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.

15-08-microscope-diatom

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:

15-08-skinny-people-cake-kidnap

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roadmap2retire
roadmap2retire
08/31/2015 5:33 am

Thanks for sharing the post, F35. Those are some great stories and glad to hear that you found your calling soon enough.

Ive heard of runescape – a buddy of mine used to be into it years ago when I was in school.

Amateur microscopy sounds like a fun hobby – what are we looking at here?

cheers
R2R

Dividend Hustler
Dividend Hustler
08/31/2015 5:59 am

Thanks for sharing some interesting stories F35. Glad to have found your blog. Will be following along. Take care and best wishes. Cheers bud.

Renée (@nickelbynickel)
08/31/2015 9:20 am

Of all hobbies, amateur microscopy, had no idea that even existed?!

Vanessa
Vanessa
08/31/2015 1:12 pm

I didn’t realize you went to uni! I thought you were one of the contrarians that shunned uni for a two-year college and made a killing in it. TIL.

Vivianne
Vivianne
08/31/2015 7:17 pm

I think the ad for cake has a point! 🙂
I used to play video games too. Until I found it’s more interesting when I can do with real life situation 🙂

Vivianne
Vivianne
09/01/2015 9:09 am

Part of growing up process?! Why haven’t you bought anything lately?

bryan
bryan
08/31/2015 7:21 pm

Couldn’t resist: > Would you rather receive $100,000 today, or $200,000 eight years from now? $100k today. If you gave this option to an accountant at a major company they would pick $200k since that should outperform the market and bonds (especially if anticipating less than average performance over the next 8 years) and is a no brainer considering the low interest rates currently. But I’m a micro-actor in microeconomics and should be able to achieve a better ROI (both in capital or self worth) (both in 8 years or jump start returns I’m already expecting after 8 years) than typical investment guidance around indexing and diversifying. What would I personally do with the $100k? Nothing immediately (just add it to my Van Guards).. Sorry, no super interesting plans in the pipeline that are capital intensive. But I’m confident I would find something to do with them after a few years (my FI timeline if all goes According to Plan (TM)) > Would you rather be less attractive and rich or extremely attractive and poor? Relative to where I am now or relative to the average person? From birth or overnight? 🙂 Speaking generally, probably more valuable to be rich.… Read more »

bryan
bryan
08/31/2015 7:24 pm
Reply to  bryan

p.s. to click the “Post Comment” button in Firefox for this wall of text had to “Inspect Element”, paste my copied comment, then “Scroll into View” in the inspector.

Jordann @ My Alternate Life
09/09/2015 3:20 am

Thanks for the nomination! I’m planning on posting my answers tomorrow.

Engineer Cents (@engineercents)
09/09/2015 4:17 am

Thanks for the nomination! I’ll try to post by Friday.

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Sunshine Blogger Award - Engineer Cents
09/11/2015 4:23 am

[…] to Liquid Independence for nominating me, this is my second go-round for the Sunshine Blogger Award (here’s a link […]