Blog / Finance

Profit First and Paying Yourself First

April 15, 2018

I was recently re-reading this article by Basecamp which really resonated with me.

When we started Highview Apps, both my co-founder and I agreed that we'd bootstrap the business and start paying ourselves right away as soon as we're making profits. Being both engineers, we were able to keep our costs extremely low as we didn't need to hire anyone to build our products. Servers cost very little ($5/month per server with DigitalOcean) …

Tax Savings 2013

January 4, 2014

Since I was traveling last year and had almost no earned income, I decided to look for some ways to take advantage of possible tax savings before the year ended.

I have some investments in index funds and it seemed like a good idea to sell some of them as the major indexes hit record highs last year. I found out that long term capital gains are taxed at 0% if your earned income is …

How to get a better exchange rate for your US dollars in Argentina with Xoom.com

September 4, 2012

When I was in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, I was chatting with a guy in my dorm room who was just in Argentina and lived there for about 4 months. I told him I was heading to Argentina as well and he gave me this very useful information on how to get a much better exchange rate for US dollars, better than the official rate.

Yes, you heard that right, better than the …

Some tips on cutting down on your expenses

May 9, 2012

The last couple of years or so I’d been looking for ways to cut down on my expenses. I got rid of things that I used to think I need, but actually rarely used. It kept things simpler as well as it gave me less to think about, which is always nice. Below are some of the things I did.

Got a prepaid cellphone

I rarely make calls. It’s just nice to have a …