Mr. Money Mustache

I’ve been out traveling in Ecuador for the past two weeks, living in the jungle, climbing waterfalls and noting the cultural differences of a country set about 3000 miles South and 30 years back in time from my own. Every time I settle into life in a new place, I’m always amazed at how many […]

Whenever something unusually interesting in the field of personal finance shows up in the news, Mr. Money Mustache hears about it. Our diligent network of Mustachian Volunteer Spies combs and filters the world’s information, both for pearls of wisdom and pellets of comically misinformed dung. Although I take steps to remain on a low-information diet, […]

If you’ve been around here for a while, you know that I have been a fan of Republic Wireless for several years now. Sneaking onto the scene in 2012, they quietly started offering a more-or-less Unlimited Everything smartphone plan for $19 per month while most of us were still forking over $50 to $100 for our […]

If you were to show up and gaze down on our planet as an outsider, you could easily get the impression that Dogs run the place, and we Humans exist only to serve their needs. We provide them with shelter, transportation, medical care and even grooming, in most cases going further into personal debt to […]

Almost one full year ago, I built myself an experimental electric bike to see what all the hype was about. As a profanely vocal proponent of muscle-only transportation, I was skeptical of the idea at first. But in the spirit of a good experiment, I decided to just add the thing to my bike fleet and see […]

Here in the MMM family household, we live a lifestyle that could be considered unrecognizably oddball, or classically familiar depending on who you ask. Although the fairly well-appointed house in an expensive area probably does a good job at reassuring certain neighbors that we fit in, our lives are pretty different. We spend most of our time […]

Four years into writing this blog, I thought I had seen almost everything when it comes to the most common financial suicides committed by the middle class. But today I was hit in the head by a shocking realization: When choosing between buying versus renting a house or apartment, people are making much, much worse choices […]

Dear Mr. Money Mustache, I just came across your blog a few weeks ago after seeing a story about it on ABC. While the idea of cutting back my lifestyle sounded horrible at first, once I dug in I saw what you were really talking about and it has been like a giant boxing glove […]

This is kind of a special moment for me. Since the year 2007, which is eight years ago or 20 percent of my time alive on this Earth, I have been stuck with a less-than-ideal real estate situation. And it is just about to be resolved with the happy CHA-CHING! of a cash register. To […]

I’m not going to lie to you – being wealthy is a lot of fun. And I’m not just talking about novelty fun that you get from driving around in a fancy car. True wealth is more of a big picture thing – freedom from negative stress and a higher confidence about how great life is. […]

Almost two years ago, I started getting reader emails asking me if student loan refinancing was a good idea, and if a company called SoFi was a good place to do it. Never having carried such a loan myself I wasn’t sure if I was qualified to answer, but other emails were coming in reporting […]

To my Brothers of the construction trades, the oil industry, the armed forces, and even plain old civilian office jobs. I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, because I think we should all be free to make our own choices. But with the recent oil boom and bust, and the even bigger housing boom […]

“If everybody retired early like those Mustachians”, the lament goes, “there would be nobody left to do the work.” We need people to do the hard, dirty necessary chores that keep society running. And we need other people to keep the innovation going, since technologies and ideas don’t invent themselves. And besides, even on an individual […]

We’re about four years into this blog, and at this point I finally have to admit I am a complete and total fraud. I mean sure, I saved enough to retire in just nine years and have had a great time running around like a free man in this subsequent decade. But that was an isolated incident, […]

Working in my yard the other day, I happened to notice that my power meter is just about to cross the ‘2000’ mark. That’s two thousand kilowatt hours, or roughly $200 of electricity. About the amount it takes to drive your Tesla Model S from Los Angeles to New York and back, or dry 570 […]

Imagine that you are floating comfortably above an alien planet observing the really insane species that lives there. We’ll call these beings Sheeple, because their incredible tendency to follow the herd even if it is running right off a cliff is quite similar to the behavior we see in sheep here on Earth. Almost everything an individual […]

Every day, the ever-generous Google search engine sends thousands of random new people from around the world to the shores of our Mustachian Nation here. Do they find what they are looking for? Just for fun, let’s take a rapid-fire tour through the top questions people have asked the Internet over the course of the last […]

As a retiree, I have a special place in my heart for Monday mornings, because that’s when I would have had to go back to work if it weren’t for the joy of early retirement. Despite the option of complete leisure, I woke up at 5:30 this morning because the sky was starting to brighten and […]

One whole year ago, I was in the depths of destroying and rebuilding a sagging 1950s brick ranch house, which has since grown up to become our actual home. Looking back through Google Plus’s automatic archive of my phone pictures, I can see the “kitchen” was still open to the great outdoors on that date: Despite […]

Mr. Money Mustache can tend to get a little high-level at times, talking about all these feelings and philosophies that underlie the proper path to wealth. But you can’t just smile your way to the top – there are real numbers at work in the background, whether you understand them or not. These can gang up and […]

Foreword from Mustache: Almost exactly one year ago, our Canadian correspondent Mr. Frugal Toque and his family reached a nice milestone: a mortgage balance of Zero. Although early retirement and financial independence do not strictly require you to pay off your mortgage (or to own a house at all) as long as you have other investments to cover your […]

Here we go again! As we do once every year, Mrs. MM and I have spent the day nervously tallying the sinful blizzard of excessive spending that we have been committing over the past twelve months. If you aren’t familiar with my budgeting style, it is “I Don’t Have a Budget“. Since we know there’s no […]

When you think about it, that brain of yours is both the cause of and the solution to every one of your problems. With the right thoughts, you can trigger yourself into actions that will change your life – or even the entire world. With the wrong thoughts and actions you can just as quickly […]

I’ve decided to grant myself the rest of the year off*. But don’t worry, I’m extending the same privilege to YOU as well. As those of us in the North endure the coldest and darkest days of the year, everything seems to shut down. Some of this is a good thing – the holiday season […]

Today’s case study is a classic, because it addresses a problem suffered by tens of millions of families: the chronic time shortage caused by a double income, double commute, kid-raising lifestyle. While some practitioners of this game do it by choice, many other would rather have more free time … if only they could afford […]

Every year right around this time, millions of consumers are tricked into a massive financial and lifestyle mistake as the natural incompatibility of snowy roads and safe driving take them by surprise. “I know Mr. Money Mustache insists that I drive only efficient cars, but that’s because he lives in the dreamy semi-desert of Colorado where […]