A post was merged into an existing topic: On the importance of reading
Another insanely interesting project I’ve found some time ago:
It’s an organization that advises on career options to improve the world. It’s generally inspired by the Effective Altruism movement.
They have also a very interesting blog that writes about these concepts. One of the last posts summarizes research about how quitting job or relationship (that we’re unsure about) on average improves happiness:
“The causal effect of quitting a job is estimated to be a gain of 5.2 happiness points out of 10, and breaking up as a gain of 2.7 out of 10! This is the kind of welfare jump you might expect if you moved from one of the least happiness countries in the world to one of the happiest, though presumably these effects would fade over time.”
Yet another reason to (eventually) quit my career.
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My new favorite podcasts: Joe Rogan Experience. The guy makes excellent interviews mostly about nutrition and exercise, and a bunch of other topics. I’ve stumbled upon one of his interviews about motivation (with motivational music in background) and it might look silly, but I find it really powerful stuff.
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Excellent article about happiness from the minimalists:
- Make little changes in your daily routine, such as getting more sleep, exercising, getting out into nature, and meditating.
- Read more books. Read books to learn—research suggests that lifelong learners remain healthy and engaged, and live long lives. Read books as an escape from your everyday life, Read books—it will make you happy.
- Find your right fit or match, both personally and professionally. If you love what you do and who you are with, you’ll position yourself for personal happiness and professional success.
- Be grateful. Sanderson suggested two specific activities to help foster a greater sense of gratitude. First, keep a daily gratitude journal. Second, pay a “gratitude visit” to someone from your past who has had a significant impact on your life, and let them know how you feel.
- Smile more—even if you don’t feel like it. Research shows that the simple act of smiling can trick your brain into a happier state.
- Relish simple, everyday moments. Appreciating life’s small moments, such as a beautiful, sunny day, green shoots sprouting from the ground, and skipping rocks at the beach, teaches you to be more grateful for what you have, especially during moments of stress and angst.
- Perform random acts of kindness. Do good deeds. Volunteer. Be charitable. Shop (for someone else!). Numerous studies have shown that you can help yourself by doing good for others.
- Spend money on experiences versus things. Studies have shown that buying an object—a car, handbag, or kitchen gadget—can quickly lead to buyer’s remorse. On the other hand, investing in experiences—a concert, a camping trip, music lessons—leads to greater happiness. Experiences create “happiness residue,” and our perceptions of them often get better over time.
- Avoid comparisons. Whatever you may think of someone else’s life, particularly as viewed through the phony, filtered lens of social media, it’s almost certainly messier than you imagine. It’s easier to embrace, and learn to love, your own imperfections, if you don’t conjure up myths about how perfect everyone else’s lives seem.
- Build and maintain close relationships. According to Sanderson, having a small number of tight, meaningful relationships is one of the highest predictor of happiness.
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Not quite my taste of motivational video, for me something between Saw and Predator, but OK… wait I mean good of course, GOOD!
Attached is my inspiration:
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Hello Ladies & Gents,
Time to update my budget. A typical month these days for my family (a couple with a one-year-old baby) is like that:
Total Expenses 3901.05
Living 1550
- Rent 1480 – This will go to about 2300-2500 next year, as I’ll have to change my apartment
- Electricity / Gas / Water 35
- Internet 35
Household 1018.7
- Groceries 745 – this includes food for guests + non-groceries that I was too lazy to split the bills
- Cosmetics 0 – Already in groceries
- Household articles 101.9 – I think we stuffed up the cleaning stuff
- Equipment / Furnitures 0
- Baby stuff 159.75 – this grows with age
(+ some stuff is already in groceries)
- Household Miscellaneous 12.05
Personal 382.2
- Clothing 73 – I usually buy clothes second-hand and on sales in Poland
- Snacks & Drinks 76.4 – my goal is to get this one to zero (for sake of money and health)
- Restaurants / Bars 61 – my goal is to get this one to zero (except when I have guests)
- Gifts 51.3
- Mobile (wife) 0 – my wife has a Lyca prepaid and rarely is using it
- Mobile (me) 30 – I have CoopMobile prepaid and this is top-up for about 2-3 months
- Education 85.5 – German learning on Skype - normally, this one is bigger (~150-200 CHF)
Vacation 132
- Vacation/Trips 132 – I normally try to visit some new place at least once a month
Health 484.65
- Health Insurance 478.45 – for me, my wife and my son (at CSS)
- Drugs 6.2
Traffic 323.5
- Public transport tickets 117.8 – I started commuting twice a week to work by train
- Car/Insurance/Taxes/Maintaince 0
- Traffic fines 0
- Fuel 85.7 – I did ~800 km with that
- Other Parking 12 – this is what I pay on parking houses when visit Luzern/Zurich
- Home Parking 108 – this is the cheapest parking lot I have found in Zug (ridiculous)
Leisure, sport & hobby 0 (Thank you libgen.io)
Taxes 0 (Thank you Zug!)
