Sunshine Blogger Award

Sunshine Blogger Award Nomination

I’ve been recently nominated for a blogging award by roadmap2retire. Thanks R2R. 🙂 The person being tagged has to share some information about themselves, based on the questions posed by the person nominating. Let’s begin.

1. Name the top three experiences from your past, that help form who you are today. 

• In the past I’ve played a handful of online role-playing games like Runescape. You earn money by doing jobs and spend money on food, and weapons to make your character stronger. It taught me the basic principles of economics and the importance of saving up to buy expensive things – useful skills I still use today. 😀 I don’t play them anymore because they are a huge time sink, lol.
• I started investing in 2009, when the markets were on sale. The S&P 500 stock market index is 140% higher now than in 2009 so it’s hard to lose money investing over this period. I’ve never experienced a bear market before and have no idea how I would react in the middle of one. My lucky timing has given me an unrealistic expectation towards long-term investing.
• I worked at Safeway making $8.50/hr when I was a teenager. My boss at the time told me he was once in my shoes and worked his way up to become the manager. I learned that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you start from. Anyone can become successful if they try hard enough. This belief gave me the confidence to pursue early retirement and start this blog. If I had continued to work at Safeway I’d probably be a mid-level manager today and earn $60,000 a year.

2. If you have one piece of advice for investors starting out, what would it be?

1. Have a purpose for your investments so you can find the appropriate assets to put into your portfolio. Investing isn’t scary if you understand what you own, and know why you own it.

3. What was your worst investment so far in your life? How do you avoid making the same mistakes?

I spent $7,000 on university tuition and never even graduated. I enrolled because it’s the socially acceptable thing to do for young adults. I enjoyed the university experience, but the applied sciences program I was in has nothing to do with my career now. Today I practice purposeful financial management. I only spend or invest money if I believe there is a good reason for me to do so, not because everyone else is doing it. 😛

4. Outside of work and investing, what is your biggest passion in life?

Amateur microscopy. Here’s one of my latest discoveries.

5. What is the last movie you watched? Do you recommend it?

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. It’s amazing! I recommend it if you’re a fan of Tom Cruise or enjoy action films in general. 🙂

Now I will tag a few other bloggers and pose five questions for them. I nominate DH from Divhut, Jordann from My Alternate Life, and taylorqlee from Engineer Cents.

My questions:

1. Would you rather receive $100,000 today, or $200,000 eight years from now?
2. Would you rather be less attractive and rich or extremely attractive and poor?
3. If someone came up to you and handed you a book and you started reading it and realized it was a book about your entire life, would you continue to read it until the end?
4. If you could instantly learn any language in the world, which would it be?
5. What impact do you want to leave the world?

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Random Useless Fact: