I think in general I was much less motivated before the startup and didn’t work much on personal development. I don’t know how I would change that if I were to leave the startup. In many ways the startup is what’s motivating me to make these posts and think about improving my personal development. That’s probably a bad thing but I think it’s true, and I’m not sure exactly why/how to change that. Part of it seems to be that it’s easier for me to improve myself or stay motivated to do difficult things when I’m doing it for something else. I noticed this at my first job too where I improved myself as a person, read a lot of books etc. in the service of some bigger purpose rather than purely for myself. I think that’s a personal flaw and I need to learn to prioritize myself as an end unto myself.
No you don’t. You’re pretty busy. You have a full time job that you’re new at (they take extra attention when you’re new) and on top of that you have other issues in your life to sort out (e.g. parent stuff, learning life skills like budgeting, thinking and planning well, and also young adult stuff like figuring out how to cook and grocery shop well). Plus you have hobbies and friends and stuff.
You’re trying to make big business decisions and talking about investing your entire net worth before doing some organized planning or learning to figure out how to deal with life, make rational decisions, etc.
Don’t jump to conclusions about what to do (e.g. quit) but there is a problem there worth considering. In short, you’re trying to jump into the middle of stuff before getting earlier issues mastered or even organized well. At minimum you could be more careful about taking on additional commitments in the future.
Do you have an equal share of the company, and equal rights and decision making power, the same as every other founder? (The short answer is that you should.)
Yes there are more fundamental issues.
I think this should be approached partly with concretes and by looking at problems. What, if anything, goes concretely wrong when you read an CF article or watch a tutoring video and try to study it? Did you get so far as doing that and running into a problem, or was the problem that you don’t even start? You haven’t given information about the problem. I don’t think the main problem is that you were too busy with other things for the last … over a year? Whatever the timeframe.
TOC is CF related but marketing and sales is not a good place to start if your goal is CF learning. That’d be a relatively minor thing to learn later b/c TOC is valuable enough to, eventually, be pretty thorough with.
Good points… I didn’t consider the young adult stuff, but you’re right, I do have to figure out those things and they aren’t automated. Also good point re: jumping to conclusions, and I agree that at a minimum I shouldn’t accept new responsibilities/commitments moving forward. I should try to cut back on stuff and become less busy as much as possible by cutting out extraneous stuff.
Yes, I own 33% of shares and have the same voting power etc. Initially when I joined and we were negotiating this, I thought I should get less than 33% because they had been working on developing the product for a year or more before I joined. They disagreed and said basically that it’s better to own 1/3rd of a bigger pie than to own 40% or something of a smaller pie. They argued that the overall pie would be smaller if we had unequal shares and then part of our mindshare was taken up by worrying about our share ownership, and we had future arguments/conflicts about it etc. It would hurt our creative output and ultimately the product, which would reduce our profits.
I was surprised that they were basically arguing for me getting more shares, but I appreciated it. So yeah, I legally own 33%, same as the other two founders.
The stuff I helped with when I joined was primarily legal + bookkeeping(I incorporated the company and started doing bookkeeping, and also started doing legal research on consulting agreements, IP agreements etc.). I had some legal experience from my last job and also connected with a lawyer I used to work with who gave us some free advice and helped me incorporate the company. I was basically able to do more of the legwork so he charged us very little, and I was able to ask him for templates for different agreements and then modify them myself. Because I knew him well, I was able to substitute my time for his time in some areas and save money, which seemed nice since we were a startup and low on money but having plenty of time (at least my time, my co-founders were pretty busy)
Now they’ve put me more onto marketing stuff so I’m learning all of that. Basically I’m handling all of the non-technical non-development related stuff and doing my best to contribute in those areas. I do basically still feel like I’m not contributing nearly as much value as they are since they’re better at what they do, but I’m starting to feel better about that as I learn stuff and bring unique insights and strategy stuff to the table re: marketing.
I’m also interested in contributing in terms of business development and ToC stuff if I can learn that well.
OK, I will make my next goal re: CF learning to figure out some concretes by trying to read something/watch a video and making notes on it. I’ll also be extra conscious of any negative feelings/boredom etc. and will note them down as possible problems (but won’t stop unless it gets really bad or something).
Is it fine to start with e.g. Fallible Ideas for Life? I like those blog posts a lot and would like to write some notes about them and analyze them in-depth.
