What did I get right and wish I knew in my 20s in terms of career and finance?

Credit: www.hdfclife.com

What did I get right? 

Optimized for learning and mastery of my skills

• Worked at a big tech and learned to work
• Put money in 401K with company matching
• Learn to invest in stock market 
• Paid off debt quickly and avoided credit card debt
• Made plans for my long term future
• Drove my first car for another 22 years. 
• Met the love of my life, and convinced her to be with me. 

What did I wish I knew?

Build my brand and connections

• Talked to more people and build meaningful connections
• Learn to build a brand for myself
• Learn to manage up (not only to do the work) 
• Learn to tell compelling stories
• Be intentional about building my credit score
• Spend less time tracking expenses and movement of stocks
• I didn’t need to buy whole life insurance. 

What’s your list? 

My American Dream is dead

Without a doubt, I realized my American Dream. My cliche American Dream : mastery of my skill sets, good pay for good work, and financial freedom. Along the way, it would be nice to help the world and my community to be in a better place (aka, don’t be evil). Working in tech for the last 30 years and catching the major technology waves from the internet, enterprise data, and AI has propelled my skills and pay in a good direction. With amazing support of my spouse and family, I leaned into achievements at work and achieving our financial freedom. But all good things must come to an end. Tech has matured to greatly prioritize shareholder value, and regulation advocacy. The growth of tech talent has achieved a new equilibrium and we are in a tech recession (Yahoo Finance, Forbes, Business Insider : some sites need paid subscription). Not all is lost, all trends are on a pendulum, examining former innovators such as Boeing, we all know what will eventually happen when innovators over prioritize away from their core and essential skills and workforce. 

As a whole, I don’t see college education and STEM skills mastery as sufficient for good pay (but as a mandatory ticket of entry). I don’t see a growth industry that would balance employee needs and retention as tech did in the early 21th century. I doubt my slow and steady path with smart saving and smart asset allocation as viable means to financial freedom. Watching “I Was An MIT Educated Neurosurgeon Now I'm Unemployed And Alone In The Mountains How Did I Get Here?” and “Why Everyone Is Quitting The 40 Hour Work Week”, I realized that there are many others who also feel this way. 

Credit: Google Gemini

In summary, my American Dream is dead and wouldn’t work for my children. I don’t have any grand theory about why and how we got here. What really matters is how do I help my children and maybe others of the same generation. I don’t have any answers, but I believe as parents we have the benefits of wisdom to guide our children in a meta discovery process. We can encourage exploration and ask the big questions.

1. What is a good life? 
2. Who is part of your community? 
3. What do you want to change most in your community for the better? 
4. How do you become that change maker? 

As parents, I often make the mistake of skipping question #1 through #3, and assume our children will have the same set of answers as we do. We unintentionally and narrowly focus on #4.  We ask questions such as: What do you want to be when you grow up? What major do you want to study in college? Or what’s your favorite subject in school? Or how do you want to make money? The answer to these questions without the larger context short changes our children’s future and possibilities. I can do better! 

I, an immigrant, greatly benefited from the American way. There is a part of me that still holds on to the American Dream. My version of the American Dream is dead and a new social contract must be discovered. My children will redefine and rediscover their American Dream that will benefit them and the world. 

What is your American Dream? 

Personal financial levers

What I love about personal finance is that I believe it’s something I have good level control over even though there are many forces and unexpected events that are completely outside of my control that influence the final outcome. I don’t influence the stock market or world’s major geopolitical events. I can’t predict if I get into a car accident and am unable to work. Nevertheless, there are many things that I can have agency over by planning, acting, and reflecting. There are a few levers that enable me to control and steer my financial outcome. 

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Archimedes (credit: Doug Ravenel here)

