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January 13, 2017

Change Genesis .site-title H1 Wrap on the Homepage

I got an interesting request this week to change his Genesis framework child theme’s homepage .site-title H1 wrap to a p wrap. I was going to advise against this until the request continued to change one of the widget titles to an H1 and become his new site’s title.

My first thought was that I had to edit the entire header or site title with a filter but it was actually much more simple than that.

Looking at the Genesis core code, it starts off looking like something familiar: adding a filter for genesis_seo_title. Then I saw something else by jumping around a bit in that area of lib/structure/header.php:

// And finally, $wrap in h1 if HTML5 & semantic headings enabled.
$wrap = genesis_html5() && genesis_get_seo_option( 'semantic_headings' ) ? 'h1' : $wrap;
$wrap = apply_filters( 'genesis_site_title_wrap', $wrap );

Aha! Could it really be as simple as changing that heading in the wrap? As we read on in the file, we see more evidence that is how things work:

// Determine which wrapping tags to use.
$wrap = genesis_is_root_page() && 'description' === genesis_get_seo_option( 'home_h1_on' ) ? 'h1' : 'p';

// Wrap homepage site description in p tags if static front page.
$wrap = is_front_page() && ! is_home() ? 'p' : $wrap;

// And finally, $wrap in h2 if HTML5 & semantic headings enabled.
$wrap = genesis_html5() && genesis_get_seo_option( 'semantic_headings' ) ? 'h2' : $wrap;

So this is the code to change the site title’s wrap when on the front-page… by placing this in the front-page.php file found in most of the child themes:

//* Change site-title SEO wrap
add_filter('genesis_site_title_wrap','seo_wrap_site_title');

function seo_wrap_site_title($wrap) {
	return 'p';
}

This matches what the title wrap is on inner pages and I won’t dwell on or try to figure out why this child theme’s front-page title wasn’t already how the client wanted, but now you, too, have the code to change the wrap on the site title in Genesis with a very easy filter.

Genesis Framework

January 4, 2017

The Year of 2017 Goals for Petersen Media Group

Stock city imageWe all need goals to improve day to day and year to year. The famous quote about overestimating what you can do in a year and overestimating for five or ten years is often attributed to Bill Gates. The quote is actually about change:

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction. -Bill Gates

I say this is even more a reason to set goals: the world doesn’t stand still for you — or anyone — so you can gain an advantage or sort out any messes you have with the comfort of knowing things will be waiting for you as they were. As a reminder, I looked for a post a couple of years ago when I knew I said something about being beyond where we dreamt of being… but it’s already almost been three years since I wrote this:

Where were you FIVE YEARS ago? THREE YEARS? Are you more or less where you wanted to be “someday?” For me, I’m well beyond where I would be by now. I hit that just TWO YEARS into business when my wife quit her job. I’m actually living well into my fantasyland from five years ago.

Take two minutes and think of how much was different in your life from three years ago.

Did you make any goals or take any actionable steps to get where you are today or did it all just happen with what we call “blind luck?” You don’t need to answer that because we all know the answer to that.

What is a goal?

Goals done properly have 5 properties:

  1. they are measurable (don’t set a goal you can’t measure)
  2. they are specific (how much money, how many pounds?)
  3. they have a start and end time (you should have short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals)
  4. they are achievable (you can’t set a short-term goal of being CEO at your Fortune 500 job if you just started in the mail room)
  5. they are realistic (don’t aim to make $10,000/mo more if you don’t change your job or get a new one or start a business)

My goals

2017 goals:

  • take a walk every weekday, weather & health permitting
  • include a junior developer into my workflow before the end of summer
  • go to Busch Gardens with my wife on a date once per month
  • take my boys on an all-guy date once per month
  • start building models again – build at least one Mustang of each generation
  • release two premium themes and two premium plugins for GenesisThe.me in 2017
  • finish my bootstrap business course and release one more course in 2017
  • net $60k in client/service work and $50k with GenesisThe.me in 2017 – that’s bottom line
  • upgrade the business computer before July

5-year goals:

  • be 100% in the products space
  • figure out the employee/contractor thing to work on the business, not in it
  • sell the townhome and get a single-unit home to match this unit: a pond view, cul-de-sac, gated community
  • buy a 2-4 year old Mustang GT 5.0 or greater with cash
  • see the Grand Canyon via long RV road trip with the family
  • celebrate 15 years of marriage, big

10-year goals:

  • sell the business for enough to live comfortably
  • start something new
  • buy a Porche 911 – any year, reasonable condition, with cash
  • celebrate 20 years of marriage, HUGE

Investments in You

January 3, 2017

Forever to Finish, Gone in the Blink of an Eye: 2016

Wow! What a year!

