My Manifesto

I recent­ly had the plea­sure of meet­ing up with Sam Lust­garten, a fel­low blog­ger. We had a great con­ver­sa­tion that spanned many top­ics, from cur­rent read­ing choic­es to the strug­gles of start­ing a blog. One of the things he asked me was, “Why did you start a blog?”

Now, it seems like a sim­ple ques­tion, but it hon­est­ly made me pause and think for a bit.

Why did I start this blog?

I’m not doing it for the attention.

One does­n’t become a famous celebri­ty by blog­ging about finan­cial inde­pen­dence. I expect absolute­ly no one to stop me on the street and ask to take a self­ie with me.

I’m not in it for the money.

Appar­ent­ly, one can make some seri­ous dough from blog­ging. If I were drown­ing in cred­it card debt, or stu­dent loan debt, I’d def­i­nite­ly con­sid­er mak­ing this my side hus­tle. But, I earn a decent enough salary through my day job that I don’t need to add any ads to my site, or use mon­e­tized refer­ral links. For now. Who knows, that could change at some point in the future.

So why am I doing this?

For me, this blog serves two pur­pos­es. One, I real­ly love to write. 

My for­mer room­mate and I go way back to mid­dle school. We were talk­ing the oth­er day about how well our school dis­trict prepped us for adult life. Con­sid­er­ing we went to the #17 ranked high school in the state, this is hard­ly sur­pris­ing. Our grad­u­at­ing class had 13 vale­dic­to­ri­ans, for pete’s sake. One way our school helped us was teach­ing us to write well. Not just teach­ing us, but pound­ing it into us and forc­ing us to learn to write well, kick­ing and scream­ing. In the case of my for­mer room­mate, he hap­pi­ly soaked in all they had to offer since he was one of the found­ing mem­bers of the Cre­ative Writ­ing Club and went on to get a B.A. in Eng­lish. Even the bot­tom quar­ter of our class knew how to con­struct a prop­er sen­tence and use cor­rect gram­mar and punctuation.

All that to say, I like to write. My day job is in the IT field, so the most I write is some code or maybe a short email (usu­al­ly about some sort of code or tech­ni­cal jar­gon). It’s ther­a­peu­tic to me to take all the stuff float­ing in my brain and put it out there for you to read. It allows me to step back from the high­ly tech­ni­cal and demand­ing work I do on a day to day basis and actu­al­ly focus on some­thing I like to do. I rarely do things just for fun these days, and this is one of them. It’s sur­pris­ing how much of your life is tak­en up with work and chores when you become an adult.

The oth­er rea­son I’m writ­ing this blog is because I feel I have some­thing use­ful to say that can help oth­er people. 

It’s ingrained into my per­son­al­i­ty to want help. Nor­mal­ly, I put lit­tle stock into per­son­al­i­ty tests avail­able on the inter­net, but my friends bad­gered me into tak­ing this one and it just makes so much sense. It’s called the Ennea­gram test. Basi­cal­ly, there are 9 main per­son­al­i­ties. Each num­ber has a wing that incor­po­rates some of the char­ac­ter­is­tics from the neigh­bor­ing num­ber. Each num­ber looks at and reacts dif­fer­ent­ly to the world. There are also lev­els of health with­in each num­ber, so an unhealthy Five is going to be dif­fer­ent than a healthy Five.

My num­ber for the Ennea­gram test is 1w2. This means my main per­son­al­i­ty is a One, with some ele­ments of a Two added in. Ones are known as “The Reformer”, “The Right­ness Seek­er”, or my per­son­al favorite “The Per­fec­tion­ist”.  A Two is known as “The Helper”. All of this boils down to this: I like to help peo­ple do the right thing.

I found this quote from here that I feel per­fect­ly sums up who I am: “They are not nec­es­sar­i­ly worked up about the plight of refugees in the Third World but may have very firm con­vic­tions about prop­er diet and exer­cise or the best way to main­tain one’s house­hold or fam­i­ly bud­get.” I am very pas­sion­ate about the top­ics of bud­get­ing, sav­ing for retire­ment, and invest­ing. What bet­ter way to share my pas­sion than to help oth­er peo­ple “do the right thing”?

It makes me sad to find out that so many young peo­ple have no idea what prop­er per­son­al finance looks like. They have no idea how to bud­get effec­tive­ly, how to plan for future expens­es, what the dif­fer­ence between a Roth IRA and a 401k is, or heck, even what a 401k even is! I could put on my tin­foil hat and go all con­spir­a­cy nut and say “That’s how the big cor­po­ra­tions want it! They want to keep us in the dark so we keep liv­ing pay­check to pay­check as we finance every­thing in our lives to look cool!” but I don’t think that’s their goal. I think it has more to do with igno­rance and, in some small part, a fail­ure on our schools to not teach us any prac­ti­cal. Sure I can tell you that the mito­chon­dria is the pow­er­house of the cell, but when I was 18 I could­n’t tell you how to sign up for util­i­ties or shop for car insurance.

I want to help change that. I want more con­ver­sa­tions to be about the mer­its of var­i­ous roboad­vi­sors, or about which cred­it cards offer the best rewards. There’s so much about adult life that we have to fig­ure out on our own, and it’s ridicu­lous. Why should I have to fig­ure out how to get the water turned on at my new place, or that med­ical records need to be trans­ferred from place to place as you move, or even that you get some dis­counts when you switch your address online with the Post Office, when there are mil­lions of peo­ple who’ve dis­cov­ered that before me?? This is 2015! I should be able to search for a check­list on Google instead of stay­ing up at night wor­ry­ing that I missed some­thing important!

My Manifesto: To help guide recent college graduates and young professionals as they navigate the adult working world with the end goal of achieving Financial Independence.

I have a burning passion for the FI/RE world. Join me and discover a whole new world free of the constraints of a 40 hour work week!