Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

This morning as I contemplated what I wanted to write about in this newsletter, I realized that now that I am 31, I can say things like "In my twenties" and for some reason that made me smile.

I did a lot of things wrong in my twenties, but I also accidentally did a lot of things right. In future issues of this newsletter, I am going to go over some of my biggest mistakes and talk about some of my greatest accidental successes.

This week I talk about how hustle culture is overrated, how swimming can burn a lot of calories, and how Crypto companies are leveling up, regardless of the market.

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: Hustle Culture is for the Impatient

In my twenties (ha! 😂), I was enamored by the concept of "hustle culture." The culture in which you reorganize your life around making extra money via side hustles/projects.

Now, don't get me wrong, having a side project or hobby that earns you additional money is not a bad thing at all. I think it's a great thing. What isn't a good thing is the culture that often surrounds that kind of activity.

My own experiences with hustle culture led me to do things like:

• avoid listening to music so I could feel productive listening to audiobooks/podcasts
• consistently deprive myself of sleep
• alienate friendships and potential relationships
• become far too self-centered
• create a lot of stress and pressure

In my late twenties, I started to realize that while I had made some major progress towards my financial goals, I had wasted so much energy on trying to "hustle" instead of taking care of myself and practicing smart personal finance.

In fact, most of my success has come from basic long-term consistency.

Seriously.

I've become much wiser by:

• consistently reading new books about various topics
• consistently writing about my thoughts and experiences
• consistently trying new things and seeing how they work for me

I've been at my healthiest when I:

• consistently exercise
• consistently cook for myself
• consistently drink water

I've become steadily wealthier by simply:

• consistently spending less than I earn
• consistently paying off debt
• consistently Investing

I've learned that while you still need to put in the work, pushing to get the work done as fast as possible rarely yields the results you want.

Sustainable work life is the key to success. At this point, it's almost a secret to success.

Work hard, work smart, but make sure you work sustainably.

If you feel like you are on the verge of burnout, check out this guide.

🏊🏻‍♂️ Health Thought of The Week: Swimming For Exercise

A few days ago I finally got access to my neighborhood pool. I've lived in this neighborhood for almost 4 years, and I've never been to the neighborhood pool.

Now that I have access to it, I looked into just how good swimming can be for burning calories. As it turns out, it's pretty damn good at burning calories, for a few reasons.

Much of this may feel like common sense, but it was common sense that I never thought about.

When you swim for exercise, you work muscle groups all over your body while limiting the negative impact on your joints and tendons. This is great for obvious reasons, as you are taxing muscles everywhere, but in the beginning, you will burn extra calories post-workout as your body works to recover throughout the day and night.

This caloric burn is increased If you swim in cold water. You can burn additional calories specifically because your body has to work harder to keep itself warm.

Just be careful about over-consuming food after you swim. I'm learning that when I swim I get much hungrier than when I do other forms of exercise.

🤑 Wealth Thought of The Week: Closer than ever to Bankless

While the crypto market has been all over the place, the builders of the crypto space have been hard at work.

I received my Coinbase Rewards Debit card and had a realization.

With this card, I could technically travel the world and never have to use local currencies, since Coinbase automatically converts your crypto into fiat currency and the Visa network handles the rest.

Also, technically, I could operate without a traditional bank account. This isn't true crypto bankless, since Coinbase still acts as custodian and is sort of a crypto bank, but it is a move in the right direction.

The rewards right now are a little lame.

I can choose between earning 1% Bitcoin cashback or 4% stellar lumen cashback, which means I obviously chose the bitcoin rewards.

** A note of caution **

If you go this route and choose a crypto card, there are some things you need to be careful about. Because you are not spending the crypto directly, and are in fact converting it to fiat before spending it, this will trigger a taxable event.

With every. single. transaction. 😱

You can somewhat avoid this, to a degree, by only spending stablecoins, as those won't show investment gains or losses. Even so, be careful, and maybe wait to use a card like this once Crypto tax laws are reformed.

Currently, cryptocurrencies are considered property for some reason and are subject to short and long-term capital gains.

BlockFi's crypto credit card avoids this by just being a normal credit card that has crypto rewards. Speaking of BlockFi...

BlockFi lowered its interest rates 😓

The glory days of earning 6.2% APY on Bitcoin are long gone.

Hell, even the stable coin interest has dropped from 8.6% to 7.5%.

You can check out all the interest rate changes here, and while these rates are still great for Bitcoin and Stablecoins, they are not great for ETH. Especially if you own more than 5 ETH.

At one point using blockfi was around the same interest rate as actually staking your ETH. Now, though, it is more profitable to stake your ETH with a central exchange like Coinbase or Kraken, which offer the lowest staking rates of around 5%.

So I plan to move the rest of my ETH off of BlockFi while leaving my BTC and Stablecoins on the platform.

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 5% interest on BTC, 4.5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.6% 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.