Early Retirement Extreme

— a combination of simple living, anticonsumerism, DIY ethics, self-reliance, resilience, and applied capitalism

The problem with the economic stimulus package and what to do about it

Published in August 20th, 2012
Posted by in Finance, Strategy
15 Comments

Update: The following post was written back in 2008, but I think it’s still equally valid. Towards the bottom of the post, I made some suggestions of buying housing, financials, discretionary consumer companies. In retrospect, this turned out to have been the right call (as long as you bought the strongest companies) for the first […]

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Are budgets required or just a good idea?

Published in August 20th, 2012
Posted by in Finance, How to
44 Comments

I have a confession. I don’t have a budget. In fact I never had one. It is my opinion that a dedicated focus on decreasing expenditures at every point excludes the need for a budget. Here’s how I understand budgets. Budgets are a way of allocating income to different accounts e.g. the food-account, the rent/mortgage-account, […]

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Why 99% of savers should avoid the stock market

Published in August 20th, 2012
Posted by in Finance
53 Comments

Over the past several decades, the stock market has become an enormously popular vehicle for retirement savings. I rest my case. Okay, you want more detail. First consider the graph in this link. You will note that during most of the past century, stocks have traded with P/E’s between 5 and 25 although it would […]

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