I’m reading the book!

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Alphaville
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I’m reading the book!

Post by Alphaville »

And it’s blowing my mind.

I finished about 17% of the book last night (on Kindle, so is “page 33” a reliable number?) About to start “The Problem with Personal Finance”

It’s not that I haven’t seen or thought of *some* of those ideas before.

It’s that they’re so well put together and add so many things I had not seen or thought of before, that it comes across like a whole new thing. And it helps me realize many things that had been bothering me for a very long time but I hadn’t managed to conceptualize. There they are, vivisected right in the open, with dyes and labels showing and describing clearly all the parts of the beast.

It’s good, deep, serious analysis. And I know you’re trying to solve a complex problem, but also, it reads like satire. Reminds me a lot of Jonathan Swift. I mean this as high praise.

It’s so much fun in fact that I’ve been reading it aloud to my wife, and we’ve been having the nicest quarantine ever.

The review fools that think you’re too wordy or that you should read this or that PF manual are absolutely missing the point.

Thanks for the great work. It’s sincerely appreciated.

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Lemur
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Re: I’m reading the book!

Post by Lemur »

I'm due for a reread. The book was a paradigm shift for my life when I discovered it a few years ago.

I'm guilty of skipping over the equations though. The part with all the P's. If I remember correctly, it was a set of equations and then a graph that shows how powerful the savings rate is.

What I like about this book is that it doesn't try to give you an "answer." It simply describes how to think about problems and introduces one to systems thinking...I think this is what made it so paradigm shifting at the time for me because I was always looking for the secret weapon that could launch me into wealth. Commend the author for this one because this is tough to articulate. I met a brilliant professor one time that succinctly described this as "thinking about thinking" or meta-cognition.

This book and forum also changed me in another way - I sought out more books and become a reader and learner. Locus of control in my life increased substantially. After that book...started thinking what else am I missing? What other books could have these gems that change the way you view the world?

Jin+Guice
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Re: I’m reading the book!

Post by Jin+Guice »

The book is fantastic! It's changed my life more than any other book I've read by an order of magnitude. It also does a great job of being available to Wheaton 4 (maybe lower) and having information valuable to Wheaton 7 (I think, dunno, not there). I've read it several times and I always get something new out of it. I really can't recommend it enough.

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Alphaville
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Re: I’m reading the book!

Post by Alphaville »

Reading the part about personal finance, the realization of my myriad past errors stung me in the face like a swarm of angry wasps.

But that’s good learning.

It was also a relief to realize why conventional PF books and advice have always rubbed me the wrong way. Stuff like Suze Orman and “Smart Couples Finish Rich” and that sort of thing, have always made me gag and think that money was not for me.

Again, thank you.

I’m in the middle of the following section and will post comments after.

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Alphaville
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Re: I’m reading the book!

Post by Alphaville »

Hm, I kept reading instead of updating and now I have too much to say.

I’ll probably wait until I finish beforeI comment again.

The “nuts and bolts” part is tightly packed with data, which creates a lots of possibilities. This is probably best discussed in the rest of the forum as things are implemented in practice...

Jin+Guice
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Re: I’m reading the book!

Post by Jin+Guice »

Is there anything in particular that stood out to you? Anything that you plan to implement immediately?

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Alphaville
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Re: I’m reading the book!

Post by Alphaville »

Jin+Guice wrote:
Sat Mar 21, 2020 7:43 pm
Is there anything in particular that stood out to you? Anything that you plan to implement immediately?
yeah i’ve been rethinking my apartment from “alphaville’s bar & lounge” to “cottage industry flex platform,” or something.

i’ve been reading this website and others for the past decade, but was always too cheap to avoid the book, or kept putting it off, and missed out on the actual principles. “jacob eats just lentils!” misses the point lol. also just talking about the high saving rate misses the point without understanding the why and the how.

so im familiar with a lot of these ideas, but never saw them deduced from first principles into detailed applications, as an organized whole.

also going to start looking at shopping the sale instead of shopping the list at the supermarket. that’s going to be a fun game.

but again, not looking at 1000 money saving tricks, i gotta finish the whole thing first before i can make a full assessment.

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Alphaville
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Re: I’m reading the book!

Post by Alphaville »

Spent the past couple of weeks going back and forth through the middle of the book: “Strategy, tactics and guiding principles” and “The Renaissance Lifestyle.” Everything covered in such mind-boggling detail after the general outlines at the start. And with Kindle allowing you to go back and forth via links, I just got into it for a while jumping in a disorganized way through these sections, thinking about the things I’ve been doing for a long time and the things I’ve yet to do. Not that I’m going to do everything described ther or the same way (a lot of that offers multiple options to deal with things), but it’s a good “dialogue” between my own praxis and what’s described in the book.

I’m better at discussing summaries than extensive details, so this portion is impossible for me to address as a whole, except to say, it’s a lot of stuff to process, and here one can see the amount of work Jacob put into it. Nothing lazy about this book. Hats off.

Now at last about to begin “Foundations of economics and finance.”

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