Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page

Trent Hamm, who runs the great personal finance blog, The Simple Dollar, has just released an eBook called "Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page." Actually, it's 49 pages long, but the first page is a summary of everything else that's in this no-nonsense guidebook to gaining financial freedom.

The book starts with the premise that the key to gaining wealth is to spend fewer dollars than you make. In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens wrote, "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery." This simple truth is often overlooked, one reason being that it seems too simple to  work, but it really is the foundation to a solid financial future.

Included in Hamm's ebook are a number of great tricks and tips for both spending less and earning more. His Ten-Second Rule can stop you from overspending at the supermarket:

Whenever you pick up an item in order to add it to your cart or to take it to the checkout, stop for ten seconds and ask yourself why youʼre buying it and whether you actually need it or not. If you canʼt find a good answer, put the item back. This keeps me from making impulse buys on a regular basis.

His 30-Day Rule will help you avoid buying large-ticket items that you don't really need:

Whenever youʼre considering making an unnecessary purchase, wait thirty days and then ask yourself if you still want that item. Quite often, youʼll find that the urge to buy has passed and youʼll have saved yourself some money by simply waiting. If you want, you can even keep a “thirty-day list” where you write down the item and the day youʼll reconsider it, but I prefer just to keep this one in my head – that way, I often just forget about the unimportant things.

To get a copy of Hamm's ebook, you won't have to use the 10-Second Rule or the 30-Day Rule. It's a free download. Grab a copy and let us know what you think in the comments.

Mark Frauenfelder – Mark is the editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog. He was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and the founding editor of Wired Online.

Comments

[Rick]

"Start a side business"
"Move towards your passions"

And if my passion is leisure? Bit of a conflict there.

Similarly, "maximize every $" vs. "don't make yourself miserable"; desperately scraping for maximum value at every turn is the quickest, easiest way to make myself miserable.

Advice?

[Personal Finance]

Thanks for sharing such great post, it will surly help many people who want such great info about finance. I totally agree that spend less than you earn is very much essential point for financial stability.