When searching for articles about investment and making money, you will surely come across many bloggers who publish their monthly income reports or also post net worth reports.

I would recommend that you don’t pay too much attention to those numbers. I personally don’t care much about them.

I used to follow many blogs that published income reports in my early years on the internet at the turn of the century, and they inspired me to start my own blog. While the income reports were part of the inspiration, I followed them primarily to learn about internet marketing and similar topics, since books were of limited use in a space that was changing extremely rapidly on a daily basis.

Many people, on the other hand, fall into the trap of focusing too much on the dream rather than on the work necessary to achieve it. The bloggers/influencers know this, and a lot of them make money by promoting a dream lifestyle that many will pursue, but only a few can and will obtain. Hence we end up having this sort of pyramid scheme, with the only source of income being the money from the thousands of people (many of whom don’t have the right prerequisites) who buy the products/courses they promote in the hope of learning what they need to know to make money online.

In recent years, as I got into the world of finance and investments, I again started to see many of the FIRE bloggers doing the same thing that was popular with the early internet marketing blogs, so I thought it was a good time to write this post.

While I’m not saying that they’re lying or manipulating their numbers in order to persuade people to do what they are saying and obtain the same results, I think that business and investing involves a plethora of decisions that are extremely based on each individual’s character and aptitudes.

Consider a few things:

• They might not include the value of their homes in their net worth.
• You don’t know if they received large inheritances or have considerable family wealth to fall upon.
• They might be manipulating their figures.
• Many are posting anonymously, so we don’t know anything about them really.

There are many other considerations I could come up with, but this is a quick post that I want to get out there.

There are now a ton of blogs about investing and personal finance in Europe, and many of them shouldn’t be trusted as a source of advice for your investment journey. Most of them are just distractions from the real research you should be doing.

See also: Why you shouldn’t ask for financial advice online

You want to learn about the type of investment you want to enter by getting to know the industry very very well and then trying things out bit by bit until you get a sense of whether it is a good fit for you.

As we’ve seen in previous decades with other related niches, much of personal finance and investment bloggers’ income comes from affiliate commissions from the platforms they recommend and not from the actual investments they make. That doesn’t make sense in my opinion.

There is no point listening to someone whose investments are making him a couple hundred euro a month at max, because he would definitely not have enough experience to be considered a reliable source of knowledge.

Be realistic; why would anybody go to such great lengths to share their financial journey just to help you make more money for yourself? Most are trying to sell you something. Very few genuinely like to write about their journeys in different areas of life just because it makes them feel better or it helps them clear their minds. Try to find those kinds of people as they are a much better source of information.

Typically I try to look for the following traits in the bloggers I follow:

• They write about several topics coherently for many years.
• They don’t hide behind the veil of anonymity.
• They are verifiably successful in their careers.
• They speak about both good and bad experiences.

That’s my little rant for today. I hope it helps you focus on the right information, as one of the biggest barriers separating you from genuine wealth and success is the overload of information you can find on social media and the web nowadays.

I’ll also say that if someone publishes their income or net worth reports it doesn’t mean I won’t follow their blog, but it won’t be my reason for doing so, and it certainly won’t be the reason why I decide to invest in something or not.

On the other hand, I consider journaling in a private or public fashion to be very helpful to keep track of your thoughts and decisions over time. I have also been thinking of starting to publicize my monthly thoughts on my portfolio’s performance, without focusing too much on the numbers. What is really important in these monthly reports is to observe the decision making criteria of the investors, and get some insider tips on how each platform is doing.

Be very choosy in what you read and whom you trust. Always try out things yourself in small doses before you go all in. Diversify and keep expanding your knowledge every day.

Do you agree with my point of view? Let me know in the comments section.

Other thoughts on the same subject

I’m not the only one who dislikes income reports, although I’m also seeing a trend of bloggers who first become famous using income reports, then suddenly say that they are not helpful and that they won’t publish them anymore, a typical bait-and-switch tactic as far as I’m concerned, but I digress.

Here are some other articles on the subject that might interest you:

• The danger of reading blogger income reports
• Why you’ll never see an income report from me

What to do instead

If you want to learn how to invest and manage your money in a better way, I suggest doing the following:

• Read as many books on the topic as you can.
• Network with other investors and find masterminds of like minded people.
• Get coached and mentored by an experienced investor. My friend Shlomo Freund offers such a service, so check that out.

