by elmads

Introduction

Investment is a word widely used in the financial world. It is a word that automatically corresponds with money. But what if I told you that investing is not just about money? that it can also be used in other aspects of our lives.

Let’s define investing, as per Wikipedia: “Investing is the act of committing money or capital to an endeavour with the expectation of obtaining an additional income or profit.” Focus on the word “committing” and the phrase “with the expectation to obtain..”. You see, when you remove money, we can bring this definition into other parts of our lives.

Relationship, like in the courtship stage: you are committing “your time and effort”, with the expectation of obtaining “his/her love in return”. This too has the risk of failure, in that the time and effort exerted could not receive any love in return.

Work: You are committing “your time and effort”, with the expectation of obtaining “a pay raise or a higher position?”. The risk? You’ll not get what you’ve been striving for.

Investing is not just about money; it is also about our time and effort exerted to achieve something that may or may not pan out, and it has its name. It’s called risk.

How about purchasing items? Can we say that buying a certain product that depreciates over time can also be an investment? From a financial point of view, a depreciating item will never be an investment, but In other aspects of our lives, it can be; this is what I call “non-financial investments.

I’ll explain this further by showing you my simple non-financial investments that I’ve made from before to now.

Running gears/gadgets/equipment

I took running seriously for my own health and fitness for more than 6 years now. I love how it is an individual sport that pushes myself not just physically, but most especially mentally.

It’s defeating one’s self, the weaknesses inside that whispers misery, shame, doubt and imaginative horrors which can completely drag ourselves down if left free to run our conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind.

I just truly believe that all the things that hold us back to achieve our full potential as a person in every aspect of our lives, are ourselves. And, Running has been one of the perfect reinforcements for my mental fortress.

But for it to be a joyous and a successful long-term hobby and healthy endeavour, one must have the proper gear and equipment to protect from possible harm. The risk of exercising is injuring ourselves by not doing it properly or doing it excessively without proper recovery.

I’ve had various problems with the start of my running journey, some muscle cramps, pains and worse, injuries. At the start, I just thought that having a light pair of running shoes was enough, and with just a couple of minutes of warm up with no cool down, everything would be fine. For a year and half, I run with that cheap pair of shoes I bought before with some warm up and no cool down, then alas! the injury happened.

I learned late the things that I could have prevented so easily if only I did it properly. Since then, I heavily invested my resources, time and effort for warmups and cool downs, (my dear friend, the foam roller), some good pairs of running shoes, running clothing/apparels, gadgets (sports watches, heart rate straps, foot pods) and equipment (treadmill).

I calculate my return on investments based on the amount of money I’ve invested relative to the total distance I’ve ran with my gears, gadgets & equipment.

For instance, (EXAMPLE ONLY):

• Total amount spent for gear, gadgets, and equipment since Day 1 of seriously running: £2,500
• Total Distance Ran: 3,600km
  • Money spent per KM Ran = total amount spent / total distance Ran
  • Money spent per KM ran = £2,500 / 3,600km
  • Money spent per KM Ran = 0.69 pence per km

Basically, the lower the number, the more value I’ve been able to extract from the amount of money I’ve spent on all of the things I bought for running. This is in the financial point of view.

If I take it from calories in/out perspective, I always base it on calories burned.

First, we need to know the data sets (these are not absolutes, just rough scientific estimates):

• For every 12 km of distance jogged or ran (not walked) = you burn 1,000 calories.
• For every 3,500 calories burned = you lose 1 pound of your weight.

As an example,

• Total Distance Ran since day 1 of your running journey: 3,600km

How many pounds were lost?

• lbs = ((3,600km / 12km) * 1,000 calories)/3,500 calories
• lbs = (300 * 1,000 calories)/3,500 calories
• lbs = 300,000 calories/3,500 calories

= approximately 85.71 pounds lost.

But wait, there’s more! That 85.71 pound loss is only applicable if we do not have any dietary intake at all, because that number changes depending on how many calories we take every day. We must consider our current BMI, and our level of daily activity to know our supposed maximum daily caloric intake.

