Jacob Lund Fisker Quotes

“More space is not better. More space means a bigger house. A bigger house means more hassle, more maintenance, more work to pay for rent, mortgage, taxes, and less time for living. More space also attracts more stuff which eventually means less space.”

“The key to success is to run your personal finances much like a business, thinking about assets and inventory and focusing on efficiency and value for money. Not just any business but a business that's flexible, agile, and adaptable. Conversely most consumers run their personal finances like an inflexible money-losing anti-business always in danger on losing their jobs to the next wave of downsizing.”

“When the automobile was made affordable to the masses, people moved further away from work and further away from stores. While transportation speed increased, transportation distance increased proportionally, keeping transportation time constant.”

“You can't predict an earthquake, but if you're prepared for an earthquake, you're prepared for a lot of other things too.”

“A salary or even the potential of a future salary seems to be a gateway to the debt drug. So many people could probably reduce the risk of getting into debt by simply quitting their jobs.”

“Any connection with nature and most connections with technology are lost. There's a belief that nature is irrelevant and that anything can be solved using the current methods--now technology; previously magic or praying.”

“Conspicuous consumption is not a natural state for all of us.”

“Doing something that is considered very difficult at least once in your life is highly recommended.”

“Dollar cost averaging naturally provides steady employment for fund managers and most everyone else associated with the stock market. Regular contributions are therefore sold to the public as something that is beneficial. In reality, dollar cost averaging is a double-edged sword. Proponents usually imagine a scenario of an initial market decline that recovers. In this case, even though the starting and ending price are the same, the average cost is lower, thus resulting in an overall investment gain. Now consider the scenario of a rising market that subsequently declines. In this case, the average cost is higher than the start and ending price, and the investor will have lost money. In fact, given that markets rise much more slowly than they drop, a dollar cost averaging investor is more likely to make an entry and invest larger amounts while the market is rising than during its decline. At its best, dollar cost averaging provides no benefit, but regardless, dollar cost averaging is an excellent way of providing steady work for Wall Street, which collects fees and commissions to invest the steady stream of money from workers.”

“Education is very different from training. Training is what you know whereas education is who you are as a person.”

“Health is thus a condition of well-being and an ability to appreciate life. It's not necessarily optimizing or conforming to a set of measurable quantities like life expectancy or blood pressure, nor is it removing all symptoms using drugs. Health is the presence of something positive, rather than the absence of something negative.”

“If you have debt, you're not a free person. You're explicitly owned by your debt and implicitly owned by the creditor.”

“Many profit-driven corporate strategies are based on fashion, planned obsolescence, unneeded upgrades, and masterful emotional manipulation causing people to continuously replace goods which are still in good working order.”

“Nobody thinks of using improvements in technology and productivity to allow people to work less and require fewer assets to achieve the same standard of living. Instead, while everybody is richer, at least in terms of stuff, no one is any wealthier. Their wealth is "safely" out of reach. If it weren't, how many would still show up for work the next day?”

“People with more money than time buy $3,000 road racing bicycles with ultralight carbon frames to shave two pounds off the bike, regardless of the fact that they themselves are probably at least 10 pounds overweight.”

“Preventing catastrophic, that is, irrecoverable losses is the only reason to carry insurance. Effectively, this means carrying as high a deductible as possible while at the same time having enough funds, which you can invest, to cover losses up to the deductible. Most of us don't insure our clothes or tools. For a financially independent person, this will extend much further since almost everything can be replaced many times over.”

“Realize that economic agents all represent special interests that typically interpret the situation according to their own interests or political views.”

“Tally up the sum total of your earned income so far, subtract your savings, and compare the difference to your pile of stuff. Was it really a good deal?”

“The Dark Ages gradually ended six centuries ago with the Renaissance, which seeded new ideas for a different world. The Renaissance ideal dominated our culture until three centuries ago, from the 14th to the 18th century, when it was superseded by modernism. Not surprisingly, this human ideal has almost been forgotten in our culture. The Renaissance, literally "re-birth", was a revival and rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman culture following the decline of culture, trade, and technology during the Dark Ages.”

“The ERE Wheaton Table identifies a few representative mindsets along the personal economics journey as mastery is developed in spending efficiency and overall life skills.

These descriptions are based on 10 years of experience talking to different people in the personal finance world.”

“The mass education in high schools reflects the mass production of the real world. The teaching style has one teacher (supervisor) lecturing (leading) 20-25 students (workers) sitting in rows, much like a manager and his employees.”

“The question “How much do you need to retire?” is pretty much standard. Conversely, "How little do you need to retire?” is extremely rare.”

“The question you need to answer is what you want to do with your life given that you don't have the time to do everything? Do you want to spend most of your life paying off the interest of a 30-year mortgage and working so you can fill increasingly bigger houses with increasingly more stuff while being stuck in your daily commute in increasingly nicer cars? Or are you prepared to give up the stuff so that you can do whatever you want, whenever, and wherever, within reason? What will your legacy be--what you owned or who you were?”

“The real problem is not how much we earn; it's how much we waste, perhaps to demonstrate our supposed wealth, when we spend it.”

“To live together, a couple has to agree on certain things, like not signing up for debt, and how much to spend on common items like housing. A compromise must be reached. For other things, whereas it would be nice to agree on them, like where to squeeze a tube of toothpaste, whether to have a TV or a car, it's not a crucial issue.”

“To paraphrase Einstein, you can't solve your problems with the same mindset that created them.”

“Unfortunately for the existing mature systems in nature, the rapid expansion of the human bubble is destroying them. Unfortunately for us, we can't exist without them any more than a living person can exist without oxygen or a body can exist without a head. In this sense, it is actually a conceptual error to define the environment as the rest of the biosphere save humans, and think of ourselves as apart from it, since we can't exist without it.”

“Walkers easily travel three miles by foot. Drivers get in their cars to get from one side of the parking lot to the other. Neither quite understand why the other is so crazy, when it's so easy to do things their way.”

“We have an economic model that is based on pulling resources out of the ground and mostly turning them into unnecessary products, getting people to buy the products by convincing them that they need them, then getting them to throw the products away because they're obsolete. This makes people buy the next model and bury the other one in the ground. The sole goal of this seemingly pointless exercise is to work faster and grow the gross domestic product, which measures the resource churn.”

“Why do we still work eight hours a day, 50 weeks a year, when we're twice as productive as we were 50 years ago?”