The first thing I did was to make sure it was the same Paul Farrell (humor attempt).
The catalyst for the article was something he found from the Consumer Reports OnHealth Newsletter about the positive attributes of aging. This was a springboard to a discussion of ten ways to become wealthy mentally; he made a reference to term he coined called zen millionaires.
The list of ten in his article are not new or original ideas and we’ve probably touched on most of them here one way or another. Farrell includes things like having a positive attitude, don’t waste time in a job you hate wishing your life away to retirement, instead do what you love and make a difference.
The comments about how much time to devote to all personal finance related matters (very little) was interesting. Farrell said that too much focus on things like investing won’t leave you in the right frame of mind; he cited a quote from Peter Lynch that if you spend 15 minutes a year studying the economy you’ve spent ten minutes too much.
Two thought there. One is that a lot of people really enjoy studying markets and investing otherwise a site like Seeking Alpha or TheStreet.com wouldn’t be successful. The other point is a quote that I think originated from Joe Moglia (but maybe not?) that no one will care more about your money than you do. Without having any numbers to cite I would say that most people are likely to never hire help, even the people who should hire someone (sorry but some people are not emotionally equipped to do it alone), and while that can work out just fine for many people it does make a case for spending some time minding your own store.
A couple of other quotes mentioned many time before come to mind here. One is from our friend Bill here in Walker which is that you can figure it out now or you can figure it out later but if you figure out now your life will be much easier. And once you do figure it, the old Woody Allen line would then apply which is there is no situation where having more money made it worse.
There still remains some core financial building blocks that I believe go along way to contributing to the mindset that Farrell addresses including a high savings rate, little to no debt, living below your means, having any investments be reasonably diversified and not doing truly stupid (financial) things.
Success with the above five factors requires paying some attention to financial matters. Success with the totality of Farrell’s article obviously is about having a balanced life. Personally speaking I believe time spent on problem solving in one area of your life (like an extracurricular activity) can help with improving problem solving in another area of your life (like your job).
We’ve had a very busy last few days here which meant limited posting. We had a funeral in San Diego that took us away Thursday and Friday, Saturday we had fire training and I had to put in an appearance at the 2013 Wildfire Expo in Prescott then that night we had a meet the neighbors thing at our house. I think that was the first three day stretch in the history of this site with no posts and compulsions notwithstanding the world did not end.