JVC 43K 43-inch TV, purchased for NTD$7778 on credit in August, accounted for 12% of total expense.
iPad peripherals including a screen glass replacement, a secondhand Smart Keyboard, and a secondhand Apple Pencil; total 6500. Accounted for 10% of the expense.
Linda’s emergency clothing from coffee spill, purchased for NTD$3,480 on cash this month, accounted for 5% of total expense.
Apple Watch SE2 for father’s day gift, split the cost with my sister, spend 3,200 and accounts for 5% of total expense.
HM in front of the new TV.A second try for iPad
Lessons Learned
– I was wrong about TV, I thought it would throw away the few family time, but it gave us more things to talk about. Plus, it gave me a bit more time for myself.
– My second try on iPad went well so far. Don’t treat it as a computer, treat it as a messy notebook. It’s not a device for organization.
After reading the first chapter of Psychology of Money, I flash backed on the event of my life that shaped the way I see money today.
Questions and attempted answers I had with myself.
Why do I keep track of my expense and income? I started to receive allowance since the second grade, but my mom has a rule to play by. Before I knew how multiplication works, mom would ask me to list down all the date and the amount that I receive allowance, then add it up, have it checked by her (making sure addition weren’t wrong) before I receive the money. It looks something like this.
May 1, Bht$1 May 2, Bht$1 May 3, Bht$1 …… Total Bht$30
This tradition continued to 12th grade. By the time I entered college, I have been budgeting for a decade. This stuck with me ever since, from analog notebook to excel file to google sheet, from being single to a father.
Why does it take me forever time to make a purchase decision? There’s a formula that my mom used to adjust my allowance. Bht$2 per day in second grade, Bht$3 per day in third grade, all the way until 11th grade when it flattened at Bht$20 per day. There’s an additional Bht$1000 for Lunar New Year and birthday. So even when I max out, it’d Bht$9300 a year and that’s all the money I have for going out with friends. A set of McDonald’s is 15% of the monthly budget, a taxi ride is 10%, so I need to save for months for a purchase.
Some purchase turned out to be a bad decision and I think that shaped followed me until this day. I remember saving $5000 in middle school to get a branded basketball shoes. I spent $3500 on a pair of NIKE, just to find out in the week after, that the shoes gain traction on the outdoor court I play in.
Why am I lazy, passive, and risk aversive when it comes to investing? A good thing about budgeting for 2 decades is precise understanding and forecast for my expense. I rarely overspend my salary so there’s no urgency to make big money since I don’t ran out of them. Consequently, there’s really no urgency to get rich through risky investments.
Page 2 Premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.
Page 7 History never repeats itself; man always does.
Page 12 Your personal experience with money make up maybe 0.000000001% of what’s happened in the work, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.
Page 14 If you grew up when inflation was high, you invested less of your money in bonds later in life compared to those who grew up when inflation was low. If you happen to grow up when the stock market was strong, you invested more of your money in stocks later in life compared to those who grew up when stocks were weak.
Page 18 Every financial decision a person makes, makes sense to them in that moment and checks the boxes they need to check.
Page 20 Before World War II most Americans worked until they died.
Page 34 When things are going extremely well, realize it’s not as good as you think. You are not invincible, and if you acknowledge that luck brought you success then you have to believe in luck’s cousin, risk, which can turn your story around just as quickly.
But the same is true in the other direction.
Failure can be a lousy teacher, because it seduces smart people into thinking their decisions were terrible when sometimes they just reflect the unforgiving realities of risk. The trick when dealing with failure is arranging your financial life in a way that a bad investment here and a missed financial goal there won’t wipe you out so you can keep playing until the odds fall in your favor.
Page 62 “Charlie and I always knew that we would become incredibly wealthy. We were not in a hurry to get wealthy; we know it would happen. Rick was just as smart as us, but he was in a hurry.” – Warren Buffett.
Page 84 More than your salary. More than the size of your house. More than the prestige of your job. Control over doing what you wan, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.
Page 85 On my first day I realized why investment bankers make a lot of money: They work longer and more controlled hours than I knew humans could handle. Actually, most can’t handle it. Going home before midnight was considered a luxury, and there was a saying in the office: “If you don’t come to work on Saturday, don’t bother coming back on Sunday.” The job was intellectually stimulating, paid well, and made me feel important. But every waking second of my time became a slave to my boss’s demands, which was enough to turn it into one of the most miserable experiences of my life. It was a four-month internship. I lasted a month.
Page 106 One of the most effective way to increase your saving isn’t to raise your income. It’s to raise your humility.
Page 186 Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant.
Page 208 Become OK with a lot of things going wrong. You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.
Page 217 The independent feeling I get from owning our house outright far exceeds the known financial gain I’d get from leveraging our assets with a cheap mortgage.
Page 217 Good decisions aren’t always rational. At some point you have to choose between being happy or being “right”.
I replaced my old ASUS RT-N12 with a new ASUS RT-AX3000 last week and it 10x my bandwidth!
