What I Just Read

An excellent resource, containing essentially everything to know for pursuing ERE/FIRE. This should be a core book for the domain. A few thoughts on mindset: Your success in ERE/FIRE hinges on whether or not you can cultivate a few specific mental traits. You will need creativity, you'll need patience, you will need the ability to solve problems differently, and you'll need to have a sturdy enough psychological core to resist comments and pressure from those around you who are fully stuck within the standard work-spend-consumerism mentality. But the foundational mindset you'll need is a belief that FIRE is something possible for you in the first place.  Many, many people react to the ERE domain initially with a confident declaration that it can't be done. Obviously this is self-fulfilling: if you don't believe it's possible for you to become FI, if you don't consider this path plausible or doable, you'll be right. I think it's worth pursuing briefly...

Suitable for beginner to early intermediate investors. As you'd expect from Tony Robbins, it does a good job pumping you up: to get investing, to save aggressively, to get on top of your financial situation and to stay the course. All helpful. However, there is little particularly special about this book. It's competent, workmanlike, and the authors enjoy exclamation points. You'll get all the basic, foundational ideas: how to think like a long-term investor, how not to get shaken out by corrections or crashes, how to understand the impact of excessive investment fees and avoid paying them, and how to find a good advisor (uh, if you really want one). If you're already a well-read, experienced investor, this book is not for you. One chapter worth noting is Chapter 7, which tells a disturbing story about how Tony Robbins narrowly avoided severe iatrogenic harm from an entire crew of doctors. Feel free to review my notes below for key themes and takeaways from this unsett...

This is a "consensus non-consensus" personal finance book. It contains most of the necessary non-standard financial insights for avoiding today's major money and career traps, and it gives readers good insights on how to hack the modern labor market, how to handle real estate, how to save very,  very aggressively, and how to invest while wasting as little as possible on fees. It's useful, and not a bad book. It also gives you a helpful window into the Millennial investing mind. It's vital to understand how the generations behind and in front of you think about money and investing: their actions and yours occur in the same swimming pool. Boomers seem to struggle with this skill (but since their generation won the asset accumulation game maybe they never needed this skill in the first place), while Xers, a forgotten layer in the demographic sandwich, tend to be more instinctive at it. Millennials and Gen Z will likewise want to become as instinctive at it as they c...

In-depth (and surprisingly interesting!) analysis of the shifting public and government opinion on Russia during late 18th and early/mid 19th century England, plus a useful (and telling) exploration of the various propaganda and media narratives used to drive these opinions. I've written before on this site, many times, that history rhymes, it doesn't repeat exactly, so you have to know your history--and by this I mean know your actual history, not your country's preferred propaganda narrative of history--in order to see that rhyme to make useful, accurate predictions. It is fascinating to see England in the 1800s applying various forms of the same propagandized and manufactured Russophobia that we see in the United States today. England went from a literal  alliance with Russia (against Napoleonic France) to a state of paranoid loathing of Russia in a matter of decades; the USA likewise went from " aren't they our friends now? " after the Soviet collapse to...