Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required

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Well, sure – you can’t spend your way to Earthly bliss. But here’s the flipside: poverty is pretty sure to make you miserable. Far from being the root of all evil, money is the most important tool we have to improve our quality of life.

What does cocaine have to do with shopping? Surprisingly, quite a lot. Understanding that connection holds the key to getting the most out of the money you decide to spend on luxuries. That’s the philosophy of Kristy Shen, a self-made millionaire who retired at 31. In these book summary, we’ll be exploring how she did it. Expect plenty of unashamedly contrarian takes, left-field strategies and novel concepts. More to the point, expect to find a roadmap to wealth creation, debt eradication and financial independence. Okay, I know how this one sounds. Kind of depressing? Many wealthy people including Steve Jobs have given career advice that’s something along the lines of “Follow your heart.” Doing something you love can really pay off, right? Shen teaches that this is often the wrong choice. Within each chapter, we split off the sections, attached deadlines to each task and got to work. At this point, we calculated that if we each write a chapter every week or 2, adding in time for re-writing, editing, and research, we’d be done in 9 months. Step 7: Write like the wind!An excellent resource to get people without much financial reading or research behind them a) motivated and b) familiar with lots of key concepts. Whilst some aspects of this book I had a good grounding in - saving, budgeting, investing, and a bit of hustling! - I still learned a lot and it felt good to have even more affirmed. I was especially inspired to think and reflect a bit on how my future might look if I have children, for example. It’s also seriously made me reconsider buying a ‘dream home’, even if house prices are ridiculously cheap where I’m from in the UK. Although watching Grand Designs alongside this didn’t help - I’m simultaneously convincing myself I can build an eco home for nothing and EARN money from that madness. The scary thing - she described my traits in parts of this book and I can’t help but feel that this is a project I can venture into beyond FI (financial independence) and complete “another year” as she puts it, to find my Grand Design [sigh - have I learned nothing?!]

Book is directed to Millenials and younger but everyone will find something interesting, either in investment or tax area. I knew we were going to teach FI and investing concepts through the story of how I became a millionaire by the lessons learned during the 3 stages of the socioeconomic ladder— poverty, middle-class, rich. Also I’ve been reading about FIRE for over 5 years now, and thought I’ve read pretty much everything there is on the subject, but they proved me wrong. Even if you’ve read everything about FIRE you will certainly still learn something from this book.If you’re Chinese like Kristy, that history means you’re basically programmed to avoid debt like the plague. But here’s the thing: when you crunch the numbers, it turns out that’s a pretty good attitude to adopt wherever you live. So, she followed the math and went with engineering. And today she is a writer. The well-paying job she had as an engineer allowed her to pursue her writing dream. She was able to put her best creative efforts forward in her free time when she wasn’t worried about paying the bills. Lesson 2: Avoid consumer debt and spend money on experiences instead. Another bizarre thing I noticed about the book is that there just aren't that many examples of other women on FIRE, even in the chapter on parenting. I follow a lot of FIRE blogs and even some podcasts, so I know that if she really wanted to, Shen absolutely could have included more women in her book. She never says this directly, but the way she reveres so many White men and ignores all of these other issues says a lot in itself. Also, if you are under the impression that women are not very involved in FIRE, you are absolutely wrong, though I can see how people may be led to believe this idea after reading Shen's book. Here's just one counter argument, but there are many:

She just is a little self-centered for my taste, but it's a good book to introduce people to FIRE, but it's a bit much. I've been researching FIRE topics on and off for years (mainly investing), so I'm not as much the audience.

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That’s a whopping 98 percent of the sale price. And remember, we started by assuming that the value of the Smiths’ house would grow by 6 percent every year. That’s well above the actual inflation rate in the US, which is about 2 percent. In the real world, the Smiths would have lost money! Use the “Rule of 150” to decide whether to buy a house or use your money for something else. The “normal” retirement age is 65 because most people save between five and ten percent of their salaries and have investment portfolios yielding an average of six to seven percent annually. Plug those numbers into a spreadsheet and you’re looking at 40 to 45 years of work. That opened an unexpected can of worms. If she wasn’t going to blow her savings on property, what was she going to do with that nest egg? Let’s find out in the next book summary! Index investing is less risky than betting on individual companies. Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung are world travelling early retirees. Their story has been featured in media outlets all over the world, including the New York Times, CBC, CNBC, Women’s Health Magazine Australia, Germany’s Handelsblatt, GQ Russia, and the UK’s Independent. They spend their time helping people with their finances and realizing their travel dreams on www.millennial-revolution.com. Genres It’s a position of privilege to not be money-driven, she says. “Anybody that says ‘oh yeah, it’s only money’, ‘money comes and goes’, ‘it’s not about the money’, it’s like, you’ve never been poor.” If it hadn’t been for her childhood experiences, Shen doesn’t think she would be doing early retirement now. “I would’ve just thought just do something I love to do … I wouldn’t have thought put in the hard work now and get the gain later.” If everybody was FI [financially independent], Trump wouldn’t have got elected. Bryce Leung

Quit Like a Millionaire, a memoir-cum-how-to guide came out this month and presents financial independence as a route to happiness and is refreshingly dismissive of home ownership as an investment.” —The Guardian (US) During her early childhood in Taiping, a village in Sichuan province, Shen says she learnt the scarcity mindset early on. “If you ever run out, the government is not here to help you, there’s never going to be any safety net to catch you. So my parents had instilled it in my head that money is the most important thing in the world.” As a student her father, who before she was born spent 10 years imprisoned in a labour camp, was able to visit Canada. Shen and her mother followed two years later. As for the advice, it seems mostly reasonable. Shen is Canadian, so provides both American and Canadian examples throughout. As I compare her situation to mine, I see that her advice really revolves around not owning real estate, trusting medical insurance will always be there (Canadians, nuf said), having a mindset to massively save from large engineering salaries, and not having kids (although her chapter on kids say retiring early is done with kids all the time, they don’t have them). Most interesting advice -- foreign travel to lower costs. I’ve heard this before, but Shen’s descriptions were compelling. For your FIRE number take your average annual spending and multiply by 25. Unless you want to work part time during retirement, then halve your average annual spending (assuming you'll make half what you normally do working part time) and multiply that by 25. See also: sideFIRE or Barista FIRE.In the following book summary, we’ll see how she did it. Kristy’s Chinese heritage taught her that debt is a trap to be avoided at all costs. When your money and priorities are in sync, you find financial peace; I’ve taught that principle for years. Kristy’s personal storyshowed me how one does the scary work required to discover those real priorities. This book is a testament to the power of knowing what you want your money to do for you with absolute clarity, and then going after it unapologetically.”— Jesse Mecham, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of You Need a Budget; founder of YNAB From two leaders of the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, a bold, contrarian guide to retiring at any age, with a reproducible formula to financial independence. How much do you need to save to retire early? That’s exactly what researchers asked in a landmark study published in the investment journal AAII in 1998.