I won’t delve deeper into that anymore, as this will become a science and mathematics blog relating to health and nutrition. 😆 My point here is that the amount of money I’ve spent on this endeavour is all for my health & fitness.

I am committing “my financial resources, time, and effort”, with the expectation of obtaining “a longer, healthier, and fitter life”. If the risk is for it not to work out, meaning I will not be able to have a healthy or longer life due to unexpected UNCONTROLLABLE diseases, illnesses, or accidents, then that’s a risk I’m willing to take. “Amor Fati”

The ability to enjoy life with vigour, endurance and strength regardless of age and still have the ability to enjoy physical activities with the future generation. It’s enjoying the accumulated wealth, knowledge, wisdom, and connections regardless of one’s age.

A man should not grow old without seeing what his mind, body, and soul are capable of.

-Anonymous

Food Intake

What goes along with wanting to take the health and fitness path is also eating nutritious food. It’s funny, though; I just didn’t take this path so suddenly. I just wanted to lose and then maintain my weight before. Then there came a time when my health and fitness goals substantially changed with my running journey. I have an aim now to achieve the Abbott six-star medal. It is a medal granted to all runners who are able to finish the six major marathons worldwide. A runner needs to complete the Berlin, London, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Tokyo Marathons in order to get this medal (See image below).

The problem I have is that I haven’t even finished a 21k run yet, let alone a 42k. I’ve just always been focused on doing 5k and 10k since I started running. So I heavily shifted my training (on top of the tempo, long, interval, fartlek, and hill runs) to the slow yet safe and said to be an effective way to run faster in the long run. It’s called the Maximum Aerobic Function “MAF” Method. I also said to myself that I also need to be mindful of my food intake if I’ll be taking the longer distance run.

First and foremost, I’ll focus on both the macro and micronutrients of my food intake. My primary focus is to slowly lower some of my sugar, alcohol, and caffeine intake. The sugar intake is not much of a problem for me anymore, unlike years ago; it’s actually more of the caffeine because I’ve been a coffee junkie ever since I entered the workforce. Luckily, I’ve been surviving a low- to moderate-caffeine lifestyle for the past few months. Slowly but surely approach. 😆

With alcohol, well, I’ve been doing fairly well. From once a week to once a month, and now I’m not even thinking about or craving it. Currently, I just drink occasionally.

Why am I reducing my alcohol intake? because once alcohol is absorbed through our stomach and small intestine and finally into our cells, it can disrupt the water balance in muscle cells, thus altering their ability to produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is our muscles’ source of energy.

Additionally, alcohol intake can also negatively impact aerobic endurance performance by reducing cardiovascular function, decreasing oxygen delivery to muscles, and altering metabolism during exercise. Also, alcohol can affect sleep quality and recovery, which are crucial for optimal endurance performance.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not demonising alcohol; I love drinking. This was true for me years ago, but not as much anymore today. Yet, it’s absolutely wonderful to drink in moderation with family and friends. 😁🍻

Next is ramping up fruits, veggies, and nuts (I need the micronutrients now more than ever). So yeah, I’ve been buying in what other people label as the “healthy” food section for a couple of months now — for me, I consider these foods to have more micro- and macronutrients per serving.

I’m not at the level to be a complete health geek. I just want to have a good recovery process for my body because I’ll be running distances that I’ve not run yet in my entire life.

There comes a point in endurance training when a person’s metabolism substantially improves. This is where eating more is now essential, not just for recovery but also to maintain weight. 😅 I guess it’s both good and bad? Sure, eating more to maintain weight is everyone’s dream, but being mindful of what to eat is another thing. I would love to try to eat heavy amounts of pleasurable and palatable sweets, but then it might cause negative effects on my body’s physical and biochemical functions and processes. 😅 Balance is essential.

