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Why I Didn’t Buy a Tesla
My Bentley was delivered back to me recently. It came in a tow truck and the trim was removed from the dash and piled up in the trunk along with half of the trim of some random Mercedes. Half of the windows were stuck down and the dashboard lights looked like a disco when I…
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Making Space
Most people who come to me for advice are either working too hard or not hard enough. The latter group knows that there’s a problem and want to fix it, but the former group always come under the guise of wanting to work on something else. No one, except maybe your family, will criticize you…
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Why I Love Buying Properties With Friends
When I talk about buying properties with friends (we’ve bought an island, a flat in Budapest, an apartment in Tokyo, and an apartment in Hawaii), some people get it immediately. Others don’t get the point, quickly do the math and realize that they’d save money and hassle if they just stuck with Airbnbs. It’s hard…
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DIY Home Projects Can Be Easy
When I was a kid and something needed to be repaired or built, my father did it. He plumbed things, ran new lights and wires, built new walls, and even built new additions to our houses. Because everything you see as a child seems normal, this all seemed normal to me. It was just one…
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How to Stick to a Project
I like writing about things that I used to be terrible at but am now good at, because I can be sure that those things could be learned by anyone. In the past I was unable to stick to anything. I went through various phases of convincing myself it didn’t matter and accepting that I…
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Ingenuity vs Money
My very first “business” was buying and selling used Palm Pilots and Apple Newtons. I would negotiate back and forth over the smallest increments of money, both on the buying and selling side. When I first started, my inventory was one Apple Newton, so it was important that I get the best price possible. After…
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Sayonara 2020
I know many people are cursing 2020 and are glad that it’s over, but the older I get the more I realize that any time is good time, and that what we do with what we’re given is more important than what we are given. So I’ll just come out and say it: 2020 was…
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Four Difficulty Levels of Life
There are several different difficulty levels on which you can live your life. They are ascendingly difficult, though the difficulty is really mostly in switching to that method of living. Once you get to the next level it actually becomes far easier. An analog would be financial investing– it’s hard to save a lot of…
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Why I Moved
I wasn’t planning on writing about this because I don’t think it’s all that interesting, but so many people have been surprised and asked why we moved that I guess it warrants a post! Five years ago I bought an apartment in Vegas. It cost $50k, was in a great location, and had two bedrooms.…
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What It’s Like Living in a Bad Neighborhood
I live in two “bad” neighborhoods. One is my apartment in Vegas, and the other is our shared apartment in Hawaii. The way I’d define both areas is that they’re among the cheapest housing in their respective cities, and they’re bad enough that when an Uber driver understands where you are going, they feel comfortable…