11,781.56/2645 = ~4 and a half months. I’d guess that means one or more of the following:
- You haven’t had $2645 disposable income for very long
- You have been spending lots of disposable income on something you didn’t list
- You have other expenses you’ve failed to list/account for
If you haven’t had your current income/expense combination for very long it’s hard to know how much disposable income you actually have. Some expenses will occur only once every 6 months, or once a year, or at random times every 2-3 years, etc.
In my case I found tracking expenses and budgeting to be a time consuming and boring chore. It was ultimately unfruitful because something unusual would happen (either an expense I usually didn’t have, or income I usually didn’t have).
If your current income is significantly greater than expenses, like it sounds is your case, I found separate accounts, buffer balances, and automated transfers work better.
As an example, say you currently have income coming into account A and expenses being paid out of the same account. Let some balance accumulate in that account sufficient to cover a couple month’s anticipated expenses. Then open account B, and switch your paycheck and other income sources to deposit into B instead of A. Set up a weekly ACH automated transfer from B to A for what you think your weekly average expenses work out to. Weekly because it’s just as easy to set up as monthly but makes the balance in A more stable. Then watch what happens over time. Aim to keep A’s balance in a range, such as 2-4 month’s expenses, over a 2-4 year time horizon so you get all the rare/unusual expenses.
If A’s balance goes down significantly (like to only 1 month’s estimated expenses), you’ve underestimated your expenses and/or your expenses have gone up. You can investigate the cause by looking at A’s transaction log if you want. Or you can just bump up the amount of the weekly transfer from B to A.
If A’s balance goes up significantly, you’ve overestimated your expenses. Reduce the amount of the weekly transfer from B to A.
Benefits:
- Over time you can hone in on a weekly automated transfer amount that keeps A in the range you want it, despite fluctuations in spending. That’s your actual expense amount, and you can know it (and see it change over time) without budgeting or tracking transactions. In my own case once I got it dialed in I haven’t had to change it for multiple years.
- Excess funds will accumulate in B. If you want a total of 6 month’s emergency reserve, and 2 month’s is the lower bound you keep as a balance in A, let 4 month’s worth of expenses accumulate in B. Anything over that can then be invested out of B.
- Because spending is isolated from income, it might help keep you off the hedonistic treadmill where you reflexively increase spending in response to an increase in income and increase in A’s account balance. Extra income windfalls are seen as extra investable funds in B rather than extra spendable funds in A.
- If any disruption happens to your income stream, you have time (4 months using the example above) before it begins to affect the balance in your spending account A.
- Rare / large asset purchases (car, house) can either be accumulated for and paid directly out of B or paid for by liquidating investment funds.
- Over time investment / passive, side-hustle, etc. income coming into B can be easily compared to your B->A transfer rate to help assess ex: when you can quit a job and rely on the other income sources. It isn’t a definitive indicator (that’d be a whole different topic) but it helps.
- If you have shared expenses with other people like roommates this system is readily adaptable. You set up one A for the shared expenses and everyone has their own personal A from which they just transfer in their share to the shared A every week. If the shared A starts to deplete, everyone’s transfers need to increase and vice-versa if the shared A starts to over-accumulate.
Downsides:
- The buffer cash in A and B accounts isn’t invested in anything that produces growth or income. When you’re first starting out that can be a significant percentage of your net worth. But if your income exceeds your spending by a lot, that phase won’t last long. Remember the balances to keep in A and B are related to your spending amount, not your income amount.
- If you tend to overspend or mindlessly spend, this system can make that problem harder to solve because it deliberately renders the details of your spending invisible unless you specifically go looking at them.
I started my job about two months ago. The stock investments have been around for a while (like 8 months-1 year or so), I haven’t bought any stocks recently.
I’ll try this buffering accounts thing although I don’t fully understand it. Instead of moving my paycheque over to a new account though, I think I should open a new account and treat it as account A, instead treating my current chequing account as account B, since I won’t have to change my direct deposit info for payments that way. I don’t see any downsides to this since it seems like the only thing that matters is how much money is in each account. I’ll do the automated transfer thing and track the balance of each account over time.
