If you're new here, this blog will give you the tools to become financially independent in 5 years on a median salary. The wiki page gives a good summary of the principles of the strategy. The key to success is to run your personal finances much like a business, thinking about assets and inventory and focusing on efficiency and value for money. Not just any business but a business that's flexible, agile, and adaptable. Conversely most consumers run their personal finances like an inflexible money-losing anti-business always in danger of losing their jobs.
Here's almost a thousand online journals from people, who are following the ERE strategy tailored to their particular situation (age, children, location, education, goals, ...). Increasing their savings from the usual 5-15% of their income to tens of thousands of dollars each year or typically 40-80% of their income, many accumulate six-figure net-worths within a few years.
Since everybody's situation is different (age, education, location, children, goals, ...) I suggest only spending a brief moment on this blog, which can be thought of as my personal journal, before looking for the crowd's wisdom for your particular situation in the forum journals.
If you enjoy the blog, also consider the book which is much better organized and more complete. You can read the first chapter for free, listen to the preamble, or see the reviews (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,Z). Subscribe to the blog via email or RSS. Get updates on the facebook page, join the forums, and look for tactics on the ERE wiki. Here's a list of all the ERE blog posts.
- 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.
- “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 😉
- 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.
- 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.
Originally posted 2011-09-02 07:34:33.
