But wait... there's less!

It's back-to-school time here in Australia. If it's a private school, it's time to pay school fees. An investment Some schools describe their fees as "an investment" in the child's future. If it's an investment, let's compare it to other investments. What else could we provide for our kids for the same cost? Other options Scott Pape recommends investments bonds for investing on behalf of children. As they grow up, there's a range of funds to invest in shares. Or they can put it in their own superannuation (retirement) account, so we know they'll be OK even after we're gone. Investment rate My superannuation account returns 10.2% over the long term - and that's after fees and taxes. But that's probably better than most. To be really conservative I'm going to assume a much lower 8%, as taxes are generally higher outside of superannuation. Bear in mind these are not exact calculations - we're just trying to get some b...

This is the story of Scott and his wife Taylor as they dive head-first into the world of financial independence, in an attempt to spend less of their life working and more of it doing what they love. It's a world far removed from mainstream america, where half of people couldn't get $400 if they needed it today. It's a world of full-on frugality. Saving up enough to never need to work again. How much are we talking? What's ordinarily considered high savings (10-20%) still has you working for 30-50 years. Significant savings, like 50%, can reduce your working life to just 17 years . Even just going from two cars to one car, still a BMW, frees up 5 years of Scott and Taylor's lives. The marshmallow experiment "The BMW felt like something I deserved" says Taylor, admitting that this even sounds silly to say out loud. When she did give it up for a Honda, she felt deflated, with a lack of status. Of course this was their plan - to spend less and m...

It's new year. A time to set ourselves goals or resolutions to improve our life. Some goals are about money. Maybe to earn more, but often it's saving. We want to spend, or waste, less of our money - and to build some savings. Good idea. My easy money-saving hack Pay cash. It's as simple as that. How does that work? Our brains are funny. Digital money doesn't feel like real money. Notes and coins do. It's part of why casinos use chips. So that money feels like a toy and people gamble way more than they should. Even more than they would if playing with real money. In a classic behaviour experiment to measure honesty, participants were given the opportunity to cheat to gain extra money. Some cheating occured. But when given the opportunity to cheat for plastic tokens, which could be later exchanged for money, cheating more than doubled. People's morality was a barrier to cheating for money. But with money-tokens people didn't consider it real m...

I never need buy a pen again. Ever. The pen round-up. I searched the house for pens and gathered them up. We had 128. Woah - that's more than I expected. Then it was test-time. (You can get a lot done watching summer sport ;). Good ones went on the table. Broken ones in the box. Pen operations I saved a few 'broken' pens, by taking working insides and matching them with functional outsides. Particularly much-loved pens, for sentimental reasons, were given a life-extending 'ink transplant'. Final Tally We ended up with 67 broken pens and 61 good ones. And about 10 pencils. What to do with 67 broken pens? In my city Biome recycles pens . It's as easy as taking them into the store and dropping them into the giant collection box. Decluttering and recycling together - I love it. A lifetime of pens An average pen writes 45,000 words. So that dedicated shopping list pen on the fridge could write a 20-word shopping list for 43 years. Our 61 pens repre...