For me, my family, and this business, 2016 was quite the year to remember. Let’s dig into the year in reverse topic order.

Petersen Media Group in 2016

Back in May I wrote about how I almost destroyed the business with a series of decisions and some health issues in 2015. The TL;DR version is that I neglected my self-promotion, growth, and family in 2015 with a partnership that, executed better, would have accomplished each of those much better.

Pretty early in the year, I started a video course for here, which I need to get cracking on the final 2/3 of. Man, the rest of the year really did fly by.

In July I got a series of projects that got the snowball rolling for the rest of the year with new relationships and skills. Right now, I have more ideas and projects to get moving on than I can shake a stick at, so I’m mentoring a padawan learner to work closely with me this summer to tackle a good portion of the coding and getting him real-world experience to decide what to do with the start of his career.

In the final closing moments of WordCamp Tampa 2016, I launched my first premium product into the WordPress space at my GenesisThe.me shop. I worked feverishly all weekend to squash bugs in my Genesis framework starter child theme for developers, which I cleverly named GenesisThe.me Developer Starter. See? I told you it was creative. That weekend, I also began work on a plugin for the shop and planned on launching a second theme in December, which is starting to look a lot like January now.

Family in 2016

Just a few days into the year, we were supposed to be saying goodbye to our newborn foster baby. Then a series of events happened that sat me on the couch late at night creating a “Surprise Adoption” site to raise emergency funds to secure our status with the adoption agency as no longer foster parents but adoptive parents. 11 months later, we found ourselves in the courtroom being sworn in to affirm our second son as a forever Petersen. We’re forever grateful to the over 140 people who donated on the site… and the approximately 50-60% of them who were WordPress-related. This community rocks!

Over the summer, my wife became a US citizen after moving here as a toddler… and then she got to vote in her very first presidential election. Great timing!

Before the election, we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary and our sons’ 7th and 1st birthdays. It’s been pretty much non-stop planning and partying since September in our house. If you follow me on Instagram (it’s a private account), you have seen the pics.

Personal

So the end of 2015 ended with me in the ER’s Trauma Room 1 with my heart racing out of control and a few days in the hospital while they sorted things out. The day we were getting adoption papers on our phones was the morning we were sitting in pre-op for a heart catheterization to permanently solve my racing heart issue. Yeah, that’s how we started out the year.

Over the course of the year being a dad of two boys and husband to a wife taking care of two boys while I tried to spend as much time at my desk as possible, I learned a few things about myself, which will be detailed in the following post with my 2017 goals.

On a final note that you won’t find in many year-end posts, with the help of some family seeing there was an issue (though they didn’t know what it was – more like, “figure it out”), I stopped taking prescription opiates for my headaches cold turkey two days after Thanksgiving. Something had been “off” with my personality for a year, which is how long we’d had big changes (see above), but also when I switched from short-acting to long-acting pain meds. So I quit them.

Stay tuned for more

That’s it for last year. Next up: 2017 goals

Investments in You

August 30, 2016

Add Genesis Custom Post Type Archive Settings

I had to avoid a long title because the actual topic is even longer:

How to add Genesis custom post type archive settings when you used a plugin to create the CPT(s).

In this case, the site is using Types and was used to create four CPTs, kill the default taxonomies, and create categories specific to each CPT. There is no way in the plugin to add support for genesis-cpt-archives-settings so there was no Archive Settings item in the CPT.

Between a support topic for the plugin and my own fixes, I was able to create a solution for my client site, so I share it with you.

add_action('init', 'cpt_archive_custom_init');
function cpt_archive_custom_init() {
//Construct an array of Post Types
$types = array('type1', 'type2', 'type3', 'type4',);
//Do a foreach (run the action over each single result of the above array)
foreach ( $types as $type ) {
add_post_type_support( $type, 'genesis-cpt-archives-settings' );
}
}

Genesis Framework

August 4, 2016

Use Minified Stylesheet with Genesis Themes with Front-Page Customizer Backgrounds

Inline CSSFor quite a while, there has been a problem messing with the stylesheet in Genesis child themes that use the Customizer to add a new background image to the front-page section(s). At first, I noticed it with Minimum Pro while using the wonderful Carrie Dils’ (you need to know her if you don’t) Genesis Style Trump plugin. This plugin moves the stylesheet down the load stack so you don’t need to put a bunch of !important; all over your stylesheet due to plugins and their rampant use of !important.

