Tag Archive: personal finance


Yes, I really do live in Canada on just $1K USD a month

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March 18, 2024

Hello, new friends! – assuming you’re here because you googled my name after seeing or reading the news. Everything you’ve read and heard is true: I do, indeed, live quite happily on $1,000 USD a month – or somewhere around $1,354 CAD as of this writing.

How? Geographical arbitrage. If you’ve never heard about it, I’m happy to be the one to blow your mind with that amazing concept. I first learned about it from Tim Ferriss’s 2007 book “The 4-Hour Workweek.” That book is brilliant, it aged quite well, and it’s filled with fun ideas: setting up and outsourcing a business, or hiring a virtual assistant, or moving someplace much cheaper where you can enjoy the same (or even better) standard of living, aka geographic arbitrage. I don’t think Ferriss ever considered that one of his readers would move from Reno to Las Vegas to Fort Worth to Tampa to Seattle to Toronto to Quebec City in pursuit of that dream, but hey – that totally worked. (And yes, just typing up that list of cities took me a while.)

2008 was a bad time to be a brand new college graduate, especially in Nevada – the ground zero for the housing bubble. That’s how, after 18 months of hustling and bustling and trying to juggle broke roommates, I got a gig as a seasonal box packer at an Amazon warehouse in November 2009. I packed a lot of boxes, got my permanent badge, and eventually got promoted to a data geek in my warehouse’s quality department…

Each time I moved and launched a new warehouse for Amazon, I received a cash bonus. As their bottom-level warehouse-based analyst (level 3 out of 12, where 12 = CEO), I never made much ($15/hour or less, usually), but there was always lots of overtime, and the annual cash bonuses for moving were nice… After three years, the twice-yearly pay raises for hourly employees stop, which was the main reason I ultimately transferred to corporate in Seattle. (At that point, I was L4, aka the lowest lifeform on the corporate ladder outside the warehouse world.) That position finally got me some sizable stock options, though – once again – I never made $100K, even if you add the stock on top of my unimpressive salary.

That whole time, I lived frugally, and contributed 10% of my paycheck to 401k (a retirement account in the US) while also trying to max out my Roth IRA (another type of retirement account), cooking at home, avoiding food trucks and food delivery (I still maintain that food delivery is a profligate scam), and generally being a good little saver. There were months when I’d switch my 401k allocation to 90%, just to turbocharge my retirement account while living off my savings. There were two dirt-cheap tropical vacations to Costa Rica – staying in hostels and traveling around the country by bus… Good times.

I’d always had the idea to retire early – recently, an old college roommate confirmed I’d voiced that notion even when we were both 20. There wasn’t much to do for fun during the Great Recession, so I overdosed on personal finance blogs and books, and came up with my own motto: Earn More, Spend Less, Invest the Rest. That’s also one of the main ideas in my book on personal finance, “Let’s Retire Young: Embrace Simplicity, Escape the Rat Race, and Achieve Lean-FIRE.” (While you’re there, check out my other Kindle e-books!) “FIRE” stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early” – and lean-FIRE is retiring early on a very lean, frugal budget. A bit like a modern-day monk, or a grad student – but permanently.

One key obstacle to FIRE fans in the United States is healthcare. That was one of the main reasons I tried getting a transfer to another, more civilized country – and after many attempts, it finally worked. (At Amazon, L4’s aren’t taken very seriously; likewise for our international transfer requests.) In March 2019, I moved from Seattle to Toronto (that was one long drive!) after the company helped prepare all the paperwork to get me a job as a financial analyst (still an L4) at a warehouse in Toronto’s suburbs.

Long story long, I worked and patiently waited for the required two years before I could get my Canadian PR (permanent residency): before that, I’d been in the country on a work permit, which meant if I lost the job, I would’ve had to go back to the US. (That would have been suboptimal.) I got my long-awaited PR in April 2021. I’d spent my 2020 selling my small stockpile of Amazon stock, investing in companies that were severely undersold during the covid market crash, and making a 193% return the following year. By April 2021, I had all the ingredients in place: just enough cash to retire early + a permanent resident status in Canada + a nice safety net in the form of my two US-based retirement accounts (they’ll keep growing for the next 22 years, till I can start withdrawing from them) and my fully funded Social Security benefits. The latter isn’t enough to live on in the US, but that alone could pay for my frugal lifestyle.

