johnfranks wrote:The guy is crazy. He's still pumping out books at a rate of one per year, so I wouldn't call that retired.
johnfranks wrote:...but he's clearly living frugal so I'll give him credit for not caring about what the Jones' have.
While he may be naturally inclined to live this way, you have to give him credit for this. The temptation of many would be to keep working to be able to live bigger. Similarly, Dave Chilton - someone who presumably could live pretty large - claims to live in a small house by most standards and it's not filled with lots of cool tech gadgets. Not everybody is wired this way but there is a lot of appeal to having less 'stuff' since it means there is less to take care of.
johnfranks wrote:Spending the winter in the U.S. living in a trailer sounds risky. What about family health care? That could easily blow his savings if he doesn't have health insurance. If he does have insurance, that must cost a fair bit. Does he still get all the Canadian child-welfare benefits if he's living in the U.S.? I hope not!
He had admitted to receiving many tax credits normally reserved for low income families but I suspect that his first book made him ineliglble to quality for such benefits. Book sales are seemingly the swing factor but I suspect he may requalify since the market for his books is - I'm guessing - much smaller than it used to be.
Another observation along the same line of thinking, however, pertains to emergency 911 service. Without a home, the family has no 'land line' telephone. Without that, he's taking a risk. Granted with a young family the the likelihood of needing 911 is very low but it's one of those risks that if it does materialize the outcome could be very bad. Generally speaking, I tend to avoid even small probability risks that have potentially disastrous (irreversible) outcomes.
I would bet real money, however, that he's not Canada's youngest retiree. He might be the youngest that has told the world about it. There must be a few 20-somethings that struck it rich in the late 1990s and kept that wealth and retired from the 9-to-5 work schedule. Similarly, I know of a hedge fund manager who hit the motherload, sold 'everything' and travelled the world on a yacht with wife and kids for a year. Now in his 40s, he's returning to work because he's bored. But he's staying pretty private about how much money he made and at what age.
And I'm amazed at how young some of our 'wealthy family' clients are given the amount of wealth they have amassed. Sorry for this but the one thing that strikes me as quite disingenuous is Derek's continued reference to himself as an idiot investor.
He clearly doesn't really believe this. If he did, he wouldn't want to even try to given advice to anybody, let alone profit handsomely from doing so. I think it's fair to say that I lean on the side of modesty. And while I'll never claim to have investment acumen to rival the likes of Buffett, Krembil, Watsa, etc. I think I can add value for a lot of people and have some nuggets of wisdom to share.
But to take money from people looking for advice and fall back on a claim that he's "just an idiot" rubs me the wrong way. I don't have an axe to grind with him. Any form of dishonesty I run into really irks me.