How to downsize your kitchen

Published in January 31st, 2008

Posted by Jacob in cooking, ecological footprint, household, standard of living

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Step one: Figure out what you need
When I was single, I eventually figured out exactly what I needed (see my minimalist kitchen post for details) to cook my food). Since getting married it is clear that those needs have [...]

How to be happy in the long run

Published in January 30th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in financial security, household, investments, job, motivation, personal finance, standard of living

18 Comments

The following is a list of the things I’ve learned during my first 30 years about how to live a good life.
Take it for what it’s worth.
1) Decide what your priorities are
Your main priorities are your health, food, shelter, and who/if you marry in that order.
Your other priorities are your children, your friends and your [...]

Optimizing blogging with S-curves

Published in January 29th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in blogging, compound interest

3 Comments

Blogging has no threshold to get started. There is no need for a degree to apply, nor is advancement determined by “unionized” seniority. This means that there is little initial investment needed to get started in terms of time and money. In fact, it is possible to start a new blog right here right now [...]

My emergency fund (transfer) in action

Published in January 28th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in budgeting, financial security

8 Comments

Today I went to my new dentist for the first time. I was pleasantly surprised since they did not seem to have a ton of fancy gadgets in their clinic. This generally means that they don’t have huge debts to pay off which should make customers pay less. Not me though, apparently a filling that [...]

Is your stuff holding you back?

Published in January 28th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in anticonsumerism, culture, ecological footprint

8 Comments

“Are your sofa and TV your best friends? You could change that. … . You can break free from the clutches of society and live well on a very modest amount of money if you simply give up most of the junk most of us cart around.”
A quote from How to [...]

The inexpensive home gym - part 2

Published in January 27th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in fitness, voluntary simplicity

No Comments

First a note on safety! When ordinary people starts telling me that what I’m doing looks “unsafe”, I just know that I am doing the right thing . Forsooth, something is only unsafe if you don’t know what you are doing. Actually, from a risk management perspective, I think it is less safe to [...]

This weeks round up - heating costs are down

Published in January 26th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in announcements, carnival, cost of living

No Comments

The heating strategy we recently implemented decreased the utility bill by $30 compared to last month. This is promising. Not only did we not use this strategy for the full month. It has also been significantly colder this month outside - as well as inside .
I was half fearing that the space heater [...]

Cash flow diagrams for the poor, the middle class, and the investor class

Published in January 26th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in assets, compound interest, debt, expenses, financial independence, financial security, investments, money, personal finance

16 Comments

Being poor or unable to get credit 100% of the expenses must be covered with wage income. Schematically the cash flow looks like this

Thus you put your time into your work which gives you a wage income that is used to pay for stuff that goes back to you.People with a credit score can go [...]

Better goal setting with S-curves

Published in January 25th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in compound interest, job, motivation, rat race

2 Comments

One popular psychological strategy is to set small goals or start slowly. This strategy usually fails from the lack of meaningful progress despite having achieved several small goals(*). There is a good reason for this. The S-curve or logistic function is a useful model for understanding why this strategy rarely brings the intended results.

DW was [...]

Wealth is not about the money

Published in January 24th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in economy, financial independence

3 Comments

In the past few weeks I have written a lot about about wealth and how I became financially independent (part I, part II, part III, part IV). One of my posts, Stranger in a Strange Land, elicited a response from Lily over at The Honest Dollar. Of course I had to write my own response [...]

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