It’s been 264 days since I last bought anything new, not because I don’t have the money, but because I decided that I had enough stuff in my life. Well that ‘buying fast’ came to an end today with the purchase of a Surface Pro 3. I’ve owned a first...
Over the last two weeks I’ve been off work, but for most of that time I’ve continued my usual pattern of daily activities, which means every minute of the day filled with something useful, whether it’s exercise, stretching, meditation, reading, writing, shopping etc. In fact it’s difficult for me to...
I finished reading the highly recommended book The Phoenix Project this morning while chilling out in Lincoln Caffe Nero, which is nicely nestled inside the Waterstones bookshop. As soon as I saw the premise of the book it reminded me of the classic novel about manufacturing The Goal and it...
In his book ‘The Six Pillars of Self Esteem’ Nathaniel Branden promotes the use of sentence completion as a technique for personal growth: Sentence completion is a technique I have developed in my clinical practice that can be used to facilitate self-understanding and personal growth. The essence of the sentence...
When I envision my retirement it’s mainly characterised by movement, mostly cycling and walking. I’ve written my retirement planning series during a wonderful pain free month so that’s perhaps no surprise. Right now I’m in a flare and so it’s a good time to write this post. What am I...
When I first read the ‘4 hour work week’ many years ago, it’s recommendation to take mini-retirements throughout your life resonated strongly with me. Retirement should not be like jumping off a cliff into the unknown. For every other major life change we normally get to practice, we get to...
The series of posts that I’ve been writing so far on this blog have been focussed on planning for retirement because I believe that preparation is key to successful retirement. Planning what I’m actually going to do once I retire is less important though since retirement is all about freedom...
Now I’m getting to one of the most thorny issues in my series on retirement planning, do I want to continue to work? Since I started with my auto-immune illnesses over ten years ago work and health have always been inconsistent with each other. I’ve struggled endlessly to find that...
I’ve just started to read The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body. It’s an impressive well researched book with with a massive ‘science based’ restricted food list. This focus on restricting natural foods seems to increasing characterise paleo books and it’s in stark contrast to similar whole food...
Foremost in my mind while planning for retirement is how to balance my costs and income and key to making this work is my assumption that my cost of living won’t rise that much in retirement. There are many reasons for this optimistic view, some of them are just general...