One of the major keys to success in any endeavor is to celebrate all the milestones you have reached. This couldn’t apply more to personal finance.

Each and every goal you accomplish should be celebrated.

Pay off your school loan or car loan? Celebrate!

Save $1,000 in your emergency fund? Celebrate!

Pay off a credit card? Celebrate!

Gain $100 a month in passive income from investments? Celebrate!

Pay off the house? Definitely celebrate!

How you celebrate is totally up to you, but you should definitely come up with some type of ritual of significance.

Going out to eat sushi is a luxury that I love to do. I always go out for sushi for my birthday. I really love food so perhaps I will splurge a bit on an expensive dinner at one of my favorite restaurants when I pay off my school loans.

That is just one idea. What is something you enjoy, but don’t get to do too often? What is something you really want, but have been disciplined enough to put your money into a emergency fund instead of buying it? Perhaps it is wise to save up the cash first for it, but if you really want it you should buy it (hopefully not with credit).

It is not good to splurge so much that you totally reverse the hard work you put in to achieve your financial goal, but it is good to celebrate your achievement in some way, shape, or form.

So find a way to celebrate your success and make it a ritual you practice every time you cross a major milestone.

This is our 26th challenge in The Personal Finance Challenge Series…

There are two types of people in this world. The ones that think they are right and the ones that are.

The above is meant to be a joke but it has some truth to it. I can’t tell you how many lives, including my own, have been damaged by false beliefs. Beliefs that may have served them for a time, but not any more. Or simply beliefs that never served them well at all, but they cling to out of some fear of change or just not knowing anything different.

We live in a world that has a vast variety of people who have had an even vaster number of experiences. Everyone holds a certain amount of truth and many people are right about a lot of things. Yet, no one has a strangle hold on what is right all the time.

This subject has come up a lot for me recently. And I have found myself on both ends of the argument.

For instance, some people really feel the need to give me their opinions to make my life better. For all their good intentions they may still be wrong. And I have been that one that thinks he knows the right answer. And I have given my opinion to people with all the good intentions in the world. And yet they don’t receive them because they think I am wrong.

It is frustrating on both accounts…

So many questions pop up but they are all the same. Am I right? Are they right? Are both of us right or are we both wrong?

For the longest time I have accepted people’s opinions openly, and have even gone out of my way to ask for them. I have felt this to be the best course because I could draw on a large pool of experience and make the best decisions. Over time though I have slowly pulled away from that idea. Why? Because you do eventually find a situation where everyone is wrong!

There is still an opposite extreme to this as well and I think it is the deadlier one. It is thinking you are always right and never taking people’s advice to heart.

You see, most people are well meaning even when they are wrong. And many times they are right. They have solutions to your problems that you couldn’t ever come up with yourself. It is good to have many counselors, but it is bad to try and listen to them all.

Like many things the solution to the argument is the middle path. It is wise to avoid the extremes and to seek out the middle path.

It is not healthy to always think you are right. Just like it is unhealthy to always lean on people’s opinions and never make a true judgment on your own.

It is also unhealthy to be prejudiced against the source of the right advice. Have we not heard wisdom from the mouth of babes?

The real lesson and the task at hand is to discover how we can stand on our principle and moral values yet remain open to possible ideas that may help solve our problems and live better lives.

I have no easy solution but I do know we get better with practice and over time. I would encourage each of you to think more deeply on this and give me your thoughts in the comment section. I am interested to know…

I have no promises for the future either. I recently had a fellow blogger, Armen Shirvanian, contact me and ask me about what I am up to and my plans for the website. Well I would like to finish what I started.

1. Finish the last 15 or so articles in the Personal Health Challenge.
2. Start and finish 52 articles for the Personal Development Series. This would technically be the third and last 52 article series that started with the Personal Finance Challenge.

This website has always been focused on how to be healthy, wealthy, and wise. And as Armen so kindly put it, I have always been focused on helping people, rather then writing top 10 articles that will attract visitors and help increase my rankings.

In the past two years my website has gone from 10,000 visitors a month, to 5,000 visitors a month, to just over 1,000 visitors per month, mostly because I have lost all my Google traffic. Lack of writing, lack of new incoming links, new Google updates, WordPress software exploits, and my general lack of attention to this website have all contributed to me losing all that traffic. So be it.

