV ads, but for many that is what they do. Personal finance blogs have value in the sense that they tell people stuff they don’t know. Travel blogging has value, but I don’t know what it is because I don’t like travel

Travel blogging is like travel journalism without the sponsorship of a magazine. It is obvious that only a few people can make a living at it just like only a few people can make a living blogging about any other subject. I like that some have made it work without going the traditional route.

However, saying or giving the impression that everybody can win in a highly competitive winner takes all business like blogging is dishonest. I am somewhat proud that at least the “ERE”-method is robust in the sense that it does not require direct competition with me or other “retirement bloggers” to succeed. You don’t need to start a blog about retiring early to retire early and in particular this is NOT how I did it.

Now, what I don’t like is 1) The language hyperbole, but I accept that this is because I am an old geezer (the last of generation X) who can not accept the loose use of the word “awesome” despite having no issues with the word “cool”; more importantly, though is 2) The way some of these things are marketed. For instance, I am currently reading the 4HWW for the first time. Now, the author suggests an approach to work which in many ways are uncommonly good common sense in terms of optimizing and efficiency (you can find this stuff in many other books though) and then some other suggestions which conflict with what I think as ethics101(*)(**), but that’s just me. I have issues, as in, a moral sense. However, more importantly … if we look at the dust jacket, the wording is

“How Tim went from 40k per year and 80 hours per week to 40k per month and 4 hours per week”

whereas from what I understand, a more accurate description would be

“How Tim made 40k per year but then worked 100 hours a week to build a business making 40k per month and eventually set it up so it could be run with 4 hours per week.”

Big difference! And just by not mentioning a few intermediate steps, namely the hard ones. This is my main issue with coaching and marketing and lifestyle design and so on. It is made to look too easy. Now, being supportive is nice, but leaving out the hard parts, that’s just not useful to the costumers. It is only useful to make the customers buy the book, the ebook, the coaching classes, or whatever.

(*) The most famous example is “winning” some kickboxing tournament by dehydrating enough to compete three weight classes lower than himself and simply pushing his opponents out of the ring and winning on a technicality. Now, some think that’s very clever and some think it’s bordering on shameful. I’m leaning closer to the latter. Then again, guess which attitude makes it easier to get rich. (I suspect that the rules where changed immediately after that so it will never happen again.)

(**) Another example is pestering your professor/instructor with a 3 hour question session any time you get anything less than an “A” using the theory that they will be wary to give you anything less than an “A” in the future. Ha! You just try that one on me, Mr. Student, and it is _you_ who will never come back.

Maybe it comes down to the fact that I don’t like marketing (which is all about selling things to people which they don’t need), and I have to admit that the main reason I don’t like it is probably that I suck at it.

Originally posted 2010-03-25 08:32:17.

I do not recall anyone having ever informed me that they disagree with me on some issue and that they therefore will unsubscribe from my blog(*). Yet, it is something I see from time to time on large blogs.

(*) Perhaps my blog is too small.

It seems that there is a common sentiment or perhaps a confusion between bloggers and journalists. Some readers expect bloggers to be valuefree and restrict their writings to facts, that is, act like modern journalists. Now, there is a natural or at least observed progression for bloggers to become more journalistic in their writings as they attract a larger audience and even to advance to editors and “magazine”-owners as they start hiring guest authors or even staff writers either for money or for access to their readership.

However, I think it is sad when a blog turns into a magazine or when a blogger becomes too afraid to state opinions which may results in a 10% loss in advertising revenue, fears which I think are overblown anyway. There is indeed a conflict of interest for any blogger that relies on ad-income rather than say being directly paid for opinions. Unfortunately, the latter approach is fairly uncommon as readers expect material to be free. Hiding the cost in the fraction that clicks on ads or worse paying for it by restraining bloggers to their perception of the emotional fragility of a part of their readers—part of which supposedly click on ads—is more acceptable even though the latter could be thought of as a sell-out.

I read blogs because I am interested in opinions and ideas. I do not want to read clinically clean, politically correct articles devoid of opinion and full of disclaimers.

Originally posted 2009-11-03 05:46:14.

I’ll admit that I too suffer from the unhealthy (stressful?!) habit of trying to quantify success. In a materialistic society, success is frequently quantified by the kind of stuff we use to make statements about our success such as big houses and big cars.

A less direct but equally important means of determining success is how much money is being made. This is often not a very adequate means of measuring but it is often the only one. It is one of the reasons that I will be selling my book rather than giving it away. It would be interesting to know what the demand curve looked like. For example, I can determine what the demand would be it the price was $0. This would likely correspond to exactly how many people could be made aware of its existence since the cost of clicking to download would be zero. However, I bet that charging even $1 would substantially change that number. If not, yeah, getting 50,000 people to pay $1 each would not be bad at all ;-D .

