On Friday this week, most businesses with close with accompanying pomp, and business will shut down so people can go for the annual Christmas / New Year break. Unless you are completely anti-holiday, you most probably have plans for the Christmas break. From the very Kenyan plans (holidaying in Mombasa), to the more humble (visiting folks upcountry), you […]

Let me tell you the story of a toy. In August 2013, when my daughter was about one and a half years old, I had to travel to South Africa for a week for work, followed by another 2 weeks when I wouldn’t be able to see her because my mom insisted that she stays […]

What are your work and life goals? Are  you working today, to save up x amount of money, then you will retire to either do what you love, or to rest in old age? Most of us are. We defer rest and happiness, suck it up in jobs we hate that are aging us, all […]

Barbara Ehrenreich attempts to crack this in her book, Bright-Sided (How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America), where she traces what we know as “positive thinking” and “self help” to its origins in late 1800s America, and the dominant religion of the time. The Calvinisim brought by white settlers to New England could be […]

Over the last 4 months, I have been participating in a savings challenge. When I started out, the intention was to save for a holiday in India, where I intended to run the Bengaluru Midnight Marathon. However, because of work concerns, I will not be going to India this December. But, you can bet I […]

If you live in Kenya, you are definitely familiar with the idea of car resale value, which is a huge part of the Kenyan car buying experience. A significant part of the car owning population buys second hand imports from Japan (typically 5-7 years old), with a view of driving it for may be 3-6 […]

Joel Gascoigne had been using Twitter for about 1.5 years when he realized that his Twitter feed would be more beneficial if he could schedule interesting content he came across online, instead of just sharing it randomly.  In 2010, he started developing an app that would do exactly that, and that is how Buffer was […]

I recently finished reading Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich. He gives very good practical personal finance advice,but I felt the book was written for and suited for an American audience. For example, when discussing how to pick a bank, he talks of asking the bank to waive fixed fees and other […]