Are a Lot of Personal Finance Blogs Really Philosophy Blogs? Is Mine?

Dear Reader, as you may know if you read the first post of this blog, Let There Be Light, I do not profess to be any genius when it comes to money. I don’t even pretend to be overly competent. Or underly competent. Look, the point is, I’m a dolt. My blog disclaimer, to which this post probably should be appended, implies as much.

But I do generally focus my blog on subjects related to money, saving, financial independence, and the like. Mostly centered around personal finance. You know, wild party stuff.

Oh, how to you do!

That said, I have not and am unlikely to ever write what are essentially super useful and often wildly clever how-to posts like Go Curry Cracker’s on how to legally avoid paying taxes. Or The Mad Fientist’s on using an HSA to build wealth. Or Root of Good’s on avoiding (much of) the expenses of paying for college. Or Paula Pant’s on the costs of renting vs. buying a home. Or the granddaddy of them all, Mr. Money Mustache’s on the shockingly simple math of early retirement. And so on. I’m the first to admit that I’m just not that bright.

Heck, only a scant few of my posts of mine even have actual numbers in them. And even then, the figure usually just refers to the cost of one thing or other, and that’s as far as it goes.

So it dawned on me recently that maybe I’m not writing a personal finance blog at all. Maybe this really is a philosophy blog. Specifically, a life philosophy blog.

Allow me to explain.

A no numbers game

A common focus of my blog posts is, broadly speaking, FIRE. Now, discussing how to get to FIRE can be discussed in purely mathematical and/or how-to terms. And there’s no shortage of mathy and how-tooy steps/paths along the way that can be pointed out and dissected. See, e.g., Go Curry Cracker, Mad Fientist, Root of Good, Paula Pant, and Mr. Money Mustache.

But to fully buy into the concept of FIRE is, to my mind, to buy into a (new or very different) way of thinking about one’s life and how to live it. An exception might be fat FIRE, but even in that instance, I think the person who got there after and because of discovering the idea of FIRE likely has adopted a different way of thinking about and approaching life.

And that’s what my blog really focuses on. It’s no coincidence that a lot of what I write about centers on gratitude. And mindfulness. And aligning one’s actions with one’s values. And being open-minded. That don’t sound like money stuff at all!

And yet, I contend it is.

Good for you!

I don’t know who first said it, but I’ve read many places that one need not be “perfect.” Rather, “good” is enough. That is, so long as you’re pointed in the right direction, you’ll probably reach your objective in time. Maybe not as fast as you might if you did things perfectly. But if you’re laser-focused on perfection, you might never even get started. Or you might have a lot of unnecessary stumbles along the way. Another saying puts a finer point on this: “never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

So in my opinion, for the vast majority of people, forget the math. If they don’t adopt life changes, they may never reach financial security. And to reach financial independence, especially quickly and/or well in advance of traditional retirement age, most people will have to adopt a radically different way of thinking about life and what’s important to them.

But I think that for most people, once those changes in how to look at and approach life are fully, authentically, and enthusiastically adopted, they’ve reached “good.” Resulting changes the person then is likely to make in the wake of that I suspect are going to point him or her even more directly on the path to reaching financial security, if not FIRE.

Then, they can get into the really mathy stuff. And the clevererest (It’s a word. Because I said so) stuff. And that will get them even closer to being on an even more direct, if not faster, route to FIRE.

To put this another way, the philosophy is strategy. The math and clever ways of doing things are tactics. Without the strategy, the tactics might be a series of one-offs. Or unsustainable. Or both.

And in the end . . .

I’ll admit, I generally envy those bloggers who write the posts on math and clever approaches. No more so than the wonderful bloggers whom I mentioned above. There’s a higher-level skill involved in developing the ideas in those posts.

But I think there’s a place for us philosophy bloggers, too. I know that I’ve benefitted from the words of a great many of them. Hopefully you, Dear Reader, may find some good ideas and/or inspiration from me. I’d absolutely be over the moon if you did. I suspect, however, that you’re more likely than not to wish that I’d just shut up.