How to Be Rich, Happy, and Save the World

In early August, Mr. Money Mustache came to Portland to speak at the sixth-annual World Domination Summit. After Pete and I presented the three-hour Money Boss workshop on Thursday, he took the main stage on Saturday to spread his message to an audience of nearly 1000 people.

Earlier this week, WDS HQ released video of Pete’s talk and it’s awesome. It’s a great way to kick off this first-ever edition of Money Boss Theater (which I hope will become a regular Saturday feature around here).

Here’s what Mr. Money Mustache has to say about how to be rich, happy, and save the world.

With the awesomeness of not one but two unicorns, Pete states his core purpose: “I don’t give that much of a shit about your personal finances. What I care about is how much better a world we’re all going to get to live in if we all become a bit more rational with our money.”

Pete says that money has the power to change the world, for good or for ill. He spends the bulk of his 24 minute talk exploring what he calls “three amazing facts that will make you rich”.

Almost everybody sucks at money

What’s the formula for human happiness? The answer involves scientific hexagons:

That’s all you need to be truly happy. But people believe they need more, which is too bad. “Any money you spend that does not make you happier is wasted,” Pete says. But research shows that’s most of what we spend.

“Even a life at the bottom of the U.S. spending scale is still way more than enough to be happy — as long as you spend it on the right stuff,” Pete says.

In his talk, MMM compares and contrasts the ten-year path to retirement with the ten-year path to “Still-Brokesville”. Most Americans follow the latter road — and never have the option to retire early.

Getting rich enough to retire only takes about ten years

The truth is the secret to early retirement is shockingly simple.

If you will save half your income, you can retire in seventeen years. If you can save two-thirds of your income, you can do it in a decade. “Luckily,” Pete says, “[my wife and I] both grew up in Canada, so nobody had told us this is impossible. So we did it.”

“It’s not just me who has this early retirement superpower,” Pete says. “Most of us in the United States and other rich countries have options like this open to us.”

Your mandatory working career depends on only one factor. In Money Boss parlance, that factor is your profit margin, your saving rate. It’s the difference between what you earn and what you spend.

Work is better when you don’t need the money

The purpose of work, Pete says, should be to create and to fuel your soul. That’s very different than the purpose of earning money (which is simply to have money).

Retiring from a cubicle frees you to focus on work you actually love.

“If you can get yourself financially independent, not only does it give you the power to eliminate most of the bullshit from your life, but it frees your life’s work to become more truthful.”

That’s it for the first-ever edition of Money Boss Theater. Know a good video that would be useful for folks in this community? A podcast episode? (Or an entire podcast?) Drop me a line! The more quality suggestions I receive, the more often this feature will appear on Saturday.

from Money Boss http://ift.tt/2dvRe83