Taiwan

Friday’s Reading: Four Good Stories for the Weekend

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Great Investment Advice

This article in San Francisco Magazine called “The Best Investment Advice You’ll Never Get” describes how Index Investing started off, it’s a wonderful insight into the world of mutual funds, fees, and passive investing.

San Francisco magazine

The best investment advice you’ll never get – page 1 of 3 For 35 years, Bay Area finance revolutionaries have been pushing a personal investing strategy that brokers despise and hope you ignore. The story of a rebellion that’s slowly but surely putting money into the pockets of millions of Americans, winning powerful converts, and making money managers from California Street to Wall Street. By Mark Dowie

Unfortunately for this writer, this story is a story that has already happened… So can you still make money out of this? That’s an interesting question because if everyone starts chasing the mean, then what will the ‘mean’ really mean? Will greater value be found in ‘managed’ funds again? …

Are you READY to retire?

This article on Extreme Retirement,

Could retirement before you’re even eligible to join AARP be the quintessential impossible dream? Not if you’re consistently disciplined, focused, driven and don’t give a hoot about what the Joneses think of that beat-up Chevy in the driveway, say experts. Whether you work to live or live to work is a question increasingly answered in favor of living by couples who have opted out of the daily grind before the traditional “early” retirement age of 50-something. What’s more, they’re not going quietly, but instead are springing up on Web sites and in media interviews, telling their stories and encouraging others to follow suit.

Dreaming of retiring at 45 or earlier? I’m not. Why? Because I don’t want to retire… I just want to be free to pursue things that I believe are important, not do the tasks that others pay me to think are important! Of course, that includes blogging on this blog: I love doing it. I just wish I could find the time to write even more ‘good’ articles’… so I should retire!

StumbleUpon Trolls: Good for your traffic!

One blog I was reading today suggests an off-beat way to get additional traffic from StumbeUpon. It’s an interesting read, and something that I’m aware of: writing negative stories or giving negative opinions (like editorials in newspapers) often elicits much more of a vocal, even visceral, response from readers. That’s why TV Shows like Mad Money, etc. are popular these days, because they elicit a reaction from the audience. Does your blog do that? Does this one? …

It’s All in the Blogger

After blogging about CashQuests.com dismal performance since the sale a few weeks ago, my story has been picked up by John Cow on his blog. Both of these articles suggest what happens when an original owner leaves his/her business in the hands of the new owner: sometimes it doesn’t last long at all.

In the area where I live, I’ve seen new businesses start up, be sold, and close down within the space of two years: I’m particularly thinking of one restaurant near my home where the owner worked hard to create an affordable pleasant lunchbox, and eventually sold the restaurant as a profitable business.

But the new owners couldn’t replicate the lunchbox experience. Fortunately, they had the tenacity and wherewithall to keep going by eventually selling a completely different set of popular food items in Taiwan: Taiwan’s Little Treats. Now they are moving, and I don’t think the new owners will be successful at all. It would be better to start a completely new business for them.

So, this weekend, where there’s money, there’s InvestorBlogger!

 

Christmas is coming: the three ‘C’s of a Succesful Holiday

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And they are: cheer, credit cards, and cost! If you match them well enough, your holiday should be great! If not, read on…

The timer at the top of my blog edges ever closer to December 25th, and with it the sense that Christmas shopping, a moment dreaded by almost every man I know, should begin! Yet this year, there are a lot of pressures on our wallets, perhaps more so than in many previous Christmases over the last ten years or so: inflation is ticking up, gasoline (and all energy prices) are rising, food prices are spiralling upwards, interest rates are rising, and many homeowners now face an ARM reset in early 2008.

natfinancecreditcards

It’s my Christmas, and I’ll swipe if I want to

Given the increasing pressure on our regular spending, it’s very tempting to let our flexible friends bear the weight of the extra expense of Christmas, so that we can at least enjoy a ‘happy’ and ‘free’ Christmas… But InvestorBlogger is challenging you: How can your Christmas be ‘happy’ and ‘free’ when you know that come January, the charges will start appearing on your credit cards‘ statements as early as the end of the first week of January?

  1. Will you feel happy knowing that you have to pay more than 15% pa interest on goods, foods, and services that have long been consumed (and even forgotten!)?
  2. Will you feel free when you find that your paycheck has to be handed over to the bank to cover the minimum payments on ALL your credit cards, and it’s going to be months before the principal is paid off?

Well, I’m proposing that you can take five concrete steps towards acting before it’s too late. If you follow these, you will find it much easier to alleviate the January pressure, lighten the Christmas shopping burden, and improve your Christmas cheer!

1. Limit your purchases

Many parents, family members and friends do go overboard on purchasing presents. Of course, this is just not necessary. So if you find that you are buying lots of presents because you’re not sure what that person wants, then don’t. Have a good think about what that person is like and means to you, then purchase one or two presents at the very most that are of good quality, that exemplify your relationship, and that mean something.

