I read many blog posts each day. They mostly focus on personal finance, but also on minimalism and travel . Here are some of my favorite posts I read in January.
I missed this post from The Loonie Doctor when it was published last year. However, I think this is a great post to review the different ways to budget. The differences are really in the focus that guides budgeting decisions, which in turn are driven by someone’s stage of life. We have the Survival Budget (for the poor student or resident), the Fun Budget (for people with a little more money coming in than they need), the GPS Budget (for when you can loosen the purse strings a bit, but you want to make sure you are still going in the direction you desire), and the Tax Planning Budget (when your focus needs to be on, you guessed it: tax planning).
Tawcan, another Canadian, has some great pearls with his post 10 Lessons I’ve Learned from 25 years of investing. I tell my students that it is always useful to review the basics, and these lessons are totally worth reading, whether for a novice investor or as a refresher for those with experience.
I often enjoy and link to pieces from The Woke Salaryman. This month, we have an interesting look at the tragedy of the commons, using a buffet as the setting: What buffets teach us about society’s problems.
A Wealth of Common Sense has 2 posts this month that speak to my current questions about my own life. The Mid Life Spending Crisis discusses the variations in spending at different ages. It appears that I am probably in my peak spending years, looking at those graphs. Maybe I should chill out a little about spending more right now. The second post asks Should You Stop Working When You Become Financially Independent? I very much liked the answer, which boils down to: you can, but you don’t have to. I particularly liked the four rules to guide your work terms.
Over at Humble Dollar, I enjoyed a post about Being Social, a reminder that you need to work on your retirement activities and social skills, if you are going to do well when you leave work.
Do you have any favorite posts from January?