Welcome to Scotch Street on the Rocks: stream-of-consciousness writing on money “told through” a scotch. The rules of Scotch Street are as follows:
- Drink a fine amount of scotch
- Record the experience so you can watch how it unfolds and get a little laugh in.
- Write a stream-of-consciousness blog post about money.
- You read said blog post. (It may or may not make any sense haha)
That is it. I just drink scotch then write whatever comes to my head revolving around money. It is pretty entertaining!
Today’s stream-of-consciousness article is “told through” Jura Origin. Jura Origin is a smokey whiskey from the Isle of Jura off the western coast of Scotland.
Below the video is the article. Here is the video taken leading up to writing the article, and as the article was written.
The Video
Scotch Street on the Rocks
Financial Blogging, Under The Influence
Ok so here we go with some stream of consciousness writing. Remember this is “told through” a scotch” and that I will go back and fix any major grammatical and spelling mistakes. As I was partaking in this Scotch Street video, you didn’t realize that I went to eat some dinner. This took place when the camera was off and I was continuing to drink the bottle of scotch I had in the video. I made a nice salad and as I was peeling a cucumber I for some reason was thinking about frugality. I have no idea why frugality popped into my head while peeling a cucumber for my salad, I know it sounds a little weird, but, whatever, I digress. As I was peeling this cucumber I was thinking about the people on the internet who preach frugality. I was thinking about the link between these frugality people and the retire early people. Sooooo, are they the same people? Isn’t the purpose of frugality to speed up the whole “being independent” process? Or the whole retire process? Or the FIRE process or whatever? Hmm, let me think about this, are they preaching the same thing? Why be frugal if you don’t want to get to early retirement? Oh, or, you can be frugal so you can have extra money in retirement at a normal retirement age. Ok, that would make them different? Or, the retire early people talk about increasing income with side gigs to retire early, the frugal people don’t necessarily do that? Ok, maybe my theory is off, maybe they are not the same group of people? Or maybe this is the scotch talking? By the way the scotch I drank tonight as a Jura and it’s really close to Islay which produces the best scotches in my opinion. Nice and peaty and smoky. You can almost taste the sea in them. Jura is right off the coast of Islay; you can actually take a ferry over to Jura from Islay so it’s like the cousin of Islay. Wait a second, I am in the middle of talking about frugality and now I’m talking about scotches, which by the way are not frugal at all. You know what, this is a great point, if you are a frugality person, you may never try scotch. OH MY GOD. This is a revelation. If you are too frugal to try the world’s best liquor, you are missing out on something my friend. Don’t let the world do that to you; you don’t have to drink cheap beer or Captain Morgan or Papov Vodka, take in a nice, beautiful, scotch, and you will actually enjoy life. Ok, I never connected frugality with never trying a scotch because they are more expensive, so I think I have to really dig in on the frugality people out there. Here are my two cents. If you save the correct amount of money and are ok with working until you are age 64 or whatever. Who cares?! It is fine to spend your money on whatever you want to. Eat what you want, drink what you want, travel where you want. If you save the correct amount of money to get you to retirement, it doesn’t matter. Just live life. Now, if you are living WAY above your means and you are not going to get to retirement by the time you want to, then maybe you have a problem. But that problem is probably easily fixable by scaling back from your spending. Ok, so basically frugality people are trying to tell you not to enjoy scotch, and the retire people are telling you that you are crazy for not wanting to retire early? Is that the gist of this article? By the way, I am inherently a very frugal person to begin with. But, I don’t feel the need to tell other people to be frugal I feel like it’s just the way you are born, and if you are born that way great. If you are not born that way, it’s not a problem. Because if you are a 30-year-old and you want to retire by age 65, you only need to save 20% of your after tax income. That’s not necessarily being frugal. That is totally reasonable. By the way, my tagline for Stock Street is “At the corner of growth and value”. I’m thinking of making my Scotch Street tagline, “at the corner of Scotch and value” or maybe, “at the corner of scotch and finance” Or “at the corner of stocks and scotch?” I don’t know, something cool like that. But I think a lot of people are confused because Scotch Street is part of Stock Street, so if you go to Scotch Street first, before Stock Street, then Stock Street doesn’t make sense. Maybe I have a branding problem? I don’t know. Wow that was a tangent, did I just black out, back to the topic. What was the topic? Retiring early? Yes, retiring early. I’m cool with it. I don’t know if I would want to retire early. I think I would be kind of bored. You can only pretend to like golf so much. Imagine if I retired at 40 and I was hanging out with the retirees at the golf club every day. That would be hilarious. I’d probably be hitting the early bird dinner with them and hitting the sack at 8 pm. Have a few martinis at the 19th hole…nah I think I wouldn’t like that. But I don’t want to hustle for another thirty years. I’m already tired, I can barely drink this scotch and write enough words. Hey, I drink scotch, some may consider that an old man’s drink! Maybe I am already acting like a retiree? Wow. Ok, I think I’m done. I don’t know if any of this makes any sense. That’s the risk with stream of consciousness, you have to keep writing so you just keep going and see what pops out. I get scared after I read these Scotch Street writings, you never know how crazy they are going to be. Wait, I said I was done. Ok, I’m officially done now. Thank you for reading this incoherent babble “told through” a Jura scotch!
If you missed the first Scotch Street post, you can find it here: Scotch Street on the Rocks: Financial Blogging Under the Influence