After leaving Amazon in May 2021 (ironically, right after the long-awaited promotion to L5: too little, too late), I hung out in Toronto for a bit, and then moved to Quebec City in September 2021. Why Quebec City? Well, let’s just say there was a reason I had become a financial analyst – it wasn’t just because of my seniority… I did a lot of research: the province of Quebec had the lowest rent in all of Canada. Within the province, two cities stood out: Sherbrooke had the cheapest rent of all (roughly $450-500 CAD for a studio apartment with all the utilities), while Quebec City had the second-cheapest. Quebec City was a little bigger and a lot prettier, and so…

My shiny 1-bedroom apartment is spacious and nice, on the second floor of a quiet brick building in the center of the city, within walking distance of everything. I live without roommates, and my rent is $674 CAD a month ($498 USD). The water and internet bills are included, and I pay only for electricity (or hydro, as they call it in Canada). With that sole bill and with the renter insurance, my total monthly rent is $734 CAD or $542 USD. That’s unheard of elsewhere in Canada, I know – and you might have a hard time believing it, but look it up – go on Facebook Marketplace, select Quebec City (or Lévis – the town right across the river), and search for “louer” – “rent.” You’ll find many other deals in that price range, and rental rooms for $450 CAD or thereabout.

Feel free to call me a liar. I know, these numbers look ridiculously low, but hey – Quebec is an awesome province with very strong rent control, and geographic arbitrage is a beautiful thing. You’ll have to learn French if you want to live here, but it’s not too hard: I speak passably decent pidgin French after just a couple of years here. You can too, eh. (The local francisation program will pay you $200 CAD a week to attend a community college – cégep – full time for a year to learn the language and the customs of your new home. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than DuoLingo.)

And so, $734 CAD for rent. My cellphone bill is $64 CAD, but I can probably lower it a bit if I try. My grocery budget is $300 CAD a month, and even that is too much: I cook at home, take advantage of sales, and live healthily yet simply. (Yes, I eat meat.) I also brew my own red wine, which is ridiculously cheap and fun. My budget also includes $100 CAD a month (or $25 CAD a week) on going out to eat. If/when I spend less than planned on groceries, that $95 CAD weekly budget ($70 + $25) goes into more trips to local diners and bakeries. The total so far is $734 + $64 + $300 + $100 = $1,198 CAD, or $884 USD. That leaves a whopping $156 CAD for random, non-going-out, non-grocery expenses, and that’s plenty enough.

It helps when you deliberately choose not to have a car: I sold mine shortly after leaving Amazon, and I never looked back. The cost of insurance + gas + parking + maintenance + the low-key stress the car might get stolen… I don’t miss any of that. Quebec City is remarkably pedestrian-friendly, and there are buses all over the place. (I use up one $3.40 CAD bus pass per week to get my groceries.)

For entertainment, I use public libraries, YouTube, and my book collection. For exercise, I walk around town and do body weight and dumbbell exercises at home. And yes, I do have a girlfriend – I’m not some chronically single weirdo living in a basement. The two of us are happy.

A few weeks ago, a journalist from Business Insider found one of my old Reddit posts (where I detailed my $1K/month plan) and asked for an interview, and I happily obliged. You can read it over here. In a matter of days, MSN reposted the article, then Yahoo Finance reshuffled a few words and reposted it too (that was quite funny), and then a local news channel based out of Montreal reached out for an interview too… Here it is – they mispronounced my name, but they got the story across, and that’s all that matters!

I genuinely hope that others will look into these concepts – FIRE, lean-FIRE, geographic arbitrage, and so many others – and will take steps to at least simplify their finances, if not move to an exotic new town/country/continent and retire early, a few decades ahead of the arbitrary schedule we’re supposed to follow for some reason.

