Adventure Capitalist

People often look at me with bewildered amusement when I say I don’t believe in pensions nor put any money into a pension fund. The reason is simple: most pension systems are thinly disguised ponzi schemes, money going in today is often used towards current pensioners pensions rather than your own.

But even in the cases where you contribute to your own pension, you’re hardly safe - firstly, the money is locked in. You don’t have an account from which you can transfer money elsewhere by the press of a button. Even if you can move money, it usually comes at a cost, with exit taxes and other penalties.
Secondly, you can have no expectation of the rules being the same tomorrow as they where yesterday. You can’t even expect yesterdays rule to stay the same tomorrow, should the government decide to change the rules retroactively, which they often do.
There is nothing stopping overstretched governments from forcing your pension fund to invest a certain amount into the governments own debt to prop it up, or change the rules to means test your money the day you want them out. Or to outright confiscate it.

The first prime example of this recently is the UK’s decision to change Retail Price Index (currently 5.2%) linked pensions to become Consumer Price Index (currently 3.1%) linked pensions. These two measures of inflation diverge wildly, and at the current rate, the decision will mean that pensioners who thought they had their purchasing power protected by inflation linking will see themselves lose 20% of their purchasing power just inside 5-7 years.

A second example of this is recent news that Spain will use private pensions to buy Spanish sovereign debt in the hopes of postponing a sovereign default for now. This is nothing short of legalised theft in order to save politicians bacon from being cooked today. Once Spain does default (which they inevitably will), these private pensions will be worthless.
Spain is the first country to do this in this round of sovereign financial problems, though I don’t think the US and perhaps even the UK are that far behind in taking similar measures should the bond markets turn on them.

Personally, I don’t pay a dime to any pension fund. I do so at the cost of higher taxation as I cannot benefit from any tax relief pension contributions would give me. But I’m prepared to pay the price of paying extra tax now and keep most of what I make, rather than receive an imaginary tax relief now at the risk of being robbed of 100% when I get older.
The simple truth is, anyone who pays money into a pension and expects to get more than a pittance back is a sucker, especially if you’re younger than 50.

Blurry picture, but this week on my trip to Sweden, I took the opportunity to give my mother some of my old stuff:

• 20 odd DVD’s
• 6 or so books
• An old PC laptop
• ..and the luggage that I took it in to Sweden..

..but that’s not all:

Swedish Bonus Edition
As I was in Sweden this weekend, my mother asked me to look through some of my old stuff, and boy did I find stuff to throw away:

All the stuff standing in the floor (except the furniture and what’s on the furniture).

..and even more old magazines that I already carried out into the trunk of my mothers car (to be disposed of).

Things that where sold, given or thrown out for the fifth week of my clean out challenge:

• 20 odd books given and sold away to 3 different friends.
• 15 odd DVD’s given away to same said friends.
• Receipts, bank statements etc from the last five years that do not need to be legally (or otherwise) retained anymore shredded (eat yer heart out, Enron!). Ended up filling about 5 large garbage sacks with shredded paper. Also broke one shredder in the process.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I have taken on the challenge to declutter my life and home over a ten week period. I’ve taken this challenge seriously, and probably gotten rid of more things in a few weeks than what I needed to do in the full ten weeks if I had been anal about only doing five things a week.

Apart from a lot more space, decluttering your life comes with an other benefit: a sense of liberation.

Consciously or unconsciously, having lots of “stuff” creates a silent, underlying stress: you worry about what you have, where to store it, how much it’s worth, what if someone steals it and so on and so forth. Decluttering means getting rid of this stress. You know what things you own and what things are actually important, because you start having an overview of what those things actually are.

You start realising that if you want to move, moving isn’t such a big hassle because you know what you own and what matters.

“Stuff” doesn’t really matter, what is important to me these days is experiences, and you don’t need a lot for that. Getting rid of the excesses and curbing new acquisitions means that you win in getting more space, less stress, less worries and a sense of more having more freedom.

