Facts about Money, Cash, Credit & more

Budgeting is simply balancing your expenses with your income.

It's a plan for the coordination of resources and expenditures. When you budget your money, there’s a desired outcome. And being able to track your spending should ultimately move you in the right direction towards meeting your financial goals.

1. Gather Some Financial Information: gather a detailed list of your income and expenses.
2. Select a Budgeting Method: figure out how you’ll budget your money to meet your most pressing financial goals.
3. Create Your Budget: tally up all your expenses and income to see where you stand and allocate expenses.
4. Execute Your Plan: you can use a notebook, pen and paper, a spreadsheet or an online software.
5. Reward Yourself: you can work a small percentage into your budget to treat yourself each month.

This method suggests that you allocate 70 percent of your income to expenses, 20 percent to savings, and the remaining 10 percent to debt.

70:20:10 may work for someone with a healthy emergency fund and minimal debt.

Under this method, 50 percent goes to expenses, 30 percent goes to wants, and 20 percent goes to a combination of debt and savings.

A person with a healthy amount of disposable income but loads of debt could probably benefit more from the 50:30:20 method.

Budget for the life you have. When you’re going through your budget and assigning spending categories, be realistic. 

Don’t tell yourself you’ll never buy a single discretionary item, because you’re setting yourself up for failure. Give yourself some breathing room.

This becomes a problem when you’re spending for a life you can’t afford. It puts pressure on your budget and encourages you to live in a paycheck to paycheck cycle.

Assess your financial situation, cut back on your expenses, prioritize your money goals, and then come up with a new spending plan.

It’s hard to stick to a budget that doesn’t have a goal.

When there isn’t one, your budget becomes an afterthought rather than a spending plan to reach your financial goals.

No matter how little or how much money you earn, creating a monthly budget is one of the most important aspects of managing your finances. What gets measured gets managed.

Having a budget doesn't stop you from spending money the way you want it to, but works like a partner to track your spending and allocating resources to help you reach your financial goals.

Frugal people do spend money, but want the maximum bang for the buck, without stressing themselves.

Frugality does not mean compromising quality, neglecting your social life, or being a cheap stake. It is about making smart spending choices, like buying second-hand clothing, avoiding pricey subscriptions or brands.

• Use tools like financial books, podcasts, and online savings groups.
• Avoid indulging in unnecessary expenses daily, reducing them or finding healthier and more affordable alternatives.
• Cultivate a healthier attitude and the right mindset towards your finances.
• Know that small, practical, money-saving actions can compound into better living for you in the long run.

Recessions are part of the fabric of a dynamic economy. The average investor fears recessions because they mean lower home prices, lower stock prices, and less or no work.

Several things can cause, or worsen, a recession — soaring interest rates, or ill-conceived legislation. If you understand recessions, you will have many opportunities to look forward to when the recession ends.

Historically, the best time to buy stocks is when the NBER announces the start of a recession.

The NBER takes at least six months to determine if a recession has started. The average post-WWII recession lasts 11.1 months. By the time the bureau announces a recession, it is nearly over. Often investors are quicker to spot the beginning of recovery long before the NBER does.

The best thing to do with your money during a recession is to pay off your credit card debt.

Paying off a credit card that charges 18% interest is equivalent to getting an 18% return on investment. You may not get that from most other investments during a recession.

The turn toward financial statistics means that instead of considering how economic developments could meet our needs, it instead is to determine whether individuals are meeting the demand of the economy.

Until the 1850s, social measurement in 19th-century America was a collection of social indicators known as "moral statistics," which focused on the physical, social, spiritual, and mental conditions of the people. Human beings were at the center, not dollars and cents.

Modern life is filled with the never-ending anxiety of making money. Our approach right from the school days is to earn money and accumulate the things required in society.

It is a powerful cultural force that makes us accumulate stuff, and is not as practical as it is emotionally and psychologically significant. A failure to make money is considered irresponsible, and a poor person who is not earning is shunned in today’s society.

History shows us plenty of examples of people pursuing goals that are not towards earning wealth.

The Roman statesman Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus had a successful public career but made no money, even though he came from an impoverished family. There are many such examples from India, where learned and creative individuals chose to live an impoverished life.

Chasing money is in a way proof that one hasn’t found the real reason for being alive. We haven’t identified a passion that could replace the concept of earning a livelihood from our minds. Wealth is tied to prestige, respect and social status and the thought of becoming untethered from our ‘network’ is a thought akin to dying.