Additionally to this list, I have few annual costs:
- Car insurance ~500
- Household insurance ~500
- PostFinance credit card 40
- Vacations ~1000
- Christmas/Easter trip to Poland (including gifts) ~1000 (2 * 500)
- Winter sports trips ~300 (2 * 150)
- Non-planned expenses ~1000
=== So this translates into average 362 CHF/month
I’ll sum up the entire 2018 at the end of the year with monthly + annual expenses. I think it will be about 3900-4200 CHF/month (46800-50400 CHF/year). My target is < 4000 CHF/month (< 48000 CHF/year)
Please let me know if you can spot some space for optimisations or if you have any recommendations.
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I’m curious about “clothing”. do you really spend that much every single month?
No, not really, I don’t like buying clothes. I only buy when my wife is threatening that she will kill me if I won’t buy new stuff. So I prefer to buy a bulk of them once per few months.
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You could avoid this cost either with a Cumulus credit card or with the alternative of Coop, the Supercard credit card.
Overall, you did a great job with reducing costs, that is a pretty frugal budget, congrats! 
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I tried this, but they sent me back some letter in German and I was too lazy to translate it. I’ll give it another shot next weekend. 
Thanks! It cost me a lot of work on my habits. I used to spend much more just on myself when I was single than now when I support my family.
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Since man doesn’t live only with savings and investing, I’m trying to share interesting life improvement and personal developments bits and pieces that align nicely with Mustachian personal philosophy here. One of my new discovery is how nutrition, sports, and meditation is important for health and well-being. For the first one, I cut out all sugar in my life; for the second I started using Freeletics app and for the third one, I’ve just discovered a pure gold - Headspace.
I already wrote about how ultimate solution to whatever problem you’re facing is turning action into a habit. So this one applies also to the diet, sport, and meditation I started practicing. Sports is definitely the hardest one - I’m struggling a lot with it.
The fight continues though.
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I love the Diet Doctor website. It has such cool pictures of foods and everything is explained plainly. I’ve already seen some videos of dr Jason Fung on YouTube. Did you really manage to cut all carbs, or only sugar? Did you achieve ketosis? Do you have the blood meter?
What I find fishy about the keto diet is that you’re not allowed to eat many fruit. Fruit is treated almost on par with candy bars. I always thought bananas are healthy and nutritious, and then they tell you that bananas have 15-20 grams of fructose per 100g!
I really wonder how they make the Diet Doctor business profitable. The website is really professional and the team is big. All advice there is provided free of charge. How do they make money?
Regarding diet, I don’t have any problem with obesity. I rather have some stomach (repeating heartburn) and colon problems. I have no idea what is causing these problems, and doctors only gave me pills which didn’t help. Also, I don’t like being addicted to sugar.
I really liked the presentation of an Australian dr Paul Mason about the science behind low carb diet. I strongly recommend it. If you know most of these things, then as a refreshment.
His other presentation I found more controversial. He advocates cutting out fiber from your diet in order to break the diarrhoea/constipation cycle. He says that fiber causes inflammatory state in your gut.
@1000000CHF did you read anywhere about this recommendation? Because it’s contrary to popular belief, that you should have a fiber-rich diet for proper functioning of the colon…
I started ketogenic (after reading Gary Taubes’s book), but the more I started reading and discussing this with my smart friends, the more I drifted towards more mainstream low-carb diet (I try to eat mostly veggies, fish, eggs, nuts, fat dairy, poultry and non-sweet fruits). I try also to limit the red meat in general and processed red meat especially (cold cuts, sausages, smoked meat), because there’s high probability it’s causing cancer (of course not as high as tobacco and alcohol, but still). So, yeah, I’m trying now to keep my blood sugar low, while eating more mainstream diet (I’m not that obsessed with not eating pasta, wholegrain bread and this kind of complex carbs anymore).
Is FIRE demotivating you to work?
I realised I made a strategic error with FIRE. I convinced myself that my job is boring and I can do many other more exciting things after FIRE. This made me more miserable and frustrated with my job and my career than it has to be. I lost my motivation, enthusiasm and joy at work, and I stopped thinking about improving my career. This is really bad because I’ll stay with this career for at least next 10-15 years (until FIRE). Now, I’m trying to rebuild my focus and motivation on my career to make the way more pleasant and think less about post-FIRE plans, so that it doesn’t distract me from my current life.
