{"id":1284,"date":"2014-12-06T00:51:04","date_gmt":"2014-12-06T05:51:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1284"},"modified":"2014-12-06T19:20:29","modified_gmt":"2014-12-07T00:20:29","slug":"the-value-of-simple-is-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1284","title":{"rendered":"The Value of Simple is Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

The official launch for The Value of Simple<\/a> was Monday, and there a few more reviews up at Financial Diffraction<\/a> and My Own Advisor<\/a> (where the giveaway is still open!). I also had a few readers email me with some great feedback, and I’ve been putting that up on the Reviews<\/a> page as well. <\/p>\n

Amazon<\/a> and Indigo<\/a> are now accepting reviews if you’ve had a chance to read it and are willing to write a review. The rankings are quite volatile, but it’s hit #1 in Amazon for the “Retirement Planning” and “Investing: Introduction” categories this week, and #3 in “Personal Finance: Investing” at Kobo, which is pretty cool. Between that and the awesome reviews it’s looking good so far!<\/p>\n

But before that, we kicked it off with a launch party on Saturday. I gave a short talk and then answered some questions on the book, focusing on how my training as a scientist gave me some perspective on personal finance and investing, and what I was trying to take from my experiences and put into the book. <\/p>\n

In particular, the effect of inflation and the importance of investing was an important lesson. Back when I was starting my PhD I got a 4-year scholarship, but nobody in my department finished a PhD in less than 4 years — I had to save and invest myself to be ready for a likely year 5. For students who didn’t have a scholarship, the take-home pay for working in the lab was just $16,000\/yr, which is what I was set to face after my scholarship ran out. Now that is not a lot of money to live on, but it’s not like the department set that low rate consciously: it just crept up on them. In fact, at the time my supervisor<\/em> did is PhD, students would have had the same $16,000; a student starting today <\/em>will also make $16,000 — and will still have to live off of $16,000 in five or six years at the end of their degree. That’s not to start a long rant on science funding and grad school and everything, but to look at the importance of inflation.<\/p>\n

At some point, that was probably a perfectly reasonable stipend, but inflation has eaten away at the buying power over the decades. And the same fate awaits money left in a savings account that isn’t keeping pace with inflation. Your hard-earned savings will seem a pittance in retirement if they’re allowed to be ravaged by inflation. Getting a return that beats inflation is critical, and that brings you to appreciate the importance of investing — a way to get an above<\/em>-inflation rate of return. <\/p>\n

It also hammers home the need to save and invest so that you can prepare to support your own retirement: OAS and less-than-full-CPP are just about $16,000 (even full CPP does not take you much higher), which is not a level I would call providing for a comfortable retirement. <\/p>\n

Holiday Orders<\/strong>: For some reason Amazon is reporting estimated delivery times into mid-January, even for books that were ordered on launch day. I believe there’s a good chance that those estimates will come down in the coming weeks — the supply chain just isn’t that long — but if you need a book before Christmas, orders placed through my direct site<\/a> by Dec 15 should arrive before Christmas at regular shipping, and rush orders can be arranged after that if needed. I have not heard anything one way or the other from customers, but Indigo indicates that they have books in stock so you should be able to get a copy in time from there. They also put the paperback on sale today (it’s actually cheaper from Indigo now than directly from me!)<\/p>\n

Update<\/b>: Sure enough, customers have received update emails from Amazon with new shipping estimates for next week (2 weeks total). The purchase webpage still says 1-2 months though.<\/p>\n

Finally, sorry for the lack of posts — between being swamped on all fronts, the database powering the site decided to crash this week and I had to trouble-shoot and go back a few days in the backup. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The official launch for The Value of Simple was Monday, and there a few more reviews up at Financial Diffraction and My Own Advisor (where the giveaway is still open!). I also had a few readers email me with some great feedback, and I’ve been putting that up on the Reviews page as well. Amazon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}