It's easy to complicate things; it's hard to simplify them.

"Earn money. Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Rinse and repeat."

This is the advice an old boss would give when asked to distill financial planning into its simplest parts. It's excellent advice. When I first heard him deploy the words that would become a well-worn mantra in my mind, it was the moment I realized how easy it is to complicate things and how hard it is to simplify them.

Work on balancing a simple personal finance equation and you'll do most of what’s needed to have healthy finances.

Day to day, month to month, and year to year—the great majority of your financial health and well-being depends on balancing one simple equation I call The Personal Finance Equation.

The Personal Finance Equation 

What you earn = What you spend + What you save + What you put into investments

If you keep this equation in balance 85% of the time, you should be in OK shape. Then, going from OK to excellent is just a matter of amplifying parts of this equation — typically by increasing income and investing.

There are the stories we tell ourselves, AND there is the bottom line.

There are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we're allowed to do, or who we're allowed to be. Then there is the bottom line. Sometimes confronting the bottom line will force you to realize that you can't afford to believe in your stories.

We underestimate the true cost of distractions and how much we cannot afford them.

Distractions seem free. It doesn’t cost a lot more than connectivity to scroll social media or click around the internet. But when we aren't mindful of how and where we pay attention, we aren’t aware of how energy is being spent and the cost of our distractions. When we're constantly distracted or interrupted, we're not teaching and training our brains to focus. Without focus, the impact your energy and money have on your goals is diminished or undermined. What's truly scary is that it might take you years to uncover the true cost of your distractions. So the seemingly free distractions of today might come to haunt you later down the road.

The greatest edge is knowing yourself.

Investors—especially professional investors—are always looking for an edge. Their job is about performance; they need to generate a better return than the market and other investors. As a creative person competing in saturated fields, trying to win clients or create work ahead of the curve is exactly like the work of a professional investor. It's all about staying on point and or beating the market, to stand out, and make a name for yourself.

The only thing we control is ourselves—we can’t control the market, the economy, or our competition. We often undermine our intentions because of our blind spots. We do this regularly. If you want to gain an edge in the competition, invest in knowing yourself. You'll never be able to see every blind spot, but becoming aware of a critical few are worth the effort and the investment.

What is the price we pay for what we are unwilling to feel?

Marketing and advertising used to be called public relations. And before it was named public relations, it was called propaganda. In the world of marketing, it's a best practice to make potential customers and clients feel uncomfortable, uneasy, inadequate, and generally shitty. Marketers exploit insecurities. This is done on purpose because after they get you to feel bad, they offer a solution that will make you feel better: the exact thing they are selling.

Consumerism depends on us buying into the idea that it's not OK to feel negative feelings. To feel bad is to be fundamentally flawed. Many of us never learn how to cope with and feel our fucking emotions.

Yes, we buy things we need. But we also buy because we are unwilling to sit with some of our feelings. It's often easier to throw money at something — ah, the American way. Whenever I feel compelled to buy something, and I have an inkling that I'm being coerced through corporate (or even influencer) negging, I stop and ask myself, "At this moment, what am I unwilling to feel?" I invite you to give it a try before your next purchase, see if it resonates.