I believe there are 5 foundational levers that I can pull

1. Income : all the different ways that I receive money. I further separate two types of incomes: active and passive. Active income involves constant exchange of my time and attention such as salary, consulting, or gigs. The income stops then the exchange stops. Passive income involves upfront exchange then only a tiny amount afterwards to maintain that income. I have control over how I invest my time productively to increase my income. I can increase one source. I can expand my sources of income. I can improve the mix of active and passive income sources. 
2. Expense : all the different ways that I spend money. I further separate three types of expenses: mandatory, discretionary, and contingent. Mandatory is a necessity for survival and minimal quality of life such as food, shelter, cloth, taxes, and internet. Discretionary spending improves my quality of life and extends my life. Celebrations, dining out, vacations, nicer cloth, charity, preventative care, etc. Contingent is one time or unexpected spending to manage risks. I can be more intentional about my expenses. I can find lower cost substitutes. I can vary frequency and quality of expenses. 
3. Assets : all the items or rights that can be sold (regardless of what “value” that I might place on it). I further separate two types of assets: financial and real. Financial traditionally means stocks, bonds, cash, etc. Real traditionally means gold, property, art, collectables, etc. The boundary continues to blur between financial and real. I have a tiny bit of bitcoin, I don’t think it belongs to either category. Maybe a better way to think about it is liquidity vs illiquid assets. I generally classify financial assets as a high liquidity asset and bitcoin would fall in this category. I can start small. I can diversify my assets. I can be intentional about my risk vs reward. 
4. Debts : all the money that I need to pay back and the associated fees. Might be useful to separate types of debt by fixed rate vs adjustable rate debt. I might also separate debt by collateralized vs uncollateralized debt. Either way, these are just different ways to think about the cost of debt or risk of defaulting on debt. I can pay off debt. I can refinance my debt. I can, as a last resort, declare bankruptcy to charge off my debt. 
5. Protections : all the event based rights that I acquired for future contingency on things above (income, expense, asset, and debt). When I buy insurance, I’m joining a pool along with other people to get protection on some future event. I believe this is an important aspect of risk mitigation due to all the things that are outside of our influence. There are many types of protections: life, health, house, flood, earthquake, auto, mortgage, long term care, accident, theft, etc. There are endless favors of insurance. I can buy more insurance. I can cancel my insurance. I only need to be thoughtful and intentional about risks that I want to mitigate. 

These are the foundational concepts that all personal finance planning is built upon. Cash flow is income minus expense. Net worth is asset minus debt. Financial independence is expense vs passive income. I call them levers because I have intentional control. Personal finance starts from understanding these 5 foundational concepts, then taking responsibility and ownership to understand our financial health and steer our financial direction. I can take responsibility by tracking and monitoring. I can take ownership by defining the successful outcomes and proactive working towards those goals. I can learn from others or from myself through reflection of my success and failure. 

What are your financial levers? 

Ricky

My financial KPIs

I regularly review my financial health. I use Quicken and I track all the movements of money. However, I don’t keep a budget and control the spending. I trust the family to spend responsibly on necessities and high quality wants. I do occasionally review after the fact to continuously calibrate the understanding of needs and wants. The important thing is that I’m not the “gatekeeper” of spending. I expect each person to be their own gatekeeper and apply good judgment on their spending. 

Credit: billdu

My top line is financial assets to expense ratio. Here is how I calculate it: Divide (total financial assets) by (12 months of expenses - 12 months of passive incomes). Add up all the cash, stocks, bonds, cryptocurrency, and other financial instrument assets (that can be easily sold and converted to money). Don’t include real estate, primary residences, or other assets that’s tied to physical assets. Then I add up the last 12 months worth of expenses: dining out, grocery, utility, vacation, taxes, loan payments, etc. Every bill that I have to pay and every dollar spent. Then I subtract the last 12 months of passive income or residual income generated by real estate or other contracts and physical assets. Don’t include any income from any financial assets (dividend, interests, etc). This is the napkin math on how many years that I can very conservatively retire. This is the number that I want to grow year over year. 

Next I review metrics that positively contribute to the top line: cash flow and rate of return on financial assets. I use simply cash flow = total income - total expense for the last 12 months. And I use a simple rate of return: percentage change on the total value of financial assets 12 months ago vs today. I review top expense categories and regular subscription in cash flow. And review the allocation of my financial assets and my returns vs general market performance such as SP500. 

Next I review the top 2 factors that are the biggest drag on the top line: cost of debt and effective tax rate. I review to make sure my rate of return is better than the most expensive interest on my cost of debt. I will make occasional adjustments to find lower cost of debt or allocate my cash flow to pay down debt vs investing. I also regularly schedule a tax review with my tax advisor on projected tax due. My personal pet peeve is getting a tax refund. I don’t want to give the government an interest free loan and definitely don’t pay more than my legal obligation. 

What are your financial KPIs? 

