Link Roundup #56: 10 Things to Know This Week

Accelerate your personal finance knowledge with this regular feature on Ringgit Oh Ringgit – the Link Roundup! I promise you’ll find these 10 links informational 🙂

1. Every self-help book ever, boiled down to 11 simple rules – Mashable

Once in a while, you’ll come across an EXCEPTIONAL article, and this is one of those. I loved it so much, I wrote down the 11 rules in my journal, so I can quickly refer to them:

• Take one small step
• Change your mental maps
• Struggle is good. Scary is good.
• Instant judgement is bad
• Remember the end of your life
• Be playful
• Be useful to others
• Perfectionism = procrastination
• Sleep, exercise, chill out, eat. Repeat
• Write it all down
• You can’t get it all from reading

Here’s another hack, if you’ll take one from me: find a mentor who exhibits the behaviours you’d like to emulate. Can be formal, can be informal (ie a public figure). It is helpful to find people who can show you the way it can be done.

2. Bye, Netflix: These free subscriptions will save you lots of cash each month – CNet

In a nutshell,

Note: the suggestions for video streaming are great, BUT you must have VPN because they’re not available in Malaysia.

My personal fave is Masterclass Live – the paid option is $180 (STILL DAMN CHEAP FOR THE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION YOU’D GET), but there is also the free option of Masterclass Live.

3. 50 Reasons Why Everyone Should Want More Walkable Streets – Fast Co

“Someone with a 1-hr car commute needs to earn 40% more to be as happy as someone with a short walk to work. On the other hand, if someone shifts from a long commute to a walk, their happiness increases as much as if they’d fallen in love.”

Hello any of you have/will have decision-making power in anything related to city planning? Please make our streets more walkable.

Also, how can I, as a common citizen, contribute towards this future? Hmmmm suggestions? The only thing I can think of is sending formal complaints when roadside stalls take up walking space meant for pedestrians (not something I want to do tbh, they’re in the wrong but… kesian).

4. How to register a sole proprietorship with SSM – Silent Confessions by Syaza Nazura

Channelling my inner boomer: back in my day I had to go to SMM in PERSON to register for sole prop! In person! And now you can do it online!

Lol no really tho. If you have a side business, doing freelancing or whatever, and have started to reinvest your profits back into yourself and your business, register yourself at least for sole prop, the cheapest option for business entity.

Why? So you can claim some expenses as business expenses during tax 🙂

(And on that note. You should totally file your taxes even if you’re not making profit *yet*. If you’re not making enough, you’re not eligible to pay taxes, but you HAVE to submit).

5. Co-Living Side Hustle: Learning The Way (Day 1) – Melepak.com

This is a blogpost from a ‘Malay guy living in Singapore’ who is exploring co-living side hustle as an income stream.

Personally I just think ‘co-living’ is just the rebranding of normal renting out business, but with built-in service of ensuring harmony between tenants, however that works. A cool exploration of idea nonetheless. Waiting for Parts 2 and beyond.

6. Which Phones Lose the Most Value? – PCMag

The iPhone XR has lost 53.2 percent of its value since 2018, and while that might sound like a lot, the LGV40 ThinQ, a serious competitor in the Android space at the same time on the market, has lost 79.10% of its value in the same time.

iPhone users get mocked a lot for ‘falling for’ expensive branding, but they actually have high resale value (they tend to last longer too), so who’s laughing now?!

7. Why Your Designer Bag Is Making You Feel Worse – The Financial Diet

Spending on luxuries (doesn’t have to be a designer bag, could be premium watches for you boys) are supposed to make you feel good… right?

Then why do some people – including me, if I’m honest – feel crap if they purchase said items?

In one study, Dr. Ordabayeva and her colleagues asked women to imagine they were buying a dress for the opera and considering a luxury option versus a non-luxury option.

Then they asked the women to report how authentic they felt potentially buying each option, and the majority of women said the luxury option made them feel like a less authentic version of themselves.

“To our surprise, we found that a lot of consumers do not necessarily experience the psychological boost that luxury promises, and instead feel inauthentic and like impostors when wearing luxury,” Dr. Ordabayeva said.

Please note here that I’m not exploring the whole ‘should you buy luxury products’ angle. You do you. Instead, I’m exploring the psychology that goes behind not feeling that ‘you’re worth it’ factor that these brands often promote.

8. People are paying $10,000 to trip on magic mushrooms at a retreat in Jamaica. But past struggles with safety and staffing show the difficulty of taking psychedelics mainstream.  –  Business Insider

TIL psychedelics retreats??! It’s a thing??

I’m just… fascinated at the services that exist just to alleviate the boredom of rich people.

9. Making Money on OnlyFans Is a Lot Harder Than You Think – Vice

“You don’t know how hard it is to hustle and get people to pay for their porn when most is free”

Damn right. Much respect to the sex workers who successfully did it. Marketing geniuses, truly.

10. Is Woke Capitalism Profitable? – Quilette

This is an interesting one. The author compared share price performance by ‘woke’ companies to their equivalent not-woke-but-not-right-wing-either counterparts, and acknowledging there may be gaps in the analysis, came to this conclusion:

‘woke corporate policies do little to positively or negatively impact a company’s bottom line. While financial gains are possible, they are minimal. In other words, woke capitalism is, for the most part, financially inconsequential relative to other higher order factors, be they store closures or increased production costs.’

Verrry interesting. Woke capitalism has been criticised as just being a marketing ploy for one purpose only: higher profit. Again, nothing here is conclusive, but it seems like that theory doesn’t hold weight.

Will woke companies continue being woke with no financial incentive? Who knows.

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That’s it for this round, catch you next time! Want to submit a link you thought was great? Reach out to me on FB or Twitter.

To read past link roundups, please click here.