Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I'm in, and will order the first couple of books today. Just the push I needed to start learning about investing! Thanks J+G!

ok

I actually started reading the first economics textbook a couple weeks ago (7 chapters down so far). Would be happy to discuss/work through some sample problems if/when others join in later this year. The end of each chapter has web-based questions that seem like they would be good exercises using real-world data.

I've been dedicating an hour or two a night during the week and so far I've found the 50-100 pages/week recommendation to be manageable/realistic. I imagine I can sustain this pace for as long as the material remains interesting. I could likely go faster if I was willing to dedicate portions of Saturday/Sunday but my weekends remain sacrosanct. That said, I gotta go!

cheese wrote: ↑

Fri Oct 11, 2019 4:18 pm

I actually started reading the first economics textbook a couple weeks ago (7 chapters down so far). Would be happy to discuss/work through some sample problems if/when others join in later this year.

You don’t need to wait. Start a “McConnell Chapter X” thread. There are enough of us who have read the book for a lively discussion.

I'm still planning on starting December 1st if people still want to read it together. No need to wait for me to start the discussion though. I think keeping everyone together will be a challenge that can be somewhat mitigated by using subthreads to discuss.

Once the subthreads start existing, I'll collate/move them into their own forum thread. For now, you can start them in the Money Questions subforum:
viewforum.php?f=3 Just make the thread titles somewhat descriptive, e.g. "EIC booktitle, chapter" or something like that will work.

O.K., I'm still planning on starting this December 1st. I got the 19th edition of the McConnell econ book, not sure if the version numbers will make a huge difference, my guess is no (but exercises might be different?). Anyone who wants to join is welcome. We are going in the suggested order which @fish highlighted earlier in this thread. I'm not 100% sure how we should do this. The McConnel books divided into 10 parts (let me know if this is different for different editions), of 1-3 chapters each (except part 7). I think we should do a section per week (~3 chapters) and spend two weeks on part 7, which is 7 chapters long. How does everyone feel about that?

Sounds like a plan. Will start working on it as soon as the book comes in soon.

Cool! I have the 15th edition, and I think there are some differences between chapters and maybe some reordering of material. But I'm sure we'll manage.

I'm going to try to join in this too. I've got the 15th edition as well. It looks like this edition is sufficiently different from the 19th that it'd be useful to post part names/chapter names for each thread so folks can read the appropriate chapters/part in their edition. It probably will be approximately the same ordering at the start though. Anyway looking forward to it.

I'll join too. My copy of the McConnnell textbook arrived today. I purchased the 15th edition.

Alright, first section this week. In the book I have that's chapters 1-2 so that's what I'm planning on doing this week. Discussion threads are in the Money Questions section of the forum. I think we should do 1 section a week so I'll "assign" the next section next Monday. Some of us will read the chapters in a day and some of us will read it right before the deadline, but that's the advantage of the forum discussion.

I'm not sure how to structure the discussion so no structure until we figure it out and suggestions welcome. My only request is that we keep the "meta-discussion" in this thread and only discuss chapter relevant information in the chapter thread.

Regarding meta, I found it hard to read a textbook. It's been a while since undergraduate studies and I find sometimes that I'm literally reading however my brain picked up another thread and is thinking about something else and not processing what I read. I catch it fairly quickly but it is a struggle sometimes to maintain attention. When the topic is interesting to me, it is less of a problem.

I also read the chapter in order and I realized it might have been better to jump to the summary/bullet point parts so basically read those parts backwards and then forwards with the main text. I enjoy having a cliff notes of where I'm going in order to hopefully alleviate the attention issue mentioned above.

I'm assuming others have this kind of struggle and while it's not a big thing, I'm always looking to improve. I did mull it over and thought that perhaps trying to read such material earlier in the day with a fresh mind might be better than reserving it for the evening. So I'll try that for future chapters. But I'm curious to hear if others deal with the above too and if they have found anything that helps!

Update: I read the second chapter in the morning and it was easier to focus.

This week’s assignment is the next section. I’m at the end of a cascading work death spiral so my only promise is to make the threads for discussion by Wed.

Apologies for doing a shitty job leading this group. I got murdered at work this week...

I was aiming for posting assignments and creating topics on Monday every week, but I'm going to do it on Sunday instead as it's the day I'm least likely to work.

Topics for last weeks and next weeks reading assignment are up. It looks like my book has different sections than other versions.

I'm going to get sections from this version's (21e, 2018) TOC from now on.

This week we'll do the last chapter of section 2 (chapter 5) and the two chapters in section 3 (chapters 6 & 7).

No posts in the Chapters 3-7 threads so I'm going to declare a week off for Christmas. Obviously I'm way behind so I'm going to use this week to catch up.

This week we'll do Chapters 8,9 and 10.

I think most are still stuck/doing chapter 3. Perhaps lower the ambition level? Or create some homework like each solve an exercise? I don't think blasting through the material will be helpful when improved investing is the actual exam. For investing, I think it's better to have a deep understanding of some key aspects than having covered a lot of material.

Thanks Jacob, I think you're right. I'll wait until we get some commentary in the other chapter threads before adding new ones.

maybe it will help to try come up with discussion questions. I still think you'll get more out of this if you start with your own reflections - what you understand the chapter to say, how you think it is relevant/useful, where you disagree...

others can use this to jumpstart their own thoughts