Back to Basics

But First, You Need a Financial Blueprint

Pin8Share7TweetShare15 SharesEver since I began plotting my way out of poverty and learning about personal finance – which started more than decade before I even conceived of writing this blog – I regularly came across people with the same goals as I do but were just proceeding without any specific direction. Like me, they wanted to be financially free in a number of years. But unlike me who had a financial blueprint that I implemented, they were “winging it”. It was crazy to me because for something as important as financial freedom, you’d think that people will exert effort to

February 27, 2021 2 Comments

Psychology of Money

A Decade in Review

PinShare16TweetShare16 SharesSince it’s the start of a new decade, I can’t help but reminisce and look back to the last 10 years, both to see how far I’ve come and to remind myself of how far I need to go. I’ve always been open about sharing with you guys how I grew up in poverty and the reasons why want to achieve financial independence. If you haven’t read that post yet and you’re curious, go to Why I Want to FIRE – A Personal Tale of Early Woes and Awesome Wins. Despite my disadvantaged background, I worked hard to get out

January 11, 2020 22 Comments

Psychology of Money

How to Break Your Financial Vicious Cycle Part 2

PinShare26TweetShare26 SharesIn my previous post, I talked about some causes of poverty. Now I’ll be sharing strategies and ideas to overcome and get out of poverty slowly, steps that you can personally take to break your financial cycle. I did not discover these ideas all at once. These are the result of years of personal experience, thinking about stuff, deep conversations with people, and reading books and articles in different subjects including personal finance, logic, feminism, public policy, even fiction. I did not just wake up one day, and then bam! ideas! It took time. I’m sure there are a

March 8, 2019 7 Comments

Psychology of Money

How to Break Your Financial Vicious Cycle Part 1

PinShare34TweetShare34 SharesOne of the many many reasons I blog is to share my experiences and strategies on how to break out of poverty just in case somebody out there in the nameless void can benefit from what I say. If there’s one thing that I pride myself on and consider myself an expert, it’s finding and implementing ways to break out of the financial vicious cycle. I was in poverty for the first couple of decades of my life. Getting out of poverty has taken me a good portion of the next decade. So I can claim that I have

February 22, 2019 2 Comments

Psychology of Money

How to Calculate Your Real Hourly Wage and Why You Should Do It

Pin10Share27TweetShare37 SharesHere’s a very neat method I learned from the classic personal finance book, Your Money or Your Life: how to calculate my real hourly wage and why I should do it. The concept is this: [bctt tweet=”we only have a limited time on Earth and we exchange a portion of that time to go to work and earn money. That means we are literally giving up our life for money. ” username=”MeKatieScarlett”] Which raises the question: are the things we’re spending money on worth the life we’re giving up to buy them? How to Calculate Your

July 22, 2018 No Comments