Notes

Part 0: Before we really get started

These are my notes and recommendations for inspiring videos, informational blogs, podcasts and books about making your own choices, deciding what is enough, why money does make you happy and how you can save money.

Video link to clip from the Matrix: the choice between the red pill and the blue pill.

If you take the red pill I’ll show you that it’s much easier than you think, to create enough Fuck You Money and do the things you think are important and really want.

Online resource

For further deepening your knowledge or understanding and for discussions about relevant FYM and FIRE topics, I refer to:

https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/

It is on this platform that you can see different opinions or get reactions from like-minded people. There is not one correct answer to most questions and there is usually not one best choice. The diversity of the members guarantees that you will be further inspired and have more information so that you can make your own choices and decisions.

Part 1: Why

Chapter 1: Why Fuck You Money

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

Steve Jobs gave a speech to graduating students at Stanford University in 2005 with beautiful, powerful and wise words. He talks about ‘dropping out’ of the system, and ‘dropping in’ in what you like and what you choose. He talks about karma, gut feeling, destiny, leaving the beaten path and doing what you love.

Chapter 2 Why less bullshit

Bullshit en bullshitjobs

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It

While reading the book Bullshit jobs I had to think about how many of the things we buy in our lives are to a large extent bullshit.

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about coffee

Chapter 3 Why FIRE

What is X/Y not?

What is X/Y not? Two travelling Canadians, a ukulele, a cat & a hammock.

We met Jenna and Matt in Ecuador. They live in Canada and have been working as teachers for five years. During these five years they save more than enough to travel for a year and do everything on their bucket list. With the X/Y leave you can take different numbers of years off. For example, work four years and take the fifth free (4 over 5).

The Latte Factor

David Bach & John David Mann, The Latte Factor: Why You Don’t Have to Be Rich to Live Rich

The idea of the Latte Factor is that if you decide not to buy that one expensive coffee five days a week for a year and save the money at a 5% compound interest, you will have saved more than $ 1300 after a year. Only by not drinking that one coffee a day.

It’s not about that coffee. The Latte Factor is a metaphor. It can be anything you spend extra money on, which you could miss without too much trouble. It’s about giving up something small to achieve something big.

Your Money or Your Life

Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence (2008).

In the book Your Money or Your Life Vicki Robin describes that Financial Independent Thinking (FI-thinking) is one of the keys to defining your roadmap for your new life or desired lifestyle.

Chapter 4 Why money brings happiness

Top Five Regrets of the Dying

Bronnie Ware, Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing (2019)

Bronnie Ware has written touching and inspiring words about this during her work as a palliative nurse. She cared for and supervised dying patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their revelations in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which attracted so much attention that she wrote down her observations in a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

How much is Enough

Robert en Edward Skidelski, How Much is Enough? (2013)

A good life is a life in which you know when ‘good enough’ is good enough and in which you are ‘time-rich’. There is social pressure on the perception of what is enough. According to Robert and Edward, ‘enough’ is what we need for a good life and not ‘more, bigger, more expensive, better’.

In 1930 the great economist Keynes predicted that, over the next century, income would rise steadily, people’s basic needs would be met and no one would have to work more than fifteen hours a week. Why was he wrong? Robert and Edward Skidelsky argue that wealth is not – or should not be – an end in itself, but a means to ‘the good life’. Tracing the concept from Aristotle to the present, they show how far modern life has strayed from that ideal. They reject the idea that there is any single measure of human progress, whether GDP or ‘happiness’, and instead describe the seven elements which, they argue, make up the good life, and the policies that could realize them. 

Good to Great

Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t

 In Jim Collins’ hedgehog model it is about finding the overlapping area in the three circles of ‘what am I passionate about?’, ‘what can I be the best at? ‘ and ‘what can I make money with?’. It’s about self-knowledge in these three areas, translated into a simple concept that you can apply as a reference for your decisions.

The hedgehog model teaches you the discipline to say ‘No, thank you’ or ‘Fuck You!’ to possibilities that are not in your ‘sweet spot’ and ‘Hell Yeah!’ to everything that is into your sweet spot.

