financial independence through continual improvement
Brewing FIRE was born on April 1st, 2018 (no joke!). It was officially conceived around January 1st, when I bought the domain name and started building out the site. I thought about taking the plunge and starting a blog for a long time prior to actually doing it. In fact, I started two other blogs … Read more
Last October we made the decision to move to Virginia. As part of the plan, I would quit my job and we’d give Coast FI a try. Being a research chemist, I didn’t think there was much chance of scoring a remote role. But my company, apparently valuing my contributions over the past 15 years, … Read more
January 31st is an actual day on the Gregorian calendar, and this fact once saved me from getting arrested. I came of (drinking) age in Boston in the early 2000’s. The running joke was that we only drank on the weekends, but the weekends ran from Tuesday to Sunday. There was just one problem with … Read more
Disclaimer: there are some affiliate links here. In the unlikely event that you click a link and buy something, Jeff Bezos may throw me a few crumbs. Approximately two years ago, I stopped buying individual stocks, and moved entirely to index funds. The immediate benefit from this transition is that I had a lot more … Read more
One of the core philosophies here at Brewing FIRE is the idea of continual improvement. I am always looking for ways to make small, incremental adjustments to my life in the expectation that it will lead to major improvements over time. So when I recently came across the Health Work Love Play Dashboard in a … Read more
I was searching through the storage area in my laboratory (for some masks, sigh) when I came across this box. The inscription was written by a coworker a few years ago, and references the popular cartoon/meme by KC Green. In the comic, a dog calmly sits at a table, drinks coffee, and tells himself that … Read more
“Time is free, but it’s priceless.” Harvey Mackay Question: what has more inherent value: time, or money? It’s often stated that time is precious, mostly because it’s finite; we can’t buy more time, and one day it will run out. On the other hand, money is the lifeblood of productivity and is quite literally what … Read more
One of the taglines of my blog is continual improvement. It’s not because it’s a cool-sounding catch phrase. It’s because the continual improvement process is a core component of my everyday life, and has been for more than 10 years. Okay, yeah- it’s a cool-sounding catch phrase, too. So what is continual improvement, what are its … Read more
I must admit that I have a mild obsession with Ray Dalio. You may know Dalio as the founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the largest hedge funds on earth. But to think of him as “just some hedge fund guy” is to miss the point of much of his life’s work. Dalio stresses the … Read more
Last month I spent two weeks in Asia for work. I attended some technical meetings with customers in Taiwan for a week, and then I went to Japan to oversee a production trial for one of our new products. By pure coincidence, I was in Japan exactly during sakura (cherry blossom) season, which was pretty … Read more