But wait... there's less!

A friend recently asked me why it is that so many people (on good incomes) are struggling to save. Often the big three money areas are housing, transport and food. In one sense these are necessary items. But what we spend on them is often way more than necessary. I crunched some numbers on how much extra my wife and I could spend on these things - if for some reason we wanted to burn our money. 1. Housing Our apartment is fairly nice, but also cost-effective. I've mentioned how choosing it saves us $1,800 per year , compared to a similar one we saw. The high end of 2-bedroom apartments in our suburb is $305 per week more than our apartment. Not $305 per week. $305 per week more than ours is. I cannot get over that. Sure it's new and modern-looking, but that's a lot of money. It's an extra $15,860 per year above what we pay. 2. Transport The Australian Automobile Association lists the costs of owning and running a car. It includes many often-overlooked c...

Go Fund Yourself is a basic money guide. Written for younger adults and usable for all, it covers many aspects of money - jobs, businesses, spending and investing. It's British, so some information is UK-specific. But this is far outweighed by helpful information that transcends national borders. Reason for being The Japanese word Ikigai means reason for being. It originates in Okinawa, where they view work not so much as a necessary chore that we retire from, but something that is innate to us as individuals. Ikigai is about fulfilling work by finding a combination of work we love doing something the world needs, while earning money and doing something we're good at. It's about finding the centre of the diagram where all the circles overlap. Ideal income It's easy to think that an ideal income is the highest one possible. Perhaps that's why we don't consider Ikigai as much as we could; why we sometimes just take the job or career with the highest pay. ...

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...

As we wrap up 2019, here are the most-read posts here on But Wait There's Less . 5. Books. Do we need them anymore? Why do we keep books? To read them again? How many do we ever read a second time? I worked it out .For me not many. This lead to a second post on my technique for streamlining my book collection . 4. Living in a converted barn. This was something my wife and I tried on a trip away this year. Check out the pictures . I still reckon it could be possible long-term. We really don't need as much space as we have. 3. What's your retirement age? It's not 67. At least it doesn't have to be. If we spend less, compulsory work can become optional at a very early age . It could even be in your 30s. 2. The automatic guest room On the same trip as number 4, we stayed with a friend who (with some clever furniture ) converts her living room into another bedroom. It's a clever way to be able to have guests, but without paying a heap of money for a bigge...

To me a "win" is giving a great present to someone who'll enjoy it, and not being wasteful. That can be tricky with these games. What is Stealing Santa? It's a version of secret santa played at workplaces or in extended families. Each person contributes a gift, and draws a number to determine the order of play. Player one selects a gift and opens it. Each following player opens a gift and can keep it or (forcibly) swap it with any already-opened gift. The last player has the choice of all the gifts. Why I hate this game Clearly it runs totally against the idea of buying a present for a specific person who you have thought about and brought something that would suit that person. Also, giving gifts for an unknown recipient often results in unwanted and wasteful purchases, sometimes thrown away. Why I love this game If played well, the worst outcome is neutral and the best outcome can be someone getting a gift they love. What? Let me explain. My wife didn't...

Today was the sad passing of Marie Fredriksson of Swedish pop-duo Roxette. She is best known for the song It Must Have Been Love , from the Pretty Woman movie. She died of a brain tumour at the age of 61. Why it matters to me? I'm not normally affected by celebrities passing. But this is different for two reasons. As a youngster I was a big Roxette fan. Most of their best stuff was before my time, but I scanned records stores (when music was sold in shops) to find their older stuff. Those CDs got very heavy listening in my younger years - and again tonight as I write this. Also Marie was 61, the same age my mother passed away - almost to the day. So it's an extra stark reminder that the phrase "life is short" is often truer than we expect. On average we live longer lives than generations before us, but it's obviously not the case for everyone. What does it mean? For me it's a reminder of that we only have a finite number of hours on the planet. ...

How far would you go for financial freedom? It's the subtitle of Scott Rieckens' book and also his year-long quest featured in his documentary . What is Financial Independence? Basically it's as simple as spending way less than you earn, investing the difference and getting to a point where the investment income supports your lifestyle. For some people, financial independence comes very naturally. And then there's Scott and his wife Taylor (and baby Jovie). Their income is good, but they also lease a BMW, are members of a boat club, frequently spent hundreds on dinner and live in an expensive part of San Diego, California. At least, until now. Why the book? Scott says that the idea of the book (and documentary to come) is to show "a journey with all of the anxieties, disagreements, negotiations and mistakes that I imagine so many others would expect or fear" . He makes good on that promise. He figures that this is an option for many people - and he ba...