The Pareto principle is often called the 80-20 rule and refers to the idea that 80% of the results come from just 20% of the work. It’s an idea that has been pushed into a lot of different areas. Businesses often get their 80% of sales from 20% of their customers. 20% of the people […]

I love the few weeks after the 1st of January. I like to think of it as the “brand new year” period. It’s full of hope and optimism and what could be. What will you accomplish this year? What will you look back on and marvel at having done? There will, however, come at time […]

Maaaan, life is hard. It’s so unpredictable. Just when you think you have it figured out, you’re thrown a curve ball and whiff. Badly. In baseball, you get more at bats. You start seeing more curve balls and you get better at hitting them. Life isn’t that much different. What if I told you it’s […]

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day and my friend Melanie asked me to participate in a blog tour because she routinely has people visit her site after search “I have so much debt I want to kill myself” – but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve never had thoughts of suicide. I’ve had […]

I believe our relationship with money starts from a very young age. My relationship with money was probably a lot like many others. Like many kids, I would ask for a lot of things. Like everything. I got a lot of “no’s” that prompted me to ask “why.” Which was met with “we can’t afford […]

When you’re young, it feels like you have a lot of hard decisions in life. Should I ask her out? Should I study for this test or hang out with my friends? Where should I go to school? Where should I go to work? Fortunately, they’re important decisions but they’re not hard. There are few […]

When I was growing up, my parents never talked to me or my sister very often about money. We knew we had to save, in order to pay for our flights back to Taiwan to visit family, but we were never privy to the numbers. We shut off our heat at night in the winter […]

“I could get used to this.” It’s a phrase that is repeated no fewer than four times in this thirty second Lexus commercial. “Once you experience this level of luxury, there’s no going back.” says the narrator. He’s right. There is no going back… and boy, it’ll be expensive to stay there. It’s a well […]

When I was a kid, one of my favorite games was The Game of Life. If you were a kid in the 80s, you probably played it too. You gave the spinner a whirl, drove your little plastic car around, and “lived” life – picking career or college, getting married, having kids, buying insurance, upgrading […]

Several years ago, my lovely wife and I went with my parents to visit our ancestral home in Wenzhou, China. When we landed at the airport and deplaned, you would’ve thought we were rock stars or foreign dignitaries with how many of our family greeted us. I didn’t understand, at the time, how momentous an […]