It is the same with blogging. I am offering the content for free. Here the $0 demand corresponds to 20 people reading the blog as their full time job, kinda akin to having a reading room populated by 20 people at all time/weekdays between 9 and 5. That’s quite impressive to me. I calculate it using 1300 average visits per day spending an average of 5:25 minutes and dividing this by a 40 hour work week. Of course if I started charging that number would drop substantially and so I wouldn’t really know. Still, 5:25 is definitely in the high end (and the 20 workweeks is also quite high, actually, even compared to the A-list bloggers) and as such I would quantifiable call it a success.

Time is a quantifiable measure of influence which is also a form of success although not as highly regarded as money is. It is interesting to note that in feudal Japan, the merchant class was regarded the lowest of the four classes (samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants) because they did not directly produce anything but only profited indirectly from the work of others. This was despite the merchant class having some of the richest members of society. Of course in American society, the merchant class is the most prestigious class.

Originally posted 2010-04-21 04:29:49.

This is a guest post from Mr Money Mustache, a software engineer who retired at age 30 together with his wife. He is now 36 and has a 5 year old kid. You should definitely subscribe to his blog.

Every time I walk past a Starbucks drive-through lineup of Idling Cadillac Escalades and then return home to read about record levels of foreclosures, bankruptcies and complaints about our recently-inflated-but-still-cheap gasoline, I become fired up again. Every time people complain about not having enough money to raise their kids while continuing to buy new products on credit, it forces me to write even more.

The reason I must write is because I am somewhat of a alternate version of Jacob. Originally a software engineer by training, I could not help but to try to optimize my money earning and spending in the same way that software engineers compulsively optimize their code to be as simple and efficient and self-evident to future software engineers as possible. In the industry, they call it “elegant”. To me, money feels just like software. If your earning and spending is not elegant, then it’s crappy, and you are causing suffering to you and your species and planet by not optimizing it. It’s an emergency!

Because of this optimization, my software engineering career was short-lived. I had put aside enough money to support a middle-class lifestyle with a wife and young son shortly after the age of 30, so it was no longer efficient to keep trading free time for more money.

And it turned out that not having a real job was a LOT OF FUN! I took on all the challenges and hobbies I never had time for. I got to read, write, exercise, learn, camp, hike, bike, drink fine beer and wine even on weeknights, sweep the driveway on Thursday morning in my pajamas, AND my wife and I get to be double stay-at-home parents. Our 5-year-old boy is completely flourishing with this unlimited attention as we read through hundreds of books together and keep advancing to new levels of learning in all sorts of fields – just from getting to spend time together. I’d recommend it to any parent!

But the rest of the world was not getting any more efficient. I saw the gullibility of the poor and middle-class citizens of the rich world, and the way in which the more advanced corporations are able to take advantage of this gullibility to keep everyone forking over most of their income in debt payments. And it just seemed more ridiculous with each passing year. At first, I just spent my creative energy on making fun of people. It is after all kind of funny to watch people causing their own financial destruction and then angrily blaming the president for their fate.

But then I realized it would be even more fun to try to change the behavior of some these people. At this point I discovered the Early Retirement Extreme blog, as well as assorted other ones on the web, many with quite a large following. The following is large, but the number of people who know nothing about personal finance is still much larger. And despite their ignorance, most of this larger group would actually LIKE to be in control of their money, and become rich, and be able to quit their jobs like the personal finance bloggers have.

So a new superhero was born. His name is Mr. Money Mustache, and he is basically the persona that is constantly talking INSIDE my head when I see the rest of the world making stupid financial decisions. Mr. Money Mustache is bossy, and he has strong opinions. But he is also quite knowledgeable and a good listener. He’s like a good set of windshield wipers to keep the windows of his readers clear from the shit that rains every day from the world’s marketing machines.

Despite the fact that Early Retirement Extreme and The Simple Dollar and all the other big guys have already covered all the major topics wonderfully, Mr. Money Mustache wants to bring yet another angle on the message to still more of the indebted masses. His angle is a bit more luxury-oriented, partly because he’s a parent and feels the emotional benefits of a fine house and a reliable car. But also because the American public is probably not willing to make any major sacrifices, so to ask too much will shrink the audience. I feel they MIGHT be willing to learn a few frugality tricks to enjoy the good life on the cheap while starting to actually build up some wealth. And once the frugality light clicks on inside someone’s head and they feel in control of their wealth, they can become an entirely new person.

But besides the fun, Mr. Money Mustache has to make his readers rich through frugality because it’s the right thing to do. If enough of us do it, we’ll accelerate the world’s shift away from the current ultra-destructive path, and become a more rational, peaceful, and thoughtful place while we’re at it.

ultimate prosperity to you all!
Love,
Mr. Money Mustache
www.mrmoneymustache.com