Absolutely, makes sense. These days I’ll spend my additional 20% on taking care of my son and doing the household work, but evenetually I’m planning also to invest this time a bit into personal development - learning German and French, maybe study online Finance and/or Economics or do more open source software projects. This will be my first step towards FI-like life.
As far as I’m concerned I work 80% because I want my main hobby (music) to be at a certain level before I’m finally able to dedicate myself fully to it. Working 10+ years while doing little progress there, and end up with all this time overnight, would be totally counterproductive. When I was a student, I played so much during my free time, that I injured myself. It was dumb practice too. I think learning French and German need similar schedules.
One other thing I do is work five days a week but with shorter days. I think this has the same benefit as what I described earlier: I have less time, but I’m focused, which leads to better results. With Fridays off I could totally see myself sleep till 9 and not do much. The downside, though, is that I have very little energy left on weekends. Work + commutes + exercise + daily practice + chores is packed.
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Thanks for your comment @canyon. I have a pretty flexible job, so generally, I can choose how I’d like to organise my 80%. I guess I have three options:
- more vacations
- working 6h
- one day a week off
Working 6h a day didn’t make much sense to me because in the new job I’d lost these 2 additional hours on the commute, so I’d end up with the same number of hours outside of the home (6h work + 2h commute), as in the previous job when I worked 8h but just next to my home. So to really make use of that 20%, I had to decide whether I want more vacations during the year or one day off every week. It seems to me that 25 days of the standard holiday is enough during the year for me and I feel like I’d regenerate and re-energize more if I just work less during the week, but maybe I’ll change that in the future. We will see how it goes. 
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I would go for slowly shortening your current work load if really too unpleasant. There are many ways to FI and who knows, most likely you won’t just sit around, engage in wasteful money spending (FIRE-extinguishers) and wait for better things to come. I would bet that one day you really work FOR yourself and ON your dreams could actually shorten the journey to FI. Imagine you unlock new skills, tie new friendships and expand your network on that one day. Maybe you’ll learn more and can quit your job earlier than you ever hoped for and make your passion your main bread-earner. Just a thought. All the best!!!
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It’s not really unpleasant. In fact, I don’t know many people who are in so good positions as mine. There are two reasons why I want to work less - the first is that taking care of a small baby and working 8h is sucking up energy from me and the second is that I find my hobbies more exciting than my work and I want to grow and expand them. I just want to have more energy and time for different things - my family, friends and my hobbies.
That would be neat. It’s really great idea. In fact, I started thinking about pursuing a career in different fields (potentially it could be economics, finance, maybe cryptocurrencies). I definitely have to engage more into networking, because this is the best way to find good job or business opportunities. Thanks for the comment!
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Hey, I’ve collected a huge library of financial independence, personal finance and investing ebooks. I can share it with you, but I don’t want put a link to my personal Google Drive here, so if anybody is interested please send me a PM.
I’m planning to extend the library by adding positions on “good life”, like for example “Principles” by Ray Dallo. Do you have any other recommendations?
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Here’s the list of the e-books I have:
I. Early Retirement / Personal Finance
- Jacob Lund Fisker - Early Retirement Extreme
- Tony Robbins - MONEY Master the Game
- Timothy Ferriss - The 4-hour workweek
- Napoleon Hill - Think and Grow Rich!
