Saturday, February 22, 2014

Financial Independence Ramblings



            I was going to write a post about a fellow blogger, who has been writing on financial independence quite a long time and claimed almost 1,300 posts on the subject.  Year after year his ambitions grew and goal was always several years away.   
             He was born and raised in China, but went to the USA to get a better life and landed a job with Microsoft to return back to China as an expat, selling the products back home.  After accumulating about $ 1 million and having no mortgage or a house owned, he returned to the USA from China. Decided to buy a house and managed to get $ 1 million house in Seattle. 
             Obviously at this stage frugality or financial independence are again couple of decades away, should he continue his life style.  Now he decided to side track from personal finance and financial independence subjects and try his luck in general finance topics to attract advertisement to his blog (last couple of years he had very infrequent posts).
            I was rather disappointed to see this happening to begin with, as there is plenty of blogs targeting theme of finance for advertising purposes.   In my “favorites” there is only handful of blogs, which I believe sincerely and openly working to reach financial independence, while sharing the results.
               There is growing gap between the rich and the poor.  In 2012 top 5% of earners were responsible for 38% of domestic consumption, up from 28% in 1995.   Since 2009, the year the recession ended, inflation adjusted spending by top 5% is increased by 17%,  while bottom 95% of the people increased theirs only by 1%.
             Among hotel the revenue is growing much faster in the high-end category (Four Seasons, etc..) twice as than in the midscale (Best Western, etc.). The rebound of the stock market only widen the gas, as approximately 50% of Americans have no effective participation in the surging stock market.
           I do not consider myself a middle-class as temporarily I do earn reasonably good money but for me middle-class is about what one owns, rather earns. The salary is an uncertainty and risks but even it , I just started accumulating the nest egg, in spite being 6 years to my financial independence.
            I will keep on going, focusing on the personal financial moves and share the learning, thoughts,  ideas.