There are actually a few reasons why I wanted to put this blog together. They are very simple. To learn and improve. To share what I’ve learned. To hold myself accountable.
Clarify and solidify my thinking and/or systems.
Identify the core principles of personal finance. That have always been, and likely always will be true? What are the essential truths of wealth building? Determine what information is at the core of my strategy and philosophy and what is on the periphery. And more importantly, determine if that is personal to me, or universal for all investors.
Identify the core essential frameworks of personal finance. Build a structure, outline, or skeleton representing an (the?) approach to building wealth. And serving as a guide that can be modified as required by adding or deleting items as needed.
Whittle my PF philosophy down to the indispensable process. Separate the wheat from the chaff. The steak from the peas. Establish an Personal Finance MVP, or minimum viable process.
Identify the essential information and knowledge. There are seemingly infinite choices to invest your money and they are complex. Need combination of common senses, acquired knowledge, sense and understanding of history, access to advice & advisors.
Identify the rules of the game. Know when they change, understand why they change, so you can then anticipate future changes or adjust quickly when they do.
To hold myself accountable
To hold myself accountable for continued education. If you can’t teach it, you don’t really know it. So, you must really learn it to be able to properly teach it.
To hold myself accountable to stay on track. Leaders should do so from the front. This will force me to spend regular time on personal finance education.
To meet other like-minded folks
Obtain input from other like-minded folks. Get feedback, criticism or validation, of my thinking about personal finance topics. Double check my system. Is it good enough? See where the holes in my plan are? What did I miss? See where I misunderstood? How?
Share my knowledge with friends, family and acquaintances
I was asked to. More than a few people have asked me for “my curriculum on personal finance”. I decided that this was the medium that made sense to present the material. Not only is a blog easy to publish this type of information in, it also facilitates easy feedback.
I think it’s needed. In my opinion, personal finance is the most important topic that is taught the least to Americans. I want to help remedy that. Even with the amount of material out there, I believe there is still a need for information to be presented again and in a slightly different way to make sure we get through to everyone who need to be gotten to! We’ll see if I’m the only one who thinks that.
To give back. I owe my financial well being to people like me who wrote books, published blogs and did podcasts to share their knowledge, experiences and insights on Personal finance. I don’t come from a wealthy family. When I had to answer the question, “How do I become a millionaire?” I had to search externally for someone who had that answer. And because of the web, I found many of them. Students owe it to their teachers to pass on what they’ve learned.
We need to talk about money more. Money is a taboo subject for far too many people. It tends to elicit shame, if not embarrassment. I’m constantly shocked at the lack of knowledge amongst the average citizen I come across. This is fixable by simply increasing the discussions of money. Especially for children. Getting kids on the talking and thinking about money early – getting them on the right track quickly – can only help change this.
To improve
To improve my writing. The best way to get better at writing, is to write. This should give me ample excuse to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, on a very regular basis.
To improve my web skills. Since my friend in college showed me how to build my first web page, I was fascinated with the power of self-publishing whatever you wanted, there for anyone in the world to see. I grasped the power in that concept immediately. Also, I believe that the way to really learn something is to just do it. And while I’ve built web sites before, I’ve never done it for true, broad public consumption. But I’d like to try that and see how it works.
Why this format? If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. Albert Einstein
The Feynman Technique
- Choose a concept you want to learn about
- Pretend you are teaching it to a student in grade 6
- Identify gaps in your explanation; Go back to the source material, to better understand it
- Review and simplify
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