- J. L. Collins - The Simple Path to Wealth
- Robert T. Kiyosaki - Rich dad, poor dad
- Thomas C. Corley - Rich Habits
- Thomas J. Stanley, William D. Danko - The Millionaire Next Door
- Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, Monique Tilford - Your Money Or Your Life
II. Passive Investing
- Charles Ellis - Winning the Loser’s Game
- Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, Michael LeBoeuf - The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing
- William Bernstein - The Four Pillars of Investing
- William Bernstein - The Intelligent Asset Allocator
- Burton G. Malkiel, Charles D. Ellis - The Elements of Investing
- Burton G. Malkiel - A Random Walk Down Wall Street
- Ben Carlson - A wealth of common sense
- John C. Bogle - The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
- William Bernstein - If You Can
III. Active Investing
- Benjamin Graham - The Intelligent Investor
- Edward O. Thorp - Beat the market
- Edward O. Thorp - A Man for All Markets
- Peter Lynch, John Rothchild - Learn to Earn
- Peter Lynch, John Rothchild - Beating the Street
- Peter Lynch, John Rothchild - One Up On Wall Street
IV. Economics / General Finance
- Robert J. Shiller - Irrational Exuberance
- Robert J. Shiller - Finance and the Good Society
- Andrew Wen-Chuan Lo - Adaptive markets
- Peter L. Bernstein - Against the Gods
- Peter L. Bernstein - Capital ideas
- Peter L. Bernstein - Economist on Wall Street
- Adam Smith - Supermoney
- George Soros, Paul A. Volcker - The Alchemy of Finance
- Philip A. Fisher - Paths to Wealth Through Common Stocks
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Black Swan
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Antifragile
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Fooled by Randomness
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes
V. Psychology and Human Behavior
- Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow
VI. History
- Charles Mackay, David J. Schneider - Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
VII. Wisdom and Good Life
- Viktor E. Frankl - Man’s Search for Meaning
- Ray Dalio - Principles
- Cal Newport - So good they can’t ignore you
- Cal Newport - Deep Work
- Harry Browne - How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World
Other
- Michael Lewis - Flash boys
- Michael Lewis - The Big Short
- Michael Lewis - Liar’s Poker
- Martin J. Whitman, Martin Shubik - The Aggressive Conservative Investor
- Henry Clews, Victor Niederhoffer - Fifty Years in Wall Street
- Michael E. Edleson, William J. Bernstein-Value Averaging
- Charles P. Kindleberger - Manias, Panics, and Crashes. A History of Financial Crises
- Guy Wyser - Pratte-Risk Arbitrage
- Kenneth Fisher - Super Stocks
- Ken Fisher, Lara Hoffmans - How to Smell a Rat
- Kenneth L. Fisher, Lara Hoffmans - Markets Never Forget (But People Do)
- Kenneth L. Fisher - The Little Book of Market Myths
- Ken Fisher, James J. Cramer, Jennifer Chou, Lara Hoffmans - The Only Three Questions That Count
- Ken Fisher - The Ten Roads to Riches
- Ken Fisher - 100 Minds That Made the Market
- Kenneth L. Fisher, Elisabeth Dellinger - Beat the Crowd
- Kenneth L. Fisher - Plan Your Prosperity
- Aaron Anderson - Own the World
- Benjamin Graham - Memoirs
- Charles P. Kindleberger - Economic Laws and Economic History
- Charles P. Kindleberger - World Economic Primacy 1500-1990
- Charles Kindleberger - A Financial History of Western Europe
- Richard A. Ferri - The ETF Book
- Richard A. Ferri - The Power of Passive Investing
- Richard A. Ferri - Protecting Your Wealth in Good Times and Bad
- Richard A. Ferri - All About Index Funds
- Richard A. Ferri - All About Asset Allocation
- Richard A. Ferri - Serious Money, Straight Talk About Investing for Retirement
- Patrick O’Shaughnessy - Millennial money
- Andrew Tobias - The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need
- Peter L. Bernstein - Against the Gods
- Barry Ritholtz - Bailout Nation
- Howard Marks - The most important thing
- Jack D. Schwager - Stock Market Wizards
- Jack D. Schwager, Joel Greenblatt - Market Sense and Nonsense
- Jack D. Schwager - The Little Book of Market Wizards
- Jack D. Schwager, Ed Seykota - Hedge Fund Market Wizards
- Jack D. Schwager - Market Wizards
- Jack D. Schwager - The New Market Wizards
- Jack Schwager - Guide To Winning With Automated Trading Systems
- Wesley R. Gray, Jack R. Vogel, David P. Foulke - DIY Financial Advisor
- Charles D. Ellis, James R. Vertin, Charles D. Ellis, James R. Vertin - The Investor’s Anthology
- Wesley R. Gray, Jack R. Vogel - Quantitative Momentum
- Wesley Gray, Tobias Carlisle - Quantitative Value
- Martin J. Whitman, Fernando Diz - Modern Security Analysis
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Dynamic Hedging
- Jim Gatheral, Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Volatility Surface
- Michael Pompian - Behavioral Finance and Wealth Management
- Martin J. Whitman, Fernando Diz - Distress Investing
- John C. Bogle, Alan S. Blinder - Don’t Count on It!
