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My parents always told me to save.  My accountant tells me to set money aside in my RRSP.  Saving seems like a reasonable thing to do, but why?  Why do we save?  More importantly what are we supposed to be saving for?  After being able to take care of life’s necessities: shelter, heat, food and 3 months of living expenses set aside, what else is there?  My TV tells me I should be saving to get a new car, a bigger TV (I gave in to this one), a bigger house, a nice vacation, etc.  What a fucking scam.  You work your ass off for 60 hours / week and then you buy a nice big house or a downtown condo and now you have to work 80 hours / week to maintain the same lifestyle.  So by saving and then upgrading, you’ve essentially locked yourself into a job you already hated.  Btw, if anyone thinks their house is an appreciating asset just ask your US friends, especially those in Florida or California.

Convinced that savings suck, but not sure yet about what to do with the extra cash?  Do what I do:  Save just enough for your next business “risk”.  That could be investing in a bottomless stock market, buying a cash flow positive income property with lots of room for equity growth or starting a business.  Your friends might think these ventures are risky.  Your friends must be employed.  Investing in yourself or what you’ve researched is a lot safer than being employed by a corporation that can fire you at any time, for any reason.  What if you fail?  Each failure contains valuable clues to achieve success the next time.  Save some money and try again.  Feel shitty about failing?   Remember that your lost investment would have just eroded in your bank anyways.

It’s a bit counter-intuitive because of how society has defined “risk”, but really one of the riskiest things you can do with your money is to take no investment risk at all.  Yet somehow, I think our asian parents would disagree.

Keith and Kevin have gone through the exercise of 1 blog post per day, and both tell me it’s a useful exercise to make blogging more of a habit so I’m going to give it a shot for 1 month and see what happens.

Golf

Kind of sucks right now.  I pinched my sciatic nerve last week hitting golf balls.  I seem to have a minor case of sciatica.  Basically, if I move the wrong way, it feels like I got shot in my lower back. It’s especially a downer because I was hitting pretty well and there’s an event at the club this weekend that is always a blast, but I can’t attend.  The one positive out of all this is that I seem to want to recommit myself to crazy fitness.  I guess I’m not in as good of a shape as I thought I was.  Time to train like Tiger :-).

Web Apps

I like to think I have good ideas for profitable web apps.  OK, really, I think I have some kick ass ideas for web apps.  But it started to annoy me that I had to convince technologists that my ideas were kick ass, because without them, I can’t even execute an online proof of concept, which would probably be more useful in getting people to believe in my ideas than my broken english.  So, I’m serious about learning Ruby on Rails.  Keith was over for the week and was kind enough to spend 5 hours with me on an app I’ve been wanting to build since December 2007.  As we were working, I was pretty impressed with how quickly Rails can get the skeleton of your app up and running.  But the biggest surprise was how quickly my developer skills came back to me.  Very cool.  We even did some work with CSS, which I had no experience with, but after a 5 minute explanation from Keith, it seemed pretty easy.  Applied it to the blog, so I hope you like the changes :-).

I have more to talk about, especially my dilemma on whether to buy Apple stock now or to buy after the US banking system collapses.  Seems like the right decision would be the latter, but that App store is going to be a mother cash cow for Apple.  Brilliant move to cut the price of the iPhone in half, reduce the barrier to entry, introduce the App store, make hundreds of millions.  Their stock should fly, I just don’t know how much the market is going to punish them for the crappy US banking system, rising oil and a weaker dollar.

À demain.

nK.