Wealth Pilgrim

I found Wealth Pilgrim via Julia Scott's Bargain Babe, and while both are well-worth reading daily, I've known about Julia's blog since it began but only discovered Wealth Pilgrim today.

That's a long way to say, "I'm going to write about Wealth Pilgrim at this particular moment."

The blogger, Neal Frankle, bills himself as a Los Angeles-based certified financial planner. His personal story is the reason the blog is compelling.

I'll nutshell it:

When I was young, my father was a real estate speculator who took big risks. Sometimes, he didn’t consider all the potential consequences. My family lived in constant financial fear and stress, and eventually, we lost everything. We were evicted from a beautiful big house in the suburbs of Los Angeles and moved into a dinky apartment in a lousy part of town. Shortly before we were evicted, my mother died. Within two years of this, my father was killed in an airplane crash.

I was 17 then, and for a short time thereafter, I was homeless and broke

OK then ... so we've established that he had a harrowing upbringing. In the blog proper, he's surely hawking his services as a CFP ... not that there's anything wrong with that. I've always told people that making money off blogging is a total fluke. Better to use it as a way to promote the other things you do.

That's what Neal Frankle is doing, all right. Julia linked this article, Living Without Television, which is a good an analysis as any on the pros and cons of eliminating TV from your life.

As with all ascetic practices, I particularly appreciate this admonition from Neal:

First, most decisions are reversible. It rarely hurts to implement a change in your life like this because you can almost always go back. Had I realized that, I never would have waited so long to give it a try.

In an unrelated matter, this is the first time I've used Blogger in many, many moons. I'd like to report that it's as awkward as ever.