Written By Paula Pant
In mid-1700’s France, there lived an artist and writer on the brink of poverty.
His name was Denis Diderot.He had been born into an established family, the son of a successful craftsman, and he had obliged the social standing of his birth by pursuing a formal education. He obtained a Master of Arts in philosophy, and seemed bound for a respectable profession in clergy or law.
But Diderot dreamed of becoming a writer.
Written By Paula Pant
Today’s article is extra-nerdy. Pull on your Coke-bottle reading glasses and let’s run through a little bit of math.
Ready? Let’s go.
If you’re retiring on index funds, you might plan your retirement on the 4 percent withdrawal rule.
But if you’re retiring on rental properties, you could use the equivalent to a 6 percent withdrawal rule.
This holds true even if total returns on the two investments are the same.
Written By Paula Pant
After three years of development, I’m ready to make the announcement.
The rental property investing course, Your First Rental Property®, is opening for enrollment on Monday, April 8th.
Here’s everything you need to know about this course: the who, what, where, when, why and how.
Written By Paula Pant
A few months ago, I got an invitation to speak at Google.
“Cool,” I thought. “That’s, like, grown-up stuff!”
The invitation came from one of my podcast listeners, David Moltz, who works at the company’s Los Angeles office and who hosted the hour-long Q&A.
“Could you talk about financial independence,” he asked me, “but maybe leave out the part about everyone quitting their job?”
“Haha! Sure thing,” I replied.
Written By Paula Pant
Here are a handful of lessons from 2018 (although many of these ideas originated during a lifetime preceding that). I’ve shared most, but not all, of these lessons on Instagram in the past year.
1: Your net worth is not your self worth. That’s true regardless of whether your net worth is low or […]
Written By Paula Pant
A year and a half ago, I saw a speech that changed my life — and the lives of at least 600 other people in the developing world.
I was at the World Domination Summit in Portland, where I’d later be speaking. I sat in the audience as Scott Harrison took the stage.
Scott is a former nightclub promoter who, at age 28, had a crisis of conscience. His job was encouraging people to get drunk. He smoked two packs a day. He gambled. He felt like he wasn’t adding anything to the world. And he wasn’t sure if, or how, he could.
“One day, I woke up and I realized I was the worst person I knew,” he wrote in an article on Medium.
He quit his job, sold most of his possessions, and spent the next two years as a photojournalist on a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia in west Africa. He saw diseases that were unlike anything he’d imagined.
As WIRED describes: “Some of the patients were grotesquely deformed by grapefruit-sized tumors, while others were nearly blind from cataracts that turned their eyes opaque.” (Here are images.)
He felt surprised — and then sad, then angry, then determined — when he realized that thousands of people die from preventable diseases, like cholera and dysentery, that are spread by drinking dirty water. More than 660 million people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, which is almost 1 out of every 10 people. That’s twice the population of the U.S.
That’s unacceptable.
Written By Paula Pant
A few months ago, I interviewed a behavioral economist named Dr. Stephen Wendel on my podcast. He suggested an idea that’s so crazy it might work.
We were discussing the fact that people often stand in their own way; there’s a gap between intention and action. We know what we “should” do, but we don’t follow through. We procrastinate. We make excuses. We act against our own self-interests.
We have an image of our ideal self, we have the reality of our current self, and it’s harder than expected to bridge that divide. Why?
Most people try to figure out the problem. “Why can’t I stick to my goals?” But during our interview, Stephen turns this conventional wisdom on its head.
Maybe we should approach this as treatment first, diagnosis second.
He suggests that you try a handful of solutions. When you find the one that works, you’ll know the problem.
Written By Paula Pant
I’ve learned a ton during the past decade, thanks to reading, interviewing, and massive trial-and-error. I’ve distilled many of these lessons into today’s blog post.
Here are 17 lessons that can improve your money and life.
#1: Money Can’t Make You Happy, But Lack of Money Can Make You Unhappy
They say, “money can’t make you happy.” But that’s false.
Researchers have examined the link between money and happiness — and guess what? Money can make you happy, to an extent. Multiple studies found a significant correlation between money and happiness among people in low-to-middle income brackets.
Written By Paula Pant
Guess what? The Washington Post published an interview with me about the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement (the FIRE movement).
They asked if it’s possible to save half of your income. They asked about the accuracy of Suze Orman’s statement that you’ll need $5 million to retire early. (Spoiler alert: No. You don’t.) And they asked if everyone who reaches financial independence then spends their time blogging about said topic, because if that’s true, then what’s the point?
Written By Paula Pant
The FIRE movement is misunderstood. The drama of the last two weeks proves it. The question is, how can we fix this?
Ohhh we have a new supporter!!
Last week, Suze Orman called FIRE “dumb and stupid.”
“When I was 30 I was dumb and stupid as well, okay?,” she said in an interview with Yahoo! Finance, adding that she’s “pissed off” at people pursuing early retirement.
But since then, she’s taken more time to learn about the movement — and she’s in support.
In a Facebook post titled “What I Hate — and Love — about FIRE,” Suze writes…