If this sounds like you, welcome home. You’ve found a great community in this little pocket of the internet.

Afford Anything is a movement rooted in one idea: You can afford anything, but not everything — and that’s true not only for your money, but also your time, focus, energy and attention.

This opens two questions:

1. How can we make smarter decisions about our money, time and life?
2. How can we align our daily behaviors and habits with the lifestyle we
   value most?

I was required to come to the office five days per week and sit in my chair from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. — regardless of whether or not I operated at peak productivity during those hours.

If I wanted to spend a week at the beach or mountains, I needed to “submit a request.”

That irked me. Why should arbitrary rules govern the hours of MY life? Why couldn’t I control my limited hours on this earth?

I wanted escape.

So I saved money. Like a maniac. I hustled during the evenings and weekends, writing freelance articles, and saved every dime. I landed a few promotions with commensurate pay raises, and tucked this into a savings account.

I earned extra money on the side, and put it straight into savings — $50 here, $100 there. Slowly, hundreds turned into thousands.

In April 2008, I handed in my resignation and bought a one-way airline ticket to Egypt. I held $25,000 in the bank.

I spent the next two years backpacking across Asia and Australia. I rode camels in Cairo, scuba-dived in Thailand, explored Indonesian islands, hiked Tasmanian mountains, drove 27,000 kilometers across Australia … you get the idea.

When I returned to the U.S. in 2010, I had a terrifying thought: I might need to get a job again. Yikes.

I couldn’t go back to a crappy cubicle. I wanted sustainable, long-term freedom. But how?

I started to focus on four elements:

Financial psychology -- mastering my money mindset 

Investing -- in stocks, index funds, and (starting a few years ago) also including a measured, conservative allocation into crypto

Real Estate -- first as a source of rental income and later as a primary residence (although these days I'm back to renting, which means I'm simultaneously a landlord AND a renter)

Entrepreneurship -- as a former newspaper journalist, I began freelancing for both news outlets and private companies when I returned to the U.S. After a few years, I scaled beyond freelancing and created two media companies. 

The first company I created, Catalyst Content Marketing, was an offshoot of my early days as a freelancer; I built a content marketing and management agency and hired a small team of writers and editors to execute client projects.

While building Catalyst, I began writing on my own website about the financial and business lessons I was learning in my own life. This turned into the Afford Anything website, which you're reading now, and has evolved into a community of 70,000 newsletter subscribers. 

Afford Anything is now run by a small team and best known for our podcast, which has more than 20 million downloads.

______

My early experience as a newspaper reporter shapes every day of my life.

For the past six years, I've used my journalism training as the host of the Afford Anything podcast, a top-ranked financial podcast with more than 20 million downloads.

On the podcast, I interview researchers, academics and authors on behavioral financial, financial psychology, decision-making, critical thinking, investing, stocks, inflation, cryptocurrency, and more.

The overt topic is money. But under the hood, the Afford Anything podcast focuses on how to be a more clear thinker and better decision-maker, told through the lens of money.

 I'm a financial journalist who is currently a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University for business and economics journalism (2022-23).