Hi, my name is Mark Cancellieri, and I welcome you to the Rational Wealth blog. This is my first blog post ever. I first heard about blogs several years ago, but until last year, I knew very little about them. They really are taking the world by storm, especially in recent years. The pace seems to be accelerating as the technology becomes simpler and makes it easier for people with no technical background to start blogs. There are blogs for pretty much every topic imaginable, and the area of finances is no different. There are many blogs about personal finance, getting out of debt, investing, saving money, and all sorts of financial topics, but they tend to be very focused, as if you could be financially successful by just focusing on one aspect of your finances.
The truth is that you need to make sure that you cover all of the fundamentals of wealth if you want to become wealthy and stay wealthy. As a very simple example, you could develop the ability to earn $1 million of income each year, but if you spend $2 million a year, you won’t get wealthy. On the contrary, you will soon dig yourself into a hole that will be very difficult to get out of. This is a cold hard fact that too many celebrities and athletes are confronted with after it’s too late. I will use this as an excuse to create a more holistic blog about finances and success, but my real reason is to give me a chance to talk about my favorite topic – WEALTH!
I don’t claim to have all of the answers, but I have dedicated significant effort to studying and thinking about the topics that I will be discussing. I’ve thought long and hard about what has caused both success and failure in my own life as well as what causes it in the lives of others. My thinking continues to evolve and improve as I challenge ideas and gain a deeper understanding of them. The reason that I named this website Rational Wealth is because I think that we need to use our ability to reason if we want to eliminate luck as a factor in determining whether we are successful or not. Don’t take what I say at face value. Think about the ideas and see if they make sense. You are free to use the ideas that make sense to you and discard the others. Or if you are not sure about them, you can try them out as an experiment and notice the results.
“We do not tell – we show. We do not claim – we prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction. You have seen all the elements of our secret. The conclusion is now yours to draw – we can help you name it, but not to accept it – the sight, the knowledge and the acceptance, must be yours.”
- Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) –
I hope you benefit from the innumerable hours I have spent studying various aspects of wealth, as well as from my mistakes and the things that I have done right. I know that I will be learning a great deal right along with you.
Enjoy!