Ikigai

Hector Garcia en Francesc Miralles, Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life (2017)

The mysterious word ikigai roughly translates as ‘the happiness of always being busy’. According to the Japanese, everyone has an ikigai, which a French philosopher calls a ‘raison d’être’. Ikigai is also called ‘your reason for jumping out of bed every morning’.

Start with why video

Start with why — how great leaders inspire action | Simon Sinek | TEDxPugetSound

Start with why book

Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2011)

“It starts with why,” says Simon Sinek. It is about becoming aware of your necessity, ambition, wish, your dream. This means finding out what your ‘Why’ is.

Because in business it doesn’t matter what you do, it matters why you do it. Steve Jobs, the Wright brothers and Martin Luther King have one thing in common: they STARTED WITH WHY. This book is for anyone who wants to inspire others, or to be inspired.

Chapter 5 Why do you want to create FYM?

JFK Moon Speech

JFK’s inspiring speech in which he expresses his ambition to go to the moon. Must watch!

Part 2: What

Chapter 6 Designing your own life and lifestyle

Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (2007)

Often what we think will make us happy does not make us happy. Are there simple optimizations that can have a dramatic impact
on your ability to get closer to optimizing for happiness,
instead of succumbing to internal or external pressure
to stay on this treadmill of overconsumption?”

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (2007)

Bringing to life scientific research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics, this bestselling book reveals what scientists have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, and about our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there. 

The Art of Thinking Clearly

Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly (2013) 

In the book ‘The Art of Thinking Clearly’ Rolf Dobelli describes in a fun way a list of 99 thinking errors or cases of irrationality he compiled. It’s about not thinking clearly, or what experts call a ‘cognitive error’, a systematic deviation from logic

Rolf Dobelli, The Art of the Good Life: 52 Surprising Shortcuts to Happiness, Wealth, and Success

The Art of the Good Life is from the same author. He has synthesized the leading thinkers and the latest science in happiness to find the best shortcuts to satisfaction in The Art of the Good Life.

Since antiquity, people have been asking themselves what it means to live a good life. How should I live? What constitutes a good life? What’s the role of fate? What’s the role of money? Is leading a good life a question of mindset, or is it more about reaching your goals? Is it better to actively seek happiness or to avoid unhappiness?

Each generation poses these questions anew, and somehow the answers are always fundamentally disappointing. Why? Because we’re constantly searching for a single principle, a single tenet, a single rule. Yet this holy grail–a single, simple path to happiness–doesn’t exist. Rolf Dobelli — successful businessman, founder of the TED-style ideas conference Zurich Minds, bestselling author, and all-around seeker of big ideas–has made finding a shortcut to happiness his life’s mission.

The Art of the Good Life is a toolkit designed for practical living. Here you’ll find fifty-two happiness hacks — from guilt-free shunning of technology to gleefully paying your parking tickets — that are certain to optimize your happiness. These tips may not guarantee you a good life, but they’ll give you a better chance (and that’s all any of us can ask for).

Choose Life

Choose Life – Trainspotting – Movie CLIP (1996)

Chapter 7 Four parts of your FYM and FIRE strategy

Chapter 8 What is Fuck You Money

The 4 Hour Workweek

Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (2009)

“a series of meaningful respites throughout your life in which you take a break from your career, rather than taking one final retirement at the end.”

Tim Ferriss about mini-retirements

The power of time off

Why you should think about financial independence and mini-retirements

Why you should think about financial independence and mini-retirements | Lacey Filipich | TEDxUWA

Chapter 9 What is FIRE: Financially Independent Retire Early

Your Money or Your Life

Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence (2008)

Founders of the idea to combine a lifestyle of simple living with investment income to become Financial Independence and reach early retirement, or FIRE: Financial Independence Retire Early.

Early Retirement Extreme

Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A Philosophical and Practical Guide to Financial Independence (2010) 

Mr Money Moustache blog

Mr. Money Moustache’s blog has awakened interest in FIRE among many people since 2011, especially in America, and has helped popularize and grow the FIRE movement.

Or listen to this podcast in which Mr. Money Mustache takes on Tim Ferriss and lifestyle design, reviewing The Four Hour Work Week and more.

