<< Preface
Most people don’t want to spend their evenings buried in budget spreadsheets or comparing investment options. You want a plan that works quietly in the background while you live your life. As you probably can tell from the title and premise, this book is not about hustling day and night for money. It’s not about risky bets or magic formulas. It’s about slow, steady, reliable progress that lets you go on living your life without obsessing about every dollar.
Personal finance isn’t really about money. It’s about freedom, choices, and building a life that doesn’t make you dread checking your banking app. Before we dive into Roth IRAs, index funds, or the thrilling Rule of 72, it’s worth pausing to ask:
Some want to start their own business, travel the world, raise a family, or dream of early retirement in a cabin to write a manifesto. Whatever your version of “the good life” is, it requires planning and trade-offs.
If you’re lazy (and I say that with affection), you don’t need a color-coded binder to track your life plan. Just write your goals down somewhere, on paper, in a notes app, even scribbled on the back of a receipt. Something simple like:
That’s it. Goals aren’t complicated. Think of them as the bullseye you’re aiming for. Without them, you’re tossing darts blindfolded and hoping they’ll land somewhere useful. With them, even a half-hearted throw gets you closer.
To begin, it helps to take an honest inventory of what you want. For some people, the goal might be as straightforward as paying off debt. Others may want to buy a home in the next five years, retire by fifty five, or take their family on big trips every couple of summers. To start, take an honest inventory and write it down. These are not just dreams, they are targets. And once you have a target, you can work backward and design a plan.
You can’t have everything, but you can have the important things with planning, and time. The key question is: “If I keep living the way I am today, will I get the life I want tomorrow?”
Most people never pause to ask that question. They drift. They earn, spend, and hope it will work out. But hope is not a strategy. The lazy strategy is better: keep things simple, spend less than you earn, and let time do the heavy lifting. It’s not fast, it’s not flashy, but it works every single time. But you need to do it now.
Build a simple plan by looking at what comes in each month, what goes out and what’s left over. The gap is the seed to your future freedom. The larger it is, the more control you gain over your time and choices.
The biggest favor you can do for your future lazy self is to start saving early. The earlier you start, the less work you have to do later. A dollar saved in your twenties is worth far more than a dollar saved in your forties because of compounding (we’ll cover that in depth in Chapter 4). Every year you delay saving, the cost and work needed in reaching your goal goes up.
This doesn’t mean living like a monk or saying no to every dinner out. It just means you stop mindlessly spending on things you don’t really care about. If you save first, then lazily enjoy the rest, you’ll still come out ahead. Plant the seeds now to start the growth so you can nap in the hammock later.
The point of money isn’t to turn your life into a never-ending balancing act of expenses and savings. It’s to give you the freedom to enjoy your days. Hobbies, travel, family, charity, whatever lights you up. A lazy investor doesn’t skip joy. They plan for it. That way, you can take the trip, buy the fishing gear, or spoil your niece without guilt because you know the slow-and-steady plan is still working in the background.
Ask yourself what experiences do I want in the next ten years? What hobbies or passions make you feel alive? What trips would you regret not taking or unable to in advanced age? What skills do I want to try out and learn? Who do I want to support with your time and money? A good plan builds joy on purpose, not by accident.
The lazy need to know the difference between cheap and frugal. Cheap is buying the absolute lowest-cost item and then dealing with the hassle when it breaks, wears out or frustratingly underperforms. Frugal is buying once and enjoying peace of mind. One takes more effort in the long run, the other less.
Frugal means choosing the best value for the money. The cheap person buys the bargain shoes that wear out in three months. The frugal person buys the sturdier pair that lasts for years. Cheapness is about saving pennies at the cost of comfort, relationships, and sometimes dignity. The frugal person cooks most meals at home but still enjoys a good night out. They drive reliable used cars instead of flashy leases, and they buy what they need instead of what will impress strangers who, truthfully, don’t care.
Your credit score is your financial reputation and credibility. Like in real life, credibility takes time to build and can be damaged in an instant. A strong credit score makes borrowing cheaper and life simpler. It determines the interest rates you get on a mortgage, car loan, or even insurance premiums. Protecting it is straightforward: pay bills on time, keep your balances low, don’t apply for unnecessary credit and freeze your credit to prevent fraud. A strong score opens doors, lowers costs, and keeps you from paying the bank more than you need to.
Don’t forget to put a freeze on your credit to protect against fraud. This is often the first thing I advise anyone to do if they haven’t already. It will take at most fifteen minutes to freeze your credit with the three main credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian and Transunion. Go to their respective websites, create an account and put on the freeze. Watch out for their alternative, inferior products with fancy names such as credit lock, monitoring, shield, protection, etc. Those services kick in after your credit has been breached, compromised and misused. A credit freeze stops the misuse before it happens because no one can use your credit, not even you until it is thawed or unfrozen. The credit bureaus are incentivized to not have you do a credit freeze because it prohibits them from their primary business of selling your personal credit information. Absurdly, they will try to direct you to their alternatives and charge you for it! A credit freeze is free to put in place and free to temporarily thaw when you do need someone to do a valid credit inquiry such as when you apply for credit, a loan, bank account, etc.
The old fable of the Tortoise and the Hare is really a story about lazy success. The hare was flashy, confident and distracted, expending too much energy going fast, comparing and then showboating, leading to tiredness, fatigue and then a necessary nap after all that busyness. The tortoise just kept plodding along, slow and steady, wasting little energy and won.
The essence of the get-rich-slow scheme: live below your means, save consistently, invest simply, and stay out of trouble. You don’t have to sprint. You don’t even have to break a sweat. You just have to keep going. The tortoise didn’t look the part of winning the race, but in the end, the hares found themselves out of breath and wondering where all their money went.
Key Takeaways from Chapter 1
Chapter 2 >>