Ricky

Laborer vs Capitalist

Originally, I wanted to write a blog entry about working for money vs money working for me. While doing a bit of internet research, I discovered this quote from the book : Your Money Ratios by Charles Farrell. 

The unifying theory of personal finance that the book proposes is:

As a laborer, you are paid a wage for … doing some form of work.  You are exchanging work for money, which means you must labor for your money, and are thus a laborer….As a capitalist, you are paid not for the value of your labor, but for the use of your money.  This payment can come in the form of interest, dividends, or price appreciation, but in one way or another, you are being paid to allow others to use your money.  This is the essence of investing, and thus being a capitalist.  If you hope to retire someday, you will need to become a capitalist–someone who generates income from their capital.

One paragraph completely summarized my various steps (1, 2, 3, and 4) on financial independence. I love it. I don’t think I can say it better so sharing this quote for today. I just ordered this book and added to my growing list of books to read. 

I will strive to be a capitalist by investing in myself, investing my money, and investing in my family's future. 

Ricky

How to teach programming to bright non-technical students?

I’m watching online Python programming classes (Google Dev Edu, Berkeley 61a, MIT OpenCourseWare, and freeCodeCamp.org Harvard). No, I’m not doing this for fun and I don’t need to learn Python. This is part of my research / learning process. I’m working on an opportunity to teach intro programming to a bunch of bright college non-STEM major students. 

In my quick search, I agree some of the common barriers to learning programming are as follows: 

• Technical jargons - This is extremely pervasive in software engineering. Especially in basic programming where computer science is like a branch of mathematics so there are shared vocabularies but it’s used with different meanings such as variables, expressions, functions, parameters, etc. 
• Too many abstractions - There are layers and layers of conceptual framework from how computers work (binary, cpu, instruction set, memory, address space, etc) to high level data structures and algorithms (dictionary, vectors, linked list, search, regular expressions). They are related so it’s hard to teach without overloading students. 
• No good real world analogies - Steve Job famously said “Computers are like a bicycle for our minds.” Of course, programming is like a recipe. But that analogy just doesn’t quite have the same favor. Same goes for variables, dictionaries, vectors, functions, and the list goes on and on. Job’s analogy successfully conveys the what and the why of computers using a real world analog. Recipe is a good concept analogy for programming. But if you don’t care about cooking, why do you care about writing a recipe to a computer.  The benefit / motivation is not convincing.    
• Error prone, repetitive, and terse - Once students get past all that, when it comes to actually programming, most people, even programmers would agree that the act of programming is tedious. Between edit, compile, run, debug cycle. The lack of feedback or good introspection tools. It’s more like a witch’s nasty brew with magic incantations thrown in for effect. 
• Demotivation factors - I suspect there are plenty of systematic stereotypes that have evolved over years. It’s “geeky”. It’s for “smart” people. One research on adult attitude indicates programming is “difficult, boring, and something they generally couldn’t learn” (paper: Challenging stereotypes and changing attitudes: The effect of a brief programming encounter on adults' attitudes toward programming, Polina Charters)
• AI and tech job recession - Currently top of mind in the news cycle, social media, etc about the evolving cost and benefit of learning to program. Will AI take over programming jobs? Have we reached peak programmers demand? AI, along with rapid potential societal changes, brings uncertainty and anxiety.  

There is no shortage of challenges to teaching something that I love to do. I think that many of these barriers are within our control and influence. As an instructor, I hope to 1) motivate, 2) build mental models, 3) try then theory, and 4) offer practical advice to make programming easier. Start by establishing common ground and context then talk about the larger “why”. Take the time to dispel common myths and misconceptions. Learning is about building new connections, and practice to strengthen those connections. I would start with an understandable problem then show how the concept solves the problem. Next, get hands-on quickly. Have you noticed how gaming ads always show a person doing lame moves? I want to start with trying it, allow me to make mistakes, and then explain the details. Finally, be a coach that guides with practical real life advice. 

Here is my attempt to write my first lesson plan. I welcome feedback. 

Do you have teaching suggestions or a favorite story about learning to program? 

Ricky

Why did I write my own financial retirement spreadsheet calculator

In a previous entry, I mentioned that as part of my learning process I developed my own retirement calculator. At a high level, it’s a good way to synthesize and apply the knowledge that I gained. Writing a program is a creative yet rigorous process to precisely put together a step-by-step recipe to solve a problem. 

