Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

It's the last week of October, and as such, this is the last Wise Owl Wednesday of the month. Halloween, Dia De Los Muertos, All Souls Day, and Guy Fawkes Day are all celebrated next week (assuming your week starts with Sunday).

We are closing in on the holiday season, which to me signals the end of the year. We are now entering the final stretches of the year.

I try not to get too reflective when the holiday season starts to arrive, but sometimes I can't help it.

This week I write about effort over results, demons hating fresh air, and a couple of personal finance tools to empower you to build wealth.

Once again, thank you to the few of you that have recently bought me a coffee!

I am considering doing something a little extra on that platform. Maybe a weekly video update just for "buy me a coffee" subscribers, or perhaps a video on the state of crypto each week. This would be a premium addition to the newsletter.

What do you think? Is this something that would be worth $5 a month to you (it would be to me)?

Alright, enough of that. Let's get into it.

You can find all past issues (including this one) here. 

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🧠 Wisdom Tip(s) of The Week: You Control The Effort

This is a simple message that hits harder the more you think about it.

I've written about this before, but I cannot emphasize any harder how f*cking important this is.

You can only control your effort, not the results.

Period.

Focus on what you can control and let everything else go.

In this case, you can always control your effort.

You cannot control what happens to you.

You can control how you react to what happens to you.

In poker, I control the decisions I make.

I control what hands I play.

I control my bet sizes.

I control whether or not I hold or fold.

I do not control the outcome of the hand.

It is my job to make the best decision I possibly can with the information I have been given.

To further this thought, you also control where you put that effort.

Stop putting effort towards low leverage tasks.

Put effort towards the shit you care about.

🥑 Health Thought of The Week: Demons Hate Fresh Air

I was reminded of this concept from Austin Kleon's amazing book "Keep Going."

Basically, this section is about going for a walk.

Both your inner demons and the outer demons of the world both hate fresh air. The list of immensely creative people that went for a walk on a daily basis is extremely long.

Here is a blissfully short version of that list:

• Diogenes the Cynic
• Wallace Stevens
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Bob Dylan
• Charles Dickens
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Henry David Thoreau

If you are having a bad day, go for a walk.

Want to punch your husband in the face? Go for a walk instead.

Dreading going to the gym? Go for a walk first, then decide.

Writer's block? Go for a walk.

Working through a tough problem? Go for a walk.

Our brains crave changes of scenery and our bodies crave motion.

Go explore your world a little each day.

Demons hate fresh air.

🤑 Wealth Thought of The Week: Some helpful tools

Last week I did a pretty huge information dump in the basics of personal finance. I had a few of you email me (yay!) and ask about tools.

So that is what I am going to share today. A few tools I think are helpful in empowering you to create a large gap of opportunity so you can start truly building wealth.

Track Expenses - Mint.com, Personal Capital, Clarity Money

This is the most important section for one simple reason - If you don't know how much you're spending each month, you will have a much harder time creating a gap of opportunity.

Loan Tracking/Debt Payoff tool - Unbury.me

I found this tool this week and WOW I wish I had it years ago.

You input your various loan principal, interest rate, and minimum monthly payments for all of your loans/debts, and this tool shows you your debt-free timeline.

It's free, extremely flexible, and honestly pretty damn inspiring.

Investment tools -

This section could go on forever and ever.

There are so many products and tools that want to "help you" invest your money.

So I will only be sharing the tools I think are the best and have your best interests in mind.

All my crypto recommendations are at the bottom of this email, as always.

BlockFi, Coinbase, and Argent Wallet are good starts.

Index Fund Investing - Vanguard, Betterment, Wealthfront

This is one of the best and safest ways to build your wealth over the long term. This is traditional investing at its best. Index Funds have very low costs compared to mutual funds, which makes a massive difference over decades.

When it comes to an index fund portfolio, most of your returns are going to come from re-invested dividends. The higher the fees, the smaller the dividend returns.

Ethereum Stats:

Total ETH burned - 640,000 ETH (or $2.5+ billion!!)

ETH burned in the last week - 59,000 ETH !!!! 😱

Avg ETH burn per minute (all-time) - 5.35 ETH/min

My favorite website for watching the ETH 🔥 is ultrasound.money.

Quote/Meme of the week:

Have a great week!

This concludes our issue this week, I hope it gave you some perspective or injected a little motivation into your life!

If it helped, let me know! I read every newsletter response I receive, and I absolutely love hearing from all of you. This newsletter is for you, so I need your help to make it as great as possible.

If you'd like to show me some love for writing all this free stuff, you can always buy me a coffee.

More Resources

I will be adding to this section over time as we find resources that will help you all.

• Check out the Wise Owl Store
• All Wise Healthy Wealthy Articles on Medium
• Start your own Sendfox Newsletter
• Free products to help you level up

Crypto Resources

The Bankless Podcast: This is a link to the bankless podcast on Spotify. Start from the very beginning and learn why I am so positive about the power of Crypto and Ethereum in particular. You can find the podcast easily on the internet, but I am linking to episode 1 on Spotify for your convenience.

Buy your first ETH or BTC:

• On Coinbase - this is the easiest starting place for the newest beginners
• On Gemini - Another great option founded by the Winklevoss brothers. They are based out of New York.
• On Kraken - Kraken has a bit of a harder user interface, but they already have ETH staking enabled with the push of a single button.

Earn interest on your crypto

• BlockFi - Currently, you can earn 4.5% interest on BTC, 5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.25% on stable coins like USDC. Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter.

Other tools:

• Argent Wallet - This is the best mobile wallet for Ethereum, Defi, and all things on the Ethereum network, including staking. They even have plans to implement Layer 2 to remove network fees.
• Ethhub - this is a weekly newsletter that lists out all the interesting news, articles, and tweets that have happened in Crypto that week. It's free and awesome.
• Ethdashboard - A simple dashboard to look at various metrics in the ethereum space. I mainly use this as a quick tool to check ETH gas fees.
• Cointracker - this is one of the better tools for tracking all of your various crypto across all of the various wallets, exchanges, etc. You can also use them to do your crypto taxes each year.
• Metamask - this is a crypto wallet that you can access from your browser and allows you to easily interact with blockchain apps online.