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I met with a friend of mine just a few days ago and heard an all-too-familiar story. This friend is at the end of her rope. She’s stressed out, not sleeping right, in poor health and she feels like she has the weight of the world on her shoulders. 

As a result, she’s not really taking care of herself the way she knows she should or could. 

The solution is simple, right?

I have a special treat today. Meghan Chomut, CFP asked me to have a chat Live on Facebook and it was a hoot!

We talked Financial Independent, lifestyle, career, debt, saving, spending and, of course, BOOKS!

It was a regular Thursday morning. I got in my car to start heading to my local Toastmasters Club meeting. I closed the door and could still hear the outside world as opposed to the usual quiet nothing that results. How weird, I thought.

…And Why You Can Now See a Whole Lot More of Me!

It feels like a long time since I've put virtual pen to paper on Free to Pursue. And it has been.

My last post was May 31st and it was a book review. My last personal musings were on May 23 (and they were a precursor to this very blog post). In short, it's been a two-month absence and it feels like a substantial amount of time.

This book is a biographical work about, as the subtitle indicates, “Thomas Young, The Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, AND Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, among other Feats of Genius.”

The more I read about who is successful in this life, the more I realize just how important it is to understand the word “enough.” I’ve written a lot about this on this blog, but I think it’s essential to keep hammering the point...if not for you, at least for me.

It has never been easier in this world to go narrow and deep. The resources to delve deeper and deeper in a subject are nearly infinite. In order to run out of material you practically have to specialize within a specialty!

While away in Guatemala this past March, I had the chance to experience something I haven’t been able to experience in a long time: scarcity. What an eye-(re)opening experience!

Of course, I took care of doing some research, but I didn’t do as much as I likely should have because I thought all we had to do was get settled and then we could go from there. BIG MISTAKE.

I don’t often write about basic personal finance principles on this blog, but I will jump in on a recent trend I’m noticing on YouTube. I'm seeing various bloggers/vloggers repeating the following advice, especially when it comes to what I would consider luxury or "treat yourself" type of items…

In a recent post about going live on YouTube, I mentioned the often-drawn-out process involved in turning dreams into reality. And that drawn-out process occurs only if we’re lucky. The alternative is that whatever we were working on never materializes or quickly gets mothballed.

I just finished another book last night: "Finish" by Jon Acuff. As I was getting through the final pages, including acknowledgements and chapter notes—yeah, I’m that person who actually reads those sections— I was reminded of a comment I received from an editor as I was shopping for someone to edit what I thought would be my first book. When she saw that I had footnotes quoting some of my sources, she authoritatively said:

“No one reads footnotes anymore.”

I was taken aback. Not just by the statement, but by her all-or-nothing position on the practice.