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I have definitely become less motivated. But not just because of FIRE. When I started my career in Poland I was in awe of managers at high positions and as frustrated at how I will probably never be able to reach this position. Then I moved to Switzerland and got a Polish manager salary off the bat. Then I moved to freelancing and I don’t need to climb any higher. With the current income I should achieve FIRE in 4 years, by the end of 2022.
So I’ve stopped to develop my skills, I just do my job in my niche and can’t be bothered to try anything else, because if everything goes right, pretty soon it will not matter.
I still haven’t figured out what I’m gonna do afterwards. I can’t really think of any job that I would do for free. My current job gives me eye sore and back pains, so when I can, I will greatly reduce. Also, if I leave Switzerland and go to, say, Poland, the salaries there will probably not convince me to pick up any work. And to top it off, I’m not sure what am I gonna do with all that free time on my hands. Right now I have some weekends where I have no idea what I should do. I hope there will always be some new exciting place to visit.
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I’m totally in a similar situation. I think I’d have to become a team leader or a software architect or move to Google to earn more than my current salary. And since money doesn’t motivate me (that much) anymore, I don’t feel the drive to move to any of these things. (I’m considering applying to Google though, but that would require me to invest a lot into learning programming, data structures, algorithms, and theoretical stuff, that I’m not so interested in.) On the other hand, I need to find some source of motivation, because otherwise, the frustration with my career will be growing with each day. I’m already incredibly bored, demotivated and frustrated.
Wow, man, you must be earning tons of money if you are able to retire in Switzerland in 4 years. I consider my FIRE target in Switzerland to be minimum ~1M CHF, and that will take me ~10-12 years with my current portfolio and my 50% savings rate (if I’m lucky).
I have actually too many ideas and I’m constantly short on time. I assume that post-FIRE, I’ll allocate 50% of my time to family activities (teaching/learning, traveling and playing with my son) and 50% to work/hobbies/experimenting. I think that I’ll be looking for something that gives me a deeper sense of meaning and purpose - maybe it will be running an organization that somehow helps people (for example, cheap personal finance advice), or maybe it will be something else. I have to experiment and test a lot of different things to find something that will keep me going because money and career won’t be these things.
It’s actually quite terrifying perspective… What if I won’t find anything? What if I won’t have any motivation to get up in the morning and work hard on anything to end of my life? Will I be constantly bored with my life?
FIRE is liberating in many ways, but it’s also pushing a high psychological burden - you have to figure out a new script for life and find the motivation to execute it. Being a salary slave is in some sense comfortable psychologically - you don’t have to think about filling your time with purposeful and meaningful activities. It’s a weird paradox.
For me the perspective of FIRE in the next 10-25 years is pretty calming. I view my stash as opportunities that I accumulate religiously every month.
When something bad happens at work I tend to get less psychologically impacted than my peers and I do believe that my exit plan plays a role in my serenity.
Even though I know that I will FIRE in the future, I still want to learn eagerly as much as I can since for me knowledge leads to a higher performance which leads to a higher salary and thus this ultimately accelerates my FIRE.
Disclaimer: I entered the workforce for a bit more than a year ago and I am still pretty motivated. Let’s see what a couple of years working will do to my motivation 
You guys are probably older than me and went through additional life phases, which could easily explain this motivational gap.
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@1000000CHF your time horizon is more or less like mine (10-12 years based on current conditions) -> I think you have to look for another job (even in another field) to stay motivated, otherwise you won’t survive such a long time… 
I’m doing the same right now and will begin something different with the new year (this motivates me, even if it means staying at least 3 days a week in another canton, away from family…)
just my 2 cents ! 
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Thank you guys for your comments. Yesteday I thought a lot about this and I think I know what I’ll do. Since I’m planning to stick with IT until I’m FIRE, but I need some change, I’ll try to switch to programming. I’ll take an online JS full stack or Python data science bootcamp and look for a job where I can do both Linux system engineering and JS programming. I’ll see what I like more and either choose one path or try to keep doing both jobs.
On the other side, I’m going to continue learning finance (with Swiss Value Investing Club), languages (German, English, French), traveling (in Switzerland and Europe), and reading popular science books in a variety of topics (but especially - economics and psychology). On FIRE, I’ll dive deeper into these hobbies at the expense of IT/work stuff.
And above all - I need to focus on being a great dad and husband, which will occupy 90% of my time outside of work and sleep anyway. Family first, work & hobbies second - no matter whether I’m on FIRE or not.
BTW. Speaking of life priorities - here are two awesome videos on that topic: