Category: Blog

More and more people are dreaming of a better life where we have a more autonomy over lives. Planning & seeking help is a big bulk of making the big move. Its one thing dreaming wanting better life for ourselves but there is a lot of planning and preparation that goes into it.

In our own experience we had travelled a lot alone and as a couple before we had our children and continued with liban. Doing this has enabled us to find what we love and what works for us. It has given us the opportunity to explore different cultures and learn the countless ways in which indigenous people have lived sustainable lives. Even though we touched on our reasons to moving to belize in Why Belize? we have been having more enquires and sessions through our Relocation Consultation to touch more on the preparing for sustainable living once you’ve decided where you want to move.

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Once you get past the initial hurdle of deciding where then the fun begins. The research begins. Sustainable living is such a BROAD subject and it can feel overwhelming at times deciding, but the key thing is to ask as many questions as possible to people that are already living the life you aspire to live. How does this sustainable living work out in a real life context. What are the cost implications that you need to plan and prepare for?

Above all else however is being mentally ready and understanding that there will be things that will come up that you might not have come across in your research stage. Some things in life you learn through living. These hurdles are nothing but stepping stones on your journey.

Underpinning your why will take you through anything and everything that comes up. Can do attitude above all else.

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One of the first worrisome moments in the planning stage is knowing that you will be away from your family/support system. This is one of the biggest reasons a lot of people get stuck on the dreaming and planning stage and never really take the leap. Sometimes having a dream without actioning it is what keeps some people feel alive, and that’s ok too. Our journeys are unique and everyone gets where they need to get to in their own time. Taking this first step takes a lot of confidence in your decision, and it can be daunting feeling like your taking a leap without your support system. For us what helped is knowing that we are creating more choices and chances for our loved ones that did not make the move with us. The unshaken belief that this is the right thing for us, our children, our community and our world. One homestead at a time.

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Another element for us is the length of time paperwork takes to process here in Belize. Even though it is frustrating not being familiar with the reasons why things are taking so long we know why we are here and why we are setting up this way of life. Its the long game, always keeping our vision on the end goal of what we are after.

What are your current hurdles?

Blessings always,

Asli

Invest in yourself

The single most important investment you can make in life….

Is in your self 

We talk a lot in these pages about investing, mostly with money and financial stuff, economics, generational wealth, and often grumble about all that’s wrong with the world,  it would seem maybe we forget the most important investment of all, “invest in yourself”

Ultimately, each of us will be most successful at anything we choose in life we invest in ourselves first, if we understand the importance of investing in ourselves and take a little time each day to do so, it’s from this single investment that everything else becomes possible.

Make the time to dream a little, and once you know what you want in life, then make sure you take time each day to turn those dreams into reality. 

Investing in yourself doesn’t directly have to have anything to do with money, but it might sometimes and it will ultimately lead to an increase in your income level and net worth over time. 

self investments could be anything  if it helps you develop yourself into who you want to be in life, and will almost always include things like; building your knowledge, working toward another certification, reading and researching everyday, taking at least one action a day toward your goals, even meditating and taking care of your physical health through good eating habits and nutrition will be helpful and are equally as important.

Consistency is the key to accomplishing almost anything in life.

keep at it consistently over time and it will work, they say “if you quit, you can’t win, and if you never quit, you can’t loose”

This is proven to be true (at least for us it has)

Long term self investments change your life and are often things like;

• Starting your own business

• Creating multiple streams of income

• Make yourself indispensable to your customers, (this could be through your own business or as an employee in someone else’s business)

• Relocating somewhere that affords a better quality of life, (a better quality of life for us personally meant somewhere cheap enough that we didn’t need to work all day to pay our bills and therefore we have all the time in our days to raise our two children).

• Detaching yourself from reliance on a broken system, (for us that meant taking as many steps as we can to be self sustainable, in terms of goods and services that we rely on)

• Getting a second passport or residency, (your only as free as your passport let’s you be)

• Diversifying your political risk, (don’t have all your eggs in one basket),

• Diversifying or decentralizing your assets, (again don’t have all your eggs in one basket)

There’s probably no limit of things that could be very worthwhile as “self investments” reading as much as you can and taking action everyday are probably the top two for us in that regard, we’d like to offer up two financial books well worth the read which we’ve found useful in understanding how real and fake economics work, this helps us gain an understanding for what’s going on globally at least from an economics standpoint.

Book suggestions;

1-“Economics in one lesson” 

by Henry Hazlitt

2-“The intelligent investor” 

by Benjamin Graham

As always we welcome feedback and are available to consult anyone who might want a little help in figuring out how to achieve their goals, reach out if you’d like to.

Until next time,

Frank

Where are we now in April 2021?

We started working on clearing the initial 3 acres we are currently working in August 2020. Us two, our children in tow and a few simple tools. In this time we have cleared 1 acre of it, started our tree transplantation. The reason for this being, as we all know trees take time and sooner we got them in the ground the better. For our immediate living area 1 acre is enough to get started on. I will go onto more details about our plans for the rest of the space for a community life at another time.

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We had a initial draft of where we wanted our temporary house, the 1st well, the car port/utility building and the vegetable garden.

You can say the last thing that is going up on the land will be the house. Not the usual approach i know but wed rather it took, what seems, longer than your average build where the house goes up first. Then you end up living in what feels like a construction site and you do the landscaping after.

As we began to clear and seeing the difference in the soil we temporarily decided to test growing some vegetables on the opposite end to where we initially had it on paper. 6 months later we’ve been able to get some of the vegetables and its proven to be a successful test run.

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The house site we cleared, measured and started derocking and derooting. Finding the odd scorpio here and there. Thankfully we haven’t had any serious dangers with the scorpions and they’ve been decreasing as we’ve cleared. Over time once we get some chickens, dogs etc. there will be next to none left. But this has lead to me and frank going back and forth on what we should call our little corner. I am for ” Rocks & Roots and Farm” and franks for ” Scorpion” farm. The debate is still on. Feel free to let us know which you prefer 🙂

Once we started getting somewhere with the house site and started the vegetable garden, we started to move the clearing outwards. Starting to work on the car port/utility building. During this time frank has built the majority of the physical house from recycled/reclaimed hardwoods, to see a bit more on it in “The cart before the horse” article of him starting the house. As we are still renting in town we have been able to utilise the outdoor space for frank to work and store the house panels.

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He then moved onto making the fence panels as the clearing has expanding and we had the initial print of the first acre. The wood he used for the fence panels are what was left over from the house panels. The quality being what dictated the left overs. The reason for this is because we want to ensure we are building the house in the most cost effective manner possible. As a form of pest control and uniform look we have been torching the panels as soon as they go up. The fence panels are almost done now, we have temporarily took a break from them however. The reason for this being that we want to finish the car port/untility building. We want to do this to move the house panels onto the site as we are aiming to have it up by end of this year.

Now that we are getting the roof on the car port/utility building we will finish the last stretch of the fence panels. So the next few months are definitely an exciting stage.

So there is a lot going on at the moment, with two little people in tow doing quality control. You’d be surprised how much Liban, at the age of 5 knows about buildings. Albeit tiring, this is one of the most exciting times. As I’ve said before i hope our journey inspires you to realise how important it is to chase your dream. Do your due diligence but let life flow.

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I will revisit how the kids are and how we are navigating their LifeLearning journey. I briefly touched on what our plans are with the kids on Is Schooling Education?.

In the meantime i wish you well. Please let us know if there are any aspects which interest you and you would like to know more about. We still have some slots open for lifestyle consultations, you can find out a bit more on Book a free first session .

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Blessings,

Asli

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”

Today I want to explore a slightly unique take on creating generational wealth, in the form of an investment that takes about a generation to reach maturity and at maturity the return on investment can be substantial maybe somewhat safer when compared to conventional investment products.

It goes without saying, creating and maintaining generational wealth is a very long term and multifaceted process. In this write up,  we are simply going to explore one small idea that fits in perfectly into our personal circumstance and belief system.

A hardwood tree plantation.

They say the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the next best time is today, that the shade we sit under was planted before us and the trees we plant will provide shade for someone else after we’re gone. 

We’re looking at growing a tropical hardwood tree plantation as a very long term investment strategy. 

We somewhat stumbled across this idea while growing a small tree nursery and then transplanting the trees on to our small farm in Belize. 

We weren’t initially looking at planting trees from a financial incentive or investment perspective, we set out simply to grow and plant a large variety of fruit trees, spice trees, and other trees with edible or medicinal utility, so that when we’re in Belize we will always have a plentiful supply of fruits and spices to enjoy.

Having some involvement in purchasing exotic hardwood lumber and building with it, and at the same time having a keen interest as an investor, I guess it was only natural that sooner or later id have an idea, go off on a tangent, start researching and crunching data on the viability of growing tropical hardwood lumber ourselves for financial purposes and then come back to pitch the idea to my wife.

The main question on everyone’s mind is probably the same question that I had;  

“if its profitable, then why isn’t everyone doing it?”

As it turns out, the answer comes quickly too; “who wants to wait 30-50 years for a return on investment”?  

That’s the main reason why growing hardwood tree plantations is not considered a profitable business, in today’s investment market, folks want to get rich quick, you’d have a hard time pitching an investment strategy where the investors would likely be dead before investment maturity! 

But then again, perspective changes things…..if you try to think in terms of generational wealth, 

(In that it’s not about you, it’s about your children and their children) 

It actually makes complete sense to create a long term investment product with a maturity factor of 30-50 years that only your children and grandchildren can benefit from, in someways it could be a good fit for a “generational wealth portfolio”

As a generational wealth investment proposition, depending on location, costs can be minimal,

The main factor is to look at countries where land and labor are cheap. 

And on the other end in a generations time, exotic hardwood lumber is almost guaranteed to be expensive, it already is relatively expensive, and with past and current global deforestation it’s highly unlikely that hardwood lumber will become cheaper over time, looking at historical data, it’s quite the opposite.

In our case, farm land (old sugarcane fields) aren’t particularly expensive,  fencing in the acres with posts and wire and growing/planting the tree seedlings isn’t costly either, labors cheap, which also makes the first few years of maintenance not particularly expensive either. We’ve done the math, as best we can and arrive at about $31k to purchase, plant and maintain 20 acres for the first 10 years, (ok, maybe we’ve got our rose tinted glasses on, so let’s just double it and call it $62k all in!)

According to statistics, tree density in plantations runs about 400-500 trees per acre, using the lessor for 20 acres, in 30-50 years time we should have about 8,000 tall thick tree trunks ready for lumber.

(Zircote hardwood)

Species is key to value when it comes to hardwoods, so we’re planting a mixture of the high value beautiful hardwoods, Belizean Mahogany, sapodilla, Zircote, rosewood, ebony, granadio, and some others, on a lumber bases these woods fetch a top price,  especially in the export market in Europe and Northern America. 

Best we can tell 8,000 tree trunks at 18-30 inches in diameter by 30 feet tall should give us (actually our children and grandchildren) between 2 and 3 million board feet of 1”by6” lumber, which at current prices for the species grown would be worth somewhere between 4 and 6 million dollars at minimum, 

So to recap the viability of this long term investment strategy, we can invest a maximum of $62,000.  for a return in 30-50 years at maturity of about $5,000,000 (5million) !

Maybe my maths isn’t too great but best I can tell that’s a compound rate of above 9% year on year for virtually doing nothing after the first few years! that sounds like a very good investment to me. (Not to mention the land the trees were planted on has probably appreciated in value to, or even potentially other products than can be harvested and sold from the trees as they grow.

While this is a very safe investment as it’s not likely to be stolen, suffer a computer hack, be devalued like fiat currencies, suffer market crashes and so forth, I guess worst case scenario it could burn down in a forest fire, but that’s not particularly likely, as with everything in life there is some risk, but not much in this case as far as we can tell.

Fortunately for me, my wife agreed with my proposition!

So we’re in the process of creating this very long term investment strategy for our children……and their children. 

My point here is this, even if this particular investment strategy is not the best choice for you, try to think long term, as in 30-50 years,  I’m sure you’ll come up with something equally as valuable to invest in. 

Until next time, 

Frank 

Hows the start of 2021 looking?

When we wrote the last article “The cart before the horse” we gave a brief outline of why we came to starting a “flatpack” style house before we secured buying a piece of land.
We started this year with full force clearing the land and planting. Having found the piece of land that we feel fit our overall goal and aspirations it was full speed ahead. However clearing and start planting on a 3 acres of land with just us two and a few pieces of equipment is not a small feat, did i also mention with potty training a 2 year old and life schooling a 5 year old? We wouldn’t want it any other way though!

Theres progress everyday, we have cleared and are working on 1 acre now. This update on how and where we are with the land will be a 6 monthly update. In this 6 month update section i will be breaking it into this small overview:

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• Why the update & a brief outline of the lay of the land. (this post)
• Trees as a form of generational wealth.
• landscape update- Overall grounds plan of the initial three acres.

The reason for us sharing this and making this mini series is to share our journey and keep you up to date.

The order in which we decided to tackle the set up was important for us. Seeing as we are doing practically all the work ourselves, we are taking our time in the way we are managing the work load. Doing the flatpack style house enables us to balance our everyday life with the children whilst clearing and planting. The other part was to get a heads up on the the building whilst we were looking for land and finalising on it.

The first thing we started doing was to clear the initial homesite. We have drawn up a ground plan and knew where we wanted the house, the vegetable gardens etc. The land was bush, complete with a whole lot of rocks and roots to clear out. The first couple of months was clearing the bush out and de rocking the general area. As the land started to clear and more of the soil was exposed we started to change things like the placement of the vegetable garden. This is one of the things that can only be learnt through presence. Even though thorough planning and draft after draft of the design is a saving grace there are some things that life only brings that you only figure out by living through it.

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The main changes to the land in this time has been:

• the well that has been hand dug- we have been using the water already for the plants and the construction of the utility building. With the kids having a few showers during the days with some of the buckets that come up, its been a whole lot of fun splashing around.

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• the toilet hole completed- franks set up all the pipes so once the house is up, its a plug and go right away.

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• the majority of the fence done- We’ve used reject wood, left overs from the house, to build the immediate fence around the 1 acre were currently working on. We then went ahead and start torching it as another means of bug prevention.

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• the utility building started this month, the rammed earth pillars are the first lot to go in. This is the first rammed earth element on this one acre. The subsoil (marl) we are using for the pillars is what’s come up from the well.

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The landscaping and vegetable garden start and on going progress will be covered in the next post as there has been a lot of changes on that front as well.

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Although we have and from time to time do face challenges i hope your main take away is to never give up. No matter what curve ball comes your way keep an eye on your goals and keep going.

Blessings,

Asli

This blog post contains parts of our first financial review of our investment recommendations at Welcome to the Decentralized portfolio our paid subscriber service..

A little back story for new readers;

We started the decentralized portfolio just a few months ago in August 2020, mainly as a result of friends consistently pushing us to make available our investment research.

(we think maybe our friends wanted to know what exactly we’ve been up to thats enabled us to lead life on our terms) and that’s fine with us.

But ultimately we thought they were on to something, so we decided to share our investment research through a subscription service to make it available to anyone who subscribes.

We even toyed with the idea of making this service free, but unfortunately data shows that typically information that’s paid for is valued more than free information, and we didn’t see the point in making an effort to do in-depth time consuming research and then to write up something that might only get your attention in passing and ultimately find its place in the trash along with everything else we all get bombarded with on a daily bases.

We want our subscribers to actually take the time to read through our research and take action on it, if it seems right for them.

So we charge a small annual subscription fee, mainly in the hope that our subscribers take their investments as seriously as we do. 

Our research is based on companies we invest in ourselves, we won’t publish investment ideas that aren’t good enough for our money.  we don’t think those ideas would be good enough for your money either.

And so here we are doing our first review of the first six months of this service from august 2020 until the end of January 2021. In the future we may decide to offer quarterly reports or something similar, but for now let’s review the first six months.

So how did all our positions do in our investments, let’s take a look;

Firstly, congratulations to all of our paid subscribers, we know it takes a lot of effort and trust to pay for a subscription service, read through all the info and take action, putting your hard earned money into anything with some risk attached is not a decision to be taken lightly, it’s stressful! so thanks to all of you for committing to our service, we think it’s been well worth it so far!

(ok it’s s still a new service so there’s only a few of you, but still, we are very happy with the last six months and knowing that if you, our subscribers keep making superior gains, our membership will grow over time)

For those that took the time to follow our recommendations at the time we made them and kept uniform position sizes, congratulations on your outstanding gains! your portfolios are up by an average gain of 154% in six months !!!!

 We think 2021 is going to be a very exciting year and we hope we can continue to deliver outsized gains into the future.

To be fair to our paid subscribers we can’t reveal the exact investments we recommended to them, but we can say this;

Over the course of six months, we recommended a total of 11 investments, 

We had 7 recommendations in the natural resource sector and 4 recommendations in the technology sector.

Out of the 11 positions, our worst performing recommendation was -21% and our best performing recommendation was +700%

And the average gain over all 11 positions was 154% all within less than a six month time frame, 

And that’s not all; each of the positions we recommended is still growing and has a lot more upside to come, we’re not selling yet in other words, and we’re starting to add new recommendations going further into 2021, the first of which went live a few weeks ago.

We always suggest allocating uniform position sizes, meaning that, whatever capital you had available to allocate for investing should be split evenly throughout the recommendations, and not on cherry picking one or two positions, uniform position sizes help create diversified spread and help mitigate risk.

It’s been an incredible six months for our subscribers  at Decentralised Portfolio, and I can’t wait to see how things pan out in 2021!

If you’d like to join us, it’s not to late, you can sign up here Subscriptions

Until next time,

Frank  

 The importance of Teaching your children how to invest and thrive for the future.

Part 8: what the wealthy do differently 

Today we continue to explore the way people with generational wealth think, we call this “old money” how does old money think?

If we want To know how to build generational wealth, then we need to look at how people with generational family fortunes think.

Making a Public Spectacle of Yourself – Not Cool

Old money likes to keep things private. It favors 

private businesses, private information, private investments, and private lives.

Private businesses are more profitable, to their owners, than publicly quoted stocks. They pay fewer legal fees, fewer accounting fees, and spend much less money trying to please investors and the media.

Today, publicly traded businesses in the U.S. distribute an average of 60% of their profits to shareholders. A privately owned, privately controlled business, on the other hand, may turn over 100% of its earnings to shareholders.

 In a public company, much of the earnings go to paying CEOs and corporate managers. In a privately controlled corporation, the owners decide who gets the money.

Accurate information-cool

Old-money discounts public information – the stuff you get from newspapers and TV – and puts a premium on their private information sources. 

They trust their own eyes and ears… sound state of mind, and their personal contacts.

This attitude informs the old-money to be ahead by having the facts and makes better investments. Rather than invest on the basis of what everybody else knows, or thinks they know, they try to pin their investments on what they know that other people don’t. 

Cash Flow – Not Cool

It’s capital that counts, not income. Most people – even high earners – are on a treadmill. They earn. They consume. There isn’t much left. Since their consumption depends on their income, they are eager to increase their income at every opportunity.

Not so with old money. It knows that, in the long run, income barely matters. It knows, too, that expenses normally rise with income, but not with real capital gains.

In other words, when you earn more money, your taxes rise… and you tend to spend the extra money on lifestyle enhancements. But if the value of the family farm goes up, the extra wealth tends to stay put. 

Old-money families don’t care as much about income as they do about capital. Often, they live in houses that were bought many years ago (no mortgages)… They drive cars that are fully depreciated (no car payments; no loss in value)… And they eschew costly fads and fashions of all sorts.

In most households, a young person is encouraged to go out and get the best-paying job he can find. Then he enters the labor force and spends the rest of his life trying to stay ahead of his expenses. He becomes a living example of the old expression “Too busy to make money.”

Tell your children: “Don’t worry about how much you make. Worry about what you learn… and what you end up with. Tell your employer you’d rather have equity than a salary increase.”

This is true in your career. And it is true in your investments. If you worry too much about the current yield, you are likely to miss the real payoff later.

Trading out of winning stock positions, for example, can trigger taxes and incur trading costs. In your work, as in your investments, you are better off ignoring income and short-term gains in favor of long-term capital growth.

Until next time,

Frank