A better path to early retirement

Over the last year, I’ve started reading a lot of “early retirement” blogs: a category that has an oversupply issue in common with digital nomad blogs, but also a common desire to look at the normal way of doing things and say “sod that for a lark”. The gist of the standard early retirement method is this: instead of saving 10% of what you earn, aim for 50% or more. Invest it in the stock market, and in 10–15 years you’ll have accumulated enough that you can live off the…

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On being different

“Robbie, where do you want your ashes to be scattered when you die?” “Well I’ll be dead by that point, so it doesn’t matter. You choose.” “You must have somewhere you’d like them to be scattered? A favourite place? Somewhere meaningful?” “OK. Bangkok.” “Oooh! Why Bangkok? Because you love it there?” “Yeah, I do. But I’ll be dead, so I don’t really care. If you’re still alive, though, you’ll get a nice holiday out of it.” “But also because you love it there too, right? I don’t want you to…

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Before you go off to do that…

Last week we officially launched a new business. We created the website, got the business cards designed, opened the bank account, and began the hiring process for our first member of staff. Importantly, though, we didn’t do ANY of this until we’d actually been running the business for more than half a year already. In fact, for well over six months we also had no logo, no marketing materials, no formal agreement with our business partner, no documentation, and no plans for how to scale. We didn’t even have a…

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Time crawls when you’re having fun

For some reason, I have an unhealthy fixation with the passing of time. If I had to put a coin in a jar every time I said “I can’t believe it’s September already” or “How can it be three o’clock?”… well, we’d be carrying around a really heavy jar which would pay havoc with our baggage allowance. I don’t know where this fixation comes from – perhaps because I’m so busy seizing every moment by learning new keyboard shortcuts that I never want it to end. But in any case,…

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Is this stretching “less is more” too far?

When we moved into our apartment in Chiang Mai last year, we noticed that there was only one knife. “Gosh, that will be inconvenient,” we thought. “Better buy another one as soon as we can.” We kept forgetting about it, until a week later we spotted a knife being sold in the 7-11 for under $1. And we were about to grab it when we realised… hey, without even consciously drawing up a rota for who gets to buy street food that needs cutting and who needs to have slurpy…

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