Earn What You Spend

It was a long trip back from San Francisco.

The flight was completely full save, by some unknown grace, the seat beside me. Ah, I thought, this will be such a relaxing flight.

Once we hit 30,000 feet, I pulled out my laptop. 45 minutes later, drained from the hours spent unsuccessfully looking for an outlet at the airport, the battery died. Another hour passes, and I finished the only book I brought.

Three hours to go. The inflight entertainment system didn’t work, my laptop battery had died, and I finished the only reading material I had. What could I do?

It’s in these moments of forced quietude that we can allow an idea to properly incubate and hatch. And I’d been carrying this one for a while.

Right before boarding, I read the what-should-have-been shocking news of the failure of Washington Mutual, what is now the largest bank failure in United States history. This is monumental - but it barely registered a blip in the airport screens blasting CNN. The financial markets had already taken us to hell and back the previous week.

So the flight gave me pause to think through these issues - the bank failures, the hotly contested bailout being debated in the Roosevelt Room at that very moment, a presidential election of historic importance.

How did we get here?

Whether you’re a bank, a large corporation, a blue collar worker, a stay at home mom, or an entire country, finance plays in an integral role in your live. And we’ve lost our bearings. The goal on this site is to explore where we are, where we’ve been, and where we have yet to go to get us back to financial independence, mostly from the perspective of how these large, somewhat illusive events affect us as individuals. They call this knowledge financial literacy, but that doesn’t convey it’s importance, especially at our current crossroads. It’s more than that, it’s our ticket to freedom, retirement, education, and, by extension, a strong and prosperous country.

We’re going to explore it through a prism that encapsulates much of what has gone wrong in our world of negatives savings: