I’m bored with investing – the site FAQ

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My blog is ready for primary school. By that I don’t mean that I’ve simplified personal finance to the level that could be understood by a typical grade 1 learner, but rather my blog actually turned 6 years old now.

And due to my metronomic consistency in getting a blog post out at exactly sometime during the first two weeks of every month, maybe, and my cunning linguistic mastery of the English language, I’ve actually generated a following of at least 9 readers. It’s gotten so popular that nearly every month my wife has a client who mentions they’ve read my blog. Sometimes she hears from a suffering wife about her husband who has a bro-crush, to which I apologise profusely.

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Investing PROPERLY offshore in 3 easy steps

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Updated September 2020 with a step 2c…

Updated again September 2021 with no need for step 2…

I want to live overseas at some point in my future, so I’m working my way towards earning a foreign passport. Now there are a number of ways to get those handy little visa exemption books. One way is to sell six of your kidneys and buy a mansion in Cyprus.

Fortunately I married a stunningly beautiful Portuguese woman, and as the Portuguese are extremely welcoming of foreigners, that means that all I have to do to get a great passport is to become fluent in Portuguese and get some documents from home affairs sorted out.

And that’s made me wish I had 7 kidneys, because I think trading 6 of them for a passport would be far less painful than what I’ve had to do. And I’m not talking about my attempts at studying Portuguese, because it’s rather easy adding a sshhh to the end of every second word, but let me tell you what isn’t easy…

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How to retire WELL as a couple on just R16 667 a month

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Time for the third installment of the retire cheaper overseas series. In the first, we managed to find a few pieces of paradise where just R10 000 a month would be comfortable for a couple. That meant retirement was possible after saving just R1.5 million per person. In that round I really liked Havana in Cuba, but my wife had other ideas, so it went with Bitola in Macedonia, where you could live a happy, interesting and safe existence on just R5 000 each. After that we upped the budget a little by working a little longer until each person reached R2 million, or R4 million for the couple. That opened up quite a few more doors, with the Turkish Riviera winning comfortably for the wife and I, as well as all the readers who voted. We’d be happy living on just R11 837, well under the R13 333 a month budget.

And that brings us here. Our savings have increased by 25% all the way to R5 million or R2.5 million each. That’s a great effort, and as your reward, there are now over 100 different options for places where a couple of humans willing to share a bed could live quite comfortably on R16 667.

So instead of spending the extra R3 333 on a weekend cocaine binge, let’s see which cities the extra money opens up to our future life.

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How to reach R10 million saving just R5000 a month

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Dear Patrick,

You’re a big fat liar and you dress funny. Financial independence is a joke, and compound interest is as useless as JZ’s legal team. I’m just basically putting my own money into the market and seeing practically nothing happen. There’s no way in hell I’ll ever have enough to retire, this whole website is a scam being pulled onto us normal peeps by you one-percenters. You can’t really believe any of this rubbish you put up here every month, are you insane?

Goodbye,
Great Disbeliever

If I had a Rand for every time someone called me a funny dressing liar I’d be rich. It’s true, but only because I’m already rich thanks to spending less than I earn and investing the rest. Sadly it’s also true that I’ve been told I’m not the snappiest dresser around. Fairly often. I married her anyway.

So if you’re feeling a little like G-Dis above and getting rather demotivated you’re going to like this blog post. Time for a story.

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How to retire WELL as a couple on just R13 333 a month

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In my previous retiring well post I tried to find places where a couple could live comfortably on Just R10 000 a month. That would mean the happy couple would only need to save up R3 million in total, or R1.5 million each.

This was what I considered the lowest level of income needed to sustain a fairly normal life. Sure there are cheaper places than that, mostly in India, but I doubt there would be any cheaper places my wife would want to live in.

And as promised, that post was the start of a series. We’ll be moving up in the amounts until we get to the point where comfortable living anywhere in the world is pretty much possible.

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My 2018 spending – What’s measured gets… saved?

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Like I mentioned last year, up until 2018 I’d never actually used a budget myself. I was being a terrible example, telling everyone else what to do, and then doing the exact opposite myself. I was just like, um, well pretty much every politician I’ve ever heard.

So what happened when I actually set a planned budget. Did I stick to it, or did I just carry on spending as and when I felt like it?

Let’s get straight to the numbers.

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The top 8 things I learnt about money in 2018

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Welcome to 2019. Happily we no longer have President Zupta running this place, but unbelievably there’s still a weird orange man in a big white house trying to build an impossible wall. Enough of the politics though, like we did in 2017, lets see what I learnt in 2018.

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How to retire WELL as a couple on just R10 000 a month

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This is a cat on a toilet

This is a cat on a toilet. If you think it has absolutely nothing to do with personal finance you’d be very wrong as you’ll see in this blog post.

Last week was my first full week back in South Africa for two months. In that time I went to Madagascar, Portugal, Spain, England, Germany, Durban*, Tanzania and Mozambique. Five of those were work, or at least as much work as it is having an utterly great time flying drones all over the show! If you’re interested I’ll put a few photos at the end of this post.

Now you might be thinking after all that traveling that it would somehow be out of my system, but like most addictions, doing more makes you want more, and all it’s done is made my wanderlust much worse. Happily, wanderlust can be a very positive part of early retirement, as you saw with the previous post about Andre and Lisa who’ve been traveling through Europe for the past 6 or so months. Not only because it’s been scientifically proven that spending money on amazing experiences can actually buy you long term happiness, that learning a foreign language helps stave off Alzheimers or that travel is scientifically proven to lower your risk of death. All of those reasons are fantastic of course, but did you know that retiring abroad can also be a financial benefit?

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This couple retired at 36 and 45, here’s what they’re up to now

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Trip of a lifetimeIt’s been a year since I interviewed Andre about his amazingly well executed plan to retire very very early, and it was the most popular post on this site in the past 12 months. At the time they had expected to leave the working work in a years time when he’d be 46, and his wife Lisa just 36! Like so many things, life doesn’t always go according to plan.

Now if you’re expecting me to tell you that they realised their madness and that it’s actually impossible to retire when you’re so young and especially when you have idiot presidents stealing all the money or blowing their trumpets and trying to ruin the global economy you’d be wrong. Instead of taking another year they moved their plans forward!


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