Posted by Canadian Dream on January 5, 2012
We were all introduced to the concept of enough when we were little through a little story of three bears and a girl with a habit of doing B&E. Yet in real life the space between too little and too much is such a brief stop we often miss it entirely. So I was interested when I came across a reference to a book called Enough: Breaking free from the world of more by John Naish. After all the core of any good early retirement plan is knowing when you have ‘enough’ spending. John goes through the world in several chapters that look at enough information, food, stuff, work, options, happiness and growth.
What is interesting about the book is often our tendencies for excess is partly driven by evolutionary instincts that were great for our species for thousands of years, but is killing some of us today. Food is the perfect example of this particular situation. For thousands of years the idea of ‘eat until you want to burst, when you can’ was a good strategy, after all you never knew when the next famine would hit. Yet today when endless all you can eat buffets, that strategy is literally killing people. A lot of us lack the sense of enough food to stop that cycle before it gets out of hand.
The same idea applies somewhat to information. Marketing companies have spend a fortune trying to understand our brains and realized a few interesting facts. Like today we are drowning in so much information that even the marketing departments of many companies are finding it hard to get their messages into our heads. So what is the solution? This is what I liked about each chapter, the author provides a few ideas on knowing when you have hit enough. With information the obvious one is start on a information diet. Did you really need to read all those news sites and blogs each day? Likely not, so can you pare down to a smaller number of sites? Perhaps one for national information and another for more local content.
While I could easily keep gushing on how much I like this book I will attempt to jump ahead to two other concepts I really enjoyed in the book. The first is the fact we have a strange culture towards work, it’s like the option of having part-time work is a problem rather than an obvious solution to a lot of people’s lives. If you can earn a good wage why do you need to work full time? After all at some point the extra money is likely largely going to taxes and buying excess stuff. So don’t forget to consider that when you are looking for a job, the best benefit of all just might be working 80% of the time or what ever number works for you.
The other concept I really liked in the book was the discussion about happiness. In a culture of ‘more, more and more’ even the idea of happiness has turned into a endless quest for more of it. Yet what is wrong with skipping the endless happiness quest and parking yourself instead at contentment for most of the time. Really? Nothing is wrong with that as an ideal.
In fact, if you understand how happiness occurs it damn well makes a lot of sense. Case in point, your happiness is largely determined from comparing your baseline to you current experience. Hence if you change your baseline in an attempt to be more happy it often fails in the long term, as what used to make you happy now only makes you content instead.
For example, let’s say you drink red wine and your day to day choice is some homemade wine from a decent kit. Then you decide to upgrade to drinking a better wine from the store in order to be more happy. The only problem is after a few weeks of store bought wine your taste buds and your mind have adjusted to that new level. It’s now no longer bringing the same level of happiness and instead you are merely content and out some more money. Adaptation is a bitch when it comes to happiness.
So overall, I was very impressed by this book as it helped explained several things that I sort of knew about, but didn’t fully grasp the concept. I would have to rank this as one of those books you MUST read prior to planning your retirement. You might just find you can get by with a hell of a lot less spending than you think you need to, once you understand your own level of enough.
Posted by Canadian Dream on December 29, 2011
Quick question: what happens when you splice a life threatening medical condition with a frank discussion on money and your emotions? The answer is the book called The Wealth Cure by Hill Harper (by the way, if the name is familiar, you likely watch more TV than I do – see here).
While not a great way to introduce this book, it does give you a bit of the theme of what the book covers. Context after all if everything. In this case, the author is diagnosis with thyroid cancer just as he was starting to write this book on personal finance. So combining that with a cross country train trip and you have the blueprint of the book. Yet while this might come across as confusing, the message of the book is very clear: money isn’t everything.
Money is rather a tool and one we often get messed up over because of our emotion context around it. We fight over it, hope to get more of it and even wept over it when we lose it. Yet we don’t do this with your actual hand tools , like your hammer,do you? Of course not! So Hill tries to come up with a medical analogy to cover this very same issue and you end up with sections called: The Diagnosis, Treatment Options, Sticking with a Treatment Plan,and Thrive and Survive.
While personally didn’t care much for the medical comparisons I did appreciate the amount of stories Hill uses to get his point across from people he knows or even meets during his train trip. You need to understand that money won’t make you happy by itself. It can buy things or experiences that do make you happy for a while, but it won’t work on a long term basis. Wealth is really a concept that expands past money into other areas of your life and that is what you have to focus on. You need to look at your health, your relationships and your money and balance those off to find a better life.
