February 2025 Update
Some small updates for this past month.
In terms of finance, I'm basically flat over the month, in the realm of random noise. I did take action, though. I set target allocations for NVDA stock and my company's stock, and sold some of each, trying to bring my portfolio into a more sensible alignment (cash-heavy, fund-heavy, fewer individual stocks). That was right before a big NVDA dip (one continuing today...), so we'll see how I need to adjust that going forward. I'll be selling company stock whenever it vests moving forward, and slowly selling off the rest.
I opened up a high-interest account at CIT bank, and transferred a bunch of money there. I'm leaning more towards cash in my portfolio right now and the 4.3% return is nice. I also signed up for a Fidelity credit card that gives ~2% cash back on purchases. I also bought money market funds at Schwab, rather than leaving things in cash (just a stupid expensive oversight on my part).
I started doing a bit more reading/reviewing literature. I'm due for a re-read of the ERE book soon. Meanwhile, I listened to some older Mad FIentist podcasts.
One of them was an interview with Bill Perkins, who wrote Die with Zero. It was a long interview and then I read the book. It's a really interesting book, I have to say. Lots of thought-provoking ideas, albeit with maybe 50% filler. The premise is good though: whatever money you die with in your account represents an expense in your time that you weren't able to recoup, basically a part of your life that you sold and didn't realize any return on. The book definitely skews hedonistic, but he also suggests sharing an inheritance early (not waiting til you die) and donating early. The thing he really nails, and that resonates with me now in my mid-30s, is that my interests and capabilities will shift over time. I can already feel this, being a little more limited than in my 20s, with a little less tolerance for things like sleeping in a hostel. He also calls out that expenses go down in retirement and with old age, even accounting for medical expenses. Early Retirement Now has a study on some of the numbers presented, which seem at best to be misleading in the book.
So I think the book is a lot of interesting ideas that need to be recalibrated with less favorable numbers. But I think it's still the right message for me right now, since it's mostly about not continuing to follow inertia and a path of least resistence that continuously accumulates money, which is what I've been doing. And most of the reason I was doing that was to mindlessly reduce risk.