We are a community of contrarians that embrace the art of "Financial Sustainability". FS is an alternative to Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) and focuses on a whole life approach to becoming and maintaining your financial and personal independence in a debt enslaved western world. If you are sick of always working, never getting ahead and knowing that there has to be a better way for you and your family, this is where you will get the answers and motiviation to change it all. Read our Philosophy and our Articles to get started.
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I am returning from a 3 week trip to my home in Australia. I was born there, spent the first 25 years of my life there, then the next 30 years in USA. Each year I go back to South Australia to see family. As much as I love my home city of Adelaide, I’m saddened by what I see going on there and the liquidation of so much of the culture by selling it out to the highest bidder. This is the story of how a city can go from utopia to constrained in a relatively short time frame.
It is Q3 2019 as I write this, and all I am seeing on the news media is the word “Recession” thrown around in abandon on all the financial news channels. This is the new “clickbait” to try and scare people into watching their shows. But here’s a completely contrarian view of the topic that might give you a positive view and why I LOVE recessions
First, I’m not a fan of buying anything you don’t need. I’m also not a fan of supporting Big Tech and their ambitions to take over the world. There are, however, some battles we can’t win, so why not find a way to live with this dystopia, but financially benefit? Well here is one way you can do that.
There are many theoretical approaches to retirement funding. If you ask a 50-60 year old their strategy, you will get a very different answer than to ask a 30 year old FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) person about their strategy. Much has to do with willingness to take on risk. I investigate these different approaches and why both are fundamentally flawed and present a simple answer that I have used successfully.
I have just returned from 3 weeks in Mexico, and spent a week in the town of San Miguel de Allende, meeting with expats who have chosen a life outside of the USA & Canada. When you see your daily life from the outside, looking in, you get a perspective that is quite frightening. Let’s talk about the expat phenomenon and what drives someone to leave the country of their birth, in search of greener pastures.
History has a nasty habit of repeating itself. And the current red flags in the USA have an eerie similarity to the build up to revolution in Mexico of the pre-1910 era. If you knew next week’s lottery numbers, you could be an instant multi-millionaire, so let’s use that trick to try and speculate on how things might go, and how you could play this to your advantage.
According to Nielsen ratings in 2017, the average American family spent 7 hours and 50 minutes per day watching TV. And what did that average American family get for selling nearly 8 hours a day of their time to the square screen? A mass state of hypnosis that has carved out social norms that are far from normal, far from healthy, far from financially beneficial and far from unconstrained.
Given the choice of going to school or surfing, if you live near the ocean it is a pretty easy one to make. But has anyone ever told you that surfing is really the best education you can have?