Perhaps my favorite quote from the book is:
When you decide to be happy, you take control of your life’s direction, as opposed to waiting for the right object to fall in your path or the right job opportunity to crop up.
In essence, he was saying you can let life happen or plan your life to happen. For too often we let our lives happen and I have even been guilty of that at times. So take control of what factors you can influence and stop complaining about your life and make it the best that you can. It won’t be perfect, but you will likely be more wealthy than before and you might not even not have that much more money.
My only compliant about the book was it seemed to lack a cohesive path for the reader to follow. It touched on lots of good points and Hill even quote some of the same research I used in my book, Free at 45, but fails to provide a path forward for the reader.
So overall the book covers some good points, but I won’t keep this one as a reference book myself. Instead find a library copy to enjoy and take what you can from the book.
Posted by Dave on December 27, 2011
This is a guest post by Dave, who is also looking to retire no later than 45, but unlike Tim has no kids and doesn’t want any. Dave is from Ontario and is working towards his CGA certification.
In my spare time, I tend to read books. When I don’t have time to actually read a book, I listen to books while I’m cooking or cleaning around the house (I listen at double speed on my i-pod – it took a little while to get used to, but single speed just seems slow now). My problem is likely the same as most people’s – what books do I read?
This being the holiday season, maybe you have a few days to read right now. I thought I would tell you what books I enjoyed over the past year, and what books I am looking forward to coming out in the new year. This is not really a personal-finance post, but some of the books are finance-related, so it loosely falls into the scope of this site.
I’m not really going to provide an in-depth summary of the books, I’m basically just putting some titles forward as books I like, and you might too.
Finance Books:
I actually don’t really read too many of these books anymore. I read dozens of these books while I was conceiving my personal finance plan a few years ago. As a personal finance writer, maybe I should read more of this kind of book, but I’ve found that blogs like this one and others tend to inspire me more than books.
1.) Early Retirement Extreme: Tim wrote a review of this last year. My wife got me this for Christmas last year (my request). I agree with Tim’s review and have taken a lot of great information from it.
2.) Liar’s Poker: This was Michael Lewis’ first book, and other than Moneyball probably my favouitetitle. It reminded me that I care a lot more about my money than the majority of money managers.
Diet and Exercise Books:
1.) The Primal Blueprint: If you’re looking to eat healthier, feel better and lose some weight in the New Year, I’d highly suggest reading this book and following it. My wife and I have been following the essential premise of this book for about 18 months. My wife has lost about 40 lbs, I have lost about 15 (and we have both maintained this weight-loss easily) in that period. I would say that we have a much better idea of what food makes us feel better and seems healthier compared to what we were eating before.
2.) The Vegetarian Myth: Think you’re helping the world by going vegan/vegetarian? I’d suggest you read this book written by an ex-vegan and perhaps get another viewpoint. At one point in the past I thought about dropping meat from my diet, mainly to cut back on food costs. After reading this book and several others about the North American food system I went another way. Now I buy my meat locally. I visit the farms and talk to the farmers, I see the area that the animals are raised and what they are being fed.
“Fun” Books:
These are books that I read and think some people might like, some are older and some are new, but I really enjoyed them.
1.) Voyageur by Robert Twigger: My brother leant me this book earlier in the year. He is not a reader, and maybe gets through one or two books per year but he was excited about this one. I read it in a weekend – It is about a guy who has never canoed before, but attempts to follow Mackenzie’s route through the Rocky Mountains on a birch-bark Canoe.
2.) Ender’s Game: Even if you don’t like fantasy/science fiction (which this book is) I would say that the “base” story of this book is fairly universal. I have given this book as a present many times to people and have never really had any complaints (and my friends are not polite people).
3.) Beat the Reaper: I listened to this book on my vacation a couple of weeks ago, it’s an interesting book that kept my attention while sitting beside the pool in the Dominican Republic. It is a fictional drama ex-hitman turned doctor whose past comes back to bite him (not really sure if that is a genre or not, but that’s where this would fall).
Books I’m looking forward to in the New Year:
1.) A Memory of Light: This is the last book of 14 of The Wheel of Time – I didn’t start reading these until about 5 years ago, but the series started in 1990 so the ending has been coming for a while.
2.) Sacre Bleu - Christopher Moore: If you have never read this author, you are missing out. One of the most consistently funny writers I have come across.
3.) The Wind Through the Keyhole - Stephen King: I really enjoy Stephen King’s stories. Sometimes the writing isn’t great, but the ideas in the stories always take me away. I love the Dark Tower stories, and this is a prequel to that tale.
So, that’s my list of books that I’ve read in the past year or so and think other people might like. Any books you would suggest?