So what problem am I trying to solve? There are already many professional retirement calculators that can do various what-if scenarios. Or specific use case calculators on Roth conversion, Roth Ira contribution, etc. I’m a good but out-of-practice spreadsheet person. Even so, I have invested 80+ hours to refine the spreadsheet, and test different scenarios. Is all this work justified? 

Here are the problems that I noticed that led me to create my own calculator. 

• Need fine-grain controls. Specifically, % of each account subject to long term capital gain. As far as I can tell, the calculator I have seen doesn’t know the cost basis of the stock. It must make conservative assumptions about % of gain that’s subject to long term capital gain. I want a better estimation of my capital gain tax as it will be an important factor of my expenses. 
• Need account by account drawdown plan. Without talking to a fee based advisor, the core calculators only provide a generic amount projected to be drawn across my accounts. But given the variety of my accounts, I want to know how to balance the drawdown between my pre-tax retirement (401k, etc), long term capital gain, and pre-paid tax retirement (Roth). It should balance withdrawing from different sources and estimate the taxes implication. It should tell me how much to draw from each account type to cover my project expenses that year and taxes. 
• Need tax bracket awareness over the plan lifetime. I don’t want to assume a generic effective tax amount. For the calculators, it’s a very reasonable assumption that over the life of the plan that some years my tax might be lower or higher, but it will average out to the effective rate over time. However, I want more precision and optimization. I want the calculator to be tax bracket aware, it should use the effective tax rate AND not exceed when withdrawing funds from pre-tax retirement accounts. Bonus if the calculator can optimize early withdrawal to maximum a lower expense year to fund large expenses that following year so both years are within the target tax bracket. Even more bonus if the calculator can optimize early withdrawal to reduce required minimum distribution for pre-tax retirement to stay within the tax bracket. 
• Need different optimization targets. The softwares that I tried has 2 fundamental optimizations. First, predict if I would run out of money. Second, make recommendations to reduce the risk of running out money by adjusting the expected volatility of the portfolio. However, I’m comfortable with my aggressive portfolio strategy because of my diversity of passive and guaranteed income sources. I also segment my portfolio into different risk buckets. I want to try different optimization goals such as : minimal lifetime of tax paid, maximum net worth at the end of the plan, maximum tax deferred estate, etc. 
• Need a holistic goal driven optimizer. All the I tested calculators allow you to propose 1 what-if scenario and compare it. For example, it can compare 5 years of Roth conversation of $x per year and compare the impact to net worth over time. But that's not very useful since I have hundreds of permutations that I want to try. I want a goal driven optimizer and constraints that allow me to say, I can do Roth conversion from years X to Y, but not to exceed my taxable bracket of Z. Tell me how much to contribute year by year to maximize my net worth or minimize my lifetime taxable income. The answer might for 1 year be 0 and 50K for another year. It should take into account my projected expenses, and income to find the best recommendation. 

Ultimately, I want a personal retirement calculator that recommends year by year how much to withdraw from each source, ensure stress-free wealth in my lifetime, reduce the lifetime of taxes paid, and leave a low taxable legacy for the future. 

Answering my initial question, using my spreadsheet, given more conservative and more accurate assumptions, I have out-performed my financial advisor’s retirement calculator by 10%. Assuming the plan works (still a VERY big if), this 80 hours spent will be one the best financial return on investment decision in my life. To be real, I’m humble enough as a programmer to know there are probably bad assumptions, bad calculations, bugs, etc. This is a strong signal for me that a fee based advisor with a more advanced pro version of the software that’s proven would be a good investment of time and money. It was a geeky fun way to really learn about an extremely complex topic. 

Some day, I’ll think about how to generalize the spreadsheet, make it user friendly, and share it with the community. 

What do you use for retirement planning?

Ricky

Financial planning is like driving on the journey of life.

I have been thing about how to making financial planning for relatable. Because money and spending is so abstract, yet fully embedded in everything that we do. It's hard to separate it and think about money without too much emotion. 

