Monthly Newsletter: August 2022

👋 Hey there, welcome to the WalletBurst monthly newsletter for the month of August 2022.

Here are some of my favorite pieces of personal finance content from around the web last month:

Around the web

💸 ​On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class by Resident Contrarian​

• Really interesting narrative about the author’s experience of going from living with a family near the poverty line to having a more comfortable middle-class income. He hits on a number of simple things that are easy to take for granted when you’re not poor and the mindset change he experienced during his journey.
• Some excerpts:
  • “Nothing is a catastrophe if you have money in the bank.”
  • When talking about when he had to treat his son’s ear infection: “I didn’t have to deal with a single government employee; I didn’t have to wait a month… I just showed up, handed someone a card that indicated I had a high-paying job, and the issue evaporated.”
  • “The US lifestyle is designed around a certain income level; everything is priced with that level of wealth in mind. When they go buy tires or medicine, they don’t even notice; it’s just how things are supposed to be.”
  • “Everything past this point is luxury. It’s nice, but it’s not necessary and it doesn’t make that much of a deal; we could live without our weighted blanket and my wife could get by with off-brand Walmart running shoes. But there’s a minimum cost for a decent, low-effort lifestyle that avoids catastrophes, and a world of difference between meeting it and the myriad things you do to cope if you fail to.”

🏘 Infographic map: The Salary You Need to Buy a Home in 50 U.S. Cities by Visual Capitalist​

💪 How to Get More Time by Nick Maggiulli​

• Nick’s piece is an interesting perspective that ties together exercise, longevity, and personal finance.
• For those who started investing later in life and are unable to increase income/contributions to catch up, focusing on giving yourself more time instead of more money is a completely non-obvious solution to catching up.
• We know that if you can get more time, you can use that time to save more money, experience more compounding, and catch up financially.
• While you can’t buy more time, you can earn more time, in a simple and obvious way that’s accessible to everyone: exercise
• “Exercising regularly to improve your strength and your cardiovascular health is the most effective way to increase how much time left you have on this Earth, all else equal.”
• “Every hour you spend exercising is likely to give you six to eight hours of additional healthy life.”

📉 EncoreBubble: Mapping the housing market decline​

• This is a nice website filled with articles and interactive content tracking the current housing market decline.
• The EncoreBubble Price Decline Map is an interactive map that displays the decline in median home sales price from the peak in 2022. It allows you to filter by county or metro area.
• The Inventory Dashboard (image below) shows how inventory has changed over 2022 and can be filtered by metro area.

New on WalletBurst.com

Nothing new this month…