My plans for the next couple of years include, in no particular order:

  • finding and agent to sell my newly finished science fiction novel, “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide”
  • writing my second science fiction novel! (See the blog post just before this one.)
  • hiking the Continental Divide Trail (my Pacific Crest Trail adventure in 2022 was glorious, and now I’m hooked)
  • joining the Canadian Army Reserves to help my new country fight natural disasters
  • joining a huge local community garden to level up my gardening skill and get a share of their vegetable harvest when it’s done
  • and much, much more…

There will, of course, be those who refuse to believe me, or – as the meme goes – will not be stopped by this blog post because they can’t read. Nonetheless… A very quick FAQ:

Q: Aha! You worked for Amazon, you rich tech-bro, you! That’s how yo managed to retire at 34!
A: Technically, that’s not a question… But no, like I said above, I never made $100K USD even if you add up my salary and stock grants. In fact, I’m pretty sure I never even made the median salary in any city I ever lived and worked in.

Q: You got lucky with your apartment, and you’re grandfathered in, and you’ll never find that deal again! Why are you bragging about this?
A: My apartment is, admittedly, cheaper than average, but you can find many others in this price range. And I moved here just 2.5 years ago: it’s not like I’ve been renting it since the 1960s. In fact, the rent has already gone up, technically: electricity (hydro) used to be included in the rent when I first moved in. There are many other deals like this.

Q: I can’t read, and squiggly characters confuse me! Where the hell do you live on $1K a month, Nunavut?
A: Nope – in the beautiful Quebec City. Sherbrooke is even cheaper! Also, that’s $1K USD, or $1,354 CAD – not $1K CAD.

Q: You lie! You got a huge inheritance, didn’t you? Didn’t you?
A: I did not, my cynical friend. Despite having buried my biological father and two stepfathers, the most I ever received from any of them was a collection of cool gems (not diamonds, no) and a beaten-up old bicycle. Also, a couple of worn white T-shirts. No riches or deeds to abandoned farms, sorry to disappoint.

Q: What the hell do you even do on that kind of budget? Sit around and watch the paint dry?
A: I do quite a lot, actually! I’m in the best physical shape of my life now, I do a lot of reading and listen to tons of fun podcasts (we live in the golden age of podcasting), I practice my photography and tinker with a couple of musical instruments, I play video games (classics are cheap, if not free), I volunteer at a local non-profit, and so much more… There’s a lot of fun stuff you can do without spending a penny. I hope someday you’ll find it too.

And with that, I’ll probably wrap up this novella. If you have any other questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to comment here or use the “Contact me” form!

Good luck on your financial journey, y’all.

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My first-ever paperback!

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July 30, 2023

I’ve come a long, loooong way from my first awkward e-books. (In fact, I deleted and then completely remastered the very first one: it was frankly embarrassing.) I’ve gone from short-length FAQs to compendiums of public-domain literature to an actual, real-length book, eh.

I used to write about early retirement on my mostly abandoned personal finance blog. Then I turned all of that into an actual e-book with advice on retiring early: Let’s Retire Young. And after remarkably great reception and reactions from multiple people, I did a bunch more formatting work and voila – it’s turned into a paperback! Amazon, as always, takes most of the profits, but still, this is mind-blowing: there will be actual books with actual unique content (none of which is from public domain, for once) bearing my name, spreading my thoughts around the world.

For all our fancy technology, paper books still last a helluva lot longer than their digital counterparts. (Go ahead and try to open a Microsoft Word file from 1983…) This feels rather surreal: I’ve made something that could quite possibly outlive me, and/or gather dust in some library collection for decades and centuries. That is, of course, if people buy it: it’s not a fancy publisher deal, just a print-on-demand operation that’s run by Amazon. (That said: fancy publisher people – feel free to reach out to me!)

To celebrate – and generate a little ranking boost – I’m giving away the e-book version for free for the next three days. The giveaway will end at the end of Tuesday, August 1st. Ditto for most of my other e-books: you can find them over here. As always, feel free to share the links with your friends, and I’d really appreciate it if you left a 5-star review if you like what you see. (Even a single sentence will suffice.)

Thanks in advance, and happy reading, eh!

