Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

I turn 32 in two months, and for some reason the age of 32 feels lamer than the ages of 30 and 31 were.

To me, my thirties have been defined by action.

Taking action on everything I learned in my twenties, and in some cases taking action to fix a lot of the mistakes I made early on.

I am at an age now where I have made a ton of money, but am too young (in my mind) to feel comfortable spending it.

My investment strategy is sound, I am patient and disciplined, but it doesn't feel like it's enough. But how much is enough, really?

This week's issue covers a few thoughts I've been having around wealth in general, and why it is so important to check in on your financial behaviors.

Let's get into it.

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

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🦉 Wise Owl Thought(s) of The Week: More Thoughts on Money

I've been using the speechify app to listen to a lot of personal finance articles recently. I've been thinking a lot about my own wealth generation systems and realized that I have been rationalizing not spending money on things that would actually be a huge value to my life.

Below is a bit of a rant on my current thoughts around wealth generation and spending.

If you get bored reading the rant, be sure to check out the quote of the day today. It alone is worth the price of opening this email 🥳.

The Case For Spending Money

I write all the time about the gap of opportunity, which is the amount of money you have left over after all of your expenses each month.

This gap is really important because it allows you to pay off debt, buy things you enjoy, and invest your extra cash into assets that earn you more cash.

And yet, once you have a gap of opportunity, pay off debt and start investing, what then?

What I have found with myself is that I can get pretty stingy with money.

I have also written in the past about intentional spending, popularized by Ramit Sethi. Intentional Spending is the art of spending lavishly on things you love, and ruthlessly cutting spending on areas you don't care about.

I don't spend money on alcohol, shoes, or clothing almost ever because I don't care much about any of that.

But now I am starting to realize that I am not lavishly spending money on all of the things I enjoy. In fact, at a happy hour last week ( where I didn't buy alcohol) I mentioned to an old coworker that I was finally going to pull the trigger on a sauna.

She looked over at me in shock and said "Garrett you said the exact same thing to me two years ago at the start of the pandemic! I thought you already had a sauna!

It was a funny but also embarrassing moment. She is 1,000% right in that I have somehow rationalized away two-years of awesome sauna use!

F*ck.

In the next section I write about the three pillars of good investing, and I can tell you right now I am doing all of it, and have been for many years. So why am I holding back on buying things that bring me joy, or at the very least better health!?

The case for spending - people say that time is money, and that is technically true in that time is valuable and most people spend their time for money. But money is also time; you can spend money in such a way that it buys you back time.

A sauna has been clinically proven to reduce your chance of dying in general by 40%. What could be a better investment than that!?

A few weeks ago I wrote about how amazing the theragun has been to my life. The one I bought was $399 and for a long time I put off buying one. Now that I have bought it, it has completely changed most of my daily life. The damn thing makes stretching and exercising int he morning much easier. It makes going to sleep at night much easier.

Spending $399 on this thing has bought me back hours of time by now, and has made the last few weeks a lot less painful by reducing the tension in my muscles.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make here, to both myself and to you is that earning money is only valuable if you are using it as a tool to grow.

The older you become the higher your earning potential gets, to a point.

So it doesn't really make sense to impoverish yourself in your twenties and thirties if your greatest decades for earning are in your forties and fifties.

Oh, and I am going to buy the damn sauna BEFORE MARCH.

3 Pillars of Good Investing

The fun part about this section is that these three pillars of "investing" are broader than just financial investing. They apply to all areas of investing time, money, effort, etc.

Discipline -

When you pick a strategy for investing, stick with it.

There is a pretty famous saying around this that goes something like "A disciplined investor with a mediocre plan builds wealth faster than an impulsive investor with a great plan."

It doesn't matter how badass your skills or insight are if you can't execute consistently.

Discipline is freedom in all things, especially investing.

Knowledge -

This comes after discipline because regardless of the knowledge you gather, if you can't use it in a disciplined way, it is useless.

But if you do have discipline then knowledge truly is power.

Building your knowledgebase over time in all areas of life will dramatically help guide you through life.

The more knowledge you have in an area, the more comfortable you become taking more and more risk.

This applies to finance, business, your career, and the decisions you make throughout each day.

Patience -

The final pillar is patience.

When you have the discipline to stay consistent, and you have the knowledge about what to do...the last thing is to just let time run its course. Once you have the ability to be consistent, you just need to be consistent.

Humans are terrible at delaying gratification and yet for many things in life you don't get the results you want unless you put in the work, consistently, over time

Building wealth, a strong body, healthy relationships, and anything that you want to last requires patience.

Quote/Meme of the week:

Just a friendly reminder that the world is going to try to fit you into a box, but you don't have to let yourself be confined to that box.

Everything that exists today was designed and built by humans that existed before now, in a time with less available information. No system is perfect, so there is always going to be a better way of doing something.

Especially if that thing is your life.

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% interest on BTC, 5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.5% 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.