If we focus our lives on what matters to us authentically, then we will fall out of this romance with dollar bills, and get into our passions, which require little or no money.

In the middle of the 2008 banking crisis, a group of anarchists, libertarians, and other tech-savvy true believers created digital cash.

In August 2008, bitcoin dot org was registered as a domain. On Halloween the same year, Satoshi Nakamoto put up a whitepaper describing a decentralised system of electronic transactions that did not involve a financial institution.

Bitcoin highlights how fundamentally bizarre money is. Money is a value token that makes exchange easier. It isn't real in a tangible way. But it's real enough that people fight and die for it.

Bitcoin's ideology is that of a specific distrust of financial institutions. In 2009, many people were looking for alternatives to the mainstream financial system that had disastrously failed. Bitcoin was the first successful attempt for an alternative financial system.

Ethereum's initial success can be attributed to a few elements. Ethereum is programable, meaning apps can run on the Ethereum blockchain. This is what let to Ethereum being used in:

• Decentralised Finance, or DeFi, meaning that apps like investments, insurance etc can be run without a central authority.
• NFTs, tokens to prove the authenticity and ownership of an object (digital or physical)
• The consensus in the network through proof of stake. New coins are created by putting guaranteeing your existing money. This incentives people to be good actors and decreases the money supply, increasing its price.

Fiat money is a government-issued currency that is not backed by a commodity such as gold. Most paper notes started as being backed by a reserve of valuable commodities, usually gold (the "Gold Standard"). Tying a currency to gold limits inflation and money supply.

But politicians hate the gold standard, so since Nixon's presidency, the US dollar was no longer tied to gold and money had value just because the government says so.

1933 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt had gold confiscated and people were forced to accept paper money for their gold. The government needed people to adopt the inflated paper and they used force. 

1940s - Bretton Woods Agreement created a collective international currency peg to the U.S. dollar which was in turn pegged to the price of gold.

1971 - President Nixon unilaterally cancelled the direct international convertibility of the US dollars to gold. Making the US government in charge of money supply and world money master. 

Banks loan money they don't have. Most hold a limited reserve to serve the few who decide to make redraws. When the majority decides to liquidate their bank accounts we have what is called a bank run.

In order to protect the banks, central banks were created to provide a guaranteed reserve for commercial banks. But once the government stepped in to protect the banks the fractional reserve mandates(only a fraction of deposits are backed by actual cash) began to be used to make up the money from thin air. Every dollar that a bank holds can be multiplied by at least 10x.  

We can measure the supply of money that exists in the market with main metrics:

• M1 money supply includes liquid money aka cash. 
• M2 (which includes M1) includes loans, deposits & market funds. This is mainly made up money. 

As the chart shows the US (and all other countries with central banks) have most of the monetary mass made up. An influx of money causes inflation and this is exactly what during the last decades. 

Robert Greer says that there are three asset superclasses: 

1. Capital Assets are productive & generate value or cash-flow: equities, bonds, or rentable real estate. 
2. Transformable/Consumable Assets: can be consumed one time, transformed into another asset, and their consumption produces economic yield: energy or commodities. 
3. Store-of-Value Assets are scarce, cannot be consumed, just transferred, and their value persists over time and space: gold, currencies, art, or bitcoin. 

Money is a WIDELY ACCEPTED medium of EXCHANGE. Lets analyse each word, they really have a huge importance:

• Widely: it has to be accepted by many people, otherwise it can’t work.
• Accepted: It has to be accepted by all these people, which means we need to have some sort of agreement that we will all accept it.
• Exchange: Now that everyone accepts it, we also agree that it has some sort of value and we can exchange it for certain things.

The reason money is valuable is because we all have FAITH in it, and this faith is operating in present and future times.

Think about it, the reason we believe in money is because we know that if we save some amount of it, we can use it in the future to buy something as this money will still have value, right?

Countries currencies used to be backed by gold long ago, nowadays they’re only backed by governmental policy so we could agree that:

• Good government equals to: good monetary policy and valuable currency
• Bad Government equals to: bad monetary policy and currency losing value
• Communist dictatorship equals to: no policy, just theft and the country’s currency becomes worthless and destroyed

In case you’re not familiar, this is the timeline of history we’ll be using.

• BC stands for: Before Christ
• AD stands for: Anno Domini

It can get a little confusing because everyone is writing different timelines, using different codes and letters, so we want to keep a simple standard for our article.

Bartering is the act of exchanging goods or services without using money, so an example would be: give me 2 arrows and I’ll give you a cow.