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New e-book! And a giveaway! :) “Let’s Retire Young: Embrace Simplicity, Escape the Rat Race, and Achieve Lean-FIRE”

Filed under: writing — 2 Comments
June 1, 2023

Okay, so the title is a bit of a mouthful, but you gotta be thorough with those things. Also, there are zero other e-books that have “lean-FIRE” in their title, and that’s just a damn shame, eh. (For the uninitiated: “FIRE” stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early” – and lean-FIRE is the frugal version of that movement.) You can download my shiny new e-book over here. It’ll stay free until the end of Friday, June 2. I may do another giveaway in the coming weeks… If you like the e-book, please leave a 5-star review so others would be able to find it too!

As for what the book is about, I’m just going to shamelessly plagiarize my own e-book description here…

I retired at 34. I can teach you how.

My story doesn’t involve huge inheritances, rich relatives, or cushy jobs obtained through the Good Ol’ Boy Network. I’m a double immigrant: from Russia to the US when I was 16, from the US to Canada when I was 32. I never made six figures, never got huge scholarships, and my first job after college was as a box packer at an Amazon warehouse. (Thanks, recession!) Over the years, and by necessity, I mastered the art of frugal living and taught myself how to earn more, spend less, and invest the rest.

This book grew out of my personal finance blog, with a few extra chapters thrown in. Consider it your instruction manual for achieving frugal early retirement, aka lean-FIRE. (FIRE is a financial movement: it stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.”)

This book is written in a conversational and informal (sometimes too informal) style, and it has something for everyone who wants to improve their financial situation. Even if you don’t replicate my journey entirely, you’ll still be able to avoid some huge mistakes and boost your savings rate.

This e-book is hands down the most book-like e-book I’ve ever written: for one thing, it’s long (317 pages, woot!), and consists entirely of my own writing, unlike so many of the public-domain e-books I’ve spliced together. In theory, I could’ve tried to pitch it to publishing houses to get it printed like an actual real-life book, but from what I understand about the industry, nowadays they prefer authors with huge social media platforms, and that’s not something I care to maintain. (You, dear reader, are part of a small and exclusive club!) So e-book format it is, then.

This e-book has a lot of rather personal information that average people never really share with one another: money permeates so many aspects of our lives, yet it’s considered faux pas to bring it up, especially so when you’re doing better than those around you. Not gonna lie, I had some doubts about releasing it, even as I cleaned up all my old blog posts and wrote a couple of new chapters.

I ended up clicking that “Publish” button anyway, and that’s due to two simple reasons. First, no one will remember any of us 150 years from now: our internal struggle, shame, or awkwardness don’t matter one bit in the grand scale of things. And secondly, if my e-book can help at least one person (and ideally, many more) streamline their financial situation and retire earlier, then all of this will be worth it. In fact, one of my PCT hiking buddies has already thanked me profusely: he’s a lawyer, but he never got a chance to learn the ins and outs of personal finance – until now. Looks like I’ve already accomplished my absolute-minimum goal – let’s see how many more I can help, eh?

And so, without further ado, head over here if you’d like to download the e-book for free, and please feel free to share the link with all your friends: my e-book has something for everyone. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope even more to get a shiny 5-star review from you afterwards. Have fun!

P.S.: To celebrate my e-book’s release, I’m also doing a two-day giveaway on most of my other e-books over here. Personally, I highly recommend 50 shades of yay: great thinkers on happiness. It contains useful perspectives on happiness from great thinkers across the millennia. (We could all use that in this stressful time!)

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What Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail Taught Me About Money (a book excerpt)

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May 28, 2023

It was eye-opening in more ways than one.

(This is a chapter from my upcoming personal finance e-book. Stay tuned for details!)

Unlike most of this book’s content, this chapter isn’t on my personal finance blog. I’m writing this in 2023, having returned from the Pacific Crest Trail, a giant 2,653-mile hike from Mexico to Canada.

It was… amazing. Larger than life. Glorious. I am definitely not the same person I was when I started the trail in April 2022. I could talk (and write, and reminisce) about the trail for a long time, but this isn’t what this book is about. If you’re curious, you can read my daily trail journal: the very first entry is over here, and the first entry where I actually started hiking (after a great deal of planning and training) is over here. I hope this inspires at least one of you!