This week, a bunch of old hard drives, books and magazines bit the dust..

Humans are highly socialized animals - there are a lot of things we take for granted that we have learned from our environment without questioning growing up. The instinct to conform is borne out of the socialization process we go through growing up and coming off age.

These “self evident truths” we learn may not always be so self evident, but the urge to fit in is strong in most, strong enough to never question the life we have fallen into, and strong enough to ridicule those who walk a different path.

If you chose not to have a traditional career, not marry, not have kids, or decide not to do any of the other things society expects, you are an outsider. If you question whether your life should be about sitting in a cubicle in an office, turning and churning out documents, you are likely to be seen as a weirdo by most of your surrounding. If, for some reason you take action on your dreams and desires for something else, something different, you’ll be lucky if anyone understands you.

If stop sleepwalking through life like most do, people around you will likely point and laugh and say you have an early midlife crisis (or midlife crisis if you are old enough). It is strange that stepping out of the gray twilight of mediocrity to pursue what you really want is seen as an oddity.

Those who awaken to the world and all that it has to offer are doomed to be ridiculed for having their eyes open by those who are intent to continue sleepwalking through their lives towards their graves. But that’s ok.

I received my Swedish voter registration paperwork today to allow me to vote in the Swedish Elections this fall. The video above shows exactly how big my belief is in the political process and what I think of it.

There are a number of reasons why I have no interest in voting now, or ever again:

• Swedish politics consists of arguments on whether the top rate of income tax should be 57% or 58% (I’m not joking). Choices are between different shades of socialism.
• I haven’t lived in Sweden for a long time, nor do I have any intention to return unless there is revolutionary change. What right do I have to tell what government the people should have there when it doesn’t affect me?

The biggest reason by far is legitimacy
The other reasons above are minor though, my biggest reason is one of legitimacy: I refuse to grant a corrupt system legitimacy by voting. It is a system that sees no limits to its ability or right to regulate and meddle in peoples private lives on a day-to-day basis, yet its supposed legitimacy comes from people being allowed to chose their supposed masters once every four years. Really? How about they take a f***ing step back, stop treading on people and allow people to mostly chose how they live every day, especially when it comes to matter of lifestyle, opinions and information?

I don’t object to democracy, but what I do object to is unfettered mob rule, which is what democracy without restraint becomes: when politicians turn one special interest against another in order to curry political favour. Where no single matter, however private is too small to regulate and poke at. The greatest gift democracy gives us is the ability to depose our rulers, but when the system is gamed to the point where it meddles in anything and everything, and where the choice of overlords becomes one of different shades of the same thing, it has lost its legitimacy in my eyes.

My statement by refusing to vote is simple: I am not a serf. I refuse to give a corrupt, broken system legitimacy through my vote, and the implied submission to the whims of the mob appointed rulers that a vote entails. I am a free man.

As part of my ten week challenge to get rid of at least 5 things a week, the above things bit the dust this week:

• A long since expired desktop PC from 2004 (I had fun drilling holes in the hard drive that I extracted to ensure the already crashed HD’s data would be even more irrecoverable).
• 3 sets of Michel Thomas language courses (full course), given away to a friend (Michel Thomas courses are brilliant, but this one I’ve repeated to the point of not needing it anymore).
• A bunch of junk I’ve had in a storage box in my storage area for two years without ever looking at it once (a sign to throw it away if there ever was one).
• Shredded a bunch of papers in said box, mostly receipts, bank statements etc from 4-5 years back that I don’t need to retain (non business stuff).

..I think the junk in front of the PC alone qualifies for this week..

Elli Pasanen, beloved grandmother 1917-2010

My paternal grandmother passed this Friday, a few months short of her 93rd birthday.

Though she was born in a different day and age, she in many ways epitomised what a good, modern woman should strive to be: positive, strong, hardworking, loyal, wise, tolerant, yet with strong values and principles. A real rock for those around her despite her diminutive figure at 149cm (4’11) tall.

