Well I’m now safely back Under the Money Tree after a week away in the sun. A small Greek island was our destination for what turned out to be an amazingly relaxing break from the daily grind.
Despite my best intentions to use some of the down time to create some wonderful posts, the lure of turquoise coloured sea and carafes of local wine got the better of me most days. So instead you’ve got a collection of random thoughts from the beach….
95% of my work life is piffle
Unfortunately while we were away I was forced to keep the dreaded work blackberry close at hand and even log in to my work pc a few times to resolve various ‘issues’. While lying on the beach, skimming through the emails each day (looking for anything that needed further attention) it struck me how utterly irrelevant at least 95% of the content was.
Virtually all of the [many hundred] group email conversations I get copied in on each day are filled with no useful or meaningful information. Reading this stream of data on a beach it soon became apparent that the average work email is just a monologue of people desperately trying to cover their backs, avoid any potential future blame and appear to look useful/important to other recipients while side stepping responsibility/ownership at every opportunity.
Resolution: Make an active effort to unsubscribe from various group emails at work and do more face to face (or phone to phone) business and less emailing.
Holidays Don’t Need to Be Expensive
Holidays all too often become hugely expensive, dumped onto credit cards and cast a shadow on ones personal finances long after the sun tans have faded.
By choosing to stay in cheap simple accommodation (with cooking facilities) that had a nice terrace to eat/chill on we had all we needed to have a great time and not have to spend a fortune on eating/drinking out all the time.
While we were away it became apparent that we don’t really have expensive needs. Shunned were the car hire, the buying of holiday tat, unnecessary mementoes and expensive water sports1. Instead our days were filled with long walks, vast amounts of swimming, snorkelling and a few early morning jogs thrown in for good measure.
It is far too easy to eat too much crap
I like to consider myself reasonably healthy. I exercise very regularly and I’m by no means overweight. Despite BMI being a floored measure, I come out right in the so called sweet spot at around 22. Having said that I know I carry a little extra weight at times and all too often catch myself eating junk at work, mainly out of boredom.
Whilst away I was accompanying my morning coffee with vegetables (a couple of tomatoes, some cucumber and maybe some left over vegetables from the previous nights dinner on most days). Lunch consisted of maybe a large salad or a very small meze. I’ll admit that dinner was on occasion a little bit more substantial however we spent more time in the local fruit & veg shop stocking up on ingredients to cook with at our accommodation than at the local restaurants.
The point is that eating out of boredom was not an issue during the week. Our days were infinitely more active than our average Mon-Fri, we ate less and we ate more healthily. There were no hunger pains at 10am, no impulsive urges towards vending machines and certainly no ravenous thoughts at 4pm. I can back lighter and healthier.
Resolution: Work harder to improve my ‘at work’ diet.
Mortgage Companies Are Thieves
Completely unrelated to our holiday but……to date I’ve experienced the customer services of six different mortgage companies in my lifetime. What always amazes me is that none to date has been able to give me access to view/manage my mortgage account online. This is course is a simple ploy to keep me (the stupid borrower) from seeing how much they (the generous lender) charge me in interest each month.
By deliberately limiting the breakdown of mortgage costs (capital repaid versus interest paid) to the little read annual statements, mortgage companies are in my opinion protecting their order books and not giving customers the ammunition (or simple facts) that will encourage them to re-finance more often, repay their debts earlier or take less debts out in the first place.
Resolution: Continue to track all of my mortgages in spreadsheets so I can see the impact of all my overpayments. Also I’ll tidy up my mortgage xls and share it on the site soon.
The Internet of Life Is Over Rated
Before we left Blighty the one obvious downside of the rather basic accommodation we’d chosen to stay in was the lack of wifi. How would we cope with no Facebook, no Google Finance and no non stop news?
Well the answer is pretty well. My wife and I soon realised the huge amounts of time we regularly ‘waste’ reading online, engaging in social media or pointlessly checking share prices amount to little constructive output. Instead we both spent a lot more time talking, thinking and reading.
As mentioned above I did have to seek out some wifi on a couple of occasions for work purposes however I resisted the urge to check my personal emails, social media or even share prices. The only thing I really missed were reading the FT and the stream of FI blog posts waiting for me in my Feedly feed.
I am becoming More Risk Averse
I’m now in my 36th year.
One day we hired some little boats with outboard motors to take around the island, visiting caves and snorkelling in deserted beaches…ah bliss…….until a couple of friends started talking about doing some jumping/diving off cliffs.
My close friend who’s visited the island many times before assured us he knew all of locations well and that they were safe to jump. However it soon became apparent that he wasn’t 100% certain on all of the spots we arrived at.
As we worked our way around the island we ended up taking turns to jump first on some of the ‘uncertain’ locations, in what turned out to be a water sports version of Russian Greek Roulette!
“Does the water look deep enough to you?”
Thankfully we all survived unscathed and I lived to discover that seemingly harmless dives I would have barely thought twice about 10 years ago, now needed serious consideration before plucking up the courage to jump! That night I sat back and realised just how risk averse I’m becoming in my old middle age.
It’s the same with my investment behaviour. I’v been overpaying my mortgages like a madman in recent years and my equity investments seem to get more defensive every year. As the money tree grows more of my thoughts are devoted to capital preservation as opposed to finding the next big shot of growth.
Resolution: None. I plan to live off the Money Tree in a few years so preservation of capital is very important too me. Getting wiped out by a property crash, stock market retreat would really throw a spanner in my master plan.
Happy Holidays!
Notes:
1With the exception of one day of hiring a boat with friends to take around the island….great snorkelling!
Re: work email, I have found a great solution to filter your inbox from most of the crud and mailing lists and provider updates and so on…
If you set a rule up in outlook to filter emails with the word “unsubscribe” in the body you capture nearly all the pointless rubbish you don’t need to see immediately and push it into a “circulars” folder (or the bin if you’re feeling brave!)
You can set up exceptions so you don’t redirect emails you actually want too.
The main downside is the rules only run whilst outlook runs and so it wouldn’t have helped with your Blackberry.
qpop,
Unfortunately the vast majority of emails I’m on are not ones I can subscribe from. They’re all work related and I’m either added as a distinct email address or because I’m part of a team/desk/department mail group. As suggested I do use rules to file/delete some common offenders however as you’ve said I’ve not found a solution that works with the Blackberry yet….
It sounds as if you had a great holiday and came back fitter and raring to go. Exactly what holidays are for. Hope the return to the working work wasn’t too painful. 🙂
The return to work has been as painful as ever! What amazes me is how quickly all of the relaxation, calmness and zen can get drained away by a few days back at the coal face!
I hear you on the email. I too scan for emergencies when on vacation (sigh) and don’t have a way to hide from all the unnecessary cc’s.
At work I’ve taken the plunge and turned off all the email notifications on my phone and laptop. I now choose when to look at email — usually 3-5 times a day depending on that day’s level of craziness — and work through them all in one swoop. [It helps that I travel >50% in my job, so instantaneous answers are not _usually_ expected of me.] Not hearing the “ding” of newly-arrived email lets me focus on the real stuff and block out the interruptions.
Great post.
Jean,
Turning off notifications is a must, i’d never get anything done if I left them on! Only checking mails at designated times each day is also a great idea to help improve productivity. I’ve tried to implement this a few time before but always tend to drift back to my bad old ways. Maybe I need to give that another go!