Early Retirement Extreme Forums

This might be a bit of a ramble and it could have gone in my journal, but I thought maybe it’d be OK for its own discussion. I have a tendency to be ‘loyal’ (word choice of DW) to many of my possessions, including clothes. That is, I don’t get rid of them. I continue to use them even though they may...

@halfmoon Of course! Yes, it's probably the air intake rather than the gas. I was probably just preoccupied with the rest of the pollution in this city. @JeanPaul I'm not sure about the beauty of the country just yet. It'll be great to get out of the city some, but yeah the state of emergency makes ...

July Update Disaster strikes. I moved into, then out of, a house. Exactly one week after moving in, there was a tremendous hailstorm that the roof couldn’t withstand. Water coming through the ceiling throughout the house. This is despite the fact that I explicitly quizzed the previous tenants on the...

Just a few brief notes. DW made me proud. Of course, while waiting for our shipment of household goods we are in an almost completely empty house. There's a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork in Ethiopia that holds up things like this. Of course, we've been buying bottled water. DW took some of the us...

Savings rate for June - ??? - see previous entry. I'll probably try to get something happening with expenditure tracking in August. Books read – Micromastery (Twigger - good idea, but the book left something to be desired. It seemed not to transcend the feeling that it was a series of blog posts), T...

In three days I'll be in Ethiopia. I've gotten in touch with a few people to check out advertised houses/apartments to lease, so hopefully in my first week I'll be on my way to finding permanent accommodation. The last few weeks here in Switzerland have been stressful, of course. Packing, organizing...

A little late to this month's update... Savings rate: ???. Actually, for the months of May and June I said "f**k it" to tallying expenditure. Arranging the move and dealing with the bureaucracy of it all has me stressed out. Furthermore, prior to the move I've been making quite a few preparatory pur...

You could try to find a swag. Image search. I've never tried one for long periods of time.

Wait, but you said sleeping bag and pad are out. And yet a roll up mat is OK? Difference without distinction in my opinion.

Your question appears directed to people with experience with multiple adult push scooters, which I fear is a very small number of people. I have experience with only one, the Micro Flex ( link ), but I will try to answer anyway. I actually recently sold this scooter (for 80% of what I paid for it, ...

The FFL is really a thing? I'm not into military stuff. I thought it was only holding on as a joke, maybe from the Asterix books.

"They say that men join the foreign legion to forget..."

Today I learned, I guess.

There's a well-known experiment in behavioral economics called the Ultimatum Game. A result from this is generally accepted to show that actor B may reject an outcome that is basically beneficial to him, if it comes about through a process whereby actor A has distributed gains in a manner that B per...

Writing tabletops settings... What. On. Earth. Is. This? Tabletop RPGs? Setting are like worlds place can play in. Examples being: Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, etc. for D&D. Deadlands: Reloaded for Savage Worlds Stuff like that. Sorry for being extra nerdy. :P You can get paid for that? I used to do...

I'd eat more fish. No hesitations. This is actually a very interesting question. Several things I thought of and then actually discarded... Air tickets, for example... Yeah, maybe I'd travel a bit more, but the time cost and hassle of moving around really is a big disincentive... Would I really do i...

Nowadays my standard insurance is global, for work reasons, so I don't have to bother with taking out extra policies when travelling. One of the reasons I used to reason that carrying good insurance was important was that I play judo - and who knows when a partner will throw me carelessly and I'll n...

I used to only self-insure when I travelled, from the age of about 24-30. Before that I would usually take out travel insurance because my parents' financial advice still carried a lot of weight. Also, I guess, I had barely any money in the bank so 'self-insurance' was not really something I could h...

It occurred to me that I actually should check my facts - and on doing so it seems Addis won't be the largest city I've lived in. That would be Melbourne, where I lived for a short period some time ago. I had thought it would've been smaller than Addis (at least back at the time I lived there), but ...

I haven't found any sites to be great for general advice on going expatriate. The good stuff you need to know seems to all be on country-specific sites. Look up blogs and stuff for your target destination, that can give you a ground-level view. The place you're likely to find general advice more hel...

I'm going to be moving to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in a few months. Although it sometimes surprises people outside of the field I work in (or people with limited knowledge of Africa), Addis Ababa is something of a hub for diplomacy and non-government organisations in Africa. Hence, it's not too surpri...

We held a little party with some friends and neighbors for our now 1-year old TH (tiny human) this month. Nothing extravagant, just some afternoon tea in the backyard. Otherwise, not too much remarkable to report on. I still have not been notified of to where I'll be reassigned, but it will come ver...

Well, I'm not, because I know nowhere near enough about it. However, I've also learnt to keep my trap shut. Reason being, I seem to recall back in 2013 or so advising a friend against converting money to bitcoin because I considered it to be pretty well overhyped (I did not consider it a scam, altho...

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2813/34195254141_97c0bc8f5a_z.jpg Social libertarianism? Left libertarianism in the Vallentyne-Steiner sense by another name, I guess. I don't think tradition and progress are opposite to each other. Not that I want to immediately disagree, but if you would elaborate o...

It's awesome to read this, JeanPaul. Penang is a place I'm very interested in checking out for an extended stay in the future. I'm actually a bit surprised you manage to live as cheaply as that, there!

I was kicked into a train of thought by this interview between Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison (the series is very good, by the way, I think it's been linked before). Particularly this para: What I find depressing about a lot of academia is you have people who think very scientifically about their ...

I thought it was "Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for the evening. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

I think Switzerland has trouble with 1, 3, and 6. As far as cost if you're comparing cities with cities, and small towns with small towns, it would be more expensive than the US. Health care is very expensive, it's one of the few countries that can compare with the US in that aspect. I'm certainly n...