Merry Christmas and happy new year y’all!

Hello everyone,

If you are a Christian like me, today is a big day for you.

I sincerely want to wish you a Merry Christmas, full of health and joy.

What my Christmas will look like

I will personally spend most of this season alone (because I want to), as I will emerge on a deep introspection about my life. If you don’t know what this is, this is typically a period where you try to improve spiritually and intra-personally. There are many benefits to this, especially if you do it for a reasonably big period and you do a technology and people fast.

This will influence my entire holiday: because unlike the previous 28 years of my life, I won’t be eating the greatest sweets of the season

food Christmas alone

sharing Christmas with my family

christmas dinner table

or anyone else for that matter. This Christmas will be shared with the most important person in my life: myself.

christmas alone

If you don’t put yourself before others you won’t be truly happy or able to help others.

Presents – a frugal Christmas

This Christmas I will be even more frugal than ever. The only present I will offer is a pack of 10 acupuncture to my mother which will cost $300. She hasn’t been struggling with major health issues yet, but she is the most important person in my life and I want to have her around for a long time. As for my father, my brother and the rest of the family – it is not that we don’t get along, but we are not really connected with one another, so I won’t be giving them anything else than a Christmas postal.

I will also give $300 away to Charity as a result of having pocketed almost $10k net on my perfect flip. From this year on, I will give 1% of my RE company’s profits as well.

As a result I will spend about $620 this Christmas.

Why I will go on a retreat to do an introspection about my life

The reason why I want to do this is that I want to have a clean approach to life. I’ve been too obsessed with a few things in my life (including making money) and I want to take a step back and look at my actions from another perspective. Don’t think that I regret trying early retirement, opening a business or having side hustles. No – I actually love business and making money. However, I have certain actions in life that I can optimize and modify. I want to grow wiser because I know I can do that.

To do this, I will basically fast from all technology and go with 30 minute and 1h meditation periods throughout the day. Ideally, I would be close to the beach (and although I live where you vacation, it is winter time in Portugal) right now 😛

I will also engage in brain hacking sessions, where I convince myself of several things, including my unique ability to heal and get better. I will also think of my actions in life pertaining to others, considering increasing my donation to charity, etc.

Why doing this now

There are essentially two reasons for doing this now:

  • My adrenals are messed up like never before and I need to give them a serious break from stress. Actually avoiding stress doesn’t fix them. Extreme relaxation is what heals the adrenals.
  • This is the perfect time to connect spiritually. I am a Christian and I believe in God, but I haven’t been connecting with Him for a long time. I want to fix that.

meditation benefits

If you haven’t taken any time off until today, I definitely recommend you to do so.

I won’t be posting before the new year, and despite I will spend all this time by myself, I am super excited about 2018. I have big plans, I will keep you guys posted.

At the same time, I think that Christmas is all about giving. Therefore, I decided to set up…

The Love-fueled charity fund!

My buddy J Money from BudgetsAreSexy (and two weeks ago Rockstarfinance) fostered me to do this. This fund will be kickstarted with 20 bucks (provided by J) and I will invite everyone to contribute towards it. I will invest the money into stock EFTs and give the profits away to charity. I will keep you posted on the fund, how much money it has, etc. The idea is to build a decent-size fund which can at least give away 500 bucks a year to some charitable institution in Portugal.

If you want to contribute, your name will be in the fund. I will keep you posted as I will write a post on the fund every now and then (listing the names of those who collaborated). The fund will have to be under my name (otherwise it will be too expensive to manage it) and I will deduct the taxes I’ll pay on it before distributing the dividends. However, I will match every 100th contribution (meaning the 100th, the 200th, the 300th, and so forth), up to 500 bucks. As I said, more to come soon! 🙂

All the best,

Ben