A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
You can do and say a lot of things in hindsight, kicking and screaming and what-about-ing til the cows come home. But the returns are the returns and you can’t change that.
-Downtown Josh Brown, as he interviews Ron Baron, an early (and big) investor in Elon Musk
“Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll make in your life.” - Warren Buffett. Gaining more knowledge and skills is never a mistake.
-from this assortment of quotes from some smart people
Life is full of experiences—touching and seeing and looking and doing and acting—but you're going to lose the lessons of those experiences if you don't take time to reflect.
We can all learn to gather up the past and invest in the future. Gather up today and invest it in tomorrow. Gather up this week and invest it in the next week. Gather up this year and invest it in the next year. Many people simply hang on one more year. They are just hanging in there, seeing what's going to happen. I am asking you to choose a different path, to learn, study, and reflect. This is a major part of personal development: the quest to become better than you are now.
It's the cliche that refuses to die: Personal finance nag Suze Orman warned investors that if they "waste money on coffee, it's like peeing $1 million down the drain.
I disagree. If the difference between success and failure is the cost of a cup of coffee, you have much bigger financial problems. A daily $5 latte does not amount to much in the grand scheme of life. . . .
Here is what really gets me annoyed: Orman tells her audience that "Your Daily Coffee Habit is Costing You $1 Million," with this calculation: Let's say you spent around $100 on coffee each month. If you were to put that $100 into a Roth IRA instead, after 40 years the money would have grown to around $1 million with a 12% rate of return.
Nope. This calculation is nonsense, and worse, it is intellectually dishonest. The actual real numbers are almost 75% less. . . . So, 12% annual returns for 40 years? That's 50% better than the markets give you. I literally have $5 billion for anyone who can get my clients fat 12% returns annually for the next 40 years.
-Barry Ritholtz, How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth—And How To Avoid Them
Raskob—a hero to the business community and a villain to much of the political establishment and public—planned to use the private dinner to set the record straight; he had no plans to resign from his role as chair of the Democratic National Committee, despite his friend Smith's brutal loss to Hoover. Instead, Raskob was doubling down: He planned to promise that he would get the party's finances in order and use his own fortune—estimated to be as much as $500 million—to underwrite the party's fight against Hoover. That was what the dinner was really about; he wanted the Democrats to spend the next four years single-mindedly and relentlessly attacking Hoover with everything they had.
Raskob saw his role—and his immense wealth—as the country's most vital counterweight to Hoover. He believed his money could be used as a political weapon: a way to obstruct the president's agenda, weaken his standing, and ensure he would be a one-term leader. Raskob considered Hoover a sanctimonious bureaucrat whose meddling and moralizing stood in stark contrast to his own bold, unapologetic faith in capitalism and risk. But it was more than that, too. This was deeply personal. Raskob was not a man accustomed to losing, and his friend's defeat stung. If Raskob had his way, the Democratic Party would become a well-financed engine of opposition, and a Democrat would be in the White House by 1932.
-Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—And How It Shattered a Nation
Over time, first the Spanish, then the French, then the British stepped into the African marketplace that the Portuguese had created. Although the word "capitalism" had not yet entered the lexicon, The Atlantic Slave Trade flourished for one elemental reason: it was the most lucrative investment available for Europe's merchants, bankers, and landed aristocracy. And until late in the game—the middle years of the eighteenth century—one would be hard pressed to hear any criticism of such a flourishing enterprise. Moral blindness made eminent economic sense.
-Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding
As a banker and financial journalist, Bagehot observed that outbreaks of financial recklessness did not occur at random. Rather, they tended to appear at times when money was easy and interest rates lot. He expressed this insight in his own inimitable fashion: "John Bull can stand many things, but he cannot stand two percent." When interest rates fell to such a low level, investors reacted to the loss of income by taking greater risks. In modern language, they engaged in "yield chasing". John Bull—that personification of English common sense—made his first appearance in Bagehot's writing in an article for the Inquirer published on 31 July 1852:
‘John Bull’, says someone, ‘can stand a great deal, but he cannot stand two per cent . . .’ Here the moral obligation arises. People won’t take 2 per cent; they won’t bear a loss of income. Instead of that dreadful event, they invest their careful savings in something impossible – a canal to Kamchatka, a railway to Watchet, a plan for animating the Dead Sea, a corporation for shipping skates to the Torrid Zone. A century or two ago, the Dutch burgomasters, of all people in the world, invented the most imaginative occupation. They speculated in impossible tulips.
-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
The cornerstone of the company's culture was a philosophy Danny called Enlightened Hospitality, which upended traditional hierarchies by prioritizing the people who worked there over everything else, including the guests and investors. This didn't mean the customer suffered; in fact, the opposite. Danny's big idea was to hire great people, treat them well, and invest deeply into their personal and professional growth, and they would take great care of the customers—which is exactly what they did.
-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
Ben Carlson takes an interesting look (with lots of charts and graphs) at us older Americans and our real estate, stock portfolios, and social security checks.
However, it’s crucial to recognize that Social Security remains a vital financial asset for a large number of Americans.
I hope we don’t screw it up someday.
Ed. Note: Started getting Social Security checks at age 62.5. As checks go, they are not very large. Was only a W-2 employee for a handful of years. By my Sweetie's calculation, if I live past 80, my net will be less than if I had waited longer to start collecting. But, at age 62.5, we still had kids in college. However meager the checks were, they came in handy then—the time value of money counts.
Posts