The previous router was purchased in 2017. It was a time when I was still single, no kid, and still renting a one-room apartment. All I needed at the time was something functional to keep my laptop and phone connected to the internet. But that’s far from the case right now.
Things are different 5 years later. With a family and a few smart gadgets, the number of devices has tripled. The web experience is sluggish; pages takes longer to load, video played at lower resolution, unexpected disconnection, and router RAM usage constantly occupied at 90%. This is an upgrade that’s going to happen sooner or later.
It got me thinking, what’s the line between “still works” and “need to be replaced”? Obviously, the old router still functions and I could live with it most of the time. But it exhausts me, I feel anxious when having to do a webinar at home, I knew the signal risks degrading so I carried a ethernet cable. These tiny incidents, although not often, breaks the purpose of a router. It’s a tool, and a tool needs to be functional and needs to be trusted. It’s functional, but it can’t be trusted, I think that’s what drove me to replace it.
Plus, the old one’s been running for 5 years, so it’s also about time.
Over the past 2 years, it’s becoming a family habit to use these old red envelopes to save up money for things we’re indecisive.
Through the process, I realize there are some benefits.
Time, at least a month, to think and discuss if this item will bring quality time for us. These discussions circling around improving our life is meaningful. Hey, if not, we can just scrap the idea.
Financial stress is significantly lower.
Proud feeling of paying cash. Saving for 3 months is very different from buying with credit card and paying off in 3 months.
Invest in a good chair Good chair doesn’t mean it’s comfortable. After a decade of horrible office posture, my body is relearning and it’s not confy. The good thing is, it forces me take a walk every hour and my back is no longer in pain after work.
Exercise is about being functional I probably spent way too much time in the gym in my 20s, it was fun pushing weights and I learned the valuable lesson of persistence. But it didn’t always made me feel great physically. In the past year, I started to incorporate cardio and yoga. Overall, It gave me consistent energy throughout the day.
2020
2021
2022
cardio
8.7%
9.52%
38.30%
flexibility
24.76%
35.11%
strength
91.30%
65.71%
26.60%
A good sleep is not easy Good sleep is a challenge on preparation and self-control. I don’t bring my phone into my bedroom anymore because I realize it’s impossible for me to not touch it and only use it as an alarm. Instead, my Casio F91-W wakes me up now.
On time management
60 minutes is surprising enough for exercise, shower, and lunch. – 35 minute exercise, 10 minute shower, and 15 minute lunch. The best way to maximize exercise time is to use a meeting room, it literally takes only few seconds to start.
Don’t go to Costco on weekends or holidays Purchase grocery is not the most important thing at Costco, it’s burning the energy of my one year old. Therefore, it’s best to avoid the weekend traffic. Besides, it’s a less frustration wait at the cashier.
Get things done with an actual pen and paper This has removed all distractions and the constant edit on a computer. It’s something I do when I work on marketing content or trying to sort out my thoughts. Tip: buy a pen that writes wonders.
Just one cloud storage I have a problem with decentralization of my cloud storage. My photos are in iCloud, my documents are in Dropbox (the evolution: OneDrive -> iCloud -> Dropbox), and it’s dumb to waste both money and space on multiple cloud services. Yeah, I know I can have everything on iCloud, but I have a Windows laptop at work and iCloud Windows is a terrifying experience. Since a few months ago, I’ve been migrating everything to Dropbox, and photo organization is now dumber than ever. Unlike Google Photo or Apple Photo, Dropbox photo comes with barely any photo organization, but that simplifies the distraction and I’m more aware of the pictures I upload nowadays.
On what I haven’t figured out
Ukulele I tried to pick up an instrument during the lockdown and I can play a few chords, but it’s a struggle this year to find time for it. I’m hesitant, whether I adjust my schedule for this or drop this? What drives my judgement?
Annual workout time still max at half of what it was when I’m single Since Millie’s birth on December 2020, the annual workout time has just been axed. It looks like 2022 will be similar to 2021. The math is simple: longer average exercise time or higher exercise frequency. Day-to-day implementation is the challenging part. – 2020 – 4,629 minutes – 2021 – 2,349 minutes – 2022 YTD – 1,582 minutes
iPhone SE f1.8, 1/60s, ISO 250 @ Eslite, Banqiao, New Taipei City
Mistakes often makes us feel wronged and deeply hurt, but the next worse thing that could happen is trapping us in an inmoble, unactionable mental state. The idea of fault and responsibility mentioned in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck could be an antidote (at least it did for me).
Remove fault from responsibility gives a better look at the event. It might not be our fault that things went wrong and very often it’s not, but we are responsible for whatever happened on us. With an acceptance of who’s fault it is, we have a better chance to detach emotion from the truth. Yeah, so if I’m the one who fucked up, then also just admit it and move on.
Let’s move on to responsibility. We’re responsible for the interpretation of the event and the action we will take. The example given is step on a pile of dog shit on the street. Fault? Nope. Responsibility: fuck, this could be a sign to take the day in a slower pace (interpretation) and a chance to get a new pair of shoes (action).
