September 2008 - Page 6 of 6

Ignore the Hype, Do What Works

Posted on September 2, 2008 - 1:42 pm by Team Dinks

Like our tagline says, we sometimes rant a bit on our blog. Well, today’s posting is a bit of a rant. Specifically, one major complaint we have is that much of the content on the personal finance blogsphere isn’t helpful for building wealth.

For our part, my wife and I have set the goal of having networth of $4,000,000 by the time we retire. Accounting for inflation that means we should worth about a million in today’s dollars.
This also means that we are focused on getting rich. Unless you want to eat overcooked spaghetti out of a styrofoam bowl at your local senior center during your retirement, you’ll do the same. To cut through a lot of the nonsense that out there, we’ve concluded it pays to say focused on tried and true methods of wealth building.

1) Live Below Your Means:

If you spend more than you’ll earn, you’ll dig yourself into a spending hole. This makes it tougher to build wealth. DON’T SPEND MORE THAN YOU EARN. Any expert you talk to will you tell you this. The math is super simple. If you have 10 dollars and you spend $11, then you’ll end up in debt and you’ll have to cough up the cash to pay the interest on the debt. If you have 10 dollars and spend $9, then you’ll have a dollar left over. This dollar will be earning interest for you and putting money in your pocket. It’s that simple. I can’t say this enough: DON’T SPEND MORE THAN YOU EARN.

2) Save and Invest Prudently:

Saving is old fashioned, but it works. For example, Miel and I saved $30,000 and used it for the down payment for our apartment, we also saved $17,000 for our wedding. No credit cards or borrowing was involved. We scraped up the money the old fashioned way. Now we have the benefits of being married and living in a great apartment without the debt hangover.

Regarding investing: Buy real estate and shares in quality companies. Both of these have worked for us. In fact, we’ve made maybe $80,000 by investing prudently. Click here for the info on our investment property and here for skinny on our investment in Hansen’s.

Ignore the hype, do what works.

Best,

James

It’s just Stuff

Posted on September 1, 2008 - 7:33 am by Team Dinks

There is a point in most people’s lives when we realize that this is our life. There is no waiting for life to begin.

This conversation came up the other day with other transient expats who are well into their thirties, and beyond, and still aren’t established in the customary ways of houses, furniture, spouses, kids, etc.

I guess there are two main things that this conversation made me consider:

1) You are more than just your stuff. While having worldly goods can be nice, don’t let them dictate your life. It’s just stuff after all.

2) Just because you don’t have roots doesn’t mean that your life hasn’t begun yet. Life where you are and don’t worry about the customary stuff that life is made of. Stuff can come and go, but to quote the Beatles, life is what happens when you’re busy doing other things.

James & I have been together in DC for nearly five years now. While we have our own place, our belongings are still rather transient. After pricing things on my move out to DC, we determined that we’d be much better off to furnish our place with more temporary goods and sell it all when we eventually leave DC. Thus, if we moved from DC now, we’d be selling about 90% of what we currently own.

This has been very liberating in some ways, not to be tied to stuff in how to get it from here to there. There also comes a point when you realize that eventually we’ll actually have to start to accumulate real stuff and move past Target and Craiglist home furnishings.

Right now I have a large, as in 2,000 pounds, shipping allowance when I leave Kabul. Considering that we couldn’t possibly fit 2,000 lbs of stuff in our condo, I question how much of this I should use. I think in the end it will likely be a couple of Afghan carpets and perhaps some Nooristani furniture.

Even with a huge shipping allowance I still get hung up on not wanting too much stuff in my life, so we’ll see what I actually end up buying.

Cheers,

Miel

Monthly Archives: September 2008

Ignore the Hype, Do What Works

It’s just Stuff

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