The background just wouldn’t load for me if I had the plugin activated. I was furious, but at the time I was much more junior in my ability to find out why.

Fast forward to last week when I went to use my function to use a minified stylesheet with a theme that I’d used on a previous project. The key point with this function is that I wasn’t using a child theme that had front-page background images, so it had always worked.

Now it was a total bust. The stylesheet wasn’t even loading.

I tweaked the code and now it was loading the minified file, but the background images were all gone.

No images

No inline CSS blockUpon inspection of the generated code, the “inline-css” style block that the Customizer files inject into head were not there at all.

Ugh!

But I digress, you want code to solve your problem, don’t you? First, you need the action to remove the original stylesheet.

//* De-register uncompressed stylesheet - minified loaded above remove_action( 'genesis_meta', 'genesis_load_stylesheet' );

I place that action right below the wp_enqueue_scripts() function in functions.php for consistency. That’s right above the HTML5 markup structure in most Genesis child themes (if you’re new to the Genesis framework or considering switching, here’s why I use it).

Now you need to be within wp_enqueue_scripts() to enqueue the minified stylesheet with this:

$version = defined( 'CHILD_THEME_VERSION' ) && CHILD_THEME_VERSION ? CHILD_THEME_VERSION : PARENT_THEME_VERSION;
$handle = defined( 'CHILD_THEME_NAME' ) && CHILD_THEME_NAME ? sanitize_title_with_dashes( CHILD_THEME_NAME ) : 'child-theme';
wp_enqueue_style( $handle, get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/style.min.css', false, $version);

If you do those two steps, you’ll have the same missing background images I had. ¡No bueno! There’s another step to take and you need to go to /lib/output.php for that. The first item should be an action to enqueue the scripts that Customizer needs to output to make the backgrounds appear. What you need to do is edit the priority for that action, whereas it is the default, unnamed priority when it ships. When given a priority of 12, everything works.

add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'theme_css', 12 );

Generated code workingNow if you’re also a stickler for customizing the themes completely for clients, you’ll also need to do quite a bit of work to all of the Customizer files to find/replace function names and strings with your project name. If you miss even one spot, you’ll either get filenames that are odd or markup that you don’t want… not to mention it not working at all. My own best practices also includes moving the original theme info right below mine in style.css as a reference when customizing a theme rather than doing full-custom. Then I find/replace the original namespaces and such throughout.

Background images working

Those are the simple steps to get Customizer images to work if you want minified stylesheets in your Genesis child themes. I hope it makes your day better as you struggle with this and find this info.

Genesis Framework code,  Genesis Framework

May 24, 2016

How to Enqueue FontAwesome to Use the Latest Version

FontAwesome
I’m currently creating a custom theme for a client who is also on Rainmaker. Since it’s a closed system and we can’t willy-nilly go in and edit the theme after submission, I wanted to always use the latest version of FontAwesome. What a shame to use outdated social icons in a few months. The icons for Instagram and Google + have both recently changed since I started some of my longer-running projects, so here is the URL to enqueue:

//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/latest/css/font-awesome.min.css

You’re welcome.

WordPress Tips

May 16, 2016

Why Partnerships Often Don’t Sail

sailingA reader asked me a good question last week: why don’t you like partnerships? A valid question, and since I’m so big on teaching how I do business, I decided to explain it fully instead of simply answering a comment that a few people might see.

A partnership is like a marriage in many ways. Immediately abandoning any attempt to avoid the obvious, 50% of Americans can’t pick a spouse to weather the storms (or the weekend), so don’t expect any better outcomes in a partnership.

There are many bad reasons to form a partnership, but there are a few valid reasons. The problem lies in the formation of a legal entity to accomplish a common goal because, like marriages, the people involved are often unequally yolked. One of the members of my mastermind group said it this way recently, “I spent as much time working on the partnership relationship than I was doing actual work.”

That directly relates to my constant brain state expecting to be interrupted when I was on a team, as many hours were spent with interpersonal relationships – building and repairing because people are individuals. What happens when individuals are legally bound to share profits and one of them goes off the range?

The list of things that go wrong in partnerships is long, and it’s sometimes referred to as “the D’s.” Divorce, dementia, drugs, disagreement, death, disaster, disability, etc. One partner has many influences on their life that brings garbage into the business, which makes the whole idea of partnerships very risky.

