I enjoy telling our story to my colleagues, friends, and even acquaintances—it makes for a great ice breaker. Recently I led a short session at the XP Days Benelux Conference, designed for people in my particular niche of the software industry called “Extreme Personal Finance”, in which I introduced a group of about 75 people [...]
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The 30-second version Keeping your job costs you money and time. You probably don’t consider these costs when you think about how much money you earn. Most people’s “true” hourly rate is half what they think it is. Your “true” hourly rate also represents how long you have to work to earn $1. Expressing the [...]
We recently spent three months living in Mazatlán Mexico as an experiment in living away from home. We’ve previously written about our goals and the cost of living, but we could never leave Canada if we couldn’t keep our businesses running. We’ve written before about our impressions of Tim Ferriss’ The Four-Hour Work Week. In this [...]
Summerside PE offers quite a low cost of living, and for the time being, any other place we try to live will need to compare favorably on basic living expenses. For our purposes, “basic living expenses” includes housing, taxes, insurance, food, electricity, heating or cooling, and communications. Put differently, we need to be warm, dry, [...]
At iwillteachyoutoberich.com, Ramit Sethi asked this recently: It seems like 98% of personal-finance material (blogs, magazines, books) focus on spending LESS — keeping a budget, saying “no, no, no” to lattes, jeans, and vacations. Why? Why don’t they cover earning more, or negotiating, or increasing your responsibilities at work, or understanding the psychology of your [...]
I have started reading The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. When I’d read descriptions and reviews of the book, I formed the opinion that I already intuitively understood many of the principles at work, particularly as regards his steps of elimination and automation. Reading it confirmed what I’d suspected: I had already used these [...]
I had started to write this post as “Saving money at the Farmer’s Market*.” But then I realized that I don’t actually believe in saving money at the farmer’s market: if something looks good or we know we need it, we buy it. We came back from our very first market trip saying, “Well, I [...]
The Summerside PEI home (more about the house itself later) will be house #10 for us. Even though we’ll go back down to only owning 9 when we sell the one we currently live in, 10 is a nice little milestone for us. When we envisioned the Dauphin experiment 5 years ago, we didn’t expect [...]
Joe and I saw a “Senior Financial Advisor” (or some related position) from TD Bank discussing the latest interest cuts on CBC Newsworld. His explanation for why interest rate cuts stimulate the economy: at practically 0% interest, you might as well just spend your money instead of save it. Wonder whether he got his degree [...]
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