Scanners and Financial Independence

Jun05
by TFS on June 5, 2014 at 6:54 am
Posted In: Financial Independence, Lifestyle Design, Philosophy
Scanner

No not… Oh for god’s sake these are getting worse every week!

 

I came across an intriguing term the other day while on my internet travels: “Scanner”. Someone followed me on twitter which led me to their blog, so naturally I did one of the first things we all do which is to check out their about page, which in turn led me to the following passage:

“Margot and Barbara is the distillation of many hours spent trying to make sense of my giant, sprawling list of interests. I’m a scanner. Multipotential. Dilettante. Whatever. What that means is that I will never find the perfect job, never settle down to just one thing. Never grow up.“

Another hit for the wonderfulness of the internet/blogging world, I love it when stuff like this happens! The site in question, margot-and-barbara.com,  is run by a lady called Elizabeth, who suggested also on her about page to check out the site Puttylike if we wanted to learn a bit more about Scanners.

What is a Scanner? Am I one?

Puttylike says that a Scanner is another name for a Multipotentialite. If this doesn’t clear things up for you here is the definition they give for Multipotentiality, which is actually from Wikipedia:

“An educational and psychological term referring to a pattern found among intellectually gifted individuals. [Multipotentialites] generally have diverse interests across numerous domains and may be capable of success in many endeavours or professions, they are confronted with unique decisions as a result of these choices.”

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Life Lessons with Dr Bob Rotella the Golf Psychologist

May28
by TFS on May 28, 2014 at 8:28 pm
Posted In: Golf, Philosophy

Dr Bob Rotella - Your 15th Club

 

Some excellent lessons in life and dare I say, inspiring words, have come from an unlikely and somewhat esoteric source this week – a book on the psychology of golf that a friend lent me. The book in question is Your 15th Club: The Inner Secret to Great Golf by Dr Bob Rotella. As you’d expect the large majority of examples and advice in the book are related on how to improve your game, mainly concentrating on the mental approach you take and how to make this stronger. But it occurred to me very early on in the book that the majority of the advice transcends golf and falls into realm of general life rather neatly, and parallels between the game of golf* and real life situations, emotions, feelings, and other psychological affairs can be drawn very easily. So let me try to draw you a few.

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Wearing stuff out

May20
by TFS on May 20, 2014 at 7:05 am
Posted In: Money Saving Ideas
wearing stuff out

This is worn out

When was the last time you threw a consumer item away in the bin, or took an item to the dump that was well and truly worn out? I mean totally beyond repair, or “proper mashed up” as the yewt of today might say? Like the equivalent of my lovely picture of the washing up sponge up there?

I am guessing if you are honest there are plenty of items you’ve replaced in the last year alone that have been eminently fixable, but have used the excuse of a minor piece of damage or functionary imperfection to ditch it and upgrade to a newer, more flashier version. Now, I’m not dead against that sort of thing, if the newer model promises greater energy efficiency for example (see: performance of fridge freezers 20 years ago* compared to now), but upgrading your 3 year old 40 inch HDTV for a 50 inch 4K HDTV with internet connection does seem a little pointless (in my humble opinion of course!). This sort of behaviour will also result in a very small chance of reaching early financial independence, which is what we are all about here, so this mindset needs to be reversed if you still think like that.

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No Meat Challenge – Conclusions

May08
by TFS on May 8, 2014 at 1:09 pm
Posted In: Frugal Food, TFS Challenge
Three Bean Chilli

Three Bean Chilli: One word: Awesome!

Well it’s been just over a month since I started my “no meat challenge” and I can happily say I completed it successfully, within the rules I set out in my original No Meat Challenge Throwdown post. As you may or may not remember, it ended up being more of an “Eat less meat” challenge, but let’s have a quick reminder of the rules:

  • Only one meal containing meat allowed per day (This allows us to enjoy the wedding meals fully, just need to make sure we don’t have a fry up for breakfast the same morning!)
  • We will also cook 3 veggie evening meals per week, so will have 3 full veggie days
  • We are still allowed to eat cheese, milk, eggs.

Here are some of my random thoughts and experiences on the challenge, in no particular order

The best thing – about doing this was trying out some new food, things that I may have never tried before. I was surprised, for example, to like meals such as vegetarian chilli, seeing as I previously had a huge and irrational fear of eating beans, which stems from a dislike of baked beans. I can safely say I still hate baked beans but other beans have been firmly accepted into my edible foods list.
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Get your violins out for the middle class

Apr29
by TFS on April 29, 2014 at 7:09 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

Just a quick one today, some extremely bad “reporting” over at the Washington Post (is this the US arm of the Daily Mail?) which was tweeted by Mr Money Mustache the other day.

Read the article here

It is about middle class expenses rising while wages stagnate (despite the apparently phoenix from the flames like recovery of the economy over the last few years, really?). The comments section is predictably harsh on this unwitting family but if you can’t be bothered to read the story or the comments here are some highlights:

  • The first sentence: “On a routine drive to the beauty salon, Robin Johnson had one of those life-happens moments” – no further discussion needed really is there!?
  • The second sentence: “Her 13-year-old Durango, with 200,000 miles on the odometer, overheated and started sputtering” – Apparently this is an extremely low MPG, gas guzzling SUV, and I am presuming the majority of the miles have been done by this family themselves.
  • Later on in the article: “They have one laptop and three iPads, and each girl has a computer in her bedroom. The bill for four cellphones runs about $300 a month.“

So as you can see, they are easy cannon fodder for the readers, and apart from their unwise spending the biggest mistake they’ve made it seems was trusting the WP reporters on either how this article would be portrayed, or the likely reaction they would receive. I actually kinda feel sorry for them on this second point at least!

One other thing which really annoyed me though was the following:

Fewer Americans find themselves in the heart of the middle class with every passing year.

In the mid-1970s, the majority of Americans were in the middle, with 52 percent earning the equivalent (in today’s dollars) of $35,000 to $100,000. Today, according to census figures, the share of households earning under $35,000 is virtually unchanged, 35 percent. The shift has occurred in the other two categories. Households with incomes over $100,000 have doubled, to 22 percent, while less than 44 percent are in the middle cluster.

Ok… so the angle here is that the middle class is being squeezed out, there are fewer of them, which is a bad thing, right? Hang on and look at those figures… there are only less of them because 11% of people have only gone and moved into frigging upper class!!!!

Unbelievable. I’ll leave it at that I think.

__________

Oh and here was an amusing/amazing story that someone linked to in the comments section which is worth a quick read: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/04/monkeys-make-better-stock-market-traders-than-people-study/

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