Nomad numbers blog

On the blog of a Nomadic FIRE couple, they explain how to get a multi-year resident visa in Taiwan: the Taiwan Employment Gold Card.

FIRE calculators

Calculate yourself

Part 3: How

Chapter 10 How to do it

Good to Great

Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t

I apply some lessons from Jim Collins’ book From Good to Great to our journey and our search for more freedom and Financial Independence.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (2010)

We all have our dreams and ambitions and we all want to succeed. One of the paths to success is to identify ‘habits’ that can help us on our journey.

‘It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder to success only to discover that it’s leaning against the wrong wall.’

Stephen Covey

Tiny Habits

BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits – The Small Changes That Change Everything (2019).

The essence of Tiny Habits is: take a behavior you aspire to, make it small, find where it naturally fits into your life and cherish its growth. If you want to create change in the long run, it’s best to start small.

Chapter 11 Get: Make Money

Chapter 12 Keep: Save

The Year of Less

Cait Flanders, The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store.

In the book The Year of Less, Cait Flanders describes how, with a debt of $30,000, she challenges herself not to shop and to learn how to feel good again without the distractions of consumerism.

Online calculators

The message of the magic of compound interest is twofold:

• Start saving as soon as possible and save as long as possible by
• Deposit money regularly

Interest on interest

On the Tools page you will find a compound interest example worksheet with interest on interest, or compound interest.

Expenses

On the Tools page you will find an expense sheet in which you can track releases and a release tracker file in which you can analyze releases.

The Latte Factor

David Bach & John David Mann, The Latte Factor – Why You Don’t Have to Be Rich to Live Rich (2019)

As described in the book the Latte Factor and as we have seen earlier about the magical effect of compound interest, even a seemingly small saving yields a lot. The difference between paying US$50 per month and US$6 per month for a phone and putting that in a saving or investment account at 5% return during the 24 month contract period will eventually save you US$1,000. If you save this every 24 months, you save US$6,700 of FYM in 10 years and more than US$18,000 in 20 years.

Find the latte factor example calculations on the tools page.

enough

Patrick Rhone, enough (2016)

The problem is that you don’t necessarily have control about how you can earn more. What you do have control over is spending less’.

Patrick Rhone, author of the book ‘enough’

All Your Worth

Elizabeth Warren, All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan (2005)

Elizabeth Warren, a former professor at Harvard, invented the 50-30-20 rule for budgeting and wrote a book about it in 2005.

Excel For Dummies

Microsoft Excel 2019 for Dummies, Greg Harvey

Microsoft Excel VBA for Dummies, Michael Alexander

Chapter 13 Grow: How do I grow my money

The Art of Thinking Clearly

Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly (2013) 

There exist at least 99 thinking errors, or systematic deviations from logic, and from optimal, rational, reasonable thinking and behavior. See again the book ‘The Art of Thinking Clearly’ by Rolf Dobelli

The Art of Thinking Clearly by world-class thinker and entrepreneur Rolf Dobelli is an eye-opening look at human psychology and reasoning — essential reading for anyone who wants to avoid “cognitive errors” and make better choices in all aspects of their lives.

More information about ETFs

Find more information about the available ETFs and respective costs in your country. For example the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Fund Analyzer offers information and analysis on over 18,000 mutual funds, exchange traded funds (ETFs) and exchange traded notes (ETNs). This tool estimates the value of the funds and impact of fees and expenses on your investment and also allows you the ability to look up applicable fees and available discounts for funds: https://tools.finra.org/fund_analyzer/

For the Dutch the VEB has a nice portal at https://www.veb.net/etf-portal with options to help you choose. In the overview of you can see what the costs are and you can sort on costs and returns.

On the MSCI website, overviews are available of all parts of the indexes with all weights up to six decimal places. MSCI website with the index constituents: https://www.msci.com/constituents

The Moment of Lift

Melinda Gates,The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World (2019)

I strongly believe in the social usefulness of micro-finance in developing countries. A small investment, i.e. a relatively small amount of money for someone from a developed country, can make the difference for an entrepreneur in a developing country. Melinda Gates writes about this in an inspiring way.

‘The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you‘ll go.’

Dr. Seuss, een Amerikaans kinderboekenschrijver, dichter, en tekenaar.