The PCT took me five months to finish: that included taking two weeks off for an injured ankle, as well as having to skip a couple of wildfires in Oregon. If all goes as planned (but when does it ever? Heh), I’ll return to it in 2026 for a do-over, after finishing the Continental Divide Trail and the Appalachian Trail in 2024 and 2025, respectively.

When I returned to civilization, I was 31 pounds lighter, a bit more intense, a lot more feral, and much, much more radical in my financial views. Since then, I’ve regained the lost weight and most of my upper-body muscle, I’ve gotten a bit less feral (I no longer stare in awe at running faucets), but I haven’t abandoned my newfound financial views. Here they are, in no particular order.

Declutter. Declutter hard. I used to be a hoarder. I became a minimalist over the years. (That is, if you disregard my collections of vintage cameras, art, and gems and minerals.) The less stuff you have, the more freedom you have if you decide to move. To quote Tylen Durden, “The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.” Even so, even in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine the sheer sense of freedom and simplicity that comes when everything you have, everything you need, fits into a single hiking backpack and stays on your back as you hike 2,653 miles. 

At any given moment on my hike, I could give you a fairly short list of all the items in my backpack: a tiny camping stove, a sleeping bag, a very basic first aid kit, my trusty spork, etc. Losing or breaking any of them would’ve been a minor tragedy (rest in peace, Sporky), but I knew where everything was, I knew what I could or could not accomplish with my resources at any given moment, and I never had to worry about consumerism for consumerism’s sake. If I bought something non-edible, it had to justify its weight and utility. For example, a replacement spork, or a pair of shorts for hiking in July, or a new pair of pants when the old ones didn’t survive my glissading adventures in the Sierra mountains.

Coming back to my spacious apartment was strange: it’s far from cluttered, but it has thousands of little items, most of which (like, say, a hammer) I use rather rarely. It’s been almost nine months since my return, and that vague feeling of unease, of guilty exuberance, still hasn’t faded. I doubt it ever will.

Find and use available free services. This advice comes with a huge caveat: don’t be a jerk and don’t steal the services designated for others. For example, if you have a sizable investing account, don’t barge into soup kitchens that are set up for those who have nothing. If, however, there are specific free services designed to help somebody just like you, go for it. Maybe it’s a free tutoring service at your college when you decide to go back to school. Maybe it’s a free (or heavily discounted) cooking class for adults that want to eat healthier. Maybe it’s a free photography workshop for anyone who has a good camera. Search. Find. Use. (And, as always, don’t be a jerk.)

Being a PCT thru-hiker was physically, emotionally, and financially challenging: there were good days and there were bad ones. Whenever I found something that was deliberately and explicitly designated for hikers, it felt disproportionately amazing. Sometimes it was a rural bar that invited dirty, smelly thru-hikers to its annual chili cook-off. (Joshua Inn & Bar, I salute you.) Sometimes it was a local business whose owner made it a point to give each thru-hiker a free scoop of ice cream and a piece of pie. (Mom’s Pie House in Julian, we shall meet again! Toy Store in Quincy, ditto!) Sometimes it was a ski resort that gave a free 40-oz bottle of beer if you showed them your PCT permit. (Donner Ski Ranch, keep up the great work!) Sometimes, you’d find a local church that allowed thru-hikers to sleep inside. (Thank you, Word of Life Church of Burney, CA.)

All of those things were free. All of them were for us – the smelly and rowdy tribe of 4,000 thru-hikers on a strange quest, relentlessly walking north across thousands of miles. Not all of these free services were openly advertised: there’d always be some thru-hikers who walked past without ever partaking in that kindness of strangers. If you did your research before the hike, or paid very careful attention to thru-hiker messages posted in the FarOut app (aka GutHook), then you’d be able to find all of that – and more. Sometimes, the universe actively wants to help you, but you still need to take that last step on your own.

