Has taking control of your money and mastering your personal finances always been your mindset as an adult? Can you share the coles notes version of your financial journey?

Thanks to habits instilled in me from my parents, at a young age, I always saw myself as a saver and someone who would live frugally.

Some of my fondest childhood memories involved clipping coupons with my mother on Saturday mornings. While Shaggy and Scooby investigated a spooky mansion, I’d sleuth through coupons in search of products I recognized from our kitchen. When we finished cutting, we’d sort them into her accordion-like binder, go shopping, and tally up our savings afterward. At the time, I had no idea these activities would shape my way of thinking.

I did it for the enjoyment of matching products to pictures, filing coupons into a binder, and maximizing savings numbers on receipts. I didn’t do this with the intent to learn but as it turns out, these activities instilled some strong personal finance lessons in me at an early age.

Looking back, I saw a common theme in my life of wanting to master the ability to delay my gratification. I hope I can begin to transition toward enjoying the moment more now that my wife and I are looking to buy our first house. I’ve struggled a bit with living in the moment but know the importance of it. By laying down roots with my wife, I feel my mindset will orient more toward the now and allow me to have a foot firmly planted in both the present and the future.

In many ways, I’ve become the man I always wanted to be and feel overwhelmingly satisfied with where my life has taken me to this point. I can’t wait to see what steps we take next.



What strategies and tactics have you implemented in your to life to best set you up for financial success?

When I can, I attempt to view the world from a flexible budgeting perspective. What I mean by that is if I intend to spend $500 on something I didn’t budget for, I attempt to find a way to earn sufficient income or cut costs in other areas to offset this cost. Doing so preserves our savings rate and cancels out the unaccounted-for spending.

But I know I view this overly simplistically. Like most people, I tend to misclassify expenses as “unusual and unexpected” when in fact, they’re “unusual and infrequent.”

For example, when most people go to an auto shop and are told the timing belt needs to be replaced because they’re at the recommended mileage point, they view this expense as unexpected and didn’t make room for this maintenance in their budget.

In reality, this is an expense you could be aware of if you knew the recommended maintenance items by age or mileage of your vehicle. Infrequent expenses like this are why I try to maintain a high savings rate and offset “unexpected” or “infrequent” costs as much as I can.

Have you made any major financial mistakes? If so, what was the outcome and what did you learn from these mistakes?

I have. Formative mistakes which require sincere inner reflection to withdraw actionable steps to avoid committing them again. I detail my first such financial mistake in a post fittingly entitled How to Make Smarter Decisions in Painful Times.

In it, I recount my harrowing moments of buying a stock I felt certain would go up but did nothing of the sort. Along the bumpy, treacherous road down, I dealt with great anguish, physical discomfort, and crisis of confidence.

Mistake #1

What I failed to do was separate the sunk costs incurred from making the investment apart from the clear decision of needing to cut bait and bail. Clear decision in hindsight, mind you. I’m sure this happens regularly with people who make investments. It’s human nature you’ll read in the referenced post above, after all. But this mistake isn’t as grievous as the next.

Mistake #2

What shouldn’t happen is the follow up action I made. This is the mistake I consider to be my crown jewel.

I chose to gamble on the stock again by buying at the bottom. It was a move of desperation. I threw good money after bad. In all honesty, I shouldn’t have been rewarded as I was. The stock managed to recover to a point where I broke even. I was beyond fortunate for receiving this outcome. But as I mentioned, it was not one I deserved.

In those moments, my mind manifested the worst versions of myself. I learned in those moments of pain, I’m not acting rationally. My primal self takes control and exercises its fight or flight reflex. If I can just hold on for a moment longer, I can use the rationed section of my brain, the prefrontal cortex to call the shots. I can choose the inputs which come into my brain, but I can control my actions if I so allow.