Same idea applies to work, my job at marketing constantly requires teamwork. Sometimes, the product development delays and it’s not in our control or fault. But we’re still responsible for it, we must make decision and take action, either we wait or move on to the next project.
At the end of the day, it’s about moving on with our live, not trapped in the past. This idea of fault and responsibility disengage what we have no control of (fault) from what we have (responsibility).
Loc 138 The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
Loc 202 Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
Loc 233 Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
Loc 393 The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.
Loc 426 Negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something.
Loc 457 “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
Loc 505 If you think at any point you’re allowed to stop climbing, I’m afraid you’re missing the point. Because the joy is in the climb itself.
Loc 675 Entitlement plays out in one of two ways:
I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserver special treatment.
I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.
Loc 1142 We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond…if you get run over by a clown car and pissed on by a busload of schoolchildren, it’s still your responsibility to interpret the meaning of the event and choose a response.
Loc 1642 Making a million dollars could threaten your identity just as much as losing all your money; becoming a famous rock star could threaten your identity just as much as losing your job. This is why people are often so afraid of success…it threatens who they believe themselves to be.
Loc 1751 If it’s down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far more likely that I’m the one who’s screwed up.
Loc 1756 If it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.
Loc 1882 Because it felt like people didn’t want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn’t want to talk to me…Because I failed to separate what I felt from what was, I was incapable of stepping outside myself and seeing the world for what it was: a simple place where two people can walk up to each other at any time and speak.
Loc 1917 Action isn’t just the effet of motivation; it’s also the cause of it……Action -> Inspiration -> Motivation
Loc 2039 The desire to avoid rejection at all costs…is a form of entitlement. Entitled people, because they feel as though they deserve to feel great all the time, avoid rejecting anything because doing so might make them or someone else feel bad.
Loc 2080 Healthy love is based on two people acknoledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support…”If I refused, how would the relationship change?”
Loc 2152 People with strong boundaries are not afraid of a temper tantrum, and argument, or getting hurt.
Reflecting on the year is just as meaningful as looking ahead to the next. I like to think of it as baggage. Every year, I take on some baggages, it is inevitable if I want to move forward. These baggages arrive in the form of habits, purchases, or responsibilities. A year end review helps me cleanup and clear the path. After all, we can’t keep the agility with more baggages on our shoulder, we can only move forward if we offload some of them. So the questions to think about: am I heading in the right direction? What should I keep? More importantly, what should I let go?
Baggage to (try to) let go
All social media notifications After multiple adjustments over the year, I have a good feeling the changes I made this time could work.
Paper Zettlekasten system The deciding question that I asked, “will I take this with me if the house catches fire?”. No.
Doing everything by myself Later this year I’m giving the responsibility of an entry leadership role. In a healthy organization, people usually get promoted base on performance. The challenge of transition from a bottom staff to a leadership role is to trust the people whom you’re leading, no matter how big the team. For me, that is to delegate the work to them although I know I can do it on my own.
Baggage to keep
Ukulele Back in high school, I spent a year learning electric guitar, but it never got anywhere. Fortunately, the image of myself playing some sort of instrument never really died. During the pandemic lockdown in May, I pulled the trigger and purchased a ukulele. I suck now, but it feels really nice to have a side project.
A writing notebook If I took anything from the paper Zettlekasten experiment, that’s the ability to focus with a pen and paper. When everything is taken away, I’m forced to create the most important content, the title, the logic, and the story.
Home exercise I logged 2,349 minute this year, approximately half of 2020 (4,629 minute) with similar exercise sessions. With a toddler in my life, going to the gym is still risky, so I’m keeping the home exercise in 2022.
The first day of owning a dumb phone was not full of anxiety from digital detox.
On the morning of December 24, I picked up the secondhand Nokia 3310 that I purchased online. Being late for work, I didn’t swap my SIM to the phone (it requires an adapter anyways), so I shove it into my pocket.
Size is a great advantage of dumb phone, I didn’t have to pull out the phone every time I sit. Even during walking, the size of the phone doesn’t break the posture. Smartphone inside the front or back pocket never felt right, it’s always awkward to walk with that.
I realize my first day reaction is not anxiety. I had, in my mind, to show my colleague the photo quality of the 2 megapixel camera, but I didn’t. I kept it inside my pocket the whole time. Something stopped me from doing that, and I think it was embarrassment. After all, it takes an effort to go against the norm.
What I couldn’t figure out at this point is the source of this feeling. Nevertheless, here are two hypothesis I have. First is the trust of this decision, I don’t have full confidence in this adjustment, which brings me back to my college days. It made sense, it’s only the first day and I haven’t dive into yet. The second guess has to do with how I perceive myself. As someone who works in the IT industry and as a marketing role, I should be on the edge of technologies, but this dumb phone is exactly the opposite to that. What part of myself will change, now or later, if the tech savvy part of me is taken away?
Fortunately or unfortunately, this experiment didn’t last long. That night I found out the phone only support 2G network, which service is terminated in Taiwan. I will need to purchase another phone to continue this experiment.
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