The most central message you can glean from my posts on early retirement is that you should save more of your take-home pay. Why? Because small changes in your spending and savings patterns will work out to dramatic changes in your future financial freedom. Both in terms of time and money. But if there’s a […]
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The Fork in the Road
From the time I was three I wanted to be professional baseball player. I don’t mean that in a sentimental sort of way. I literally wanted to be a professional baseball player for the San Francisco Giants. And I would stand outside in the rain throwing tennis balls against the wall of my house creating […]
Tail Wags Dog
If a teaspoon of medicine does you good, are 10 tablespoons necessarily better? Can’t too much of a good thing be a bad thing? In pharmacology there’s a term called the “therapeutic index.” This is the range at which at which a medicine does more good than harm. If drug levels are too low the […]
A Universe of Options
If you’re looking to open a new investment account, in order to invest all of your additional savings from your newly frugal lifestyle, there are a multitude of options. There is no chance that I could give a complete picture of all brokerage options. I’m not going to even try. What I will do is […]
Butterfly Effect
Life is unpredictable with its own rhythm and logic. Which is why the self-help genre is inevitably so disappointing. Self-help strategies seem to assume that life is shaped by the conscious mind. In my experience, it largely isn’t. Instead, life rolls along chaotically, each seemingly unrelated event shaping the next. Each subsequent human move percolating […]
Herding Cats
One of the main challenges of managing an investment portfolio is organization. If you’re an average investor you likely won’t have just one 401(k) account. You’ll have a collection of accounts from prior jobs. Maybe you’ll also have invested in an IRA along the way. Perhaps a personal investment account has been thrown in there […]
Death and Taxes
If I were to design a tax system it would be simple and progressive. The rates would be largely lower than the current rates because there would be no deductions. Income would defined simply. Any money earned in any manner would be income and there would be no distinction made between money earned by labor, […]
E-value-tion
In William Bernstein’s excellent book The Intelligent Asset Allocator, he really gets into minutiae on a host of market issues. Almost every aspect of portfolio theory is inspected, weighed, run through models, graphed, and dissected. You had me at “inspected” Dr. Bernstein. One section which I particularly enjoyed was his discussion of value investing. In […]
Cogs
One of the peculiar things about life these days is specialization. On one hand it makes an awful lot of sense. Crafting something in an artisanal manner is not the most efficient way to produce things. A factory is. With each person or machine doing specific acts over and over again. Linked together by an […]
Top Secret
Tonight I introduce you to my top-secret portfolio. To read this is to understand my values. I am laying bare my innermost investment secrets. And without further ado: Overall Makeup Total stocks 72%. (68.5%– 75.5%) Domestic stocks 43%. (40.5%– 45.5%) International stocks 29%. (26.5% – 31.5%) Total bonds 28%. (25.5% […]
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