At the very least I will slowly but surely write all of the articles I mentioned above even if it takes years. 67 in total. Maybe just the act of writing again will bring about a renewed passion. And perhaps I will finally write a book to put all the concepts and collected wisdom of Insight Writer together in an easy to read format.

For anyone reading this, thanks for subscribing, and continuing to read Insight Writer. I hope you are getting at least as much out of it as I put into it. Thank you!

I often like to link to articles and provide a nice commentary on them…

Not much more I can say except that this guy spent 6 years as a vegetarian because he disliked cruelty to animals. (He still dislikes cruelty to living things).

I spent a year and a half as a vegetarian and I understand where this guy is coming from…

Just bear this quote in mind as you read this article from Time magazine…

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain

But I actually learned something useful today.

Mushrooms ARE Good For You!!!

You see, here is what happened to me.

A friend in college got me hooked on adopting a vegetarian lifestyle for a number of convincing reasons. He also happens to be the reason I don’t drink milk anymore (but still enjoy the occasional milk product such as cheese, or ice cream).

One thing he got me hooked on was a restaurant that had portabella mushroom sandwiches. Mmmm. They were so good. Problem for me, I ate three in one week and got sick. Now granted, I could have gotten sick from something besides the mushrooms, but it does have a strong psychological effect.

Now I read on MSN that mushrooms are awesome for Men’s Health. Huh, maybe I should check this out.

So I found a great website about mushrooms…

Fresh Mushrooms – Nature’s Hidden Treasures.

And now I am going to incorporate them into my diet more…

Has this ever happened to you?

Have you ever added (or subtracted) food from your diet because of something someone said, or something you read somewhere, or even a personal experience? I’d love to hear it.

I came across this quote recently and I wanted to share it and some of my thoughts about it with you all.

Andrew Jackson was one of our most influential Presidents…

He was born in the U.S. two years after his parents immigrated from Ireland. He endured a rough childhood. Participated in the Revolutionary War as a courier when he was a teenager and became a POW. War and disease spared none of his immediate family and he was orphaned at the age of 14.

He pursued a law career and entered into business. He was appointed as the commander of the Tennessee militia in 1801 and became a war hero in the War of 1812 for his defense of New Orleans. He earned the nickname of “Old Hickory” for his character of toughness around this time.

He goes on to become our 7th President of the U.S.

His many acheivements overshadow one other claim to fame he has. He is the ONLY U.S. President to have paid off the national debt.

I thought this was amazing when I read it. It is interesting to think that we have always been a debtor nation and will probably continue to be. My only question is, “What would Andrew Jackson do today if he were President?”

But I digress, this post is more about your fears and what to do with them. Jackson’s background helps us understand why he came up with this quote.

He was known for his toughness and accomplished a lot because of it. He gained a huge hatred for the British growing up. And in an ironic twist of fate that hatred produced a lot of good. He helped to secure America’s freedom from Britain.

If you are ever to accomplish any good in this world you must refuse to let fear stop you.

Fear will keep you from doing anything! It will paralyze you. Fear may keep you from harm, but it also keeps you from everything else as well.

Fear’s answer will always be a resounding NO!

Even when the outcome will be hugely beneficial, fear tells you the sacrifice will be too great.

Sure they could have surrendered at New Orleans, but at what cost? Fear tells you to surrender and spare lives. Courage tells you to fight and win your freedom!

Courage tells you to make their losses so great that they will never consider attacking you again.

This is the power that comes from courage, and freedom from fear.

Do you fear losing your job? Losing your pension or 401k? If you have recently become unemployed do you fear being unable to find another job with similar pay and benefits? Do you fear starting a business? Do you fear what other people think of you? Do you fear moving to a place with a lower cost of living? Do you fear that you are inadequate for the challenges that will come?

Fear tells you to freeze and do nothing, or to run away. Courage tells you to push through and overcome.

Like Winston Churchill who came after him said…

“This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Most often the enemy we have today is fear itself. We must not listen to it. We must not yield to it. We must not give in to it. We must take it, and beat it into submission, and let courage stand tall over it. Then we will gain the freedom over fear which is rightfully ours…

We are most likely headed for a Depression or a lost decade like Japan had. At least you will hear these references more and more in the coming months and probably years ahead.

