With all the FIRE content out there on free blogs, does Work Optional by Tanja Hester have anything new to share with the world?

Dear Future Me: You will try and you will fail, a lot, and that's amazing because failure means growth. Embrace it, fail fast, and revector.

Mad*Pow's Financial Experience Design (FXD) conference is where design leaders serving financial institutions talk about how to optimize experiences.

With the number of sessions, breakout events, and random meetups, you won’t have trouble filling your time with great experiences, but you definitely won’t get as much bang for your buck without a business to focus on. What I need right now is heads-down internal reflection, and FinCon this year was not a good choice.

It took unknowingly gaining 30 pounds in a year to get me to make a conscious change, and in the journey I’ve realized there are an insane number of parallels between weight loss and the journey to financial independence. Here are a few I learned whie losing over 50 pounds and saving over one million dollars.

My fear is that at the end of my first year not working, I’ll have nothing to show for it. Be it Netflix, starting (but nowhere near finishing) a bunch of projects, or being the first human to successfully hibernate, I’d feel worse than I do while working full-time.

There are no blessed stone tablets of personal finance truth by which you need to live your life, and any expert that tells you your choices are wrong because they’re different is not an “expert” you should listen to.

While there is a more “how-to” chapter from Ariely and Kreisler at the end of the book, the primary focus of Dollars and Sense is to illuminate patterns and principles around our human relationships with money: How we spend, why we spend, and fostering more mindful money approaches.

Happy 2018, y'all! I've never much been one for new year resolutions, but here goes, along with a recap of 2017 and celebrating a guest post on Two Cup House. Let's see how much I regret posting goals a year from now ;)

We just donated my first year's salary to our donor-advised fund, saving $25k on our $70k contribution. Find out how to maximize your charitable giving in a tax-efficient way, even after 2018 tax reform changes