Happy New Year! It’s been two weeks since I last posted anything on this blog! Wow! Has it been that long already?
As usual around the holiday season, I take a break from blogging to spend time with my family. It’s all about spending time with the wife and kids, and a whole lot less time spent thinking about money and finance! On that front, I think the holidays were a success..
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Well, it’s time. The holiday season is upon us! It’s time of parties, good food, and plenty of socializing and celebrating. Inevitably, I find myself invited to a few of these holiday parties every year.
My modus operandi at holiday parties tends to consist of standing around with a party-plate filled with snacks, being chatted-up by people I’ve never met…
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If I had to pick my favorite kind of restaurant on this planet, I would probably pick an Izakaya. Not the smoky drinking-dens of yesteryear, but the newer and more vibrant version that serves delicious food at reasonable prices.
Izakaya’s are a form of Japanese restaurant that serve up small plates of delicious food to be shared. In addition to the food, they serve also alcohol and other drinks to patrons in need of refreshment…
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November was something of a rough month for the Tako family. We all caught a bad cold and were feeling “under the weather” for most of the month. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. The family went through literal truckloads of tissue.
I’ll spare you the disgusting details, but there were actually a couple of days when I didn’t even bother to get out of bed in November. I was that sick…
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This time of year it seems to get progressively harder and harder to sit down and write a blog post. Firstly, there’s the holiday’s vying for my time — Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s are the primary offenders. There’s also parties, celebrations, and family gatherings that fill-up the days surrounding the holidays too! Certainly no time for writing then!
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Patience is a theme I often write about here on this blog… mainly because I tend to write a lot about investing. As we all know, investing is one of those activities in life that requires large amounts of patience in order to be really successful at it.
Here’s the thing though — I’m not an inherently patient person. Patience does not come to me naturally. I’m actually pretty bad at waiting for things in general…
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There’s a popular saying about cars… One that reaches a level of truth that bares repeating here.
“Once you go hatchback, you never go back.”
I certainly tried for 13 years to drive a small sedan. I tried. I really did! But the siren son of ‘the hatch’ and those acres of storage space eventually called to me in a deeply practical way. Yep, it’s true! I finally bought a new car!
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For the average Joe or Jane, working a 9 to 5 job can be a real drag… because the reality isn’t 9am to 5pm anymore. Most people I know put in at least 10 hour days now. They get-up around 6 or 7am, and then commute for at least half an hour (and some even more than an hour) to work. They don’t usually leave work until 5:30 or 6pm either. It’s pretty normal for the average person to put in a 10 hour day these days…
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Imagine for a moment, you walk into a room filled with money nerds. All eyes in the room are on you, because you’re giving a presentation on personal finance. With sweaty palms you step up the podium and do a quick mike-check:
“One million. Two million. Three million. Can everyone hear me OK?”
Those pleasantries completed, you begin with your opening line…
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