trade-offs

1. 18 May 2023

   Adiós, amigos!

   This blog and Fairhaven Wealth are on indefinite hiatus. I have other things in my life right now that are more important to me and my direct loved ones, and freeing up that mental bandwidth is more i…

2. 6 May 2022

   The right ragrets

   The secret isn't living without regrets — it's having the right ones. Most important decisions come down to shades of right, not right versus wrong. Embrace the ragrets.

3. 4 December 2020

   It’s trade-offs all the way down

   The word "decide" traces back to Latin — "to cut", or to kill. Every decision kills other options you could have taken. Time is scarce. Money is scarce. Even Bill Gates makes trade-offs. It's trade-of…

4. 12 June 2020

   Retiring early is expensive (and so is private education)

   Every time I run the numbers, the cost of private secondary education stuns me. Retiring early is expensive too. Neither is wrong — just know what you're trading off.

5. 17 April 2020

   Investing in a business can make you rich. It can also make you poor.

   For most of my clients I recommend widely-diversified, low-fee index funds. They're steady, sensible, and almost no one gets really rich from them. Investing in a business is one of the few things tha…

6. 13 December 2019

   What price a dream

   A personal allegory. On the surface it's about my long-running desire to own a Porsche Cayman. Underneath it's about having a clear-eyed perspective on your goals — the real, annualised cost of the th…

7. 19 July 2016

   Fixed costs aren’t necessarily fixed. (Or: Less car, less house, more wealth)

   When we think about spending, we focus on the discretionary stuff — coffees, clothes, takeaways. But it's the "fixed" costs that do most of the damage over the long run, and the two big ones are house…