Reading Time: 4 Minutes Happy Australia Day everyone! Hope we are all taking the time out to spend it with our loved ones. This weekend also coincided with the Chinese Lunar New Year so it was a doubly joyous occasion for The Frugal Samurai household. Happy New Year! Australia Day also marks the time when the year starts to kick off again in terms of activity and work. The Christmas and New Year slow-down period is firmly in the rear-view mirror, and it’s time to get back on the horse. It’s also the time when we reflect on our New Year resolutions and see how far (or not) we have…
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Is The 4% Withdrawal Rate Enough To FIRE?
Reading Time: 3 Minutes What’s going on peeps! Whilst on the bus earlier today, I was reading a FIRE blog which is a personal fave of mine, called Young Adult Money. I think the blog is predominantly about young adults and money. David does a fantastic job with his blog, and I thoroughly suggest you go through his other posts – they’re pretty awesome! Actually, I was reading up on their latest post on Basics of FIRE: Financial Independence Retire Early. For everyone who wants to know what FIRE is and what it’s about, this post provides a great starting point. The post also goes through the well-known concept of the…
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How To Hold Your Partner Financially Accountable
Reading Time: 3 Minutes What’s up everyone! Hope we all had a great week. Listen, so I was reading the papers earlier and came up on a pretty interesting article… https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/queen-s-message-to-harry-and-meghan-couldn-t-be-clearer-it-s-over-20200119-p53spj.html?js-chunk-not-found-refresh=true I know right! I mean Harry! What are you…wait… sorry, wrong article. This is the right one. https://www.smh.com.au/money/planning-and-budgeting/how-to-get-mortgage-free-by-using-an-envelope-budgeting-system-20200107-p53pj5.html?js-chunk-not-found-refresh=true It describes the personal finance journey of a couple, aptly named Cheetah and Sparky. Cheetahs as you well know, are the fastest creatures in the animal kingdom. But this Cheetah turns out to be a “part-time fitness instructor and personal trainer”… Cheetahs sometimes do this you know. Sparky is an electrician. He fixes er… electricity. The article goes on to say…
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Cryptocurrency Update
Reading Time: 2 Minutes Howdy everyone! Hope we’re all settling into the new year. Everyone’s heading back to work now (boooo!), you can see it written on our faces. Depressed look. It’s why we have to FIRE people! Get some of our time back to do the things we want to do. Mini-rant over, I wanted to visit the crypto-market today as it’s been a while since the last update. We all know what happened a couple of years ago, when crypto was on everyone’s lips. And yes, we all know for every crypto-millioniare, there are hundreds, nay thousands, nay hundreds of thousands, who have lost their shirts investing gambling on them. Myself…
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Global Total Returns 2019
Reading Time: 2 Minutes Howdy everyone! It’s going to be a bit visual today, with a couple of graphs showing what the different returns for different asset classes were for 2019… I did a similar post on this last year which highlighted 2018 vs 2017 here. First, here are the stock market returns for 2019 vs 2018: Well done to Russia, IT and Greece. Polite applause to Poland, Chile and Argentina for participating. Although it must be said that looking back, 2018 was a fairly abysmal year, and that 2019 was much better across the board. Just goes to show that markets move in cycles – and unless you have…
