Thoughts on FIRE and how I use it.

Money, career, relationships… when was the last time you sat down and peeled the layers to see if things were going according to plan, if there was a plan, if it made sense with your current situation, does it spark joy? When it comes to Big Life Stuff, it is easy to stay busy with “doing” and having no time to plan and track progress.

I, like most people with an internet connection, have used chatgpt, claude, perplexity, etc. in the last few years. It has been casual, random things, with some shockingly bad experiences with complex code and logic.Today, I wanted to challenge myself and these tools to build a complete app with a time-constraint, limited prompts and minimum help from my brain or experience.

Learning about tariffs was not on my bingo card this week. However, here we are and I’m struggling to understand many aspects of it, the why and the weird frequency of change in particular. I saw a short video by Alberta Tech on Tariffs vs Programmers that made me laugh and is the inspiration behind this piece. She is very funny.

Pension - two important things to note - it is your money and it is invested. A pension may be your biggest investment because the plan is to support oneself on it for 30-40 years. The government wants you to be able to do this and they help out with tax relief. Why does the government care? Well if we don't have a source of income in our old age, the government would have to support us in some way and that would be expensive for them.

Would I recommend it? Not really...maybe. You’re better off reading a summary somewhere or watching a video on it. It’s an extremely well-marketed book, you can borrow it from your library or a friend if you’re interested. This review is my experience with the book. The TL;DR version: The author talks about growing up with two influences (rich and poor) and the difference in mentality between them.

The best time to buy shares is when stock prices are low and sell when they are high. But how am I supposed to know when that would happen? The people who work in finance can barely predict this. A search for “how accurate are market predictions by financial experts” has some interesting results about people and institutions being less than 50% accurate; that’s worse than a coin flip!)

Would I recommend it? Yes, especially for the US audience. The TL;DR version: Vivian Tu talks about rich people's mindsets about money (and life) and how we can think like that to get richer, whether we come from a rich background or not. With the mindset, come detailed steps to get better with money. Library appreciation tangent: My book club selected this book for January-February (we are slow readers/ busy people), and my library didn’t have the book.

We have been learning managing risks involved in investments by diversifying them. Feel free to revisit asset classes and size and investment style <-The other diversification options are sector and region. This post is mostly external links because I came across a lot of cool charts. Not great for mobile, best viewed on a bigger screen. Region This is an obvious one.