My financial goal for 2023 \ stacker news ~Personal

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My financial goal for 2023

300 sats \ 11 comments \ @cryotosensei 23 Dec 2023 Personal_Finance

I was watching an LinkedIn Learning infotainment video on my flight back. It was titled “Embracing Unexpected Change” or something like that. Something just clicked in my mind while watching it.

A decade ago, I would have hoped that I would have accumulated authentic teaching experiences in several countries. It was a dream that I took seriously because I went to take up Thai lessons, fantasising a romantic stint in the Land of A Million Smiles where everyone would fall in love with Ajarn Le.

Suffice it to say that this long-cherished dream of mine was shattered to smithereens when I became a father of one, then two. Parenting is an arduous endeavour in itself - and I’d rather not complicate matters by raising my children in a foreign land, a nation where I have yet to navigate its sociocultural norms successfully. No track record, so to speak.

Contemporary society places dreams on a pedestal because they represent potential and possibilities. They reflect how people take the bull by the horns and dare to aim for something lofty, thus exercising control of their destiny. On the other hand, goals kinda signify that we have limited the parameters of our dreamscape, that we bow down to reality and try to achieve whatever that is within our capabilities.

However, if we were to take a step back, there is nothing wrong with having goals at all - even if society deems dreams to have more of a wow factor. If I surrender my capacity to dream but work my ass off on fulfilling my goals, I am then living life to the truest of my ability.

So, with 2024, I have some financial goals, one of which is to earn enough sats as a content creator. I occasionally buy gift cards from Bitrefill and receive cashbacks in the form of sats. My goal is to amass enough cashback to redeem a Bitrefill gift card next year. This will make me feel validated as a writer. It will probably squeeze me dry and drive me nuts for the whole year, but I’m pumped by this challenge!

What are your financial goals for 2024?

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40 sats \ 1 reply \ @boisechampion 23 Dec 2023

That is awesome. Thanks for sharing.

“Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

Now, Emerson hits hard and you def don't have to agree with this statement. But it is always how I feel when I travel. From 2020-2022 we went to the Maldives, Athens, Jamaica, Mexico. Don't get be wrong, its fun, you learn about the world, and you make memories that will last forever.

But he also mentions in a later paragraph about how modern men are scared of duty. I think about that word a lot now. What is my duty, mission or vision? Can it be accomplished by traveling all the time? For me, no. I will be that typical guy that takes one big vacation a year and I'm completely ok with that.

My duties and responsibility are growing by the day and it makes me feel powerful.

Goals:

-Sell my home and buy a way bigger home. Achieve this by getting 2.5x what I paid for it and dumping into a new smaller mortgage. Hopefully going from $380k to $280k -Continue the relentless focus on my income

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 24 Dec 2023

Thanks for sharing Emerson’s quote with me! I never read that before, so it was good for thought for me.

What you have written reminds me of the Costa Rica phrase plan de vida, which is similar to the Japanese concept of ikigai. They both mean “life purpose” - which is something that I grapple with (maybe like you) as I grow older. What am I put on this earth for? What is my unique contribution to the world? How do I want to be remembered after my death? I agree that taking on the role of a vagabond traveller will make it harder for one to live his life purpose. Thanks for reminding me of that.

I like how you have concrete figures for your goal. $100k drop in mortgage is a hell lot. I wish you all the best!

40 sats \ 4 replies \ @Eghigc 23 Dec 2023

I started a social media endeavour a few months back, I had no idea what to do, so I decided that seeing as I wash up everyday, I'd do something along those lines,

It's fluid and I've meandered between asmr, music added, fast edit, slow edits and the next thing will just naturally come to me,

I would like to monetize my channels, so, I'm told consistency is key, it really doesn't matter what you do, just keep doing it!

A lot of my viewers are from South Asia, and it got me thinking, some of those billion strong people have no access to mains water, so watching a guy wash up a pan in a creative, edited way could be quite engaging,

And I have to say, billions of people are just bored and want a distraction from the impending doom of life 🫣

So that's my financial plan to create a side income, potential passive income if the older videos get picked up in the future and keep creating the gains,

It's all about the gains 💪

20 sats \ 3 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 24 Dec 2023

Or they are stressed-out parents turning to YouTube and hoping that their child will find something appealing to give them much-needed moments of peace. Believe me. I have watched countless inane videos with my son haha

I think it’s great that you choose to take something you do every day anyway and give it an original spin. That way, you don’t have to squeeze time out of your schedule. Also you get to combine two things you do/love to create something that’s yours. Keep it up!