Slow and steady always wins. I was hiking through the windy mountains near Tehachapi when I learned that important lesson – and, more importantly, took it to heart. I’d hiked 600 miles by then, and I averaged about 27 miles on a good day. My hiking style was sporadic: I would use a burst of energy to hike fast for a mile or two, then slow down, take a quick break, and rush again. Then I met two older guys – Hal from Houston and Kevin from London. Their strategy was radically different: they’d just keep walking, slowly but inevitably, even despite the powerful wind bursts that threatened to tip you over. They were, in short, like a pair of 60-year-old Terminators: they simply didn’t stop.

They passed by me during one of my many breaks. A few minutes later, I raced past them and thought I wouldn’t see them again for a long, long while. Lo and behold, they hiked past me again on my next break. It went on like that all day long: I’d use up way more energy but in the end, I’d always fall behind. (Not unlike that story about the tortoise and the hare.)

I learned a lot that day, and I adjusted my pace afterwards. That made me a better hiker, and the parallel with personal finance is obvious: slow-and-steady investors who go with stable and reliable index funds will almost certainly outpace those who try to jump from one lucrative-seeming investment to another. You’ll never set a speed record if you follow Hal’s and Kevin’s example, but chances are, you’ll outpace your competition.

When the bell rings, run. It was the opening night at the Vermillion Valley Resort, deep in the Sierra mountains. There were dozens of thru-hikers, all of us waiting for the dinner bell in the large dining room. The routine was simple: hear the bell, walk up to the counter, get your giant serving of meat and veggies and mashed potatoes. (They cooked in bulk. It was delicious.)

And then the long-awaited bell finally rang. You’d think that all the hungry hungry hikers would follow their Pavlovian conditioning and run for it. You’d think wrong. There were a few seconds of silence. There was the slow stretching of limbs as other hikers slowly (ever so slowly) started to get up from their benches. And then there was me, nonchalantly speed-walking to the counter the moment I heard the bell. I was in the back of the room, and yet I was among the first 10 hikers in that line. The three cooks did their best, but the line still moved slowly. I inhaled all of my food and got back in line for seconds (hiker hunger is real!) while 30 or so hikers were still in line, waiting for their first serving.

In the end, we all got plenty of food. Nobody went to bed hungry that night. And yet, the sequence matters: if I took all your food from you and then returned it (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the in-between snacks) at the very end of the day, you probably wouldn’t be very happy with me, even if your caloric intake for the day ended up the same. It’s similar in personal finance and in life overall: even though you’ll eventually get what you’re after, you can make things a lot easier for yourself if you pounce on that opportunity as soon as possible.

When you hear the bell, or the signal, or whatever it is you’re waiting for, don’t wait. Don’t try to appear cool or sophisticated by taking things easy. Run, speed-walk, pounce – do whatever you must, but seize the opportunity when you can, while you can. And then, of course, go back for seconds.

Act early to avoid huge expenses. The PCT goes through dozens of tiny towns, standalone gas stations, and resorts. Some of them were friendly and welcoming. Some of them treated PCT thru-hikers as if we were just wallets with legs attached. There was quite a lot of shameless profiteering. There were tiny gas stations or towns that wouldn’t just charge you $4.50 for a 20-oz bottle of soda – they wouldn’t even put up price stickers, and would seemingly make up the prices on the spot. Let’s just say those places weren’t too popular with the thru-hiking crowd, but if you had no other choice for your food resupply, and if the next store was 50-80 miles away, what else was there to do – hike on an empty stomach? (In philosophy and economics, this is known as Hobson’s choice: an illusion of choice where only one thing is actually offered.)

I’d done a lot of research before the PCT, and I sent a few food packages to my future self along the trail, but I hadn’t expected those levels of price-gouging. (That remains one of the very few things I didn’t like about the trail.) If I could go back in time (or if I’d researched better), I would’ve sent out many more food packages ahead of time to all those tiny towns, all those little resorts, all those borderline-illegal tiny stores with no price tags. That would’ve saved me a lot of time and money, not to mention anguish.

