It takes 19 years to learn

January 9, 2019

Introduction

It is my personal finance research. I was so busy last winter break after Christmas. I did not have any party to go. My good friend in SJTU went to Europe for family vacation, and I had to spend time to chat one hour with my Florida Atlantic University friend as well. I have Chinese friends and their family working in Seattle, they work for Google and Amazon.

It takes 19 years to learn 

I started my personal finance research in November 2018. I continuously work on my research, and after hundreds of hour work, I push myself to find more things to work on. I finally searched citi bank credit card online access and there is a feature in citi bank credit card to request statement from 1996 to 2018.

This is the first time I downloaded all statements, and then I exported to Excel sheet, applied some simple scripts and generated the pivot table. Here is the blog I documented my experience this morning. I took a sick day to go for dental appointment.

I purchased over $1900 US dollar clothing alone in 2000. I just could not believe that.

I am always a good friend to all my past classmates. But we do not communicate with personal finance in detail. I tried to figure out why I have to work since my tooth are falling out since periodontics.

Since last few years I talked about social housing in Canada, I felt so ashamed to myself. I decided to do some research and figure out what is the real reason with my situation. My friend talked to me in 2017 summer.

One of my good friend from SJTU told me that I should not work on algorithm and data structure practice, she advised me in May 2018. I should not go for those challenging positions. I thought about it and I argued to myself. So that is one of reasons I decided to start my personal finance research.

Here is year 2000 citi credit card statements and my analysis. I just could not believe that I was such stupid in my purchase. In 2014, I went to Florida and threw so many clothes with good quality and some of them I even only wear two or three times into garbage can. I did not count how much I spent on cloths at all.

Here is my personal finance github.

My argument 

If I do not learn the value of dollar, then there is no point to make more money. Since I will waste the money even I make more money from my job and investment.

I like to be a minimalist.

January 10, 2019 11:32 PM
If I was so smart like I am in 2019 back in 2000. I will cut all expenses to minimum. Do not offer my mom an international trip. Do not spend on clothing. Those two items will save $2600 US dollars. That is one bedroom condo in the city of Yichun. Or I will invest in Vanguard growth index fund for $3000 US dollar purchase.