As a Mr. NAME_1 reader, you are on the straight and narrow path to considerable wealth. You’re actively soaking up financial knowledge and putting it into play in your day-to-day life.

Unless you are very new here, you probably don’t need convincing of either the value of creating a golden financial situation, or the methods by which we pursue it. Understand and optimize your spending with happiness as the prime directive, while improving the rest of your life and increasing your ability to earn money as a side-effect.

It sounds easy when you put it that way, but to newcomers there are many roadblocks.

First is the issue of basic financial knowledge itself. Most of your neighbors believe that borrowing money for cars and kitchen renovations is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, a 5-10% savings rate is admirable, and credit cards are a way to borrow money when life’s little expenses temporarily outpace their salaries. With assumptions like these, wealth will always prove unattainable.

But even with a solid understanding of financial concepts, you still have to get over an even bigger hill: changing your behavior in a way that sticks.

After all, we already know that to get rich on an average income, you need to have lower-than-average spending.

But to use just one common example: But a big part of average spending goes into car ownership. So that will be one of the first things you’d want to address, by doing less pointless driving around in your car, right?  But you’ve become very comfortable with