If you're new here, this blog will give you the tools to become financially independent in 5 years on a median salary. The wiki page gives a good summary of the principles of the strategy. The key to success is to run your personal finances much like a business, thinking about assets and inventory and focusing on efficiency and value for money. Not just any business but a business that's flexible, agile, and adaptable. Conversely most consumers run their personal finances like an inflexible money-losing anti-business always in danger of losing their jobs.
Here's almost a thousand online journals from people, who are following the ERE strategy tailored to their particular situation (age, children, location, education, goals, ...). Increasing their savings from the usual 5-15% of their income to tens of thousands of dollars each year or typically 40-80% of their income, many accumulate six-figure net-worths within a few years.
Since everybody's situation is different (age, education, location, children, goals, ...) I suggest only spending a brief moment on this blog, which can be thought of as my personal journal, before looking for the crowd's wisdom for your particular situation in the forum journals.
If you enjoy the blog, also consider the book which is much better organized and more complete. You can read the first chapter for free, listen to the preamble, or see the reviews (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,Z). Subscribe to the blog via email or RSS. Get updates on the facebook page, join the forums, and look for tactics on the ERE wiki. Here's a list of all the ERE blog posts.
Once upon a time I realized that limited edition graduate texts in myField might go out of print some day and I decided to establish my own “little” library by buying them before they went out of print. In retrospect this was stupid. The reason is that graduate level texts are generally only useful while one is actually on the graduate level. After that most information is acquired from published papers. This even goes for the graduate textbooks which also reference papers. Another problem is that the information slowly gets outdated. It is rare that some information will turn out to be wrong, except when a famous researcher refuses to let go of his pet theory and invents steadily more elaborate patched to fit his old theory to reality, yet the textbooks will obviously and inevitably contain outdated information.
Therefore I have started listing my books on amazon. Surprisingly, many of them sell for quite a bit of money. After all, they’re not part of those double digit edition text books that make a select number of professors very rich and a huge number of students fairly poor(*).
(*) One suggestion to college students is to buy textbooks used 1 or 2 editions back. They typically cost less than $5 compared to the new price of ~$100. And if some book is in its 12th edition you can bet that the incremental changes are very small at this point.
Now the question is whether to also sell those proceedings where I actually got a paper of my own in – oh the nostalgia. I suppose I could always check it out from a library should I feel so inclined.
Originally posted 2008-07-29 16:11:48.
