This upcoming week is going to be busy. I have to finalize the accounting approval for last year before sending off all of the records to the firm that prepares our taxes, I have to drop off the finalized terms contract for the attorneys that are helping me explore launching my own financial vehicle, I…
Years ago, I vaguely remember hearing someone comment that it was interesting how differently we measure wealth today compared to British society at the end of the 19th century. This made me realize that most people don’t even know there is a difference; that there are primarily two ways you can think about measuring your wealth and which you choose for your own household will influence how you behave, the capital structure you employ, and even how you think about risk.
I started thinking about people who lose everything, or what Charlie Munger calls returning “to Go”, as in the Monopoly board. Once you are rich, your primary motivation shouldn’t be to get richer, it should be to avoid wipeout risk, or returning to go. But as a training exercise, I decided to contemplate what I would do if I woke up tomorrow and the last ten years had been a dream. What would my first course of action be to rebuild until I got my financial affairs in order?
One of the most common questions I receive is, “how do you come up with a list of stocks for your portfolio that you then research further?”. Here is a brief overview.
The single most important line in the President’s State of the Union speech to Congress last night hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. Here it is: Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school degree. And yet, as many as a quarter of…
As the American Civil War dawned, William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who was to be called the “first modern general”, remarked to a Southern friend: You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly,…
There are a lot of things you can take from corporate America and apply to your personal life. One of my favorites is a cost/impact analysis. If you are having difficult sorting all of the work and projects you need to finish, one way to make the decision easier is to draw a box and…
A $1.00 bill in 1971 has the purchasing power of only 18¢ today. A £1 bill in Great Britain has the purchasing power of only £0.09. That is, if you put money in a coffee can in 1971 and buried it in the back yard, you’ve lost 82% of your purchasing power in the United…
In an interview called “JK Rowling: A Year in Her Life”, that covered the period during the last year when she finished the final Harry Potter book, the interviewer asked Rowling, “How would you like to be remembered?”. Her response was poignant. As someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.…
I think the major tipping point in terms of wealth creation and financial freedom probably comes somewhere around $650,000 in productive assets with little or no debt. That isn’t an arbitrary amount of money. It comes down to a function of economics. That is an important distinction – your house, car, and furniture aren’t productive…