Our bubble is being deflated, both economically and mentally.

So much is wrapped up in our consumption lifestyles that it is no wonder this change in the course of events does not bode well for us.

To me, it seems we are angry about what is being taken away from us, but we aren’t too enthusiastic about it.

You would think there would be protesters in the streets asking for justice to be served. For the people who stole billions of dollars from the American public to be put in jail. Instead our own money is not being used to save us, but to help save the very institutions that helped get us in this predicament.

There is a time and place for personal responsibility. In fact, you should always take responsibility for where you find yourself. However, we should not stand idly by and let things happen as they are without speaking our mind.

My mind is made up…

We can not spend our way out of this mess. We must solve the root problems and correct them there. And I truly believe fixing the root problem will cost a whole lot less than dumping money into a wound that can not be healed.

I firmly believe that we must speak out about the way the government is spending our money. And how they will force us to pay it in the future. Basically robbing future generations for an ease of our pain today.

This makes me think back to the American Revolution and the Boston Tea Party. A government exploiting their own people for their own gain.

The protests have begun. The new Tea Party has started. People are waking up. They refuse to be depressed. They have gained their enthusiasm back and are becoming angry.

The winds of change are whipping violently in the land of the free. And not all of it promises to be good change.

It is becoming too easy to be jaded by our politics. I hope and pray that true leaders will emerge in this crisis that will lead with integrity and in common purpose to promote the welfare of the people…

My goal with this whole Better Health Challenge is to educate you on the current research science and inform you what the best of science has to share with us. Not all science experiments are created equal and a lot of what passes as science is actually pretty wishy-washy. It takes some critical thinking to discern what is good science and what is bad science, and unfortunately a lot of the major news networks pass around a lot of bad science.

In any case, I will give a few brief thoughts of my own on these myths and potentially write longer articles on certain ones in the future. But here are the 10 Stubborn Exercise Myths that won’t die…

Myth 1: No Pain, No Gain (My thoughts… Too much pain could mean you are producing too much cortisol, which is our major stress hormone. Too much cortisol means absolutely no gains to be made at all. End of story.)

Myth 2: Soreness After Exercise is Caused by Lactic Acid Building Up in Your Muscles (My thoughts… As the article says soreness is created by the microscopic tears in your muscles. Lactic Acid is long gone by the time delayed muscle soreness sets in a day or two later.)

Myth 3: Exercise Takes Long Hours/Is Worthless If I Can’t Exercise Regularly – (My thoughts… Great benefits can be seen from exercise that is as short as an hour or two a week. Exercise doesn’t have to seem like “exercise” either as I explained in my article last week about walking.)

Myth 4: You Need a Sports Drink When Exercising to Replenish Your Body’s Electrolytes/Minerals/Etc (My thoughts… Whenever you hear BS like this you know someone is trying to sell you something. Just ask yourself what we did before sports drinks were invented. Unless you are running a marathon or working out for hours on end, you don’t need anything to replenish yourself. A simple breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack after you exercise is all you really need. Wait, you do that anyhow? Then you are covered.)

Myth 5: Stretching Before Exercise Will Prevent Injury – (My thoughts… Oh stretching. What can I say about you? The article perhaps says it best that people often confuse “warming up” with stretching. I have always liked the advice to never stretch before your muscles have been warmed up which kind of prevents this confusion. I believe strongly that people should add in some “mobility work” to their workouts, but not necessarily stretching. This seems to be an area we need a whole article on so…)

Myth 6: Working Out Will Only Build Muscle, Not Help Me Lose Weight – (My thoughts… This one almost makes me want to pull my hair out. Working out is a great way to lose weight, but you have to do it intelligently. Certain exercises are better than others for fat loss, but in general a well designed workout plan along with a well designed eating plan will help you retain muscle at the same time you lose fat, which is the body composition you are looking for. Simply losing weight means you are probably losing fat and muscle at the same time which isn’t exactly the best case scenario.)

Myth 7: Exercise Will Help Me Lose Weight Quickly – (My thoughts… This goes hand in hand with the above myth. Here is a hard and fast rule folks… “More exercise = more hunger = more eating = less weight loss” Make sense? If you are obese you can lose weight very quickly with a well designed exercise and dieting plan, but the closer you get to the optimal weight for your height and gender, the slower you lose weight.)