Guidelines on financial driving on the journey of life

1. Have a fuel gauge - know how much cash I have and amount I need to the next paycheck or income source. Make sure I have emergency reserve and will never go on empty. I don't want to get stuck on the side of the road. Emergency expenses is most expensive. 
2. Steady speed - be intentional about my spending. Avoid quick purchases and focus on the necessities. 
3. Keep a light load - Assets and debts reduce efficiency and increase weight. Carry what I need and things that bring joy (being in the moment). Be intentional about long term benefits and opportunity cost of everything else. 
4. Regular maintenance - Situation and circumstance are constantly changing. I regularly do a holistic review of my investments, income sources, expenses, and subscriptions, and debts. Close out unused accounts, find better services to make sure I’m getting the benefits that truly match my current situation. 
5. Know where we want to go - Building our map and key destinations. Have regular family conversations about our financial situation, goals, and destinations. Investing my family’s future so we get to our destinations stress-free. 
6. Enjoy the journey - Take time to celebrate and experience wonders together. Perhaps this should be higher than #6. 

Credit: Gemini

What do you think about driving as a metaphor for financial planning? 

Ricky

Build a financial retirement plan with confidence

Financial retirement is a high stake and low certainty type of planning. I’m looking for a retirement number - can I safely retire when I have $X? The cost of being wrong in the late stage of life is extremely bad, since no one can roll back time and have a redo. Low certainty as no one can predict the future for my health, lifespan, or world’s climate, economic, or geopolitical situations. Of course, money itself is not going to solve any actual problems, but it’s an important tool that simplifies and unblock troubles. 

My personal approach to these important and tough problems is to expand, synthesize, and apply.  

1. Expand - Start with what I know, and ask questions about what I don’t know and who can help me answer those questions. I like the rules of 3: read 3 books, talk to 3 “experts”, and try 3 software / tools. 
2. Synthesize - Filter and build my mental model. Like mixing multiple audio channels, find areas where sound converges, amplify, and enhance each other. Also find areas where there is disharmony and cancel each other out. Be intentional and build hypotheses about these effects. 
3. Apply - This is the most important part. However small I start, taking the all important first step, then build the habit of taking incremental steps. 

Currently, I’m in the stage of applying. I spoke with 2 financial advisors, read a few books, and used 3 retirement planning software packages. Here are my big takeaways. 

• There is strong convergence on the retirement financial number by back of the envelope,  averaging method, and more advanced monte carlo method. Multiple independent software with similar data sets and assumptions all clustered around the same result. This is super important for me. The clustering effect of multiple independent predictions. 
• The divergence is the degree of acceptable volatility and optimization goals: reduce emotional stress of financial volatility, avoid running out of money, avoid unnecessary taxes, and leaving a legacy. 

How I am applying what I learned. 

• Writing about it. Trying to explain and teach what I learned is forcing me to clearly organize these ideas in my mind. Talking to my spouse and writing a blog is very helpful for me. 
• Deciding on a change. Rationally analyzing my decisions and biases then changing my mind to buy annuity is a big step.
• Building a spreadsheet. This is where I geek out and see if I can build a spreadsheet to model the different scenarios and test the different hypothesis on the divergence. I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone else, but I’m having a lot of fun with it and discovering some counterintuitive results.  

How would you build a retirement plan?

Ricky 

Blown away by the generative AI in NotebookML

(credit: Andrew Best, source)

Generative AI has mostly been a fun distraction; generating some fun memes, help rephrase a few paragraphs, or generate a rough draft of a doc. I tried the NotebookLM yesterday and I was blown away by it's sophistication and naturalness of the AI generated podcast. I updated the doc version of my recent blog entries since I restarted blogging. At the press of a button, it generated a podcast entry of 2 speakers discussing the content of my blog in a fun way. I uploaded the audio to audiogram and added a Gemini generated cover art. 

I didn’t edit the audio in any way, the discussion felt very natural and convincing. It even added interesting metaphors that I haven’t considered before, but will consider going forward. I started an unlisted YouTube podcast channel to host the audio. It’s about 17 minutes long. It’s a very nice summary of the blog so far. 

Please check it out: https://youtu.be/quPV1xwA-Sw

I listened to it a few times, and am still in a state of shock at the uncanny realism and smoothness of the content and transition. 

Ricky

Optional fourth step to financial independence

 Continue the series on Financial Independence

The first step is having a financial fuel gauge. A gauge to track the rate of income vs expenses and developing the discipline to monitor the ratio and avoid running out of fuel. The second step is building 1 year worth of free cash or high liquidity assets. The third step is strategic allocation of your cash flow to all your financial goals and purchase of appropriate type of asset to meet those goals based on the time frame. I believe this is the steady way of achieving financial independence. Nothing fancy. Mostly common sense, discipline, and time that focus on the foundational stuff. 

