Here’s a list of newsletters that I am subscribed to. I save most of the articles I receive into Pocket and then read the best of those during any downtime I have during the day. Apart from these newsletters, I also consume a lot of content through podcasts and through RSS aggregation websites such as Euro Finance Blogs.

General Knowledge

• Notboring
• ThoughtCo’s What I Learnt About Today
• Farnam Street Brain Food
• The Loop
• 3-2-1 Thursday
• 5 Bullet Friday
• Common Sense with Bari Weiss
• The Latticework
• Recomendo

Investments

• Lyn Alden
• Real Vision
• Collaborative Fund
• CryptoCompare’s Crypto Roundup
• Spanish Property Insight
• Bitwise Monthly Newsletter
• IO Fund

NFTs

• Medici Minutes
• Letters from Zeneca
• The Groundfloor

Crypto

• Ecoinometrics
• 30,000 Feet
• The Node by CoinDesk
• Metaversal by Bankless
• BanklessDAO
• Crypto Economy by Peter Yang
• The Deep Dive by Bitcoin Magazine
• Clown World Today

Health & Sport

• FoundMyFitness
• Healthline Nutrition
• Neuro Athletics
• The Long Game

Parenthood

• Daily Dad
• My Baby This Week

Spirituality / Deeper Thinking

• Sloww
• Raptitude
• Motherfucking Monday

WordPress

• Post Status

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…]