Author: Growing your tree of prosperity

  Because this is a financial blog, I would say that this chapter is the only disappointing one so far. The author positions fuck-you money as having one year of living expenses so that you can say “Fuck You” to your asshole boss and then storm out of the office never to come back to a dysfunctional workplace.  What a horribly bad idea. In this age of tech disruption, some knowledge workers may be unemployed much longer than a year and this idea might only work in a welfare state. Alternatively, you can get an Uber license. A better...

Today’s topic is going to be a teensy bit controversial, so I put up a picture of controversial person. Some other financial bloggers have commented that I am a Kong Hee like person when I give my talks, I am quite flattered by that remark. In fact, I followed Kong Hee even as an atheist when he talks about modern topics like postmodernism. There is something mesmerising about his speaking quality, something I was unable to experience even after spending 10 years with the Toastmasters movement. The working paper is entitled Randomizing Religion : The Impact of Protestant Evangelism...

This is the single most momentous event in Fantasy Literature with Legend of the Condor Heroes being successfully translated into English. Translation of this work is so difficult and thought to be previously impossible, even the Economist published a book review last week. I was never able to watch a complete series on this storyline so I was kept mostly in the dark when it comes to Jin Yong’s work, having only completed the Duke of Mount Deer series which starred a young Tony Leung Chiu Wai in the 1990s. Reading this in book form is epic. Imagine the...

When an experiment is conducted where researchers ask participants about how much a recently bought object brings them happiness, it was found that an expensive high-end car brings more personal satisfaction than an average vehicle. However, when the same participants were asked about how they experienced their last trip, the price of the vehicle did not affect their experience. This chapter is really about two concepts that are commonly in the local financial blogosphere. The first concept is that when it comes to purchases, experiences always trump things. I have tried to explore various counterfactuals but I can not...

On the whole, we’ve had a fantastic 2017, which was why Budget 2018 was not a punitive one even though it was a mid-term budget. The aftermath of the Budget is interesting because discussions about NIR returns mirror the internal discussions we have on our journey to financial independence. Ray Dalio in his book Principles has a very elegant way of describing what happens when someone becomes financially independent. There are two approaches to living life post financial independence : a) A certain portion of FI folks would want to Savor Life. b) And yet a substantial number of...

Suppose you had a really bad day in the office. Meetings were extremely long and dwelled on unimportant matters. Your boss is also giving grief once again over small matters like the formatting of your powerpoint presentation. After a tough day at work, you managed to crawl out of the office to attend a financial talk and the guru then paints you a wonderful picture about financial independence. The guru, a master of failure pornography, first tells you a story of his life, how he never did well in school, how he was a dropout from the education system,...

I try to come up with something every Valentine’s Day but this year I have said everything I wanted to say so I was about to skip it until I read something really interesting about marriage and divorce in Daniel Pink’s When. So here’s something for you to think about this Valentine’s Day. a) It’s not a good idea to get married if you are too young or two old. If you marry at 25 years old, you are 11% less likely to divorce than if you were to get married at 24. Divorce rates drop as people marry...