President Obama’s administration has announced that he wants to impose a one-time tax levy of up to 14% on the $2 trillion in foreign profits American companies have built up and not repatriated in exchange for making repatriation on future foreign profits that were subject to at least a 19% tax rate tax-free, encouraging domestic…
If you need something to brighten up your day (or make you feel despondent depending on how you look at it), this is living proof that all you have to do to be successful in life is give people what they want at a price that is higher than the cost it takes you to deliver it to them, with sufficient margins for risk, capital tie-up, and opportunity cost. You can literally fail 3rd grade science and, if you satisfy a want, make six, seven, or even eight figures a year. The system we have now forgives a lot of shortcomings if you prove useful in other areas.
Back when Dave Thomas left his discipleship of Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame to go off and start the hamburger chain that we now know as Wendy’s (which he named for his daughter, Melinda) one of my favorite things he did was find a way to reduce waste – and thus costs –…
We’ve had fun over the years answering the question, “How much money does it take to be in the top 1%?” and even looked at the breakdown of how the top 1%, as a class, generates its money. If you enjoyed those posts, hold on to your seat because there is a new report out that…
By now, all of you know what happened recently with the Swiss Franc, Euro, and, as an extension, the price change of Nestlé shares in the United States. It caused a stream of messages to come in through the contact form like I haven’t seen in a long time, all with the same theme. Here…
One of the reasons I haven’t been around much this month is I’ve been working with members on both sides of my family, adjusting portfolios now that we are in a new tax year, reviewing plans to make sure everyone is on track for retirement, and dealing with some paperwork that includes a nightmare of an annuity transfer that has gone so wrong, I had to have the annuitant involve the regulators of two different states.
The Night Black Wall Street Burned to the Ground When I became obsessed with investing as a child, convinced it offered me the greatest probability of escaping what I saw as an economic dead end due to the community in which I lived, I spent years reading everything I could about any and every event…
We’re at home wrapping presents, baking cookies, and getting ready for the family dinners that are coming up in the next couple of days. Since Aaron and I are gifting stock this year – almost all of the transactions were completed yesterday with a settlement date of the 26th – there isn’t a lot left for us to do. However, to give the kids something tangible they can open under the tree from us, we went and got industrial size boxes of their favorite candy along with an explanation of how their stock in The Hershey Company is going to work.
The average healthy adult should eat roughly 2,000 calories per day to maintain a recommended weight. In the United States, all else equal, the average male, at 5’8″, should weigh between 140 pounds and 172 pounds. The average female, at 5’4″, should weigh between 114 pounds and 151 pounds. In study after study, the typical person underestimates…
A friend of mine, a nuclear engineer, once explained that he doesn’t bother to contribute to forums or message boards when the topic of nuclear energy is brought up anymore because people are irrational about it, interested in their own confirmation bias rather than learning or having an honest discussion. Almost everyone I know working in…