Alright,  guilty conscious apart. I will just say what made me start writing again. I came across a book named “The Happiness Equation: The Surprising Economics of Our Most Valuable Asset” in a neighborhood bookstore called “Landmark” , It was in the “New Arrivals” sections, I usually run my eyes quickly through this section before getting into the actual shelves. I don’t know what made me pick this book. I browsed through the Foreword, contents and few pages.I came a across a page randomly with a chapter head as “Does money buy happiness” or something similar. I started reading that and it finally made me write about that, it was so compelling.

The few paragraphs i mowed are about the one – to – one relationship between money and happiness. Author actually started “So Money cant buy me love can it buy happiness ?”. A lot people would say a “Yes !” immediately isn’t ?. Yeah most of them. But there is always more to it. This book is about breaking the illusion of what makes people happy, which author calls the most invaluable asset.

The author talks about Easterlin Paradox. The “Easterlin paradox” suggests that there is no link between a society’s economic development and its average level of happiness, although many tend to think that the rich is reasonably happier than the average poor.  As part of this paradox a table of data was shared in this book. That table represents data starting from 1970 until today the GDP of USA in $ and its growth by decades alongside average happiness level. The happiness levels had  absolutely no change even though country’s wealth has grown dramatically during this period. Infact the happiness index was a number between 1 and 3 where

For

3  = Very happy, 2 = Pretty Happy, 1 = Not Happy

For all the 4 decades the happiness index was about 2 or 2.2

So then the author deals the ultimate question So money doesn’t make people happy, How should one explain richer being happier than the average poor ?Author calls happiness as a function of others happiness and also quotes that “Men doesn’t want to be rich, they want to richer than other men”and we are caught up with a thing called “social status” which money brings

I think its best you get the rest of the thoughts from author himself directly..……..

I was totally overwhelmed with this fine eatery called “Crimson Chakra”. Which eventually made me write about it  going beyond the genre of this blog. Their home page  has got a pretty neat description about their offerings in terms of both ambience and food. But still wanted to write what i felt about that.

• Located in a clam n cozy neighborhood
• Eclectic wall hangings and paintings (I ended up calling them to know where they got ‘em , Those were works of a Sri Lankan painter!!!)
• Some marvelous bamboo/cane furnishings
• Pristine table accesseries
• Some antiquities or antique like trinkets .
• Non monotonous seating arrangements
• The water table on the pool
• The candle room for those who need some time alone
• Cornucopia sharing the same space and you can get continental dishes served from cornucopia in crimson as well.   (Cornucopia is a multi cuisine boutique restaurant moved here from Cenotaph road)
• Of course the near unique menu..loved the Goose berry halwa, milk panchamirtham and tender coconut payasam)
• Have both a la carte and buffet (but call it a fixed menu )
• Not very overpriced as well IMHO.

(The Water Table, Crimson Chakra)

Give it a shot.

I recently bought a Mac Book pro 13″, I am a switcher from windows to Mac and yes it is expensive . But tell you what, I am totally in love with it, not just for the looks but also for some neat features (like a gorgeous looking yet nice girl !!). The intent of “Why you’ll love a Mac- yet another version” is to give my personal opinion on how Mac & Windows will differ in the “average computer user’s” perspective and how that could cost justify the same.

Disclaimer: This is not one  of those  “Mac Vs Windows debate”. Honestly it takes a lot of insights to write something like that .

Before we jump in recommend you to skim through the Apple’s version of “Why you’ll love a Mac”. Which talks about a virus free Mac, easy interoperability with windows, and a UNIX core based Mac OS X and things like that.  I am sure it will be intriguing for a lot of people but doesn’t mean anything to an “average computer user”.

IMHO an “Average computer user” can relate himself or herself to any of the following most used features/day-to-day activities

The Author has quoted some great personalities like Arnold Schwarzenegger and his dream of being a body builder/Actor/Politician, Steven Spielberg and his dream of being a film director.

John also says when your dreams are really yours; you own it and live it;

Most of real dreams have to meet some dream crushers both emotional and non friendly ones.

A true dream will undoubtedly sound outrageous to a lot of people and it is completely normal

Traits of a real dream and dreamer

I don’t have time for bull shit nor do you! So let’s get to it right away.

Enough said already on calories, metabolism and fitness. Just to re-iterate for the benefit of first timers: Doesn’t matter what we eat if we lead a sedentary life style even best of the diets can pile up as fat in human body. Mostly shows up as belly or love handles.

Before we start gotta tell you that dedication and sacrifice is the key to achieve fitness goals absolutely there is no way round it. As 90% fitness goals comes out from diet, 7% from life style and 3% from exercise. Surprising huh? But that’s fact

While there is lot of ways do this, I am laying out an under-explored and hopefully a delicious way to do it. Back to body and fat, there are essential fats which our body needs to function normally as well supposedly called the “Good Fat”. Before we go deep on this, let me introduce MUFA our abdomen friendly fat which has tendency to Induce (HDL high density lipoprotein a.k.a Good fat) and reduce LDL. So we are going to go the MUFA way to get flat abs.