I’m not rushing to be able to run a 21k or a marathon because I want my body to learn how to properly cope with the multiple stresses that I am putting on it. I don’t have any coaches while doing this, so I learn everything from scratch and apply those learnings — the practitioner method. The last thing that I want to happen is to have an injury that will completely put off my hard work. This is also one of the reasons why I’m taking the not-too-fast and slightly-slow approaches.

At the end of the day, I’m doing this for myself, not for competitive purposes, plus I have a lifetime to attain that Abbott Six Star Medal.

Food, food, food. My investment here is not purely about the money, because it is certainly cheaper to eat food possessing more macro- and micronutrients per serving, as it helps us feel more sated and is helpful to boost our bodily system in general than eating the ones with minimal to no micronutrients, mostly carbs and sugar, which most people call and label junk food.

My main investment here is time, effort, and discipline. How willing am I to do this for a long time to achieve a goal that I may or may not attain in the long run?

Personally, I’m willing to put in my time and effort for that. This game is all internal, not external. 😁

Gadgets (Laptop & Smart Phone)

Without my laptop and smart phone, I wouldn’t be able to do this blog, share what little knowledge I have about finance and investing, and in turn encourage others to take the reigns of their financial lives.

With it, I am able teach how to fish from both personal finance and investment standpoint, to be able to consume information at scale through different platforms, and most especially to learn from the works of both the successes and hardships of people in different walks of life including those who already passed away.

I hold an opinion that due to the internet and the massive increase in connectivity worldwide, gadgets are one of the best investments that we could make for ourselves. It is using technology for our own self-development and self-improvement.

That being said, it is still dependent how we use it because we certainly wouldn’t want to harness the dark side of it, which causes misery, shame, doubt, and anxiety.

From a financial point of view, I only maximise what is essential for me. Not everyone utilises the full potential of their laptop or smart phone; this has always been my reason why I don’t purchase newly released smart phones and laptops. I just cannot fathom spending that sizeable amount of money on a newer phone with specs that I will certainly not be able to maximise. Probably not even more than 50% of it.

Personally, I just always see more value in spending that extra amount of money on other things than purchasing a newer phone that I wouldn’t be able to fully utilise. It’s just me—a value-for-money type of individual.

Books

I never expected to be a person who’d spend money on books because reading was my least favourite activity when I was young. I just thought that it was boring, and it doesn’t give any value at all. Looking back, I just had a not-so-good experience with it, probably because I only read materials that were for school purposes (I think I barely read textbooks before, and it completely reflected in my grades). That was most likely the reason why I had negative point of view towards books when I was young.

Reading books gave me the notion that all books consist of non-interesting contents. For years, I thought of books as a means just to get a passing grade, a torture device for children.

Then, as I grew older, I found out there were books other than what my school required me to read, and there were a lot of them. Somehow, something changed. I started reading fiction and young adult genres, but I was just a casual reader back then.

For years to come, after finishing university (I truly feel that I just got lucky with this), I started to enter the workforce. I now have a lot of time in my hands; no one will tell me what to do, what to read, or what to learn. Just like with some kids before, after high school, I didn’t know what degree to pursue. A complete happy-go-lucky and a completely lost kid). Instead, I now could follow my own curiosities, which were slowly building up during my early 20s.

Then fast forward today, to my amazement, I’ve been reading textbooks, articles, blogs, annual reports, shareholder letters, and even watching videos and listening to podcasts at a massive pace. My younger self would be horrified when he got to see his future self enjoying reading, as he knows well that reading was a complete and utter torture for him, but then he would see how it would liberate his future self.

It is indeed true that education doesn’t stop after you leave school. Personally, education for me started after I left school. Don’t get me wrong, without my formal education, I wouldn’t be able to have a job that provides food on my family’s table; without it, I’m nothing. This is the reason why I am completely thankful and grateful for my parents; they’re the ones who provided my formal education so that I could make a living.