One of the best presents I ever got from my parents was a simple ‘made in Taiwan’ plastic chess set (the pieces were large and easy to handle for a kid!), even though the chess set is long gone, the gift started me on a long journey to play Chess at school, and with friends. From there I learned a lot more wonderful board games, including backgammon, draughts, etc.. That simple plastic set was a much more valuable present to me than all of the fancy Evel Knievels, Action Men, and Meccano Sets that I received in all my years as a kid. One simple game, decades of satisfaction.

2. Limit your spending

Set large budgets for your shopping, and allow a little legroom so that you can overshoot your budget with out feeling bad. Typically when I’m shopping for a big ticket item, I’ll budget a base amount +/- 20%. In other words, if I want to buy a new TV, I’ll budget say $400 +/-$80. I’ll try to get the best TV I can around the $400 mark, but I won’t limit that to just $400, so if I see something that is quantifiably better for a little extra money, I won’t feel bad about it! I can buy. The important thing for me is the freedom to buy something better, but I feel secure enough knowing that there is a ‘hard’ limit to my spending as well as a soft limit.

3. Simplicity vs. Abundance

We all live in a world of things, too many things. We’re given things on many occasions, we spend too much time and money shopping, we’re even buying on the Internet now. Yet in this world of abundance, we’re often short of simplicity: simplicity in our relationships, simplicity in our lives and simplicity in our health.

Every box of cereal comes with 200 vitamins, every mobile phone can do 100 things, … What happened to a simple gift made to do one thing and do it well? So, if you are shopping, choose carefully, choose meditatively, choose simply.

4. Focus on the people, not the things!

In the US, Christmas is a time of celebration, a time of rejoicing. It isn’t an accident that it is preceded by Thanksgiving. If you are faced with a choice of buying a lot of things on credit cards or owning up to not feeling good about spending too much money on credit cards, tell people that you are just not able to spend that kind of money…! Instead, enjoy Christmas for what it should really be about…! Tell people that you’re going to enjoy Christmas because it’s a real chance to connect to people you care about…! If you find buying an abundance of things tough on your pocketbook, then look to making things for them, things that they will appreciate because you made them especiallly for them: your own calendars, postcards, T-shirts, plants, books… the list is quite endless. While the kids may want an X-Box, most adults really don’t.

5. Making the most of your ACTUAL spending

There are so many ways that you can utilize credit cards these to cut your expenses that it would, of course, be foolish to not use them. So, if you do use your credit cards, make sure that you get as much back as possible: typical benefits can include cash back on purchases from cash back credit cards, bonus points or airmiles, parking discounts, 0% interest periods, grace periods, balance transfers, store discounts, rebate points, etc. If you are applying for new credit cards before Christmas, or you have a bundle in your wallet already, you may want to compare credit cards carefully to get the best benefits! But remember, using a credit card to save money only really works if you were going to buy the item in the first place!

Whatever your shopping plans are this Christmas, I hope that all my readers have a happy holiday and that we welcome in a prosperous new year!

Your Christmas has been saved by natfinancecreditcards!

19″, 22″ or 24″: how big is your LCD monitor?

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After yesterday’s super long post, I’m going to keep things much shorter and sweeter today. … There are actually two major computer shows in Taipei every year. The first one, everyone knows is Computex. But the second one is IT Month, and last year it attracted over 750,000 visitors as it toured the island. That’s not bad going.

Christine, a friend and I went to 101 to a nice restaurant for lunch on Sunday. And I fell in love… with a 24″ Apple display in the Apple Store in “New York New York Department Store“. I’m not particularly fond of fruit, really. Mostly, they tend to be rather expensive here, and you can get a LOT more PC for the SAME price. But there are times when a large-size monitor will really do things: on that monitor, I could open my blog page on one side, and another page on the other side.

And truthfully, there are times when working away on such a size would really help: like updating my blog theme. It’s pretty difficult to keep flicking back and forth between screens to make sure that you have copied all the elements and javascripts from the old theme to the new one. Trust me, it’s painful. In fact, if you look closely, apart from the sidebar, there are still some elements missing.

Could a large monitor help? Well, yes it could! But there’s a snag: I’m looking at 22″ monitors and I’m finding most of them support 1680*1050 which is a resolution my graphics card does NOT support… Whoa! In fact, my card seems to go all the way upto 2048, but 1680 is not one of them… Woops! Little did I know.

So I can choose: a 20″ monitor (which is still pretty big), two 19″ monitors (one for each of my systems at home), or a 24″ monitor… Which would you choose? Do you have any suggestions on other solutions? I’d like to hear what you have to say.

What is your current monitor choice? I’m using a 15″ LCD 1024*768 monitor from about 5 or 6 years ago at home, a Philips 17″ LCD monitor that is two years old (and plenty big!) at work…