30 sats \ 2 replies \ @Eghigc 24 Dec 2023

Yes that is key, keep it up, you see so, so many channels where a video has gone viral, so you click on their bio and last upload was 5 years ago, it is hard to just show up every day and keep doing it, that's why most people give up

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @cryotosensei OP 25 Dec 2023

May 2024 be the year in which we become rich and famous! Merry Christmas!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Eghigc 25 Dec 2023

🥳🎉🥂🍷🍻🔥👊🙏

832 sats \ 3 replies \ @987654321 23 Dec 2023

This is a very small and packed Personal Finance post. I'll go by your paragraphs.

Embracing Unexpected Change.

When I worked for Best Buy embracing change was one of the programming techniques they used to train employees. It sounds like wisdom but it's all about dealing with the corporation moving according to the market demands. It is good advice and without goals for your personal life it is meaningless gibberish. If you have personal goals embracing change means, "Prepare for rough seas while heading to your destination."

I have a history with the Thai Forest Monk tradition. I study Buddhism. I would not want to raise a child in Thailand. There is a lot of moral relativism there and i'll just leave it at that.
Congratulations on becoming a father! The Buddha has stated that if you could carry your parents on your shoulders for 1,000 years it would not be enough to return the favor of giving the gift of human life.
There is a mural near my house with cosmic moons and stars and colors and it says, "dream". This reminds me of the movie, They Live, which is an allegory for the controller class verses us regular plebs. Taking the bull by the horns is good except we are in the great year of Pisces and the previous great year was Taurus. A great year is about 26,000 years. We are heading to the Age of Aquarius so what is interesting here is that humans have been tracking time for that long! A notable aspect of this tracking is that in 60,000 years humans have also been working on MIND CONTROL and if you don't work on self mastery you are part of someone else's game. The term Swami comes to mind and there is a "Swa - self + mi - master". If you don't have any goals it's because you are a slave, asleep, and it's time to wake up.
Ignore contemporary society. It's a psychological operation against you. One of my favorite books of all time is GOALS! by Brain Tracy. He knows what he is talking about. I bought the Audio and Paperback book in 2003. You can probably find it for free as a PDF. Dreams are sold to us to keep us in the Right Brained prison of relative reality. Self master is not what the controllers want. They want you to do things that you ARE KARMICALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR by relinquishing your responsibility to them which is IMPOSSIBLE.
I haven't used Bitrefil, but I've been using FOLD and another one and stack sats. I have for about 3 years. I've written down my sat goals too, but they must be reviewed constantly. Brain Tracy suggests that you must write down your goals by hand. This is powerful. I have kept hand written journals since 1984. Mostly they were nonsense written about nonsense. I have to constantly remind myself to write about solutions! When I do this things happen that I welcome.
Seven is a very nice number. The polar star has changed over time but there are seven stars of the Little Dipper, Ursa Minor.

My financial goals are to remove my fiat debt. Get rid of rent seeking services. Educate myself on Bitcoin more. Increase my skill set which always finds payment. Write here at Stacker News. Fix my shitty blog that I've ran for 25 years and have paid way to much to services that always close, fold or sell to someone else.

My financial goal is to stack sats, too! My financial goal is also to pay attention to people like you who inspire me to move ahead and work also!

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 24 Dec 2023

I love your well-considered and thought-provoking response. It feels like a personal email reply rather than a public forum response. And what are the odds that I will encounter another Stacker who has some experience with Thai culture? I feel like maybe you are one of the few who would understand my fascination with Thai culture (and pull me back so that I don’t get embroiled into the rabbit hole 555)

I like how you equate goals with self-mastery (alongside a defiance to stop living according to societal norms and expectations). I will continue to formulate my idiosyncratic goals that make sense to me and relevance to my circumstances. Hell ya!

Will check out GOALS! Sounds like a wonderful book.

Edited: Can’t find GOALS! in my nation’s electronic library database. So I borrowed “Make more money” instead. Cheers!

30 sats \ 1 reply \ @987654321 24 Dec 2023

This is a link to the PDF: https://www.booksfree.org/goals-by-brain-tracy-pdf-free-download/

Read online: https://archive.org/details/goalshowtogeteve0000trac

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 25 Dec 2023

Thanks! Merry Christmas