It’s similar in personal finance. Perhaps there’s a recurring event or an annual holiday: you can save 70% or more if you buy all the decorations and accessories on sale after the holiday, and they’ll be just as good a year later. (Well, maybe not the Easter Bunny chocolates, but you get the point.) If you buy your plane tickets at the last moment, you’ll pay a high premium. If you shop for them months in advance, you’ll be able to take advantage of price glitches, ticket sales, etc. If you plan on getting to the airport early, bring some snacks and save a ton of money on overpriced airport restaurants. The list goes on: there’s almost always some advantage, some way to stack the deck, or to at least minimize the damage if you act early enough, if you do more research, if you think ahead.

There were many, many more lessons learned, but these are the main ones. I’ve returned from my thru-hike a lot more radical than I’d ever been before, and I don’t see that going away. That’s an interesting change in perspective, if nothing else. At this point, I view shopping malls as profligate temples of mindless consumerism. Fancy cars are still aesthetically pleasing, but they’re also hilarious: they get stuck in traffic just like all the clunkers around them. My own consumer footprint became almost non-existent: I’ve just double-checked my online order history, and the only non-edible things I’ve bought over the past nine months were a few books, a new pair of jeans ($12 USD on sale), and an otamatone, a hilarious miniature synthesizer that cost $51 USD but brings me a lot of joy. (Can’t say the same for my neighbors. Heh.)

You don’t need to go on a gigantic cross-country through-hike to gain your own financial insights – you can learn from just about any situation, if you’re so inclined. These are just a few of my own

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New project: LetsRetireYoung.com

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December 4, 2021

I grew up reading personal finance blogs: there wasn’t much else to do for fun after graduating college during the 2008 bubble. I always wondered about that elite and mysterious tribe of bloggers, the influence they wielded, the lives they might have led. As tempting as it was, I never set up my own personal finance blog, if only because I didn’t want to be just another non-entity who was still stuck in the rat race, daydreaming out loud, sharing less-than-motivational updates along the lines of “just 51 more months till retirement!”

After I achieved my lean-FIRE early retirement in May 2021, life got a whole lot more fun and easier. Eventually, an online acquaintance teased me: “is it really a FIRE if you don’t have a FIRE blog?” (A bit like that joke about how to figure out if someone is a vegan – they’ll tell you within three minutes. Heh.) And so, the seed got planted…

I’ve launched my Let’s Retire Young blog just over two months ago, and it’s finally fleshed out enough (and not at risk of being abandoned like yet another infatuation) that I feel it can be shared with the world at large. It’s quite separate from this here blog because while a large part of that new blog is based on my own experiences, it’s mostly just money advice. Conversely, while this blog occasionally mentions money, it’s more of a personal memory repository. And, of course, “Let’s Retire Young” is far easier to memorize and pronounce than “Grigory Lukin.” (Which, if you’re curious, rhymes with “story” and “win” when pronounced correctly. Russian names are weird, I know.)

The new blog’s tagline is “Earn more, spend less, invest the rest” – and while I was pretty bad at the “earn more” part, it’s a valid part nonetheless. (Like this post I wrote about getting a tech job without learning how to code.) So far, I’m writing three posts per week: I meal-prep them every Friday (because, as we all know, Friday = “write day”), and there are already 24 of them out there. Once I make it to the big #25, I will have proven my commitment to the bit, and might be able to secure some sort of a semi-professional writing gig. (That’d be a pretty huge upgrade for this writing hobby of mine.)

Just for the fun of it, I’ve also set up a mirror version of my blog over on Medium: I may have missed that platform’s golden age, but it still gets me some readers, especially after I joined a publication for newbie writers – which, admittedly, accepts absolutely everyone, a bit like a tutorial level in a video game.

The blog itself is about early retirement, with a side of geographic arbitrage: I strongly believe that anyone’s financial situation can be changed for the better (if only a little), but that can require significant lifestyle changes, up to and including moving to another city or even country. My advice won’t suit everyone (it would be rather strange if it did), but for the right kind of person, my stories could provide a valuable blueprint. I escaped the rat race at age 34, without having rich parents or a huge inheritance or a high-paying job. (I never once made $100K USD in a year.) I found and exploited multiple glitches in the system, and managed to escape it in one piece, with my sanity mostly intact. Now I live on roughly $1,000 USD a month (rent is cheap here, eh), and loving it.