Despite the fact that a lot of sources claim that Barter was the first way in which we conducted economical transactions, there is no clear evidence that this was the case and let’s analyse why:

In several places around the world commodity money was gaining traction, now, what do we mean by this?

Well, commodity money are objects that are valuable by themselves and are also valuable when using them as money.

One of the most interesting parts about this segment of history is that the Babylonian civilisation was already implementing some primitive economic systems where they had contracts, laws, rules of private property and debt.

It was only a matter of time until a universally defined medium of exchange came into play.

Around the year 1100 B.C in certain parts of China miniature bronze replicas of goods were being used, so if you had wanted to get a sword, you would have likely needed to have a miniature bronze sword as the equivalent currency to get one.

Bear in mind that the fact that miniature replicas were being used as currency in China, that doesn’t mean that coins didn’t exist already in some places, they were just not official means of exchange yet.

Around 600 B.C King Alyattes minted what would become the first official currency ever recorded.

Each coin was made from electrum alloy which is a mixture of silver and gold.

A very fun thing that we never managed to understand is, why lions were sculpted or depicted with two possible faces: 

• Concerned as if they had problems
• Cold as if they were a cartoon freezing

Around 700 A.D during the Tang Dynasty in China there were already some forms of paper money like bills and credit notes. The Government realised that it was far more convenient to use credit notes to conduct transactions instead of carrying a whole load of coins.

Paper money arrived in Europe thanks to the travels of the great explorer Marco Polo around the year 1200 A.D.

It was not until the year 1661 that the first Banknote was issued in Sweden.

The term "Dollar" already existed before the U.S adopted it as its official currency name. It was very common during the colonial period when referring to the Spanish Real coin.

In the year 1775 the Continental Congress of the United States authorised the issuance of Continental currency but it wasn't until the Coinage act of April 2, 1792 that an official monetary system was defined and the U.S dollar came to life as the official currency for the United States of America.

On March 3rd 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt closed all the banks in the U.S.A. 

Banks held large amounts of Gold which were backing all the available U.S dollars. At those times there was a fixed exchange rate between U.S dollars and Gold.

Gold standard ended officially when president Richard Nixon on August 15 1971 announced that the U.S would no longer convert dollars to gold at a fixed value, that’s how the gold standard ended.

Nowadays, fiat money is no longer dependent on gold but rather on governmental policy.

The creator of the first bank issued card was Mr. John Biggins of the Flatbush National Bank of Brooklyn in New York around 1946.

Biggins created the “Charge-It” program.  Merchants could send sales slips into the bank after a customer used the card with them and the bank would then go and bill the customer back.

Frank Macnamara had an idea, to create a card that allowed you to dine in restaurants and the Diners Club would pay your bill and you would pay them later.

The card was originally intended for a very small and exclusive group of 200 people belonging to the club, but the idea caught on fire and in less than a year there were more than 20.000 cardholders and you could use them pretty much everywhere.

In the 1990’s there were 2 different businesses known as confinity.com and x.com, both were diving into the online banking world separately through several innovative ideas.

At some point both companies decided to merge and gave birth to Paypal, the online payments giant.

Fun fact:  Elon Musk the founder of Tesla was the owner of x.com, as you can see, he’s always working on some great thing.

Around 2009, a mysterious developer known by the Alias "Satoshi Nakamoto" created Bitcoin.

Bitcoin grew with no official employees, no marketing and no investors to become the world’s largest digital currency.

In terms of the history of money, Bitcoin is relevant because it presents the following changes:

• Fiat money is backed by governments, Bitcoin is decentralised and the power lies on the whole network, not one person that can make decisions.
• Bitcoin gave anonymity to people who transact on the network.
• The blockchain system became a way to perpetually store records that cannot be altered and are always publicly accessible.

Thanks to these features, bitcoin took the world by surprise and proposed an interesting leap forward in technology.

1. Time: It is a commodity given to every living being, no one has excess or little of it. But it depends on the usage.
2. Knowledge: learning does not only happen in classroom but on everyday life.
3. Money: it answers all things that pertains to living.

At any given point in your life, you will have at least two of those currencies, and whatever it is you are missing. Use the those two to acquire it.

It's true that we have don't understand between LIABILITIES and ASSETS.

Liabilities is the thinge which take out money from you.

Asset is something which puts money in your pocket

An economic indicator is simply any economic statistic, such as the unemployment rate, GDP, or the inflation rate, which indicate how well the economy is doing and how well the economy is going to do in the future.

