About One Pocket
There are gaps in what people know depending on whether they grew up in Israel or moved here. Even if you know your way around money and investing, you still need to learn how the local system works.
I know this stuff. Money and bureaucracy come easily to me, and so does dealing with them in Hebrew. Translating this site into English is an important way for me to make this knowledge more accessible. Because money isn’t just money. It’s also the financial tools, the forms and the terminology. These are all things worth knowing when you live here.
Hi, I’m Lior
I work in SEO. Outside work, I’m into all sorts of things.
I’m a nerd about food, finance, royal families, SEO and storytelling.
This blog brings together all the things I do outside work.
What ties them together is that each one is a story, with a long shelf life, that answers a question someone asked.
From growing edible mushrooms at home to a recipe for lemon pesto and, of course, getting started in the stock market. Every post here is about something I’ve done, researched and documented, so if you’re asking those questions, you don’t have to start from scratch.
If you’d like to hear more from me:
Everything’s in Hebrew
Windsor
A podcast about royal families, with Ronit Blay-Weingarten (רונית בליי־ויינגרטן).
History, politics, fashion, knick-knacks and intrigue.
The Lior Shapira Podcast
Videos about money, interviews with experts about the society around us, vlogs and travel recommendations.
And here’s where I’ve appeared:
- What do we do with Google’s new feature? An interview with me as an SEO expert in an article in TheMarker.
- Employed or self-employed? On the podcast The Best Marketer in the World (איש השיווק הכי טוב בעולם). YouTube; Spotify.
- An article about earning more from home in Pnima magazine. An article by Tehiya Peretz (תחיה פרץ) about the ways women, mostly from religious communities, but I’m in there too, increase their income from home.
- Episode 8 of Yael Shatzberg’s (יעל שצברג) Twenty-Something podcast (20 ומשהו). A 34-minute episode about each guest’s twenties. I talked about finding our place in the world, the dream of academia and how it fell apart, partnerships and money. You can listen to the episode here.
- What do you want to do when you grow up? Lishkat HaTa’asuka (The Employment Office), a column I wrote for almost three years in Makor Rishon, about careers: what’s out there, how to get into them, what the work involves and how much you can earn.
A few important points about my money articles
I’m not
I’m not a financial professional. I’m not an investment, pension, household finance or mortgage adviser, or one of the other professionals legally qualified to advise you on money.
I don’t have
A degree in economics; qualifications as an adviser or financial professional; any intention of writing about things I don’t understand; such an attachment to my opinions that I can’t take criticism.
I am
A finance nerd. I’ve been reading financial newspapers since I was 14, and I think economics is the most interesting branch of the social sciences. I’d have studied it if, at the start of my second year, the department office at the Hebrew University hadn’t crushed my dream by telling me that four units of maths (the Israeli Bagrut level) were an entry requirement.
I’ve always been a nerd. It used to be an insult; now I wear the label proudly. I’m good at asking questions, understanding the answers and making complicated information easy to understand.
I do have
A household to run; experience running an SEO business; curiosity; years of working alongside people who did do this professionally; a knack for making complicated information easy to understand; and a strong desire to talk about money and teach people everything I know. That combination of nerdiness and being able to explain things simply means you’re in good hands.
I’ve also had a column in Makor Rishon, a blog at TheMarker, and a whole course on running a business.
I hope Terry Pratchett wrote somewhere (and if he didn’t, he should have): “Just because I know how it works doesn’t mean it isn’t magic.”