The Poor Swiss

9 Simple Tips to Find Cheap Kindle Ebooks

Mr. The Poor SwissAugust 21, 2019August 21, 201911 Comments

I bought my Amazon Kindle more than six years ago. First, I purchased the original Kindle. A few years later, I bought the Kindle Paperwhite. I have been delighted with both. It is such a fantastic thing to travel with all my ebooks in my pocket and not have five or more heavy books in my luggage.

Over the years, I bought and read well over 120 books on my Kindle. At the time, I thought it was very cheap. And indeed, I was saving money compared to print books. I realize now that this may not have been the case.

For frugal people, there is one big issue with Kindle books: You cannot buy used books. In the last two years, I almost have not purchased any Kindle ebook. Instead, I bought many used books. There is a second-hand shop near my current job. I probably bought over 40 books during this time. I bought them for less than 2 CHF each on average. And I only bought books in an excellent state.

The problem is the room second-hand books take! My bookshelf is full, and books are piling up! I am going to build a new one. But after some time, the new one will be full too. The other problem is traveling. If I need several books, it is a pain to carry them.

So I only bought Kindle ebooks for traveling. But there are still so many advantages to my Kindle. Therefore, I have been looking for ways to find cheap Kindle books. Here are nine simple tricks to find cheap ebooks for Kindle.

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2 Great Free Newsletters to become a Financial Expert

Mr. The Poor SwissAugust 19, 2019August 21, 20192 Comments

Generally, you should not base your investing decisions on financial news. It is usually bad advice. Following the crowd will not help your returns. You need to stay the course.

However, that does not mean financial news and stock market news are necessarily not interesting. On the contrary, I think knowing what is going on is interesting.

I like learning about what is going on in the market. Sometimes, it will give you some insights as to why the stock market is up or down, for instance. But most sources of information are pretty bad. I do not want to spend one hour going through a ton of information.

So I went looking for interesting sources of information about finances and especially the stock market. Of course, being frugal, I wanted some free sources of information!

I tried several newsletters, but in the end, I found only two that were really what I wanted: Finimize and Morning Brew. I am going to present these two newsletters and also my arguments for finding them!

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13 Awesome Stock Market Facts that will surprise you!

Mr. The Poor SwissAugust 16, 2019July 22, 2019Leave a comment

The stock market is the best place to invest your money. But it is also a fascinating place with a long history. There are so many great facts surrounding the stock market. It is really interesting.

There are tons of very interesting facts about the stock market. Today, I want to share 13 of these facts. Some of them will probably surprise you a lot! At least, they did surprise me when I learned about it!

Knowing all these facts will probably not make you a better investor. But it is still very interesting to learn some details about the place you are investing your money in, no? Some of these really surprised me. I hope you will find them interesting!

Without further ado, here are 13 awesome stock market facts!

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26 Great Money-Saving Tips from The Best Finance Bloggers

Mr. The Poor SwissAugust 14, 2019August 14, 20192 Comments

I am sure you like money-saving tips. At least, I sure do! I really like great and original tips about saving money. So today I am going to give you many of them!

And who best to give money-saving tips than the best Personal Finance Bloggers there are? So, instead of giving you my tips, I am going to give you the best money-saving tips from the best bloggers!

Without further ado, let’s see how to save money with the best money-saving tips from the best Money Bloggers!

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How to Overcome Lifestyle Creep For Financial Freedom

Mr. The Poor SwissAugust 12, 2019July 31, 2019Leave a comment

(This post was first published on ThinkSaveRetire. Thanks a lot to Steve for the opportunity of guest posting.)

My personal goal is to become Financially Free as soon as possible. As a software engineer in Switzerland, I am earning about 130’000 USD per year. As such, I am viewed as a high-income earner.

People think that earning a high-income makes it easier to become Financially Free. And on some counts, it does. But most high-income earners are not financially free and a lot of them are not even wealthy.

People believe most high-income earners are wealthy. Indeed they generally show signs of wealth such as a very good car, a large house, and very good suits. But, a lot of these people do not have any savings and accumulate large amounts of debt. They are not wealthy at all!

The main reason for that is Lifestyle Creep! In this post, we are going to see exactly what it is. I am also going through my own experience with it. And more importantly, how high-income earners can overcome lifestyle creep for Financial Freedom!

