Personal Finance Hackers & Lifestyle Gurus Unite

Once you have enough income to find the need for personal management and creative investing, you might start thinking about how to put it to the best use.  Whether it's the best way to approach a rental property or how to navigate the torrid waters of starting a business, getting familiar with these blogs and books isn't a bad place to start.  Being in control of your living situation and coming up with a plan to work from a beach cabana takes a combination of planning, smarts, and maybe some entrepreneurship (ok maybe alot).

Mr. Money Mustache, Timothy Ferris, and Ramit Sethi are all monsters of the personal finance money/savings/extraincome-verse.  MMM advocates dialing back consumption and riding bikes to work while shaving our personal expenses like a non badass would shave their facial hair.  Tim Ferris and his masterpiece the 4 Hour Workweek philosophize on the nature of living retirement without waiting until you're 60.  Ramit combines practically engineered finances with the added bonus of an Earn1K Club.

Each focuses on a different theme to make us lowly wannabe lifeneurs forget that we aren't lounging on the beach while someone else takes care of our business and sends us courtesy Venmo (social payments - highly recommended) deposits.  Genius.  Taking charge of automatic savings and the 5% vacation fund can be a game.  Conquer that anti-savings goblin, try to suppress that passive revenue grin at your day job, and worry about what to do when you retire at 35.

Mister Money Mustache is a much welcome newcomer to the area.  Combining his Canadian hard-working engineering background with his self-taught carpentry skills, he reminds me of a different generation where work-ethics would make most people today cry.  Old-fashioned hard work and saving.  It's good for you.  Forget about all those vacations, brunches, and inefficient cars.  Cut those expenses to the bone and find new ways to save money.  Suck it up, Stop being lazy, and Grow a mustache for godssakes.  End goal - save 50% of your take home cash.  Definitely not an easy thing to do.

What resonates most about MMM is how practical and everyday Joe he comes off as (in a good way).  The first post I read mentioned his college days ending, starting work right away without a break, working his way up the job ladder as a youth gas station attendant, newspaper delivery boy, scraping by after college, and the benefits of dual incomes living in Boulder.  These are all topics we can relate to.  He blogs about very practical things; his family vacations, riding a bike to the supermarket, boxed wine, the Housing market, and small business mistakes.  Check out his recently added forums with tons of helpful information from mustachians.  Personal favorite Passive Income Streams - very Ferris esque.

Challenges ?  Maximum Mustache March.  Everyone needs a call to action.  Stick it out for a month.  You might be surprised with what you accomplish.             

Timothy Ferris takes a different approach - almost out of the personal finance-verse and into the exciting lifestyle design canvas.  Heavy on the internet marketing, blogging and startup superstars, light on the savings account specifics about why overdraft fees are bad.  His message; think big.  $100,000 Startups, workouts / workweeks / cheffing it up in 4 hours, entrepreneurship, and Geoarbitrage.  Not for your next door neighbor who wants to know how to save money on his mortgage - unless he started a successful iPad cover business and just sold his muse for a little f#$k you money.  Personal finance should be designed to accommodate your perpetual retirement lifestyle instead of putting off all the things you really want to do until you're too old to enjoy them.  This is somewhat similar to MMM in that the end goal is hacking retirement, but by design instead of analysis.

Entrepreneurship is a path to financial independence just like extreme cost savings and personal financial dominance.  Engineering your own passive income involves lots of personal challenges.  How do you find out if your idea is worth anything ?  What specific tools do you use to promote this idea one step further ?  One of the best articles from his blog IMHO was the interview with Noah Kagan of AppSumo on all the ins and outs of this process.  Putting in motion a potential $1,000,000 idea seems like a huge juggernaut, but when you break everything down, there is a method to testing and getting feedback with achievable milestones.

Challenges ?  Several:  Shopify Build-a-Business & Engineering a Muse are the serious ones that come to mind.  The latest one resulted in 3,000 entrepreneurs making over $12,000,000 in revenue.  Even if you didn't win, I'm sure alot of those business are still killin it.

Finally, Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich fame and vast media coverage combines both previous gurus.  My favorite chapter of his book details effective ways of negotiating with credit card companies; specifically how to change your limit to help your credit score, getting better rewards, and which cards to keep or avoid.  All of this advice is under the "Get Rich by Being Smart" mantra and the details / processes / methods can add up to big green over time.  One of the best tips I learned from him was that automation is key.  If you allocate a portion of your income every month via helpful online tools, you won't even realize how much you are saving a month and will be shocked once you finally view your account.  Automate as much as possible and automate smartly.

The Conscious Spending Plan & 60% Solution (slightly modified):

• Monthly fixed costs:  60%
• 401K:  10%
• Savings goals: 10% (cover your eyes MMM)
• Guilt free spending left over:  20% 

Thinking about your expenses in dead simple percentages and making efforts to tweak these percentages to arrive at your preferred rates makes budgeting manageable.  Know exactly where your money is going.  In this case, if you wanted to bring your Savings up to 50%, it would require some serious trimming of guilt free spending (maybe eliminated - is that such a bad thing tho ?) and putting your fixed costs under a microscope.  Buying a house ?  He's got a section for that.

Challenges ?  The Earn1K on the side program aims to motivate you to achieve the ever-elusive $1,000 / month extra revenue stream.  Finding a profitable idea is less about the idea itself and more about how you implement after thorough testing.

In the end, you have to figure out what works with your situation and how best to tackle what you want to accomplish.  Is it more travel ?  Is it being an expense ninja ?  Is it paying your bills with a side income ?  Starting with an end goal is definitely a big step in figuring out how to achieve it.  The best of all of these would be a dental-floss bill statement, making significant passive revenue while developing a million-dollar business dining with startup gods, and being in complete control of your engineered finances.  Sound tough ?  You bet.  I'll let you know when I'm there.  In the meantime, take some lessons from each and work on it gradually.  Don't try to ski a double black diamond on your first day.

Would love to hear about some passive and side revenue streams and how you made them work..........