Reaping what you sow My wife hails from a farming family, and has always been conscious of the need to survive the lean years which agriculture tends to throw up periodically. Growing up on the farm, there were some years where the inclement British weather didn't allow for a productive… full article

You're not the user Andrew Carnegie once said that the older he got the more he watched what people did rather than what they said. Apply this to your property investment plans: while a lot of us say we like the idea of moving to acreage in regional areas to… full article

Spurious precision One of the big accounting firms got my goat this week when it released house price growth forecasts by capital city out until the end of the year 2021, predicted to one decimal place. Even if you could predict the future of housing markets beyond a decimal point… full article

Extreme outcomes In his ground-breaking book Thinking Fast and Slow psychologist Daniel Kahneman invited the reader to consider why some small, rural, Republican towns in America's South, West, and Midwest might've recorded the highest rates of kidney cancer (perhaps due to the clean-living rural lifestyle, lack of pollution, and access to fresh… full article

Making the weight For the first year after my daughter was born I became lost in a maze of statistics. Doctors recognise that children come along in all shapes & sizes, but when looking at the 'normal' distribution of baby weights, she was an outlier - consistently lower than she… full article

Old habits Upon catching up with someone you haven't met for a long time they often observe that 'you haven't changed a bit!', and it's usually meant affectionately. On the other hand, an old associate noting that 'you've changed...' can be taken as an insult (although this often says as… full article

Re-engineering your life We've all heard more than enough Buffett quotes about the price of swimming naked when others are greedy (or whatever) to fill our proverbial punch-cards 20 times over by now. Instead, for today, how about some more practical advice from the 'Sage of Quotemaha'? Here's Wazza, on… full article

Your next move! I was intrigued by the game of chess for some years when I was at junior school, with its universal appeal & endless permutations - in fact, there are well over 319,000,000,000 possible positions after only four moves! One of the interesting things about chess is that… full article

Quality time Lately I've been going to the gym twice per week with my mate Si, usually for about an hour. Si is a builder, and this week he turned up looking rather drained: 'Short session tonight, I've been digging a wretched trench all day' he grumbled (or words to… full article

Appetite for destruction When I trained as an accountant a handful of our clients still maintained their records in a handwritten ledger, whereas today you can scan a receipt into your phone and post an according book entry in real time. Some things don't change so easily - I'm still… full article