For many years I struggled with associating myself with the country where I was born, especially when I started to travel on a long-term basis and now that I’ve spent most of my adult life living outside of that country.

Mine is not an isolated case, and I know many others who have several thoughts and feelings after going through similar experiences.

I do not feel patriotic nor feel any particular pride for the country I was born in. I do appreciate everything I benefited from while living there, but at the bottom of it what I feel is a sense of being lucky to be born in a very good environment, compared to all the other places that I could have been born and raised in.

I strongly dislike nationalism and have seen its negative outcomes and induced madness first hand in Catalunya.

The concept of the nation-state has been very influential in the past few centuries, and has fully taken the place of religion in many parts of the world. I believe that we are seeing the first signs of the fall of the nation-state, and more and more people losing this strong sense of binding their identity with their country of birth or childhood. For many people who work in the digital industry, this is already the case. As one of them, I consider myself a citizen of the world. Home can be anywhere where I can find a supportive environment, good internet and the freedom to work and live.

Here’s an excerpt from My Country, a song by one of my favorite musicians; Roger Taylor:

I would not fight for my country
I would not work to no rule
Don’t have no truck with no power game
Won’t be some other jerk’s tool
Don’t have no part of no partisans
Won’t have no part ‘cos one party and another’s all the same
All the same
Gonna play it at my own game

Don’t wanna die for some old man’s crusade
Don’t wanna hear what they feed
Don’t wanna kill for some cause of the age
Don’t wanna cry for somebody else’s need
Don’t want no piece of no flag in the breeze
Don’t want no part ‘cos one party and another’s all the same
All the same
Gonna play it at my own game

Going forward, nations will have to compete to attract people to live there, by offering the best possible conditions. In many ways, they will be like today’s companies, in a healthy competitive environment. This will cause governments to stop acting in a totalitarian way and focus on actually being efficient and improving their country in order to attract more quality citizens.

FIRE stands for Financial Independence/Retire Early. It’s a term that was coined in the United States by personal finance bloggers who started to blog about their journeys of achieving financial independence with the aim of escaping the rat race and retiring earlier than the standard 60-65 age bracket.

Obviously this is a hugely attractive proposition for pretty much any person around the world, so the concept and the FIRE bloggers themselves have become immensely popular.

I’d like to share my thoughts on the concept itself and the FIRE community, as there are some things I like and others I don’t like so much.

[Read more…]

I learned about chronotypes from sports sleep coach Nick Littlehales. While I’ve never had much trouble sleeping, I have struggled on and off with going to sleep and waking up at the right times.

Your chronotype describes your sleeping characteristic – whether you’re a morning person or an evening person. Chronotypes are genetic traits and are usually easy to spot.

Do you like staying up and going to bed late? Do you need and alarm to get you up for work in the morning? Do you often skip breakfast? Do you sleep in on your days off? Then it’s likely that you’re a PMer.

AMers wake naturally, enjoy their breakfast and love the mornings. They tend not to need an alarm to wake them, they’re less likely to feel fatigued during the day and they go to bed reasonably early.

There is a third category of chronotype – the inbetweener. Many of us genuinely are in-between, but almost all of the population live their lives as inbetweeners, regardless of their real chronotype.

To find out your chronotype and optimize your schedule around it, you can take the Chronotype quiz.

My Chronotype Quiz Results

My result was Lion and it certainly corresponds to my observed energy levels. Over the years I’ve figured out that my best wake-up time is between 6 and 7 am. In practice, most days it’s closer to 8 am, since life in Spain is geared towards late evening and nighttime activities, meaning I go to sleep later.

I’ve also given myself the liberty to sleep as much as my body requires, and it invariably falls between 7.5-8 hours. Afternoon power naps or siestas help me a ton to give me a fresh boost of energy for the evening time, and they do not affect my nighttime sleep at all. I’m not that sensitive to caffeine intake either, so I make use of coffee during the day quite liberally.

I try to sleep between 11 and midnight, anything later and I’m into my red zone and it will affect the following day negatively.

23andme Wake-Up Time Trait

Another supporting piece of evidence for me was the Wake-Up Time trait from my 23andme report, which again shows that I’m very strongly a morning person.

To compensate for less than 8 hours of sleep on certain days I’ll take a (coffee-fueled) power nap in the afternoon.

Why is it important to know your chronotype?