If one person is the business-minded partner and the other spends frivolously or feels mistreated because they what feels like all of the labor while the other “just emails people and travels to conferences.”

the alternatives

You can work with another person who also owns a business and form an agreement between the two companies, referred to as a joint venture. One person can own the business and the other can be a contractor or employee who benefits from an agreement of profit-sharing, which is financially the same as ownership without the mess if things sour.

You can create a commission or affiliate network among the interested parties. This is the loosest form of partnership, and also the easiest to set up. Commissions would be a percentage of sales (be sure it’s reasonable after expenses, so don’t make commission 50% if you pay a lot up front for hosting or your mail list service). Affiliates are people who get paid for making a sale… so that would be ideal for a sales and marketing expert you don’t need to partner with.

It’s kind of funny, but since I started writing this post, I have heard at least three different sources warn about partnerships. Do some of them work? Sure. Copyblogger (now Rainmaker) is still wildly successful and a lot of doctors and lawyers and some accountants have successful partnerships, but those industries are the only consistent winners of this model.

It’s only prudent to be prudent when considering tying yourself to someone else where your money, reputation, livelihood, sanity, and much more are wrapped up in.

Business Tips

May 9, 2016

How I Almost Destroyed My Business

When I was playing Little League Baseball, I was the smallest kid on the team, and was relegated to right field most of the time. I really wanted to play infield, but I didn’t have the reach of the other kids and I had a tendency to throw a bit wild under pressure.

One day the coach decided to start grooming me for 2nd base during practice. With drill after drill, I got used to ground balls on the dirt instead of grass and the ball got to our tall first baseman every time, so (finally) in my 3rd year of baseball, I started a home game at 2nd base. To everyone’s surprise, including my own, things went okay and I was able to hold the position for consecutive weeks.

Then all of my hard work came undone.
During one game, the other team had runners on multiple bases quite often. I felt unnerved concentrating on where to go, where to look, where to throw, and “dear God, don’t screw up” with everyone watching. Out of nowhere, a blazing ground ball came bouncing off the left side of the pitcher’s mound my direction and, as it was deciding if it was going to bounce one more time in front of me or not, I glanced to my left and my right to remind myself where the runners were.

I took my eye off the ball.

"Never, ever take your eye off the ball"That’s when the ball hit me in the mouth and broke a tooth I’d knocked out the year before. I was dazed. I was embarrassed. I don’t remember who rescued the ball, but it wasn’t me. I sat out the rest of the game with a busted mouth.

Something changed at practices and the next game. I was afraid of every grounder and started to let down my friends and teammates. Soon, I was back in right field, backing up someone who never let the ball get past him unless it went over or around him.

I lost everything I’d worked for to get out of the outfield.

fast-forward thirty years

After almost six years of growing my business, I was tired of wearing 30 hats but hungry for more (mostly better) work. With more work than I knew what to do with, my biggest stressor was trying to find enough hours to meet everyone’s expectations and my obligations set forth upon receipt of project deposits.

I gained access to a team. While I worked on a project, someone else did development on another, and another. The earning potential was great. We had worked out an arrangement that, if things fell together as I saw it happening, I’d double my income with little more work, if not less work.

Life didn’t work as planned. Over the course of the year working on a team made me more distracted. At home, we had newborn foster after newborn foster, and I was thus sleep deprived and missing meetings and deadlines. In the past, I was always able to work these things out under my own label, but things were different now. I was failing friends and clients and friends’ clients.

Everything became too much after over two months with a newborn we brought home from the hospital (the one we are in the process of adopting now). We resumed our separate ways over missed deadlines affecting others and just days later I had a heart episode that put me in the ER Trauma 1 and a hospital room for 3 days right before Christmas… and heart surgery right after New Year’s. It turned out that I had a heart defect that had likely been affecting my energy and oxygen levels for quite a while.

Something had to change.

My frustrated wife sat me down to talk about why I was insane in the membrane. We finally figured out that I had inadvertently trained my brain to expect to be interrupted. Chats, emails, text messages, tweets, Slack, and tiny people in the house all burst my thought bubbles constantly. I didn’t start tasks (let alone projects) for fear of getting interrupted. I rarely finished anything I started.

With lots of effort, I sorted that out, but there were no projects now. For a year, I had focused on someone else’s business. I stopped writing articles, developing new products, and promoting my primary skills.

I had taken my eye off the ball. Again.