On the other hand, I just don’t want to make a living but also to serve based on what my nature demands of me. Hence the investments in books. This is where I completely synced myself with my own curiosities, my gifts and my whole being, but with caution, because there are books that can be detrimental to one’s self!

Furthermore, by reading not just books but also articles, blogs, financial letters, and others more you are basically learning. I get to learn how to write, to structure my thoughts, and let them flow through my writings. It is my own way to share all my collected learnings, with a tinge of my personality, with others.

“Reading informs you. Writing transforms you”.

-anonymous

This is how I think of what I’m doing and why I put a lot of effort into it. It is a method where I plant a tiny seed of information in one’s conscious or subconscious mind, hoping that the seed I planted might grow into a plant or hopefully a large tree, which could not only help the people who consumes my content but also others in the process as they pass some of the seeds I’ve planted to them to others. (Paying it forward)

It doesn’t matter if that person asks for my help to cultivate that seed of information or not. What matters to me is that as long as one of the many seeds I’ve and will spread through my writings helps them grow into the biggest tree that they could ever have in their lives (with or without my help), then I see it as a complete success of what I’ve been doing.

I’m just your ordinary INFJ: The Advocate

Subscriptions

Sometimes outsourcing some of our work is important because it will take a substantial amount of time to learn things from scratch. The hardest part is forcing ourselves to learn something that we are not even interested in learning. Our time is a precious part of our lives that we cannot ever take back.

“Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.” 

-Jim Rohn

That being said, if we’re willing to learn things and prefer to do them ourselves, then by all means, we must go ahead with learning and doing them. This will save us a substantial amount of money.

Tikr.com is a website that I use to do a quick financial analysis of the public companies on my watchlist. It also helps to quickly screen unknown but promising public companies around the world. Nevertheless, this doesn’t constitute a complete investment analysis; this only makes reading a company’s financial numbers faster than collecting them ourselves, like, for example, 10 years’ worth of financial data for a company. Before I subscribed to Tikr.com, I did everything myself, including plugging all the financial statements of a company into my Excel file, which took a substantial chunk of my time.

With Tikr.com, I was able to roughly shave off 1-3 hours of my time just for collecting and analysing data from companies via their corporate reports online. Not to mention that with Tikr.com, I’m now able to do a very quick screening of companies for which I would not do research anymore based on my chosen fundamental parameters. That was just impossible for me to do before, not unless I was willing to do a manual, one-by-one, quick financial analysis myself for every company in a certain index by looking into their yearly financial reports on their websites, which again would require collecting data. It’s by taking it the old-school way. 😅😆

To learn more about Tikr.com, see my resources page. https://elmads.com/?page_id=2798

Microsoft Office is a subscription that I’ve had on and off. I’ve tried to save money before by cancelling it and instead using free Microsoft Word and Excel-like applications such as PlanMaker. I’ve used PlanMaker for approximately 2 years, but when I get to learn more about Excel, I realised that nothing beats Microsoft Excel overall. From Excel functions to charts, it’s top-notch. Plus, I’ve been using Excel for years now, for all of my finances, for financial and investment analysis, and even for my other endeavours like running. Thus, I eventually and recently subscribed again to Microsoft Office. I realised that there are things that are really worth paying for, especially if they completely sync with our principles and life plans.

Furthermore, I would say that WordPress is the best value-for-money investment of all of my subscriptions. Without this, I wouldn’t be able to have my own website, an outlet for my learning and ideas through writing. It is one of my ways to plant seeds of information to others regarding personal finance, investing, and its behavioural aspects.

To Sum It Up

Investing is not just putting out money with the expectation of receiving more money. It is more like putting out money to receive returns greater than the money itself.

This is different for each one of us, but it always comes back to our own personal objectives and personalities.

It doesn’t always have to be about money. Think about this not literally but in a bigger picture, in a worldly view. 😁

Knowledge is my Sword and Patience is my Shield,

elmads

This blog is for informational purposes only and not a Financial Recommendation. Not all information will be accurate. Consult an independent financial professional before making any major financial decisions.