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LATEST BLOG POSTS
Miss the newest posts? Here are the last six!
How to be Admired and Have the Wealth You Want
Certain characteristics tend to show up again and again. If you admire people with money you might notice they tend towards frugality and index fund investing or own a business. You can emulate that easy enough. You might notice many travel and want to do the same. By following their example you increase the odds you will accumulate more resources to travel.
There is no guarantee you will get the same results. A person in prison will have limitations from the rest of the population. Nelson Mandela is a perfect example. He gained the respect of the guards and the people of a nation while imprisoned. He was fortunate that he was released and led South Africa for many years. Other people doing the same thing will almost certainly get a different result.
This blog is about wealth. It might depress you when I say you can search the traits of those you admire and incorporate those traits only to find less admiration than those you worked to emulate. That misses the whole point. Successful integration of quality traits do not guarantee anything and shouldn’t even be the goal! It is the daily effort to improve yourself with the traits you acquired that makes you wealthy.
The daily journey is the reward, the riches you seek. You can examine the admired of your community and work to integrate those positive traits into your persona. But please, kind readers, make plenty of room for you. Explore the qualities already inside you.
Marriage and Money: Finding the Perfect Mate
From the outside it can look easy. Watching a couple together for 30 years and still madly in love is something everyone can enjoy and learn from. We forget the ride from when they met to this very day where they are still together wasn’t a smooth one. Life intervened. Money problems arose, fights broke out, angry words were uttered and myriad other problems interjected into the relationship.
Mrs. Accountant and I are such a couple. We celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary earlier this year. Some people like to throw a party as they reach anniversary milestones. Mrs. A and I prefer a more solitude ceremony of two. We share stories and wondered what we did that was so special we would beat the odds.
Both of us came from poor, lower middle-class backgrounds. Mrs. A had a small car loan when we met and a modest balance in the bank. I was starting to make headway, but money was tight. I say this with a brave face. It’s easy to forget how hard we had to work to build our wealth and maintain a stable relationship.
Beat Procrastination and Get Rich by Taking a Break
It happens to all of us. A project gets on our desk and we stall out; a credit card bill needs to be challenged with the bank and we can’t get the energy to get it done; a book we really want to read sits on the night stand waiting for the day you actually crack the cover. Like I said, it happens to all of us.
As an accountant I feel overwhelm often. People don’t bring me the easy ones and the IRS doesn’t care about your schedule. They pay me for things that make mere mortals head’s explode. Generally I’m booked out 6-8 weeks, and any time I say yes to something or set an appointment within 6 weeks it means I subtract it from personal time. Then I stall out!
It isn’t the worst or most difficult tasks that cause my tires to spin. I eventually reach a point where fatigue sets in and if your file is in the wrong place at the wrong time (or I made too many commitments), it ends up on the hellish side of my desk where things don’t get done. I keep putting it off because opening the file creates visions of pain in my skull. When fate (a disgruntled client) pushes me to engage the task it usually is something much less involved than I thought.
If You Love Spending Money This Will Make You Rich
“Should I feel guilty when spending money?” It’s a common question when I consult with clients. They are so tuned into frugality they sometimes start associating negative feelings with money. It’s a bad thing to start feeling.
Spending money is NOT an evil activity! In modern society we have it so easy that we tend to either overspend (the vast majority) or become hyper-frugal (a significant percentage of the demographic reading this blog). Both lifestyles are unhealthy. Overspending leads to serious problems when the bills come due and income might not keep up. Debt is a serious issue I ask clients (and readers) to consider purging. The opposite of overspending is the hyper-frugal drive. This can suck the pleasure out of life as fast as a heavy debt burden.
The IRS Issues Proposed Regulations on the Qualified Business Income (QBI) Deduction
The IRS is true to their word when they said they’d issue regulations on the Qualified Business Income Deduction, otherwise known as QBI, by the end of summer. In the past week proposed regulations were published, coming in at 184 pages. Remember these are “proposed” regulations. Final regulations come after guys like me pick it apart. Most of what you see probably survives so it is a good time to start the planning process.
Accountants who wanted to get a jump-start advising clients on ways to maximize the deduction are in for a rude surprise. Most schemes are out. At the end of this post I will outline what can be done to maximize the deduction.
The 184 pages of proposed regs cover more than just QBI. We will discuss the most relevant here. Consider consulting with a tax professional to review how your personal situation is affected by these proposed regulations.
If I find any other juicy tidbits, I’ll publish. If not, I’ll wait until the final regs are issued.
The Day Jordan Peterson Schooled the FIRE Community
Most people familiar with Jordan Peterson and his work comes from the litany of YouTube videos. From college classroom lectures to podcasts to interviews, Peterson has covered a wide variety of topics. Sometimes he is controversial in his stance, bringing him viral traffic. Most of the time his presentations are extraordinarily deep probes of the human psyche.
Whether you love or hate him, the one thing we should all agree on is that he makes us think. His latest book (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos) is must-read material. Unlike most books, this one you must own. A library copy will not be enough. You will read and re-read this material again. The message is so deep that one reading only scratches the surface. As I read Peterson’s book I could rarely finish a page without stopping to think about what I just read. Sometime I had to walk away and make sense of what I was just presented. By far, this is the slowest reading of a book for me in over a decade.
For over 730,000 words I’ve been trying to convey a message with this blog. While reading 12 Rules I discovered Peterson said more clearly what I intended in only 500 words. (Yeah, I feel exactly how you would expect.)
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