Personally, I never heard my grandmother say a single bad word about anyone, let alone lose her temper. She seemed to subscribe to the idea that if you don’t have anything good to say, say nothing. The worst thing I ever heard her say about anyone else was “I don’t think we got along very well”.

As a young mother, she had to raise a young, growing family during the Winter War and Continuation Wars that lasted 5 years, while my grandfather was away most of the time fighting Soviet forces trying to invade Finland.
My grandfather lost some of his best years to the war, and came back a changed man, no doubt tormented by the things he had seen, done and endured during the war. Thus at times it fell on my grandmother to keep the family together, bring up what eventually became five children, and provide for the family through hard work.

Despite these struggles: war, financial hardship, a husband who spent years fighting his own demons before learning to cope, she managed not only to keep her family together, but also make good, solid, self-reliant people out of my father, uncle and my three aunts (my dad, uncle and at least one of my aunts have gone into business for themselves).

In my grandmothers late 70’ies and early 80’ies, she stubbornly made sure that she alone cared for my sickly and frail grandfather in his last years of life rather than put him in a home, not because she had to, but probably because she thought it was the right thing to do.

To me, my grandmother was more than just a nice old grandmother, she was like a second mother: as a kid, whenever I was visiting my dad, I would spend the days with her and my grandfather when my dad was off to work, as my grandparents lived just upstairs from my father during most of my childhood.

In many ways, she instilled many of the values in me that I hold dear today: taking responsibility and doing what is right by others, self-reliance: working hard and not expecting hand outs from others, ensuring that your word is your bond and that it can be trusted.
She did this not by holding sermons or being a disciplinarian, but through a million little understated, simple things: tell stories, reward me with my favourite food when I did something smart or inventive to encourage industry and creativity, send me off to apologise if I had done something bad. She rarely missed an opportunity to instill the wisdom that she had gained from a long life.

Like any family, there are probably hang-ups and occasional disagreements, but there is a grounded solidity in my extended family on my grandmothers side that has always made me feel welcome, safe and at home with all of my aunts, my uncle and their respective families, and I think that speaks volumes of the job my grandmother did in making good, decent people out of them despite the hardships they all had to endure. There are many others who would have failed miserably under much better circumstances.

I am grateful for the time I got to spend with my grandparents and all the good memories will always stay with me. Outside of my parents, they were by far the strongest positive influences on me while growing up.

With the passing of my grandmother, a generation is lost and the world becomes a poorer place. A force of nature is gone.
She will be sorely missed, but never forgotten.

I came across this post on Y-Combinator and was quite appaled by the expectation of some people on a supposedly entrepreneurial forum to have a “right” to a job.
Let’s make a few things clear: no one owes you anything. You don’t have a right to a job anymore than you have a right to stay indefinitely for free at a friends place. A business is private property, just like your friends home. The owner decides what they want to do with the property, and who they will allow to reap benefits from it. If they so don’t like your face it’s their right to throw you out of their home, in the same way it is a businesses right to fire you (though getting rid of someone because of personal dislike would be irrational, stupid and likely their loss).
Being employed is not the same thing as getting adoptive parents - you are there because the business owner thinks you can be a net contributor to the business, not because you have a right to anything, least of all being cared for by an employer as some sort of surrogate parent.

Considering private businesses are private property, just as private homes are, the concept of a “safe” job, or a “right” to a job is as preposterous as having a right to stay however long you want at a friends place despite their wishes for you to leave. There is no difference, apart from the ones that some governments foists upon business owners under threat of violence and duress.

This brings me to my second point: If you think employment is a “safe” option, one where you can finally become complacent and sit back, you will be sourly disappointed. On the basis of what I just said, you are there because the business thinks you can be a net contributor to the businesses success.
In other words, the only “job safety” you have in this world is your wits, your skills and the value you can create with them. At which point you might as well be in business for yourself.

The fact is, everyone is the CEO of “Me Inc.” - you are in business for yourself, it’s just that most people don’t get it.