Barcelona, Anyone? Never Retire: Don't Pressure Yourself To Save

For the previous fifteen posts in February, see the Never Retire archive.

This is post #16 of 20 for the month, as we head back to Barcelona, Spain, from Naples, Italy.

In a minute, final thoughts from Naples, the second to last leg of our trip.

But first, today’s Never Retire checklist item—don’t pressure yourself to save—ahead of a full treatment of the subject in March, when I’ll write 20 posts in 31 days, meticulously detailing each of the 20 checklist items.

Pay yourself first. Easily the most popular piece of money advice you’ll find on and offline. The idea that, before you pay bills or do anything else with money, you should automatically save a fixed percentage of your income.

Sounds sane, logical, even amazing in theory. However, for some of us it doesn’t work out all that well in practice.

So, in post #16 for March, we’ll consider backwards saving for many of the same reasons I prefer backwards budgeting, which we will discuss in detail in post #11 come March.

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I was going to write a whole long thing about the many things that turned me off about Naples. But what’s the point? It’s an experience.

Would I suggest you come here? No.

There are too many other places worth visiting that won’t be quite as unsettling and where you won’t feel like you’re being hustled every time you step into a cab or walk into a store.

We’ve been ripped off a couple of times, particularly in cabs and once at a bar. Sometimes a city’s reputation gets earned. Simple as that. There’s nothing charming or endearing about it. It sucks.

So, if you must see Naples, come for a day—two tops—and spend the rest of your time along the coast. Or, better yet, a 90-minute train ride away in Rome or a two-hour flight away in Barcelona. Two cities with pretty great and also well-earned reputations.

That said, we had some good food on our last day here—

Alimentari coscia. In Naples historic core, this is a gourmet grocery store that serves amazing looking sandwiches as well as meat/cheese boards we can vouch for. Because we had one.

Two things—

Even when you don’t particularly care for a place, you have experiences and meet people who made you glad you came. You might not come back, but at least you had a good time, amid the annoyances and such, while you were there.

No two people experience a place quite the same way. For example, we found out about Alimentari coscia, somewhat randomly, from my mother’s hairdresser. She came to Naples, from Western New York, in January and absolutely loved it here. On that trip, she visited this store several times and got to know one of the owners, Francesco. And when we mentioned my mother’s hairdresser’s name to Francesco, he remembered her and said to say hello.

So that was cool.

Our board of local and some rare meats and cheeses, along with a half bottle of local white wine, came in at 23 euros. If you could find that same ones at, say, Whole Foods or Eataly, the cheese alone would have been around $20, if not more.

At night, we hit the 47th best bar in the world, according to the 50 Best Bars list.

L’Antiquario. Pretty close to LA prices for two cocktails each, an amaro from Calabria called Amaro Erocio and a spread of mostly meat and cheese with a handful of snacks—88 euros.

Alright. Off to the airport to catch a flight to Barcelona, where we’ll stay until we head back to cold and stormy Los Angeles (!) on Tuesday.