Designing my life, part one: Building a compass

Last week, I raved about the book Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. These two Stanford design professors have taken design principles and applied them to helping people figure out what they want to be when they grow up.

After advocating Designing Your Life to several friends, two of them suggested that we work through the book’s exercises together. One of those friends is Kim, my long-term girlfriend. The other is Craig, a college classmate. I thought it might be fun to share some of these exercises as we complete them over the next couple of months.

Because I want to respect the intellectual property of the authors, I’m not going to describe the exercises exactly. Instead, I’ll provide a vague overview and then discuss my own answers. (And, when it makes sense, I’ll also include answers from my friends.)

With that out of the way, let’s dive in! Let’s see what happens as I begin the process of designing my life.

Read More

Call for reader questions and stories!

This week I’m in Orlando for Fincon, the annual gathering of folks who work at the intersection of money and media. As a result, I haven’t had time to do all of the things I normally do during a week. I haven’t been reading or writing about money. Instead, I’ve done a lot of chatting with colleagues.

We’ve been coming together at Fincon since 2011. At first, we were nearly all strangers to each other. Today, many of these people are my closest friends — but they’re friends I see in person only once or twice each year. I value every moment I get to spend with them.

On Tuesday, for instance, a group of us booked a private VIP tour through the Disney theme parks. We had a blast. I mean, look at this wretched hive of scum and villainy…

Our tour group at Disney

Chat with other money nerds this week has given me additional clarity about the future direction of Get Rich Slowly — on the web, on YouTube, and in the email newsletter.

You see, most money bloggers (and podcasters and YouTube creators) are in it for the money. That’s fine. I have no problem with that. But that’s not me.

Yes, I would very much like to earn income from the work that I do, but I’m in the fortunate position that I don’t need to earn that income today. I had a windfall from the site thirteen years ago, which allows me to pursue this as a passion project

Read More

Easy & Affordable Way To Get Life Insurance

Do you have life insurance? Today, I am sharing my Policygenius review to help you find an affordable and easy place to find life insurance.

Life insurance is extremely important.Policygenius Review

And, it’s probably something you can easily afford. In fact, many people are able to find life insurance plans for less than $50 a month – there are extremely affordable plans out there!

Yet, many people go without life insurance.

If you’re unfamiliar with what life insurance is, I want to start my Policygenius review by explaining what it is.

See, life insurance is money for your family for when you pass away. If you are the sole or primary earner in your family, then there are probably a lot of people who rely on you financially. And, if you are a stay at home parent, life insurance is still extremely important as well.

The money that comes from life insurance can be used to pay for funeral expenses, day-to-day bills (such as your mortgage or rent), to pay off debt, to hire help for the family (such as a nanny or daycare) , set up college funds, etc.

Think about it like this: If you were to die tomorrow, how would your family be able to cover the bills?

According to the Insurance Information Institute, in 2020, 54% of all people in the US had some sort of life insurance. However, many of those people don’t have enough life insurance coverage. That means their policy likely doesn’t meet the

Read More