Welcome to Wednesday, money nerds! And welcome once again to Apex Money, where we do our best to share the best money stories from every corner of the interwebs.
This week, I’m at Lake Tahoe, hanging out with blogging buddies. I’m handing curation duties over to them, asking them to give me their favorite recent articles. And, as I’ve mentioned all week, our talk continues to be centered around the Tim Ferriss article about fame that I shared on Monday. I’m not kidding: This piece has everybody talking.
Still, I’ve managed to get people to give me other stories worth sharing.
My business partner Tom Drake (from Maple Money) thinks you Apexians would appreciate this MSN Money article about the “Japanese art of saving money“. — “What sets this 116-year-old method apart, however, is that it doesn’t involve any budgeting software, apps or Excel sheets. Similar to bullet journaling, kakeibo emphasizes the importance of physically writing things down — as a meditative way to process and observe your spending habits.”
Mr. Josh Overmyer likes this story from MSNBC about thrift-store arbitrage. Enterprising entrepreneurs rummage through used books, clothes, and gadgets to find casually discarded treasures, which they turn around and sell for a profit online. “Reselling online touches several current trends. You don’t add to the landfill. You streamline your possessions and satisfy your inner Marie Kondo. And you side hustle, because who can’t use a few extra bucks?”
Here’s a video recommended by Lacey Langford, The Military Money Expert ®. She loves The Alter Ego Effect, Todd Herman’s recent book about using the power of secret identities to transform your life. The premise? Defeat negative self-talk by naming it and isolating it. Then, when you need to perform at a high level, pretend you’re somebody else. Pretend you’re Sasha Fierce.
Here’s a four-minute video in which Herman describes the alter-ego effect.
This video is a little cheesy, no doubt, but it’s an interesting concept, one I’d find useful for me. I’m intrigued enough that I ordered his book, in fact. I’ll read it and report back in the near future at Get Rich Slowly.
Lastly, here’s an article submitted by Apex reader Craig, who is not a blogger and not present here in Tahoe. At The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey writes about the great affordability crisis breaking America. “Beyond the headline economic numbers [of the 2010s], a multifarious and strangely invisible economic crisis metastasized: Let’s call it the Great Affordability Crisis…In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.”
Do you have something you think your fellow readers would enjoy or find interesting? Send it to us! We love reader submissions.