Investors use all the information at their disposal to make decisions. If a set of economic indicators suggest that the economy is going to do better or worse in the future than they had previously expected, they may decide to change their investing strategy.

These statistics measure the amount of money in the economy as well as interest rates and include:

• Money Stock (M1, M2, and M3) [monthly]
• Bank Credit at All Commercial Banks [monthly]
• Consumer Credit [monthly]
• Interest Rates and Bond Yields [weekly and monthly]
• Stock Prices and Yields [weekly and monthly].

Financial Intelligence is awareness. Knowing the basics before trying to control them. Do you know what’s your Net Worth? Do you know what’s your Cash Flow? Your Incomes? Your detailed Spending? Do you know what are the interest rates of your liabilities? Do you know your actual hourly wage?

It seems it’s the simplest step one can do, but actually, very few financially-in-trouble people do it. It takes willpower and/or desperation to make the first step. It also requires some knowledge.

Financial Integrity means taking actions. Once you have a good picture of your situation, it’s usually easy to find and grab low hanging fruits. So, strategies like cutting superfluous expenses come natural and they are easily implemented.

What will happen when you start taking action is that you better define your values. You understand easily that you need to spend less than you earn if you want to get back in financial shape. To do that, you either earn more or spend less (or, better, both).

You may be enjoying the freedom not having to think about next paycheck brings to your life and start saving, building an Emergency Fund. Eventually, when you have enough cash to survive a year (people recommend 3-6 months) without working, you’ll stop hoarding cash and start investing and/or paying back your debts, sending your money to work for you thanks to the immense power of compounding.

You may also work on the earning side of the equation: once you ‘stash a year of salary you may consider working part time and take some classes or learn a new skill or start a side gig to boost your earnings. You may realize your commute takes too much time and it’s costing you a lot of life energies (opportunity cost) and living far from your office is not worth the few bucks you’re saving.

Financial Independence means tasting freedom. You no long have to work to maintain your lifestyle, since your money are working for you instead. Your passive incomes (like stocks appreciation, dividends, rental properties income,…) cover your living expenses and you’re free to choose what to do.

You may keep your current job, try a different career, go back to school, take entrepreneurial steps, work less, work none. You may have dreams you want to follow, people you want to take care of. It’s really up to you. You’ve got freedom.

Freedom here stands for freedom from selling your time for money. You no longer need it. You’ll rely on your passive incomes robustness, like betting on average market returns of 7% per year (inflation adjusted) on the long run or a combination of good tenants, rent/house appreciations and low vacation rate for your rental properties.

Financial Freedom means removing money from the equation.

True financial freedom is when you have almost military grade security measures against unplanned events. Rock solid financial integrity with a monthly budget well beyond your most desirable spending regime at your safe withdrawal rate. Or, equivalently, a withdrawal rate of 1% or less at your current spending regime.

No economic event in the foreseeable future (excluding catastrophes, world war or a sudden depletion of earth resources) can put your plan at risk.

• Make all spending decisions as if the price were $0.00
• Make all work and income decisions as if the wage were $0.00

Saving money is the gap between your ego and your income, and wealth is what you don't see. So Wealth is created by suppressing what you could buy today in order to more stuff or more options in the future.

Some people won't sleep well unless they are earning the highest returns; others will only get a good rest if they're conservatively invested. To each their own.

• Set aside 10% of your income for you!
• You can use that other 90% to pay bills and other expenses. But that 10% is specifically for you to save and invest later on.
• It seems small at first, but gradually, you’ll start to have a good amount set aside.

1. When you save part of your income (even if you have a low income), it helps you build up your wealth.
2. When you invest your money, it will multiply so you have more of it.
3. Leverage the advice of financial experts if you need to when investing your money for more security.
4. Don’t rush headlong into an investment you know nothing about! It’s just asking for trouble.
5. Don’t fall for get-rich-quick schemes or scams. You’ll lose your money.

The lack of market mechanisms frustrates government planning. This is also known as the economic calculation problem.

When people and businesses make their own decisions based on their willingness to pay money for a good or service, the information is captured. In turn, resources are automatically allocated toward the most valued ends.

Governments' interference causes unwanted shortages and surpluses. However, the forces that guide voluntary economic activity toward the benefit of societies are the same forces that curb the effectiveness of government intervention.

Smith believed a nation needed three elements to bring about universal prosperity.