My network thought I was busy with “my job” though we still have no idea why site contacts slowed to a drip and were almost instantly turned off with one email.

what turned it around

Well, I started talking about new ideas and new projects again. The world saw me busy and shaking trees. With that as the only quantifiable change, contacts picked up, the contacts started signing up, and I’m nearly back to having too much work.

It has been a full 4-month process of a humongous pivot to new business. I fall asleep most nights by 8pm, mentally exhausted, but very satisfied in my work once again. With new things coming out, the spark is there and people are excited and talking about them:

  • GenesisThe.me is nearing launch. With just desktop viewport remaining for coding, the only major building blocks unbuilt are documentation, support, and the shop with a demo. I’ve sold 4 limited-edition lifetime updates and support licenses and those people are my early adopters.
  • WordPress learning is in full swing with my Bootstrap Your WordPress Business video series. 5 of the 16 videos are posted, and at a $78 early-bird price, people are taking advantage of the discount before it’s done. I got 4 major sponsors for the series: StudioPress, WP Engine, Gravity Forms, and DesktopServer.
  • Related to my last article on Impostor Syndrome, I’m releasing a premium plugin that will be sold in the theme shop. It’s under tight wraps, but I’ve connected with a Genesis core developer to make sure it’s solid code.
  • Still doing full-site and mini projects, both custom and customized. I’m still one of the few who use mobile-first stylesheets and have positioned myself pretty solidly as a mobile-first advocate for Genesis themes.
  • I’ve taken on several support contracts to supplement projects and add residual income while product sales ramp up. I don’t want very many so I can keep my standards of communication and quality high, so that’s just about at full capacity already.

There you have it. I almost killed my business last year. Have you done something similar and had to start over or did you recover with a reboot?

Business Tips

May 7, 2016

The Other Side of Impostor Syndrome

Talking about impostor syndrome (IP) became a hot topic in 2015. Did you see it happen? Many posts popped up, as well as several WordCamp and Ruby conference talks.

Most everyone has it, even the egomaniacs in the room, but probably not the meglomaniacs. They take care of that self-image thing way better. I know I have IP and have for well over two decades, until I reach a point of boredom in a position because there is little or nothing else to learn, let alone master. That’s about the time I’d move on to another job. Challenges are fun, so maybe it’s a case of yearning for IP? That’s a discussion for my mental health professional.

For those who are late to the game, IP is the underlying (or more self-aware) sense within yourself that others know more than you do about what you’re doing and you aren’t worthy of your position at your company or in your circle of friends. It’s only a matter of time before they find out you’re a fraud and exile you to live out the rest of your days on Dagobah with Yoda. It prevents you from asking for help (or at least feel ashamed when you do) and tapping the resources of your team or network.

but it doesn’t have to be that way

I’ve been working on a project since October that has been my plan to productize when I got it working. One delay led to another, which led to another, but it’s finally done. Now that it’s done I realized I don’t have the toolset to convert it to a product. There are several gaps in my programming abilities. I’ve also not yet sold a commercial plugin. Stealth Login Page has over 70,000 downloads and 20,000 active installs, but it’s free and just sits in the WP repo for download.

One attitude to have is to look at everyone who knows how to do such a level of programming, but that is focusing on the wrong thing. Those people have spent the time and energy to learn some additional skills that allow such wonderful packages of code.

Someone could also be defeated and give up on a great idea. That’d be a terrible state for me, because ideas come pretty easily for me and have to spend time sorting out which ones are worth pursuing. If that was my default, I’d have only done one Treehouse course, not three… and also would have skipped Modern WordPress Workflow because when that idea happened, 50% or more of it was something I was learning and mastering as we went.

my favorite option

Collaborate. While I don’t believe partnerships are a good idea for something with two people, with one person as the idea/code/IP rights, they can work out commission or profit-sharing to those who help bring it to fruition and/or keep it going. Harness your weaknesses by accessing them in the form of others’ strengths.

Just like joining a team increases the abilities of the individuals nearly exponentially, combining forces for single item projects is a great way to quickly bring something to market… like Andy Wilkerson and I did for Customizer Remove All Parts in 2015. We had that ready in less than a week based on some lines of code I uncovered to do what I wanted to do, and he put them into a plugin and we started marketing it as our free collaboration.

So what’s holding you back? What do you need help with?

Investments in You

October 16, 2015

Pro-tip: Care Less What Others Think About You

Unlike my usual self, I don’t have an elegant way to enter into this thought, that you should care less what others think of you, so let’s dive in with the belief assumptions of my content’s stance.