- Thomas J. Stanley, Cotter Smith - The millionaire mind
- Thomas J. Stanley - Millionaire Women Next Door
- Thomas J. Stanley - Stop Acting Rich …And Start Living Like A Real Millionaire
- Daniel C. Goldie, Gordon Murray - The Investment Answer
- Roger Gibson - Asset allocation
- Jeremy J. Siegel - Stocks for the Long Run
- John C. Bogle - Enough
- Charles T. Munger - Poor Charlie’s Almanack
- Roger Lowenstein - When Genius Failed
- Benjamin Graham, David Dodd - Security Analysis
- Joel Greenblatt - You Can Be a Stock Market Genius
- David Schneider - The 80_20 investor
- Larry E. Swedroe - The quest for alpha
- George S. Clason - The Richest Man in Babylon
- Daniel Kahneman - Attention and Effort
- Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, Amos Tversky - Judgment under Uncertainty
- Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky - Choices, Values, and Frames
- Burton G. Malkiel, Bruno Solnik, Thomas K. Philips, Richard M. Ennis, Ronald N. Kahn, Howard M. Crane, Mark P. Kritzman, John D. Freeman, Harold S. Bradley - Equity Portfolio Construction
- Charles Wheelan, Burton G. Malkiel - Naked Economics
- Edwin Lefevre - Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
- Edwin Lefevre - Wall Street Stories
- Philip A. Fisher, Kenneth L. Fisher - Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
- Jason Zweig - Benjamin Graham, Building a Profession
- Jason Zweig - The Devil’s Financial Dictionary
- Jason Zweig - The Little Book of Safe Money
- Jason Zweig - Your Money and Your Brain
- Joel Greenblatt - The Big Secret for the Small Investor
- John C. Bogle, Arthur Levitt Jr - The Clash of the Cultures
- Joel Greenblatt - The Little Book That Beats the Market
- Ben Stein, Phil DeMuth - The Little Book of Bulletproof Investing
- Christopher H. Browne, Roger Lowenstein - The Little Book of Value Investing
- John C. Bogle - The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
- George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller - Animal Spirits
- Lawrence Cunningham - How To Think Like Benjamin Graham and Invest Like Warren Buffett
- Warren Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham - The Buffett essays symposium
- Warren Buffett, Elena Chirkova - The Warren Buffett philosophy of investment
- Donald R. Keough, Warren Buffett - 10 Commandments for Business Failure
- Lawrence A. Cunningham - Berkshire Beyond Buffett
- Lawrence A. Cunningham - Contracts in the Real World
- Warren E. Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham - The Essays of Warren Buffett
- Warren Buffet - The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville
- Warren Buffett, Max Olson - Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders
- William J. Bernstein, Jonathan Clements - The Investor’s Manifesto
- William Bernstein - The Birth of Plenty
- William J. Bernstein - A Splendid Exchange
- John C. Bogle - Common Sense on Mutual Funds
- John C. Bogle, William T. Allen, Paul A. Volcker - John Bogle on Investing
- John C. Bogle, Arthur Levitt Jr - The Clash of the Cultures
- John C. Bogle - Enough
- John C. Bogle - The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
- John C. Bogle - The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
- John C. Bogle - Character Counts
- John C. Bogle, Alan S. Blinder - Don’t Count on It!
