Conan, what is best in life?
I’m off to London and northern Spain tomorrow with my wife and two of the grandkids. Don’t have much planned, we’re going to slow travel our way through the British capital and then go and stay with relatives in Plentzia where I spent my childhood summers.
It’s all part of our plan to spend more and enjoy life while we can -although this on this trip we’re going to spend a bit more than I was counting on…
While we’re away we’re getting the bathroom renovated too.
Spending some of our recent stock market gains on memories and making our day to day slightly more pleasant makes a lot of sense to me. After all, there is no point in dying with a mountain of unspent cash in the bank.
This is a slightly different problem than most people have. If you are getting started, or still working on your investing plan, you want to prioritise saving and investing. This can take decades, so by the time you reach your goals your saving and investing habits will run deep.
Many people find it hard to flip the switch at this point, and start spending their money.
I was fortunate in that I read Die With Zero, by Bill Perkins, just as we were approaching our ‘number’, and it made a huge impression. For the last year or so I’ve been making a deliberate effort to give ourselves permission to spend more on things that will either let us spend quality time together with loved ones or will make our life slightly easier.
If you’re starting out, read Your Money or Your Life. If you reach your destination, read Die With Zero.
Have a great summer. I will try to write The Monday Read while we’re away but make no promises 😉
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This week’s books
Started reading Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, by Neil Peart (the drummer from Rush). It is a wonderful, thoughtful book about life and loss. Can’t recommend it enough.
Also started rereading the Foundation series by Asimov. Incredible writing. Hard to imagine it is almost a century old!
This week’s links
- Didn’t know Baye had a substack. Really want to try this carrot cake now: Kyle’s Good Finds is a Great Find!
- This might accelerate my spending rate: Not yet panicking about AI? You should be – there’s little time left to rein it in
- And now dolphins too? Biting Dolphin Strikes Again: Schoolboy Injured at Fukui Beach
- Have now decided to spend all my money in the next few years… (YouTube) The $100b plan with “70% risk of killing us all” w Stephen Fry
- I could do with more of these: $656,000 of Frugal Things I Still Love Doing
- Die With Zero had a big impact on me too: Summer Travels: Applying Lessons from Die With Zero
- Is the correction here? Gradually, then suddenly
- Wonder when (if ever) we will stop seeing this headline? Japanese population sees biggest drop on record in 15th yr of decline
- Looks like Japan is considering getting rid of the 100 unit lots to buy shares: 株取引、1株単位に引き下げ視野 東証ルール変更検討、3月策定へ
- I like the messaging here: Great British Energy is becoming a reality – bringing with it cheap, clean and secure energy
- Oh good: Sunday was world’s hottest ever recorded day, data suggests
- Wonderful musings: Tokyo Notes -Public Commons
- Really enjoyed this (recommended by Craig Mod above): The akiya influencers have arrived
What do you think? Anything interesting in there?
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2. As a software engineer myself, and after listening to a few big names in the field, I am not worried about the so called AI, yet.
Until it becomes a real AI (what they now call AGI), it just paraphrases things from the past basically. And for example if too many of these machine learning models start being used, we’ll have very boring arts in a few years.. 🙂
“Also started rereading the Foundation series by Asimov.”
There are two prequels (written much later)–are you including those? Tho there’s probably a reddit sub for this, I’ve wondered whether it matters if they are read first, before starting the trilogy, or if after is okay. (also a couple of sequels)