If we were left to our own devices, to get up and go to sleep whenever we wanted, to wake naturally and start work at a time of our own choosing, it wouldn’t matter hugely. But, strangely enough, working cultures have yet to develop with this in mind. Whether you’re an AMer or PMer, you still have to get to work for 9 a.m., you still have to be at training in the morning if you’re a football player, and in this instance, it’s the PMers that suffer because they are effectively trying to operate in a different time zone to their internal body clock. This is known as ‘social jet lag’.

Because they naturally get up earlier, AMers tend to get tired sooner and go to bed earlier too. This means that, when morning comes around, they will have enjoyed plenty of restorative deep sleep and so will be in a lighter sleep state as they approach their wake time. They often won’t even need an alarm.

PMers, on the other hand, will push on later at night, meaning that when morning comes, the alarm often needs to rouse them from an earlier part of sleep (only for the snooze button to be hit repeatedly), and they will spend the rest of the morning playing catch-up. A PMer is likely to lean on caffeine to do this.

Managing your chronotype

For a PMer, daylight on a morning is vital if you want to set your body clock to play catch up with the AMers. Get a dawn-wake simulator, which recreates a sunrise in your bedroom to wake you up, from a reputable brand such as Lumie or Phillips; open the curtains, go outside.

The bad news for PMers is that you should cut out the lie-ins at the weekend too. If you spend all week adjusting your body clock to the demands of your job, then let it all go at the weekend, your clock will drift back towards its natural, slower state, and you’ll be starting over come Monday.

Offices and workplaces should take this more seriously. Instead of having desk hierarchies where the more senior people get the window seats, allocate them to the PMers struggling through their morning and the AMers for their afternoon. Investing in daylight lamps will help both the AMers and PMers conquer their respective difficult parts of the day and increase their productivity, especially in winter, when there is less light.

It’s not all bad news for PMers. They have a natural advantage not only when it comes to enjoying nightlife, but also when working shifts. An AMer nurse working night shifts in a hospital would equally be in need of daylight lamps to play catch-up with their PMer colleagues. The most important thing for either chronotype to find is some harmony with their environment.

For example, an AMer might live with his partner, a PMer, and they both have to leave for work at 8.30 a.m. He gets up and 6.30 and she gets up at 8, but, of course, every time he gets up on a morning, he disturbs his partner. She goes back to sleep, and imagines it’s doing her good, but in reality she’s flitting between wakefulness and sleep.

But what about a compromise that could be made? They both get up at 7 instead, which is a big shift for her, but the AMer makes the breakfast and gives the PMer the space to sit in daylight, to reset her body clock and wake up naturally. It will take a bit of adjusting to, but all of a sudden the couple are working more in harmony. When the evening comes around, it is the PMer’s turn to do her bit, maybe cooking the dinner or doing the washing-up later, when the AMer is tired.

If you’re an AMer, you know you’re at your best in the morning, so you can plan your day to take advantage of this. Let’s say your job involves managing your company’s social-media accounts, some bookkeeping and a lot of communication, but also some of the more mundane realities of office life such as taking the mail to the post office and filing. Presuming you have a bit of freedom in the order in which you do things, you could manipulate your schedule so that you compose all your tweets and press releases in the morning, everything that requires you to be at your most alert, then spend your afternoon taking the post out and doing filing.

Often there isn’t this kind of freedom in our daily work, and sometimes a job to write a press release or something similarly requiring of thought will land on your desk in the afternoon and it has to be done right at that moment. But where we’re able to, instead of spending what feels like forever on getting something done in the afternoon, wondering why it’s taking so long,  just stop and have a think about it. If you’re struggling with it now, come back to it in the morning, when you’re fresher and more alert. It’s the same philosophy with PMers.

Chronotype: 7 Steps to Sleep Smarter

1. Know your chronotype, and establish those of close friends and family.
2. Manipulate your day so you can be at your nest when it matters most.
3. Use caffeine as a strategic performance enhancer, not out of habit – and no more than 400mg per day.
4. PMers – don’t lie in at weekends if you want to beat social jet lag.
5. Fit meeting rooms, offices and desks with daylight lamps to improves alertness, productivity and mood at work.
6. Know when to step up and when to take a back seat based on you chronotype.
7. Learn to work in harmony with your partner if your chronotypes differ.

What’s your chronotype? Has it helped you achieve better performance?

Further Resources

• When is your best time to drink coffee?