- James P. O’Shaughnessy - What Works on Wall Street
- James P. O’Shaughnessy - Predicting the Markets of Tomorrow
- James P. O’Shaughnessy - The New Rules for Investing Now
- Harry Browne, James Grant, Roger Lipton - How You Can Profit From The Coming Devaluation
- Harry Browne - The Secret of Selling Anything
- Harry Browne - Why Government Doesn’t Work
- Harry Browne, John Hathaway, Roger Lipton - You Can Profit From A Monetary Crisis
- Ray Dalio - How the economic machine works
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I cleaned up the list a bit if you want to update it.
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Very good initiative! Knowledge is power and indeed making knowledge accessible to forum members is of big importance.
What we could do to improve it further is a big wiki post, editable by all members, where anyone can add a book he recommends and explain succinctly why he loves this book so members do not feel lost in this huge list and have a feeling where to start.
Then, since most of all books are available anyway on libgen.io, make a big archive of all books in the thread and make it available to members on demand. I am willing to help if needed!
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I totally support the idea. These books changed my life indeed and I believe it’s worth spreading the knowledge.
That’s where I got them from. Thanks (again) Julianek for that website and congrats (again) on you becoming a father. 
Did you read ALL this stuff ? 
No, I’ve got interested in the topic only last year and I started reading books on it this year (before I was reading just blogs and listened to podcasts). I’ve read only a few positions this year, but as long as I’ll keep myself passionate about the topic, I’ll read as much as possible. First half of the list is somehow more important and I put a priority to read it first.
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http://www.dobelli.com/de/bucher/die-kunst-des-guten-lebens/
In addition I like that one here: http://www.dobelli.com/de/bucher/klar-denken-klug-handeln/ It explains many of the common cognitive biases.
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Thanks for the suggestions, Genti! Would you mind to kindly add them in the wiki post of the users collective recommandations? Just edit the main post to add your contributions and please explain in a few sentences why you found them so interesting. And yay, being aware of our cognitive biases is a hugely important topic for an investor!
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In response to the latest Mr. @_MP’s blog post:
- Are you a Swiss reader who plans to achieve financial independence?
I’m Polish, but yes - Switzerland-based FI seeker.
- If yes, in how many years/at what age?
That’s good question. It really depends on my and my wife’s career, our savings rate, a number of kids we will have, and so many other factors. My personal estimate is 10-15 years - so when I’ll be 40 or 45 years old. Max 50 - I’m not gonna work full time and for money after 50. No way!
- Feel free to add contextual elements such as your FU number, your savings rate, your current net worth, where will you retire early, or what will you do when you become financially independent. The goal is to inspire the many readers of the newspaper with other cases as real as mine (in addition to having a more concrete answer).
FI number - I have few targets depending on whether we retire in Poland or Switzerland. But in Poland, I’d be good with 0.5-1M CHF, in Switzerland I’d prefer to have at least 1.5-2M CHF. And 1M is in the middle - hence my forum nickname.
Savings rate - on average 50%. If I have a lot of guests, it can drop to 45%, and if I have no guests and other activities, it goes up to 55%.
Net worth - 150k (80% in VT ETF, rest in cash).
Where and what after FI - good question. I was considering starting a Personal Finance FinTech startup in Poland or in Switzerland. Maybe I’ll start studying finance/economics. I have a few ideas. One thing is certain - I’ll work no more than 4 hours a day, so that I can spend more time with my family and pursue my hobbies and interests.
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Lately, I realized that the secret to success in anything is building proper habits. I’ve read two books that changed my mind on this - “Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg and “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman.
I learned that on average we act, think and make decisions almost half of the time on sub-conscious autopilot - habitually. The reason is that mental, emotional and physical effort burns energy (glucose) and our bodies and brains are designed to save it because for most of the human pre-history and history, it was a scarce resource and it made sense evolutionary. MRI scans of people who do something habitually (or are naturally very talented) show that there’s no much activity happening. It means that our mind can do pretty smart and complicated things in System 1 - intuitively, without effort, almost automatically - if we train it good enough.
One can build and alter habits by focusing on habit loops: cues-routines-rewards. Each habit consists of these three elements - cue telling our brain to activate the “habit procedure”, routine activity that is being executed and the reward that reinforces a habit.
