# Yeah, Mr. Money Mustache, Good for You, but What About Real People?

## By Mr. Money Mustache

## Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:36:09 +0000

First a quick editorial update:

Mr. Money Mustache and the Realist got into an epic battle last night, similar to the one where Good Superman and Bad Superman smashed each other around in the auto wrecking yard in Superman III.

However, unlike Superman, we ended up in a death grip of mutual strangulation where our atoms both fused into one Ultimate Financial Being.

So now you may find both sensitivity and brash belligerence displayed within the same posting. Also, Mr. Money Mustache may still refer to himself in the third person, just because he finds this makes him sound more authoritative.

. . .

I’ve been getting quite a few comments already, both online and offline. This is to be expected with a controversial topic like money. A blog like this can be offensive to many people, because the subject of money gets mixed in with your feelings around happiness and life security. So to have somebody telling you how to handle your money, when they don’t even know you!? – Forget it!

But wait. First of all, Mr. Money Mustache is not judging you. He loves you and he is here to help.

And then there’s the issue of our different life situations. Perhaps you feel alienated because you read Mr. Money Mustache’s Own Story and saw that he and a very cooperative wife started saving earlier than you did.

Don’t worry! It’s not a contest of how early you started or how quickly you race your way to early retirement. It’s a contest of who can start making some changes in their life right now which bring them benefits in the surprisingly near future.

On top of that, not every person is a good candidate for the MMM way of life. If you’re already supporting a large number of children (or have other unstoppable life-and-death expenses) on a very small income, you are probably more frugal than me already and may gain very little from reading on.

But what I keep finding every time I meet new people, is that a surprisingly large number of people do have a pretty reasonable income – higher than what we currently live on – yet they all seem to be just barely keeping above the waves financially.

Others have a super-high income (which I define as as over $100k per year for a household – $50k for each person in a couple), yet STILL tend to borrow money for things like cars or even carry a credit card balance. These people are really a key part of my target audience.

These are the people who have the power to start feeling like lottery winners on the gusher of income they are currently sitting on, instead of being a slave to their current inefficient spending patterns.

It is commendable to advance yourself in a career to the point where you earn such a high income. But most people manage to build up a spending pattern that burns the money as quickly as it comes in.

If you are one of these people, you’re in the right place. Because although I also earned a good income, the big difference between you and me is that I lived like an engineer both on and off the job.

That is, being an incurable engineer, I can’t help but to calculate out every possible spending decision over a lifetime and weigh it against a dollar-value estimate of the potential hassle. So I make certain decisions differently and end up with the same desirable lifestyle – fairly big fancy house, good cars, a self-employed (and fully optional) ten hour workweek, lots of fun vacation travel per year – yet at drastically lower levels of cost and debt.

I started this blog figuring that surely some of these tricks could be boiled down into a nice periodic column. And here we are.

So to the people that are asking “What’s next?”, I can only say “Read on.”

I’ve got a big list of future articles already written and more on the go, and I am accepting comments and criticisms from anyone, and writing them up with all my might. No expense or strategy will be spared. You will surely reject some of my ideas and perhaps outdo me on others (and then I can copy you!)

But the bottom line is if YOU, middle-income-person, make some of Mr. Money Mustache’s recommended changes in your spending, you will become rich quite quickly, and you will enjoy the process immensely.