You hear scattered financial advice but it's not easy to connect the dots into a cohesive picture of how your financial picture over your life is connected to your daily decisions as well as what you actually do with your time.
Your "investment" behavior is not methodical or steady and dominated by one off decisions which fit a narrative of the moment.
Maybe you buy a stock that a friend recommended.
Maybe you save but have pangs that it isn't enough, because while you have a rainy day fund you can't quantify what you are saving for so have no idea if you are socking away enough.
Maybe you deprive yourself because you save everything out a constant sense of insecurity, the flipside of the same gap in knowledge -- you don't know what you are actually saving for other than a catastrophe.
Maybe you keep a job you hate because you can't imagine how to live on less income with a job you love.
Maybe you get ambitious about budgets but once you get going it gets forgotten or you follow them inflexibly only to be frustrated that there is yet one more thing you aren't executing.
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You want to focus on living but know there's a financial mess in the other room you are ignoring.
What you are actually feeling is the vague awareness that there is indeed a wealth function that constrains your life. You are trying to make optimal decisions balancing risk and the needs of your life but feel you don't have a grasp of all the variables you are ranking. When you are faced with large financial decisions (buying a house, paying for college, choosing between jobs) you don't have a clear sense of what is a "good" decision and any advice you get feels generic and certainly not relevant to your own picture which includes obligations, desires, and trajectories that your well-meaning advisors may not fully appreciate or be equipped to advise on.
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This wiki is designed to give you the tools to think about money and risk holistically.
Your wealth function is constraining your job satisfaction and standard of living but it does so in ways that you may not be fully conscious of. Unpacking these connections will guide you to make more informed and better choices to meet your true goals of living happily, with less stress on the future while enjoying increased mental bandwidth as you come to not only ignore the latest fad advice but face financial decisions with a more confident top-down framework.
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Let's clean up that financial mess in the other room so you can live in a truly clean house once and for all.
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