And this brought me to this post - the list of habits I want to build. Some of them I already managed to implement: e.g. I started saving +50% of my income and invest in ETFs, I quit sugar and moved more towards low-carb diet and I started reading at least an hour a day. These are huge changes, that made a positive impact on my life.
There’re few other that I’d like to improve (I also got some inspiration from the Rich Habits blog):
- Physical exercise: I have no ambition to be a Navy Seal but doing half an hour to an hour of an intensive exercise every day would be perfect. (I’ve created a thread about this.)
- Deliberate Practice/Education: I always wanted to be a lifelong learner. I sort of have two purposes in this area: I want to have broad general knowledge about the world and I want to be highly specialized in “my” field. General knowledge is something I’m working on by reading more books. The specialization is something I have to rethink - I used to focus on my IT skills since I had an objective of a professional career. Now, when I realized that at some point I’ll be FI and I found so many other passions, I have to think what - if anything - should be my object of specialization.
- Networking: I need to invest more in meeting regularly with people - professionally (for business) and personally (for happiness).
- Relaxation/Leisure: I want to rest better. I thought about learning meditation, but I’m not sure how to start.
- Dreams/Goals setting: I need to clear my head and think about what I want to achieve in my life. It’s not an easy task because I have so many (often contradictory) ideas and I’m not sure which of them will make me happier and which are worth the time and effort - and I’m in the process of giving up some plans (career in IT) and acquiring new ones (focus on being a good parent/husband). I already have few ideas: one is learning more languages - German, Swiss German and French are on my list. Second, I’m thinking about a Personal Finance startup - helping people getting to FI in a smooth way for a very tiny fee.
- Effective Altruism: I’d like to help people in smart, resource-efficient way.
- Order/Minimalism: I suck at keeping order at my house and I hoard too much useless stuff.
- Technical Skills: Except for a computer system, I can’t fix anything. I need to learn how to build, fix and improve things myself.
There are also a few habits that I’d like to destroy or minimize:
- Social media addiction
- Smartphone addiction
- Internet addiction
I know from my management studies that goals have to be SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. I need to tackle this problem first and turn my habit-formation ideas into more specific SMART goals. I also have to think harder about cues and rewards to turn a routine activities into real habits that reinforce themselves every time I do them. The biggest challenge, however, is to figure out what is my purpose - what should I dedicate my life to. Before I’ll hit FI, I need to re-learn how to structure my life and adapt to these ideas.
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About Habits, you should read Scott Adams’ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
How do you plan to help others getting to FI? I was thinking about creating an App to manage expenses, but my idea is kind of hard to develop (receipts scanner etc…)
Thanks @ma0! Added to the reading list.
I was thinking about starting a company that would combine two approaches:
- education, training and advice to help people get their personal finances straight, teach them the basics and in general support them to increase their motivation to save and invest, and to coach them to change their attitude and adjust their lifestyles - in other words, to turn them into Mustachians
- building an (open source) web/mobile app to help them track the savings and investments and progress to FI - basically building an app that would replace our spreadsheets and online FI web calculators and portfolio visualizers, with some basic performance metrics and explanations what it all means in simple words
PS. Receipts scanner is a good idea, and I think it’s not that hard to build - it would have to consist basically of two services: OCR and regex parser making sense of the scans. I think for OCR there should be open source tools and libraries doing the job - we would have to just build a mobile frontend for it. For regex parser we would have to build the parsing rules for Swiss receipts - it shouldn’t be that hard (I’m working in a company that actually builds such parser for transaction reports from Swiss banks).
PPS. For last 3 years, I have worked in FinTech startups that were building such financial “toys” for millionaires and wealth managers - I think śomething like that needs to be built low cost and for everyone, to be really successful.
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I am going to take a look at some of my old projects to see if I can resuscitate it with some new libraries available. I’ll let you know if you are interested.
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Sure, I’m interested. I suck at coding, but I can help anyways. What programming language are you using for this? Are you using GitHub?