Author Archives: Patrick

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.

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.

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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It’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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