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Personal finance is kind of like breakfast—it’s crucial to get your day off to a good start, but you don’t want to be having breakfast all day long. This isn’t Seinfeld—you eat breakfast and then you move on to lunch and dinner.
And right now I feel like I’ve been eating Corn Pops and orange juice all day—personal finance bores me.
Once you get certain basics down (spend less than you make, contribute to your retirement, create a budget, etc.) you should move along and step into the next phase of managing your money.
In my mind, it’s making more money.
Before I get blasted for sounding materialistic or shallow, let me say one thing about money: it won’t bring you happiness (not on its own anyway) and it won’t solve any problems you have in your life.
But it sure doesn’t hurt.
The other day I was making my infamous sandwich at work and I realized that some people just aren’t built for personal finance. They have absolutely no interest in doing stuff like:
- Building a budget in Excel
- Finding the best rates to store their money
- Researching the best place to open a Roth IRA
- Calling the cable company to get a better deal
- Hassling your bank to get stupid fees refunded
This isn’t exciting stuff, but for some reason personal-finance nuts love to do it. We’re proud of it. We take what we have and we make the most of it. And we often rail on people who don’t “get it.”
But most people just don’t care.
They don’t want to spend time on the phone or online to save a few dollars here and there. And you know what? That’s totally fine.
As I stood there waiting for my sandwich to toast, I had an epiphany: there might not be a universal appeal to making your finances more efficient, but there is one thing I know we can all agree on.
We all want to make more money.
I’m not talking about whoring ourselves out for every extra cent we can get. I’m talking about doing something meaningful outside of work and getting paid for it. Like this blog (although “getting paid” is kind of a misnomer in this case). Like having side projects that help others and make some money.
And that’s what I’m working on right now: a side project that I’ll treat more like a business than I have this site, which is more of a place I use to chat and talk about the things I find interesting. Could I monetize it more efficiently and turn it into a good income?
Sure I could. But then I’d be writing about online stock brokers and the best banks to store your savings in.
And I just don’t care about that.
More on this project as it unfolds, but I’m pretty excited about it. I feel the way I did when I was getting this site off the ground and everything felt fresh and new.
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