Trent from The Simple Dollar is one of my favorite bloggers. Judging by the numbers in his Feedburner chicklet, he’s liked also from at least another 35,000 readers – Trent is quite a popular fellow. In 2007 The Simple Dollar got Performancing award for best business/money blog.
Besides the good posts there you will find some downloadables – just scroll the home page a little bit and you will find them at right.
Enough about the blog. Let’s try to have a look deeper inside Trent’s brain – get your scalpel and join me now:
SI: Man, I can count at least 10 financial mistakes you have done! (Oh, well, you have actually written about them in your blog). Do you regret making them? Don’t you wish you could go many years back and be a wise frugal guy with a white beard yet from the teen age?
Trent: “Bottoming out” taught me a lot of lessons about how I should live my life and what values I should focus on. I’m not sure that simply having all the right answers in college would have really taught me much of anything at all. When I was in college, I was already sure I had all the right answers, anyway, so I likely would have just ignored them – or implemented just enough to keep my head barely above water. I think the path I followed was the best one to follow.
SI Note: 1. But the girls in school would enjoy the white beard, no?
2. I can see myself doing some of the Trent’s mistakes, fortunately not all. What about you – can you look at your financial habits right now and say you have figured the right way?
SI: If I only have the time to read one single post from your blog, which should be it? Why?
Trent: This one sums up my whole personal finance philosophy in five simple images:
Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance on the Back of Five Business Cards
SI Note: That’s indeed a must read post. Managing with our finance is really as simple as following the ideas shared there. Of course, implementation is what makes ideas work at the end.
SI: Let’s say I can offer you a job paying 10x times more than you make now from all your income streams. There is only one little catch: it’s a job that you really hate to do. Is it a deal?
Trent: It depends on whether that job can stay constrained to an eight hour day or not. If that job takes over my whole life, no deal. If I can keep it constrained to a nine to five, where I don’t have to think about it at all when I walk out the door, then sure. But a job with that kind of salary naturally does begin to take over your life – and right now, I wouldn’t trade my personal life for anything.
SI Note: It sound very tempting to me to accept such a job just for one year no matter how much it takes of your life. If you can get paid 10 times your current income for an year, such an offer would give you 9 years of freedom. There is one big problem though – when they taste the big money, most people can’t stop.
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