1. Enlightened self-interest. He thought most people would naturally practice thrift, hard work, and enlightened self-interest.
2. Limited government. Smith viewed the government's responsibilities as being limited to the defence of the nation, universal education, public works, the enforcement of legal rights and the punishment of crime.
3. Solid currency and a free-market economy. Smith hoped backing the currency with hard metals would prevent the government from depreciating the currency.

Prior to the existance of Layered Money there was simply money.

Money is a tool which allows peers the exchange of goods within a consensus value.

Let's see different forms of money used historicaly:

• Seashells
• Animal Teeth
• Jewelry
• Livestock
• Iron tools

And then...

GOLD & SILVER appeared.

Initialy, gold and silver coins were issued as a first-layer form of money. Which means that coins where backed by its own value depending of the purity of gold/silver contained.

First records of coins usage trace back to around 700 BC in Lydia, modern-day Turkey.

Over the years, each region minted their own coins, which varied in gold/silver purity.

Gold & Silver Coins were a huge implementation for humanity growth & evolution. Unfortunately they had some cons:

• Coin Multiplicy: There were too many different currencies, which was an issue to money velocity (how quickly money changes hands).
• Risks of Physical Transfer: sending coins across land and sea was dangerous and a logistical nightmare during the medieval era.

First of all we need to see the difference between first layer & second layer money:

• A gold coin - First Layer Money.
• A piece of paper (bills of exchange) that says: "The Medici banking family will pay one gold coin to the bearer on demand". - Second Layer Money.

The gold coin is a first layer money because it is the basis of the monetary system. If the gold coin wouldn't exist the piece of paper wouldn't neither.

It was created back in 1609 and thanks to the world's first joint-stock company, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC).

The VOC was the first example of equity investors providing capital in exchange for a share of ownership in the form of a paper certificate.

As the shares increased in value, original investors wanted to realize gains by selling them for cash to new investors, and that is how the first stock market was born.

All cashiers were forced to surrender precious metal to the Bank of Amsterdam and were issued BoA deposits in return.

The Bank of England was created in 1694 with the purpose to purchase new government bonds in an effort to rebuild the country after a crushing defeat of the English navy.

It was tasked with taking custody of precious metal, issuing deposits, effecting transfers between depositors, and circulating notes as cash.

The Bank of England and the Private Sector (private banks/non-government entities) created the third-layer of money.

This third-layer money was issued by Private Sector and its value relied on both BoE Deposits and BoE Notes. Private Sector issued:

• Deposits
• Bills of Exchange

Shortly after an earthquake in 1906 rocked San Francisco, the US immersed into a financial crisis.

Congress passed into law the Federal Reserve System on Decemeber 23, 1913.

The Fed was founded to combat financial crises, and it would do this with a second-layer money called reserves.

Wholesale money (Fed reserves) is money that banks use, and retail money (Fed notes) is money that people use.

The Federal Reserve Act's stated the following purposes:

• To provide for the establishment of Federal reserve banks.
• To furnish an elastic currency.
• Means of rediscounting commercial paper.
• To establish a more effective supervision of banking in the US.

The Act also decreed that at least 35% of the Fed's assets must be held in gold.

Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933 which instructed all "gold coin, gold bullion, and certificates to be delivered to the government."

The order was effectively a forced sale of gold in exchange for Fed notes (cash) by all US citizens and eliminate the people's access to first-layer money.

In 1934 the US devaluated the dollar against gold by increasing the gold price from $20.67 to $35 per ounce.

The goal was to attract foreign demand by having the cheapest prices.

In 1944, world leaders gathered at a hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire and formalized that all currencies besides the dollar were forms of third-layer money within the dollar pyramid.

Federal Reserve notes still promised the bearer gold coins on demand at $35 per ounce.

Currencies would have fixed exchange rates with the dollar and wouldn't themselves be redeemeble for gold.

In 1971, the United States suspended gold convertability for the dollar; the suspension was supposed to be temporary, but the dollar never returned to any linkage with the commodity.

Two years later, the modern era of free-floating currencies began, officially ending the Bretton Woods agreement.

Gold transitioned to the informal role of neutral money, still held today by governments and central banks around the world as first-layer, counterparty-free money.

Bitcoin originated back in 2008, forty-six days after the fall of Lehman Brothers. Its whitepaper was sent to a very small online community called the Cryptography Maling List.

The paper was written by Satoshi Nakamoto. The creator remains unknown even now, something that strengthens Bitcoin's neutrality, as no leader exists who wields too much influence, can be coerced or blackmailed, or will try to change Bitcoin's ru