To celebrate the beautiful days ahead, I am giving you here below a few quotes from Jacob Lund Fisker taken from his book Early Retirement Extreme. He offers us a strategy that would allow us to stop working in just a few years, by moving away from the consumption-production paradigm. He offers a convincing alternative to the well-trodden path of diploma-car-marriage-house-furniture-clothes-television-appliances-lawnmower that forces us to work for decades.
Why do we still have to work eight hours a day, 50 weeks a year, when we are twice as productive as we were 50 years ago?
What do you want to leave as your legacy? What you owned or who you were?
If you have debt, you are not a free person. You are explicitly owned by your debt and implicitly owned by your banker.
Health is primarily about well-being and the ability to enjoy life. Suppressing symptoms with medication is only a secondary part of the equation. Health is the presence of something positive, rather than the absence of something negative.
Mass education in secondary schools reflects real-world mass production. The teacher addresses his 20-25 students sitting in rows, as a manager does with his employees.
Companies follow a strategy based on fashion, planned obsolescence, unnecessary updates and manipulation. They encourage people to continually replace goods that are still in good working order.
Why don't technology and increased productivity allow people to work less?
Does it really make sense to spend the rest of your life working and paying off a mortgage just so you can fill your house with unnecessary stuff, while also sitting in traffic every day in a big leased car?
Today's amateur athletes buy $3,000 racing bikes with ultra-light carbon frames just to save a few grams. But they have no problem weighing 10 kilos too much.
The question you need to answer is: What do you want to do with your life, given that you don't have time to do everything?
Our business model is based on extracting resources from the ground, transforming them into useless products, getting people to buy them by convincing them they need them, and then getting them to throw away those products because they are obsolete.
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/14405891-early-retirement-extreme-a-philosphical-and-practical-guide-to-financia
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Hello ,
This is what I call common sense, or thinking for yourself, being autonomous, therefore, a free thinker, etc.
The fun part of the business is to get there by taking advantage of stock market income, collecting dividends from it too
d exploited by the “rat race” customers & employees,,,
Slaves or free, there would be nothing outside the "enterprise"??
You will tell me that we can be free thinkers and stuck in a traffic jam,,,, but if it only happens once a year it is more pleasant,,,,, LOL
Yes, the best thing is to be free in thought and action.
Hello Jerome!
A big thank you for all this information and relevant thoughts that you share with such lucidity and this original perspective that you bring to our society.
A big fan of the DGI approach, I have been following several North American blogs for a long time but it was only recently that I discovered your site. What a pleasure to come across a quality Swiss site, it's a rare commodity...
I congratulate you for your healthy approach which is based on solid foundations as well as for your perseverance, tenacity, discipline and above all for having known how to learn from your past mistakes.
I started trading in the stock market in 1998 but didn't realize until 15 years later that swing trading, options and technical analysis were no better than lottery tickets.
For several years, I have been building a portfolio of quality stocks by analyzing the fundamentals of companies according to my own system, of which dividend coverage and growth are major elements.
Looking forward to reading your next texts!
Hi
Thank you very much for your compliments. It touches me. We have a fairly similar stock market background it seems…
Indeed, there are not many quality stock market blogs on growing dividends outside the US. Over there, on the contrary, they have been doing it for a very long time.
I wish you every success in your approach and look forward to reading you.
It's true that our paths don't seem that different. A few years ago, I thought that my path was quite unique, but since then I've met several traders or investors who had gone through the same path. Which just goes to show that all paths ultimately seem to lead to fundamental analysis, value investing and dividends!
Quick question: With such a large portfolio and so many dividends, have the tax authorities never tried to tax you like a pro?
No, never. They asked me once to justify my change in fortune, that's all. It must be said that with the increasing dividends approach, essentially buy&hold, we normally meet the criteria defined by the AFC: http://www.moneyland.ch/fr/gains-boursiers-actions-impots
So somewhere the withholding tax, so decried by those who do not want dividends, indirectly protects us from this kind of inconvenience. It would not be fair indeed if we were to go through the wringer twice.
What makes me cringe a little is that the model of believing that others will consume in our place is a little naive. It's betting on people's stupidity, except that at the same time, you publish your stuff and they read you so you cut off the branch you're sitting on yourself. But above all, people are not (all) stupid. 🙂
Today we see new trends, Americans eat differently, they travel, the Chinese have started to travel too, emerging markets are more and more distant as are the capacities for "growth".
I wonder where we are going and how the market will evolve, but I am betting on a long and constant stagnation.