Well, here at Pinko HQ, we like to think we are working for the liberation of all workers from the yoke of capitalist oppression! REVO-LU-U-U-U-U-U-UTION!
That said, my focus is this: if you have a job and are not teetering on the brink of homelessness, then you have the ability to get your finances squared away, get rid of your debt, and increase both your freedom and your peace of mind. It won’t even be that hard to do if you can get a new perspective on what money is good for (and what it isn’t), what lasting happiness looks like (you can’t buy it), and why foregoing buying “luxuries” for even a short period of time makes it increasingly easy to forego more useless spending and keep saving and investing.
And we will do this not via some amazing investment opportunity (scam), secret strategy (scam), or spiritual practice that brings prosperity (scammity-scam-scam), but by simple, boring, repetitive practices that pay down what you owe, help you make good decisions with what you have, and help you develop a plan to point you in the direction you want to go. What we talk about on the blog won’t be exciting to do, but doing it might allow you to bring other excitements into your life–travel, a new job, or getting by on one job instead of two.
Which brings me to a second aspect of our work here at Pinko HQ–I’m not interested in talking with people who are earning $100,000 a year. I’m interested in strategies for the person who is busting their hump every day at a job (or two) and struggling to get debt under control, the person working in the shadow economy who isn’t sure how to be legit, the artist who works a day job to afford to make sculpture on the weekends, the musician who is a bar-back Sunday through Thursday so she can play with her band on Friday and Saturday nights, and the person who has stepped off the careerist track to walk a different, less lucrative, more fulfilling path.
And finally, this site is for the person who knows nothing about money, personal finance, investment, or budgeting. Most sites that talk about money are only speaking to people who are already extremely interested in money, but not us! The Pinko Guide assumes you know nothing about money and seeks to give you a solid footing, but not by boring you to death with some academic, super-technical, hyper-quant approach to finance. Just the basics and the gritty. So, we will talk about the fundamentals of finance, about the building blocks of saving and investing, but also what happens when it doesn’t work out, you don’t get a break, or when you are stone broke. Stay tuned.