Added 7/12/2018: Nominations for the 2018 Plutus Awards are now open. If you like what you read here, please consider nominating tenfactorialrocks.com in all the relevant categories! Please submit your nominations here! Only one submission per IP address, please! Thanks a lot for your support! There..I just dated myself. If you remember “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” movie (1989), […]
After last week’s article explored why many multi-millionaires are worried about money, today we focus on another angle. Not exactly millionaires, but affluent retirees are also worried about running out of money. So, they chronically under-spend, leaving big portfolios and delighted heirs behind. Bloomberg’s article on this subject shared some interesting facts. I will […]
Recovered from my big reveal last week yet? 🙂 Today’s post is an interesting segue while revealing yet another tidbit about me. I read an article recently in The Globe & Mail, a Canadian newspaper. Yes, I do read magazines from outside the U.S. Of course, I stick with English newspapers published around […]
The Internet is open to all but is also home to many cozy bubbles that distort reality. It is easy to extrapolate a very specialized, rare thing to a much broader population just because you spend a lot of time within a small group who believes in that thing, talks about it a lot, plans to […]
What an oddly-titled article from this website, right? Trust me, it will make sense. Read on… Does money drive your life? It may sound ironic hearing this from a guy who has a monetary target to achieve, firmly planted on the name of this website. But it is true. Truth be told, I put up that big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG) […]
We all have to live somewhere. We also need a roof over our heads. Even before the buy vs. rent argument enters the picture, what’s even more important is the allocation you give to your housing expense as a percentage of your income. The math of compounding works in such a way that the early […]
Love ain’t FIRE
It’s true. Math and Science don’t lie! I will prove it in this article.
Getting to financial independence or retired early (FIRE) stage is not easy – it requires of years of persistent effort, discipline and an ability to think for yourself and often against the ‘grain’ of modern lifestyle and social norms. Maybe one in a hundred people will have the wherewithal to reach FIRE. So, the probability of getting to FIRE is say about 1%, whether you are a man or a woman.
Raman Venkatesh is the founder of Ten Factorial Rocks. Raman is a ‘Gen X’ corporate executive in his mid 40’s. In addition to having a Ph.D. in engineering, he has worked in almost all continents of the world. Ten Factorial Rocks (TFR) was created to chronicle his journey towards retirement while sharing his views on the absurdities and pitfalls along the way. The name was taken from the mathematical function 10! (ten factorial) which is equal to 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 3,628,800.
This is not an easy article for me to write. I now see this as an important counter to the other extreme I covered – life of a 1%er. It brings back unpleasant memories from my time in Asia, during my corporate stint there. Don’t get me wrong, we had a great time but the unpleasantness was for a different reason. Asia is home to over 70% of the world’s poor people. As is common practice there among all middle and upper middle class working households, the TFR household hired a part-time maid during our stay there. It was initially awkward to have a stranger spend couple of hours each day doing our chores but we slowly got used to it.
Raman Venkatesh is the founder of Ten Factorial Rocks. Raman is a ‘Gen X’ corporate executive in his mid 40’s. In addition to having a Ph.D. in engineering, he has worked in almost all continents of the world. Ten Factorial Rocks (TFR) was created to chronicle his journey towards retirement while sharing his views on the absurdities and pitfalls along the way. The name was taken from the mathematical function 10! (ten factorial) which is equal to 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 3,628,800.