About The Money Principle

The Money Principle is a personal finance blog building on the belief that ‘financial health’ is equally if not more important than ‘financial independence’ and that it is a matter of balance between: how much we earn and how much we spend; how much we have and how much we want; how much we consume and how much we let go; and how do we live and how we would like to live.

At purely technical level, personal finance is easy: if you spend less that you earn you are, kind of, all right. What makes it complex and exciting is that personal finance is not about the personal and has little to do with finance. Your financial choices are not simply choices about money; they are choices about your life. Your choices about finance are personal only according to their consequences; the decisions have to account for developments much broader that the ‘personal’.

We at The Money Principle shall provoke you, build an information base for you and entertain you. We promise to offer a range of answers but even more importantly, we shall support you to come up with your answers – after all we are here to help you deal with your money and with your life!

About Maria

I am Maria and here are some of the words that describe me: mum, wife, academic, land owner, obsessive reader and long distance runner. I am a ‘stranger’ and an ‘outsider’; I am a Bulgarian in Britain and a woman in the cloisters of academe. I have a PhD and this makes me ‘a doctor who cannot make people better’ as my son used to say. None of my formal education is in finance or economics. One thing I didn’t think I will be is a blogger. But here I am, writing a blog about personal finance and loving every second of it.

How did I get here and what qualifies me to write The Money Principle? I had a personal crisis which made me examine and changed my relationship with money. For years I had lived a life of ‘chosen ignorance’ and the flows of money were a mystery. Then, one evening in November 2009, I heard that we have substantial debt negative wealth. I had just lost £10,000 off my annual salary (before tax) and my husband’s business was not doing too well. Metamorphosis came out of this collapse – change founded on learning, contemplation and action.

Since then we have substantially reduced our outgoings with gain of quality of life, have paid off over 60% of our negative wealth and have increased our net worth by a six figure number. I learned, thought and experimented. I want to help you do the same!