In my path to financial independence, I also worked on a fourth goal. This is an optional and more advanced path. I assume everyone has 1 or 2 primary income sources, where I do an exchange of something I directly own (time, skill, talent, knowledge, access to network, etc) for money. The more things I have to exchange, in theory, should increase my value. Time is one, but it’s a common commodity, so not very valuable. Adding some knowledge such as a college degree, again, in theory, not given, will increase my value since I’m exchanging time and knowledge. The personal finance community often talks about investing in oneself and I’m a believer. The primary path to increasing one’s cash flow is to increase one’s value by investing in oneself and finding the right buyer that needs that service. 

I’m not a fan of “side hustle” unless the goal of the side gig is to expand one’s primary value and/or switch the source of primary income. Same as investing in one’s existing customers, it’s usually easier to keep and grow one’s current skills and assets than to switch and develop something new. 

The optional fourth path is using cash flow to acquire assets that can generate passive income. The key word is “passive”. Passive means there is a path where I spend near zero time on the project and asset and it continues to generate a profit. Example assets are stock dividends, bonds, REITs, and etc. The initial investment of time or money might be high, but after the decision is made, it should generate steady income when I sleep and give it zero attention. 

Like all things, active and passive incomes is a constantly changing spectrum. It varies on the stage of progress or change as the value or personal interest changes over time. I advocate that one should always be crystal clear if the goal of an income stream is to be active and primary, or passive and secondary. 

My passive income plan is based on real estate. Our investments here include rental properties, and REIT. We ensured our investments has a viable path to be wholly passive so we used property managers, realtors, and a team of contractors even when the cost ate into the profit and there is occasional loss. Our overarching 15 year strategy for rental properties was (1) generate a passive income stream, (2) accelerate the loan payoff, (3) after the property is free and clear, it pays for a significant portion of the kids’ college expenses, and (4) financially worry-free college experience.  

I still remember the feeling of pride, when the 15 year plan finally reached fruition. As my son planned his college move-in supply, we paid off the first rental property mortgage balance. Along with our 529 savings, and increased cash flow, we are financially worry free about the cost of college. Allowing us to help him maximize his college experience and enabling him to invest in his primary value for his future livelihood of knowledge, skill, and network.

Ricky

Gratitude for the long journey

Sharing two images today

First, my first real job straight out of college. I got my start as a software engineer at Microsoft in 1994 working on the first version of Microsoft Exchange Server. 

I kept the offer letter for 30 years.

Second, a picture of my visit to the Google Campus wearing my various Google swag as a product manager for Ads ML platform. 

my first visit to Bay View office 

These are some of the defining moments that I’m extraordinarily grateful for.  

• Being in tech during these major technology shifts
• Being hands-on in defining and creation of software products that made a difference in people’s lives. 
• Worked with many amazing and talented people

Ricky

Tidying up - office supplies and old paperwork (part 3)

Two pictures to share today. 

First, I rediscovered an old forgotten item. Found in a dusty corner of the office along with a bunch of other items meant to be reframed and installed. Definitely the best thing that happened so far, rediscovering this brought much sparks of joy.

My clean desk and a rediscovered poster

Second, the adventure continues. I have done cloth, books, boxes, and shipping supply. Now, this is the biggest one yet. My office supplies and old paperwork. 

Many years of paperwork and office supplies

I have more faith in this method, I see my organized bookshelf with my favorite books along with new books just waiting to be read. 

Ricky 

Second chances

I like to fix and repair things. I’m willing to go to fairly unusual lengths to maintain, repair, and upgrade things to squeeze more use out of things. I have repaired things like a dishwasher, many computers, a washing machine, a microwave, 2 refrigerators, many backpacks, toys, bikes, etc.  For things that are gently used and still working, I just couldn’t bear to throw it away. Especially technology things that I have put in time to upgrade, repair, and keep it running for as long as possible. 

source (credit : theprettyplaneteer)

My options are 

• Throw it away
• Donate it
• Sell by second hand store
• Sell by owner
• Rent it

The big picture. 