When I started that side project, I didn’t realize how interesting the monetization component would be: thus far, I’ve made $22 USD through AdSense on the main blog and $4 USD on Medium. Not exactly a huge income stream per se, but according to the r/blogging subreddit, search engines generally ignore you until you put out 25-30 posts. We’ll see how that plays out – but meanwhile, I’m enjoying this gamification process of all the different indicators that can be tracked and improved. Earnings rate, visitors, clicks, page loading time, etc…

Getting to the first 25 posts is the first major milestone. At the pace I’m going, I’ll cross the 100-post threshold sometime in June/July. (Unless, of course, that money-related reality TV show I applied for calls me back, in which case I’d probably be offline for a few months in early 2022. My life is pretty eccentric.) Once I get to that point… Perhaps I’ll be able to get a book deal, and get an actual, real book published from some of my best posts. Perhaps something else. Maybe I’ll switch to just one post a week, or end the whole project with just 100 posts so as not to dilute it with random generic gibberish. We’ll see.

In the meantime, though, head on over to LetsRetireYoung.com and check it out for yourself, eh. Feel free to leave comments, ask questions, share your favourite posts on social media, and tell your friends. I know that personal finance blogs are a dime a dozen these days (things have changed a lot since 2008), but hey – it’s better to have blogged and lost than never to have blogged at all, am I right?

Cheers, y’all.

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Announcing my new book! “Buffett’s Biggest Blunders”

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April 29, 2015

Hellooooooo, everyone!

It’s been a while since I published an e-book, but now there’s a new addition to my growing e-book empire. Ladies and gentlemen and all the conscientious objectors to the binary gender code, I humbly present to you my latest (and greatest!) e-book: Buffett’s Biggest Blunders: The Greatest Investor’s Greatest Mistakes.

Warren Buffett is without a doubt the greatest investor of our time. A humble, down-to-earth man with a talent for mathematics and analysis, he’s managed to build a $350 billion empire known as Berkshire Hathaway in 50 years. He’s a voice of reason, a paragon of patience, the living proof that one can attain wealth without day-trading or memorizing arcane formulas.

His successful trades, business purchases and arbitrage maneuvers have been analyzed time and again. Most Buffett fans know about his brilliant investment in See’s Candies or his lifelong love affair with Geico insurance. At the same time, however, there’s relatively little focus on the investments and business deals where he ended up losing.

It’s impossible to truly understand one’s investing strategy without examining one’s mistakes alongside the successes. They are two sides of the same coin. Both must be studied in order to get a full picture. Instead, even though Buffett has been remarkably open and candid about the mistakes he’s made along the way, very few pay attention to them and learn by analyzing his actions.

Did you know, for example, that once upon a time Warren Buffett paid his shareholders a dividend? That he briefly invested in Disney but then changed his mind? That he tried and failed to corner the market on stamps – and chose not to become a car collector? Those are just a few of the 30 investing blunders contained within this book.

This book collects 30 summaries of Warren Buffett’s investments that went awry. With summaries, charts and commentary from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger themselves, “Buffest Biggest Blunders” provides an excellent opportunity to learn from the greatest investor’s greatest mistakes – and to become better investors by learning about the missteps of the Oracle of Omaha.

If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about his investing methods and foibles, this is the book for you. (Or, if you’re more of a 1,000-page book person, I highly recommend Buffett’s biography “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” by Alice Schroeder.) If you’re new to investing and don’t want to lose your hard-earned cash, “Buffett’s Biggest Blunders” might just save you from making egregious investing mistakes. Or, if you’re going to join me at this year’s 50th annual shareholder convention in Omaha (also known as “Woodstock for capitalists”) and don’t want to be lost when Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger start reminiscing about their mistakes, you’ll probably want to skim my book and learn all about it.

And did I mention that it’d make an excellent present for your business-oriented loved ones? If they don’t have a Kindle, they can still read the book on a Kindle app. I have it on good authority that it works on any device that has a screen and an Internet connection. (And pretty soon, the screen will be optional!)

I’m always interested in hearing from my readers, so if you buy my book and love it, I would enjoy getting a 5-star review from you on my book’s Amazon page. I hope you enjoy reading my book every bit as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Happy reading!

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