This website aims to provide you with the information needed to shift your financial paradigm to become more conscious of your personal finances and intentional with your spending.

  • Track Spending

    One of the most important aspects of personal finance is simply tracking your finances. There are three key things that you should track: all spending (monthly), your net worth (yearly), and your minor assets (yearly). To be successful in personal finance, you must know where your money is coming from,…

  • How Many Hours do I Need to Work to Pay for This?

    Something I often consider is the amount of hours I need to work to pay for something – that helps me to put the purchase into perspective. I recommend that everyone know their net hourly income. Simply divide your net income on your paycheck by the number of hours worked…

  • Conscious Spending

    The topics introduced on this website aim to increase your spending consciousness. What I mean is that you should think about the true cost of your spending decisions. Did you realize that each km you drive is costing you over $0.50 even though you don’t have ‘that nice’ of a…

  • The Rule of 72: How long to double your investment?

    The Rule of 72 is a simple formula used to estimate how many years it will take an investment to double in value, OR the rate of return required to double the investment value in a known period of time (Kenton, 2025). To determine how many years it will take…

  • Correlation vs. Causation

    A fundamental concept that everyone must understand is the difference between correlation and causation when interpreting the relationships between two variables. Too often, assumptions are made that a correlation between two variables implies a causal relationship. But the association between the variables may be coincidental without any cause-and-effect relationship. Here…

  • Unjustified Confidence

    English philosopher Bertrand Russel famously said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts” (Carney, 2021). It is a natural human characteristic to have confidence in matters when understood only at a high level.…

  • Commodification of Society

    In his book Value (s), Mark Carney discusses how commodification – adding economic value to an activity or service formerly without economic value – can erode social values and altruistic motivations (Carney, 2021). Social values and morals drive behaviors of those in a community. Why do we help our elderly…

  • Emotional Investing

    In Andrew Hallam’s book Balance, he corrects a common misconception about what it means to buy a company’s stock and cautions against emotional investing (Hallam, 2022). Firstly, to buy stock (e.g. shares) of a company means to purchase a portion of the company. Shares of publicly traded companies are traded…

  • The Big Mac Index

    Nineteen years after the introduction of the famous Big Mac sandwich, The Economist introduced the Big Mac Index in 1986. The Big Mac Index compares the cost of a McDonald’s Big Mac hamburger between counties in US dollars. You may be surprised by how much the cost varies from country…

  • What is your Lawn Costing You?

    The quintessential American home includes a lush green front lawn. Growing up, I always wanted a suburban home with a large grass lawn. That is until I had it. At 25 years old, I purchased an older suburban-style house with a big grassy lawn in the front and back. It…

  • Rewarding Confidence over Competence

    In his TEDx Talk, Martin Gutman introduces the Action Fallacy. This is the incorrect notion that the best leaders are the most visible and create the most noise and activity. History shows that we tend to celebrate leaders with dramatic stories of triumph. But many of these celebrated stories, like…

  • Overconsumption

    Earth’s Biocapacity is the total regenerative capacity of the planet’s ecosystems, including crops, grazing lands, forests, and fishing areas. The Ecological Footprint is the global population’s demand for agricultural products, livestock and fish, timber and forest products, and urban space (Ecological Footprint, 2024). 1971 was the first year when Earth’s…

  • A More Precise Estimate of Retirement Savings Needs

    While The Rule of 375 is a quick way to estimate your retirement nest egg needs, there is a more thorough way to estimate your retirement savings needs. I have outlined the logic and calculations below using real-world values for the example. The formulas used are shown and are intended…

  • Net Worth – How Do You Stack Up?

    On your financial journey, it is helpful to know how you compare to the rest of the population. By understanding how your net worth compared to others, you will know exactly where you stand, since otherwise, it’s impossible to see if you are doing well or poorly in society. Now,…

  • Generational Differences

    Generations are a way to demographically categorize cohorts of the population in terms of the period which they were born. Each generation was influenced by different factors including education, environmental, social, and cultural factors, and the age at which experiences occurred. For example, several different generations lived through the COVID-19…