Re: large/rare purchases, I should be accounting for them. Like if I think I buy a new computer every 5 years, then I should do something like $2,500/5 and then add that to my yearly/monthly expenses. Same for desk, chair etc. I think companies do this in their cashflow planning so it’s something I need to learn anyway. I don’t drive and own plan to own a house any time soon, so those are OK, but I should probably budget some 500-1k per year to random luxury expenses, e.g. the PS5 I just bought for $600. If I don’t spend the full 500-1k in a year, then it can roll over to future years. I think doing something like that will help me be less impulsive with my spends as I do tend to spend more when I have more money. I like the A and B idea because it psychologically helps me only spend $x per week and any decision to buy some big luxury good that requires a transfer from B will be something I have to think twice about instead of being possible as an impulse purchase. I do spend from my credit card primarily at the moment, which makes impulse purchasing easier.
Stop rushing into things without thinking them through.
I do not recommend implementing anything I suggest that you don’t fully understand. Understand first, then (if you decide to) implement.
That’s fine. I had many times the number of automatic payments set up as I did income sources. Pretty much every bill I have is on auto-pay. So switching the account for income deposits was easier for me. But if that’s not true in your case doing the opposite should also work. You’ll just need to transfer the buffer to A to get it started because it won’t already be there.
OK. My dad is currently helping me in a way since I’m living with him. I think also part of it is that my parents’ culture is Indian and that’s partially my culture too, so even though I’m fairly North American culturally in many ways, I still have some psychological hangups around some expectations like taking care of parents and stuff. I’m conflicted on a lot of that stuff.
What you wrote makes sense to me though. My dad has to take responsibility for his problems and I shouldn’t be taking responsibility for them. He has choices he can make to improve his financial situation.
Helping when I’m 40 or 50 does make sense since I’ll be more well established then, having savings and investments etc. I guess they will be around 80 by then. Maybe I psychologically treat them they are older than they actually are, since 60 isn’t actually that old and they are still basically capable of independent living with no issues. I think I also psychologically underestimate how big a deal 20 years is in terms of me going from young adult to middle aged adult in that time, and they’ll be old but still sort of senior-ish. I need to perceive time better in general I think. A lot of what you wrote isn’t stuff I was explicitly familiar with.
I can also help my dad by e.g. helping him find a better job etc. which would be more sustainable and impactful ways of helping compared to just giving him money every month. Sort of like giving a man a fish vs. teaching a man to fish.
wise words!
FIFL is not very organized or comprehensive, doesn’t start at the beginning, and isn’t focused on epistemology. Plus you’ve already read it. I think you should use it as a possible backup plan. But it could be a way of avoiding the main CF stuff without trying it or identifying a problem.
Ok maybe I can start with
from:
Also re: not rushing into things, you’re right. I should wait on stuff and understand it well before I act. I’m still thinking I should just pay the $129 for the ToC stuff and learn that instead of Jonathan Stark stuff, but I’ll wait a bit and think about it more before deciding. I also want to find some software or method of downloading the videos instead of having to screen record them.
Also just saw this and it looks interesting too: Improving Emotions
but I’ll start small and see if any problems arise first.
IMO, start with Yes or No Philosophy Summary and Tutoring Videos (the Max videos).
PS Please use quotes of text instead of screenshots in general.
2 things occur to me:
- If you use an email forwarding service (probs best with a wildcard:
*@example.com), you can combine that with gmail’s send-as feature so that mail is automatically delivered to a free gmail account and you can set your default send-as to an email on your domain. - google used to have free personal g-suite accounts; if you had that, then it continues but it’s no longer available. The loophole is that, for existing personal g-suite accounts, you can still add and remove domains. so if you can acquire one of these then you might be able to port over to it. (This is mb against ToS – not sure – but definitely ‘grey market’ type stuff. Mb not worth looking into)
But this is like ~$100/yr, so is it really worth thinking about? It’s about 0.3% of your monthly income.
Yeah realistically I just shouldn’t worry about it. I think it’s silly that it weighs on me so much, and I think it definitely stressed me out more when I had no income. Now that I have an income, I don’t think about it as much. I should clarify that when I said “Have been trying to figure out how to migrate these emails and just host on something like zoho for free instead” that was something I tried to do months ago. I haven’t tried to do that recently. I should have been clearer in my original post.
It’s not a constraint and I should focus on other areas for bigger wins first. The Big Win idea seemed to be an important part of Ramit Sethi’s philosophy, basically saying focus on the big wins and don’t worry about e.g. buying starbucks or whatever else people worry about when they are trying to improve their financial health. I think some big wins he mentioned were automating your saving and investing and making sure you set yourself up with good bank accounts and credit cards since that’s a one time negotiation to set up and will save you/make you money perpetually.