The Monday Read
Year of the Tiger Edition Happy New Year! Can’t believe it’s 2021 already… 😉 What will year 3 of the pandemic have in store for us? Hopefully more tapering and fewer seismic shocks. I’ll be doing a planning post soon, but just quickly my primary goal for 2022 is better time management, and my secondary […]
The Monday Read
Winter Edition I got the oil heater out today so winter has officially started. How are things where you live? The Forum The Forum is doing well (17,832 posts to date). Here are the latest active threads: This week’s books I’m really enjoying The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s near-future SF/ecological […]
The Monday Read
COP26 Edition More like COPOUT26, amirite? Very disappointing. Film I saw The Laundromat this week. It was trying very much to be The Big Short (which is excellent), but kind of failed to hit the same notes of interest/humour. The main problem is that the story is a bit too big and abstract to work […]
The Monday Read
Online Conference Edition In the before times I organised a few RetireJapan events. I gave a talk, took questions, then everyone kind of hung out and chatted. They were really fun. I also did an online finance round table this week, and it really brought home to me once again how many people are really […]
The Monday Read
Take care of yourself edition It’s been a rough year and a half, eh? Recently I’ve been getting a bit too sucked into the news, into Twitter doomscrolling, into ranting at the TV. Not helpful or healthy. Or productive. Or happy. So I pulled back a bit. I tried to read more books, focus on […]
The Monday Read
Climate Madness Edition I’ve always been somewhat concerned about climate change and environmental issues, but it seems to be accelerating recently even faster than I imagined. One of my daughters lives in Vancouver, which made the whole ‘heat dome’ thing much more real, and then we have the rain/landslides in Japan this week. I wonder […]
Planning 3
Plan Harder Four years ago I wrote a couple of posts about planning (Planning, Planning 2). It was really interesting to go back and reread them. Let’s take another look at the questions and see what kind of progress we’ve made in that time. Two big changes: I started doing jiu-jitsu just over three years […]
The Monday Read
So far so good Well, it’s kind of sort of might be rainy season now. The air is definitely getting more humid, and the other day I had my first unpleasant reminder of how not fun masks + heat + humidity are. Really wasn’t expecting a second summer all masked up! Hopefully there won’t be […]
Book Review: Die With Zero
This mediocre book is the best thing I have read for a while There is a new pandemic spreading across the world. Not Covid-21 thankfully, but rather every single personal finance blog is reviewing Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. The author is a somewhat unrelateable natural gas trader/hedge fund manager/movie producer/high stakes poker player […]
Interviewing Smart Money Asia
Expat personal finance made simple? A couple of weeks I was doing some online searching for personal finance and investing in Japan in English, and while I was disappointed that RetireJapan didn’t show up as much as I expected, I did find an interesting site. When I saw the site owner Martin also did fee-only […]