• I want to live and help all of us to live more sustainably with less consumption
• I want low hassle and deal with reasonable people (avoid hustlers and fraudsters)
• I want to give once cared for things a second chance at a new home

Here are the winners based on my experiences. 

• For books and medias, the local library is the best choice. I frequently visit and see many people donate and purchase items from the local library. The volunteers are very nice. It’s a good community of people that care and share the books. I have sold textbooks on Amazon and eBay. Amazon is better with a low fraud rate and convenient transactions, but more hassle to setup and maintain the account for low volume sellers. eBay is mixed. Craiglist is a sh*t show. I’m staying away from both for now
• For cloth, 2nd Street thrift store has been the only option for a few nicer pieces of cloth. The rest has been donated but I’m highly uncertain how those donations get handled. I’m a bit weary of them. 
• For furnitures, sport equipments, and kitchen appliances, I had good experiences on Facebook Marketplace. Most people show up for meetings on time, make an effort to communicate, and low fraudsters, and only a few hardcore hagglers. Occasionally, I get a story. Once I sold my daughter’s gently used bike to grandparents who are raising their granddaughter abandoned by her mom. It’s sad but also heartwarming that there are good people that do their best for their family and making ends meet. 
• I recently discovered Yoodlize. I’m going to give that a try. I suspect early adopters are most likely people that share my value on sustainable living. 

What’s your philosophy and practice on second hand things? 

Ricky

What is success in my 50s?

A follow up on “What are some smart moves a 22-year-old can make as soon as he/she starts earning?” That article stopped at the age of 50s. At the time I wrote it, it was hard to think beyond being work optional financially. Now, I’m in my 50s, it’s time to revisit that question. I think the key challenges in the 50s are

• Identity and habits beyond work and career
• Growing financial uncertainty and changes
• Lost of social connection and greater family distance
• Medical and mental challenges

source

There is no single quantitative definition of success, I wanted to have a more holistic multiple pillar definition of a good life. Here is my attempt to define my ideal outcome in my 50s using Objective Key Result (OKR) format. 

CAPVee - 4 Holistic Pillars 

Meaningful Community - Build meaningful and new bonds with people that matters

Joyful Activity - Discover my avocation with purpose and joy to use my remaining time 

Worry-free Prosperity - Develop and execute on a plan to preserve and endow the family wealth

Sustained Vitality - Rejuvenate and sustain my health

Meaningful Community - Build meaningful and new bonds with people that matters

• Renew - (1) Daily quality time with family and spouse, and (2) reestablish former friendships
• Explore - (1) Guide kids to the next major milestone of their life, and (2) establish new social connections via clubs and networks

Joyful Activity - Discover my avocation with purpose and joy to use my remaining time 

• Grow (my mind and heart) - (1) Read X books per month, and (2) Travel to X new regions per years
• Give (Betterment of others) - (1) Find a volunteer opportunity, and (2) Teach.  

Worry-free Prosperity - Develop and execute on a plan to preserve and endow the family wealth

• Preserve (execute retirement financial plan) - (1) manage expenses within 20% margin of safety, and (2) grow passive income to 50% of expenses 
• Endow (safety net for future generations) - (1) review will and trust, and (2) establish family council. 

Sustained Vitality - Rejuvenate and sustain my health

• Rest - (1) High quality sleep on a regular schedule, and (2) reduce coffee intake to acceptable levels. 
• Rejuvenate - (1) Met all medical and blood test result range, and (2) be pain free 
• Mindfulness - (1) Learn to let go, and (2) practice gratitude and meditation 

There is a lot here, and I have a full decade to accomplish it all. :) 

What's your idea of success as you age? 

Ricky

Tidying up - Maria Kondo way (part 2)

Step 1: Cloth

This is easy for me. I don't have many pieces and I don't have much imagination or desire for cloth. Anything that I haven't touched in while, looks too worn out, or just don't fit. It's out. I guess because I'm so practical with cloth, I didn't get a sense of joy from any particular piece of clothing. I kept any piece that I want to wear in special occasions.  

Step 2: Books

This one might be difficult for me. I started by gathering all my books in one place. It's my goal today to decide which to keep. Then donate the rest. 

This exercise is more difficult than I thought. I maintain that hope that "the magic of tidying will help .. create a bright and joyful future! (Maria Kondo)"

Ricky