  1. I’m not talking about your integrity or public opinion about what kind of person you are. This is about assumptions and first impressions of the superficial sort.
  2. Money is a tool. It buys things. If you put more into it than that, I believe you’re putting too much into it.
  3. The love of money is the root of evil. See above. To strive for money (wealth, reserve, margin) as a tool to serve your family, friends, and those in need is not “love of money.”
  4. Generosity is a muscle. Children are wonderful givers. Most of them. Every time our son gets more than one of something, and sometimes when it’s only one thing, he wants to give it to me or his mom. Stickers, candy, or money. It doesn’t matter. We lose this as adults unless it’s encouraged or exercised.
  5. You can’t help those in financial need unless you have margin. Time and/or wealth is needed. Notice “The Good Samaritan” rented a room for the injured man and told the innkeeper to provide everything needed. He was good for it. He had margin.

With those in place, we can dig into the basis of where this is going. I’ll come out and say that I compare myself with others too often. It’s a fault of mine and it’s one that was learned and reinforced for decades. Only in the last 3-5 years have I actively tried to shake that and I still fail just about every week. I’m in an industry of successful people. I often don’t see myself as “a success” until I’m suddenly reminded how many people know me when I attend a conference. It’s like, “Oh, right… I’ve been doing this a decade in a niche and have now taught 3 Treehouse courses. I forgot. Again.” Still getting used to not being anonymous except to my friends.

At least I don’t have a big head from it, eh?

Anyway, those comparisons are my modern day “keeping up with the Jones'” that is so cliche. They got the Smart TV, they got the MacBook Pro Retina the day it came out, they got the new Mustang GT that is sooooooo on my birthday list (right!). But it’s more subtle for some geeks, especially the professional geeks.

It’s not necessarily the latest and greatest, but it’s more than what it takes to get the job done. Would I love a new Mac Pro? Heck yeah! I have a 2011 Mac Mini. When someone had a spare 2013 Air and remembered that my laptop is a 2008, they gave me the Air… would that have happened if I over-extended myself (or even not) and had a new(er) laptop? Not a chance. I lugged my 90-minute laptop to 6 WordCamps and finally just used my iPad Mini for one. It was too embarrassing to lug my white MacBook around.

I cared too much about what people thought about me. “Hey, isn’t he supposed to be successful? Why does he have that old thing?”

If I had replaced it, we wouldn’t have had margin. That would have stressed my family for the sake of impressing people who wouldn’t be impressed. Everyone has the silver unibody Macs now. That’s not an excuse to justify it.

You can spend all of your margin and go into debt very easily just trying to keep the pace with people you have no right to compare yourself with. One person I compared myself to looks young… and then I found out he is a decade older than me. It’s not even being fair to myself to do that. Look at where you were 10 years ago and compare it to now. If you’re like most people who improve every month, it’s cruel to turn around and try to compare yourself to someone 10 years your senior.

If I bought that new Mustang while I have a working car that gets the job done (which I wouldn’t do because that depreciation would just be plain stupid), more people would be impressed by it than I would gain in increased pleasure driving it over my existing car. It would serve to impress people I don’t know who see it in the parking lot when I’m inside. How do I know? Because I look at and usually take a photo of every one I see in parking lots.

So I have a few tips to curb your spending related to keeping up to an imaginary, moving line pace:

  • Until you have 3-6 months of expenses saved for an emergency (margin), don’t buy things over $5-20 unless you need them. Knowing what is a need and what is a want is huge. Entertainment can be a Redbox or Netflix night instead of a $12-30 movie night.
  • Let’s mention that emergency fund again.
  • Be content with what you have as long as it gets the job done. I can work myself into a frenzy waiting for my computer to do something, or I can be thankful that when I finish this project, I get paid. Would spending $4k on a computer really increase my income by $4k very quickly? Probably not unless I was doing a bunch of video or photo editing for paying clients.
  • Don’t look at sales fliers/emails and stay away from Amazon until you are buying something you need.
  • Enjoy your friends’ cool things instead of buying your own. Why buy a $1200 gun when your friend will let you shoot his any time you go to the range with him? Borrow movies or share libraries on Vudu. Get your graphic novels from the library.
  • Live on a budget. Don’t think of it as restricting. It’s a way to tell your money where to go and an easy way to give yourself permission to spend wisely without any hesitation. “Oh there’s $50 in entertainment left this month, so this $2 Redbox is no problem.”

So if you want to have enough margin to build wealth for your family and others, you have to care less what others think about you.

Investments in You

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