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How to buy an ETF from IBKR Mobile

Mr. The Poor SwissAugust 9, 2019August 8, 2019Leave a comment

Interactive Brokers is my favorite broker. I believe it is the cheapest broker and it offers a very large array of investing instruments. It is really great!

However, there is something that is not so great with Interactive Brokers. It is simply not really user-friendly. It is really getting better, however. The main issue comes from the fact that there are four user interfaces in Interactive Brokers. That means you can buy and sell shares in four different ways!

And another problem is that the simplest interfaces are also the least advertised. If you look around on the internet, most people would advise the Trading Workstation (TWS) interface. However, this is the most complex interface. You need to know that you do not have to use this interface!

Interactive Brokers has two simple interfaces: Account Management and IBKR Mobile, their mobile application. I have already covered how to buy an ETF from Account Management. Now, I want to cover the mobile application. I know a lot of people like to trade from their phones more than from their computer.

Let’s see how we can buy an ETF from the IBKR Mobile application. We are going to see how to deposit funds, how to convert currencies and finally how to buy an ETF or any other share for that matter. Let’s get into it. I chose the VT ETF since it is a large part of my portfolio. But these steps are the same for any ETF.

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6 Steps towards a Solid Budget can make you Debt-Free

Mr. The Poor SwissAugust 7, 2019August 1, 20191 Comment

Today’s post is a guest post by Aiden White, a San Francisco Writer. She enjoys writing about debts and many other financial subjects. She is the author behind consolidatecreditcard.org. I am happy to have her as a guest poster for the second time!

“Are you worried about your increasing weight? Did you already plan your daily gym routine and diet chart after consulting an expert?”

If I ask these questions to any normal people, most of them will answer me by saying Yes!

But what if I ask someone this – “How much debts you have?” or “are you making payments on your high-interest credit cards?” or “are you worried about your increasing debt load?”

The answers you might get would not be so encouraging, trust me. But it is also a fact that a maxed-out credit card or few unpaid payday loans may increase your debt weight more than you can imagine.

So what is the option you have? Just get out of debt and improve your financial status, that’s it! And in this case, a proper budgeting strategy will help you a lot to reduce the debt burden.

How? Read on to know more.

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How to make your Savings Rate Explode with Math

Mr. The Poor SwissAugust 5, 2019July 7, 20196 Comments

You probably all know what savings rate are. It is simply the percentage of your income that you are saving. If you do not know your personal savings rate, you should probably start with calculating it.

The basic formula is fairly simple. You need to divide your savings by your income. And this gives you your savings rate. It seems simple, right?

Well… Not really that simple. There are many ways to calculate it. The problem comes from what you count as expenses and income. And because of that, it is extremely difficult to really compare savings rates.

And it seems to me that most people on the internet are trying to inflate their savings rate by using the computation that yields the higher number. So today, we are going to see how to increase your savings rate with math!

In this post, I am going to show how we increased our savings by 26% without doing anything! And so can you!

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July 2019 – New computer

Mr. The Poor SwissAugust 2, 2019August 8, 20194 Comments

July 2019 was a very simple month for us. Not a lot of things happened. It was a good month from our point of view. We did not do much but we had several outings with our friends and family!

From a financial point of view. There were many unexpected expenses. However, there was also some extra income this month. Put together, it makes higher savings than usual.

Finally, July 2019 was a good month. However, I could not help to think that it could have been a great month! We had too many unexpected expenses that reduced significantly our savings rate. If we did not have the extra income from my company, this would have been a poor month.

In this post, you will find all that happened to us during July 2019!

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The 9 Biggest Blogging Mistakes I have made

Mr. The Poor SwissJuly 31, 2019July 4, 20196 Comments

Every blogger makes a lot of mistakes in the early days of the blog. I have done many blogging mistakes myself. I am sure every single one made at least a few mistakes. And doing mistakes is fine as long as we realize and we improve from them.

Today, I want to share with you the 9 biggest blogging mistakes I did on this blog since the beginning. Hopefully, you will learn something from them and do not repeat my mistakes.

You have to remember that I am a hobby blogger with a full-time job. I cannot invest 50 hours per week into my blog in order to make it big. Even if I was a full-time blogger, I would probably still have done all these mistakes. However, I would have done them much faster.

If you think I have done other blogging mistakes, please let me know in the comments!

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