There could be possibly a zillion articles on Mediterranean Style Diet which is magically rich in MUFA. Also it is enough discussed that adopting a MUFA powered diet could directly help reducing abdomen fat.

So here is an Indo-western version of a MUFA powered diet for those who want a washboard abdomen. While I say that I am covering only the diet part of it which is the obvious first step and the fitness part of it is key too and it should happen in parallel.

But fitness part of it is a subject for another post

Major MUFA sources which we will be using all through our diet plan are

1. Olive Oil
2. Nuts
3. Oats
4. Peanut butter
5. Red wine

I strongly recommend you to go through MUFA Health benefits before getting to the diet chart

Diet chart

*Vegans feel free to ignore the options that are not of your type !!

*Another general tip is to keep soduim level to low, try LoNA which is a low sodium salt.

 As soon as you wakeup

1. Handful of mixed dry fruits & nuts, plain not roasted not salted (Mostly almonds, walnuts, pistachios limit cashews and raisins)
2. 1 cup reduced fat milk

 Break Fast

1. Brown bread Toast with peanut butter (Carbohydrate Source)
2. Steamed Beans  or Chicken Sausage (Protein source)
3. 2 Egg whites (Protein source)
4. 250 ml Orange Juice (One serving of your 5 veggie/fruit source per day)

 Mid morning snack

1. Oat meal in reduced fat milk 
2. Fruit /Vegetable salad.

 Lunch

1. Low carb rice 11/2 cup
2. 2 Cups of fresh veggies or 250 g Steamed chicken or 2 pieces of steamed fish
3. Fruit of your choice

 Evening snack

1. Dark Coffee (Only if you get a coffee headache )
2. Sprouted veggies 1cup

 Dinner

1. Rotti 2 pieces
2. Chenna/Green peas/brocolli
3. Fruit of your choice
4. 1 cup reduced fat milk

Above is my personal recipe which I am using for few months now. Leave a question if you find it hard to shop any of the products mentioned above, I can help you with that. If you need to explore more on belly fat diet plans recommend you to try “Flat belly diet”

Try ‘em let me know if it works.

Amongst the key findings I really loved the 7 traits that the authors were able to figure about Millionaires

• They live well below their means
• They allocate their time and money efficiently, in ways conducive to building wealth.
• They believe that financial independence is more important than displaying high social status.
• Their parents did not provide economic outpatient care.
• Their adult children are economically self-sufficient.
• They are proficient in targeting market opportunities.
• They chose the right occupation

As I read through I reached a point to know the Stanley and Danko’s mathematical formula for wealth

If Your Net worth > (Your Age x Your pre tax annual income) / 10 Then

You are wealthy and Stanley and Danko calls them Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth or PAW


I wasn’t entirely convinced about the credibility of this extra terrestrial formula especially the constant 10! As I quickly ran my fingers through Google I found articles and discussions about the flaws of this formula more than number of people who actualyl might have encountered this book. Honestly, i haven’t found the exact problem with the formula to say how to fix this.

Back to my point the possible outcomes of applying the above formula to anybody could be one of following 3

1. Positive Net worth > Stanley and Danko's threshold: you are financially Wealthy
2. Positive Net worth < Stanley and Danko's threshold: you are not financially wealthy
3. Worst Case, Net worth is negative, don’t be surprised am sure there will be lot of takers

Here is what I observed which doesn’t seem right. The results have a common outcome pattern and is erratic at times, common pattern and still erratic? Yes you heard it right!

• Case 1: The outcome for this formula will turn out always wealthy if applied for those who have a high paying job at a younger age which is the case of high fliers and good performers.
• Case 2: The outcome for this formula will turn out always not wealthy if applied for those who have a job which pays an average industry standard salary for a particular age
• Case 3: The outcome can be totally erratic if applied for those who have income levels which has exorbitant raise and fall for different reasons

I have personally taken real life examples which belonged to each of these cases and asserted my perceptions. You can try yourself and share your results

So IMHO we don’t need any geeky formula to evaluate a person’s financial status (am not calling it wealth). Just a simple math would do. We should know how much a person has made in total from day one till date of evaluation and his/her net worth.

In our hypothetical evaluation let’s assume William Smith is a 30 year old (I am really sick of Bob’s and Ram’s) IT consultant is currently making a whopping 220K USD/year. He presumably started is career at 25, so has a 5 year long career. Using these I am going to lay out an earnings chart which is what we need.

Hypothetical Earning’s chart of William Smith

I am assuming he worked 12 months for each of the earning brackets for my convenience
In 2010 he has been in job 3 only for 2 months now so it’s adjusted as appropriate

 Hypothetical Net Worth of William Smith

So 275K is approximately 44% of 616K we can say he has saved less than 50% of his total earning so far.
There is no bottom line here for sure as it all depends on your spending priorities and patterns but this could be a good start to know how well you are managing money. May be we can go ahead and say people who saved 50-60% of the total earnings are good and anything more than that would mean you are already on your way to be a millionaire!!

Do you have a different method to evaluate financial status? Share your thoughts.