Myth 8: You Need to Take Supplements to Build Muscle – (My thoughts… I love Whey Protein and Creatine, and all the amino acids, but you really don’t need them to build muscle. Again, it’s like sports drinks, someone is trying to sell you something. Do they work? Yep. Will they work for you? Maybe. Should you just buy a few more steaks instead of whey protein? Probably.)

Myth 9: If You Don’t Exercise When You’re Young, It’s Dangerous When You Get Older – (My thoughts… First off, don’t let anyone tell you what is and isn’t dangerous. Hopefully you can decide that for yourself. Exercise is almost imperative when you are old so that you can retain most of your abilities into old age. But again, it should be a well designed intelligent program. Can old people get hurt? Yes, but so can younger people. In any case, the benefits to exercise for the elderly outweigh any dangers they pose.)

Myth 10: Working Out at Home/Working Out at the Gym is Better than Working Out at Home/Working Out at the Gym – (My thoughts… Does it really matter as long as you are doing a well designed exercise program? What is well designed since I mention it so much? A well designed program is one in which you get the results you desire. End of story. You can achieve the results you want anywhere. This is just one more excuse for people not to exercise.)

These things really get me going, but they are worth talking about. It is hard to believe people still think these things are true, but I hear them all the time. You need to do this, or that, or the other thing. Just try some things out and see what works for you and what doesn’t. Take some time to do some research and bring a critical mind to the subject matter.

This is our 23rd challenge in The Personal Health Challenge Series…

How does buying local improve your personal finance situation? My answer is to think of it as bartering.

As popularized in the book, Your Money or Your Life, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin argue that money is simply a form of your life energy. You trade your life energy for money and use money to get various things that you want or need. Presumably, if you think about your money in terms of life energy you should make better decisions with it.

No matter if you trade your product or service for money or another product or service, you are still trading one bit of life energy for another.

I could be wrong, but I believe that one day we will no longer be able to transport such a large quality of goods over such long distances the way we do now. This will force us all to become more local.

But perhaps local is the way to go anyhow?

You help a person more directly, and they help you more directly. Is there not something to be said for the satisfaction found in this. As compared to producing a product or service that the corporation you work for sells to a customer that you will never know or see?

Let me go a little deeper… To show how this kind of thinking and practice can help you more.

If we specialize to some degree we can effectively produce a product or service much easier then the average person. If something comes to us a little easier than it does to the rest of the population then there is some money to be made there. If something comes much easier than it does for the rest of the population then there is much money to be made there.

Each person is using a certain amount of life energy to create that product or service. Their ability determines the worth of their life energy.

Now if you are one of the few, or perhaps the only one in your town that is good at doing a certain thing then you will always be in demand. You will always have a job. You will always have what you need.

As we move from local to global things become quite different. Suddenly everyone can do what you can do. Not only can they do what you do, a good portion of them can do it faster, better, and cheaper then you. What happens to you? No demand. No Job. No Money. You don’t even have the money to pay for all the supposedly “cheaper” things you can buy.

Cheap is suddenly not cheap anymore because at the same time goods and services became cheaper, so did the buying power of your money. As they might say in science, “nature abhors a vacuum”, and “things tend toward equilibrium”.

We wanted to have our cake and eat it too. Meaning, we wanted to make tons of money, but also be able to buy tons of cheap things.

The moral of the story is that, at least in this regard, local is better. We help people locally and we benefit people locally. We trade our life energy for theirs in the form of goods and services. Wild extremes do not exist. No ones makes drastically more, or drastically less then the next person. They attain a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship, instead of a parasitic one that is often found in the world.

If one labors to think deeply about how he or she both gives and uses up life energy…

…then both the individual and those around them will be better off for it.

This is our 41th challenge in The Personal Finance Challenge Series…

I read his first book, The 4 Hour Work Week, and loved it.

Now Tim, after 3 years, has produced another book called The 4 Hour Body…

In his book he talks about how he practiced all kinds of health/weight loss/muscle gain ideas on his own body and it makes for some fascinating reading…

One interesting thing to me was how he did some stuff to help his old nagging injuries to disappear. Having a shoulder injury myself I am excited to read about this.

Check it out in bookstores today and let me know what you think.