Category: finance
-
Independent Budget Travel and Round-the-World Backpacking Trips
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. – Mark Twain Travel Independent thinks it has “everything you need to…
-
Good Investment Funds
I’ve said before that Stocks and Shares ISAs are a crucial item in your investment armoury, and with Plonkee’s comprehensive introduction to them, they were demystified. Now Plonkee has done it again by giving us a guide to some basic investment funds. It’s posts like this that save me hours of research. In terms of…
-
Behavioural Addiciton: Gambling in Las Vegas
A conference on gambling addiction, run by the National Center for Responsible Gaming, is to be held in Las Vegas later this year. Put aside the irony for a moment, there are more sinister events afoot. Salon’s article Gambling with Science notes that the NCRG is funded by the gambling industry and may have a…
-
The Warren Buffett Guide to Investing
In Picking Warren Buffett’s Brain: Notes from a Novice, Tim Ferriss shares the notes he took at a recent convention for Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. It’s an interesting read and here’s the crux of it all: How would you invest your first million dollars? “I’d put it all in a low-cost index fund that tracks the…
-
Tips on Mini-Retirements from Tim Ferriss and JD Roth
How to Take a Mini-Retirement: Tips and Tricks from Timothy Ferriss is the first part of a two-part interview between JD Roth (of the excellent personal finance site, Get Rich Slowly) and he of 4HWW fame, Timothy Ferriss. There’s an apt quote in the interview on something I’m currently struggling with: The hardest part is…
-
Lifestyle Costing – Reverse Engineering Your Ideal Wage
April sees the start of another financial year and as such I find myself thinking about financial matters more often than is typical. I then stumbled across Plonkee’s How Much Do I Need to Earn? post, detailing how she reverse engineered her ideal salary. I had a go myself, and it’s quite enlightening; it reminds…
-
Travelling on a Shoestring
I’m pretty sure we’re all agreed that travelling the world is a great thing to do. And when you can do it on a frugal budget (not a cheap one), it’s even better! That makes Plonkee’s latest post, 21 Resources for Budget Travel great in every respect – links galore! take the train, not the…
-
Stocks and Shares ISAs
There are a lot of very good US-based personal finance blogs around, but sometimes the information given is difficult for a UK reader to understand as the terms used are completely alien to us. One of the newer additions to my RSS reader is Plonkee Money – a site I found when searching for a…
-
The ‘Easy’ Way to Intelligent Asset Allocation
NPR‘s All Things Considered recently profiled David Swensen and analysed his investing strategy (Swensen is Yale University’s head investor): Yale University recently announced a 23 percent return on its investments, swelling its endowment to a whopping $18 billion. The man behind that investment success is David Swensen, one of the most gifted investors in the…
-
Official: Money Makes Us Happy, Happiness Makes Us Money
Newsweek ran an article last year on the link between happiness and money. Here’s an executive summary: Money will make you happier, up to a point. After that, it makes no difference. That point is the wonderfully quantitative ‘point of comfort‘. If you’re happy you’ll typically earn more than those less happy than you. If…