About Can Kicker

Welcome to CanKickerFinance.com, a blog from a guy who went broke following canned advice to blazing his own path and outperforming the same canned advice that caused his financial woes. This blog is not a wealth flex because there are many with more wealth. This blog is not about blowing up egos or bragging about intelligence since mistakes were made even after recovering from broke. This blog is meant to help people financially educate themselves and take action. 

 

What I did to grow my wealth was budget, pay off debt, save, and invest. That might sound like any number of canned advice financial plans, but I didn’t follow a canned plan. I looked at what all the canned systems I saw had in common, and figured out the reasons for the nuanced differences between the canned systems. Sometimes the advice was mathematically based, sometimes it was psychologically based, and I didn’t always take the mathematically efficient route. Understanding the differences allowed me to make decisions to maximize my personal finances and mental well-being, and that is what CanKickerFinance is about – taking action based on knowledge to optimize the financial and mental well-being of the individual.

The Can Kicker Mission

CanKickerFinance has two main goals – 

 

1. Motivate people to stop kicking the can down the road for building wealth. 

2. Educating people and pushing back against one-size-fits-all canned advice that is optimized for branding and marketing of gurus’ wealth and not your wealth.

Stop Kicking the Can Down the Road

The amount of information that is out there in the world around how you should handle your finances is insane and confusing. Some of the information is good, some mediocre, and some is just plain bad. The saddest thing to hear from the perspective of a personal finance nerd is when someone says “I need to sit down one weekend and do some research and find something that works for me.” When someone gives that brush off someday response, they are pushing off action. Pushing off action is a byproduct of financial education in America sucking and woefully under preparing people for the realities of financial adulthood. Learning about personal finance is easy though, just type “how to build wealth” into the Google box and go down the rabbit hole that is the 935 steps to financial freedom from no less than 213 financial gurus. When that person pushing off action finally does take a weekend to research, they will be paralyzed in fear for their money. 

 

Regardless of the wealth philosophy you subscribe to, they all have the same tenants of budgeting, eliminating [bad] debt, building cash reserves, and investing to accumulate assets. If you’ve been kicking the can down the road on building wealth or sitting around trying to find the best system, create a budget and put all the cash you possibly can towards debt, emergency savings, and investments. Even if you aren’t on the optimal path, you’ve done the most important thing which is to take action and just freaking start already. Just starting gets you past the analysis paralysis that keeps so many people trapped in a never ending financial purgatory. You might not squeeze out every last penny from just starting, but at least you’re getting your money working for you for a change.

Educate Against Canned Advice

CanKickerFinance aims to share information among those in their wealth journey and tries to get you to think critically about the money moves you make with respect to your situation. Algorithmic or stepped financial systems are fine to organize your thoughts or give you a plan, but your situation may actually set you back against a given system, or you may be passing up valuable options if it is against a core philosophy of the canned advice prescribed.  

 

CanKickerFinance is not a cookie cutter philosophy or system. The core tenants are there – live on less than you make, build up stability now, and build wealth through budget, debt elimination, savings, and investing. Sure we can talk about building businesses, taxes, dividends, debt restructuring, leverage, and any number of things, but those things ultimately get back to the four basics. 

 

Rather than tell you a prescribed plan, we try to focus on the why and when of an action and then you can plug in your situation against it to make the best choice for yourself. Some advice can be good advice like investing instead of paying off low interest debt, but that advice can also be bad depending on the financial situation of the person following it. Understanding that difference and applying it to your own financial situation is more powerful than canned advice ever will be. 

 

We don’t believe in cookie cutter one-size-fits-all advice. At best, one-size-fits-all is one-size-fits-most, and if you’re not one of the ‘most’, cookie cutter systems can make you  insolvent or cost you years of compound interest, resulting in potential loss in the near term all the way up to millions foregone over a lifetime. There is nothing wrong with modeling after a popular strategy but understand that strategy is generic and not tailored to you. Always remember, canned advice is optimized for branding and marketing of gurus’ wealth and not yours. 

 

The fact of the matter is no two people have the same financial situation, so jumping into a wealth building system that treats someone with $20,000 in emergency funds the same as someone with $20 in Starbucks gift cards doesn’t make much sense. The canned plan might be sound for most people, but the financial guru (marketer) behind the canned plan is not in your finances and faces no recourse if they cause you financial distress or loss.

 

Get Kickin It

Getting you off the sidelines building wealth and providing information to optimize your wealth building journey is what CanKickerFinance is all about. Check out our articles that you can browse by wealth category. Also we are building and expanding our custom tool calculators. Subscribe and we will send you alerts when we add new tools and articles.