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One way to begin making money is to create and own synthetic equity in other companies. This technique is one that Aaron and I used early in our career and was very lucrative for us, providing a stream of profit and cash for us to fund our other investments.
I found some of our old tax filings from last decade! It turns out that around our college days, living together in the apartment complex next to the Quakerbridge Mall in Princeton, New Jersey, our combined household income was somewhere between $80,000 and $100,000 even though neither of us had full-time jobs and we were both students attending school on music scholarships. (This is the same apartment that I showed you a few months ago.) The difference between the two figures depends on whether you count unrealized capital gains as “income” since our net worth was increasing but it didn’t reflect in our taxes at the time.
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’ve written a lot about the economics of household income over at Investing for Beginners at About.com, a division of The New York Times. [mainbodyad]Most economic data, as I explained there, comes in the form of regular households that are easily understandable to the average worker. For example, to be in the top 5% of household…
Reuters just published an awesome article about songwriter Franke Previte, who lives in New Jersey, and wrote the hit songs “Time of My Life” and “Hungry Eyes” for the movie Dirty Dancing. The copyrights have turned out to be a lottery ticket for the composer, providing him with a substantial stream of profits upon which…
A fantastic passage from page 97 of The Richest Man in Town: The Twelve Commandments of Wealth. It talks about how success in life comes down to execution of the work that is sitting your desk, right now. That means getting it done right, getting it done quickly, and getting it done with pride so that your name becomes synonymous with quality.
A lot of times, people convince themselves that if “they just had a little more money” they wouldn’t be in the financial dire straits they are. Their bills would be paid. They wouldn’t have financial stress. The problem is, everyone else with any sense in their life is likely thinking, “Yeah, you’ll be right back in this situation in a few years” but no one wants to say it aloud.
When I come into the office, I begin by sitting down with a white pad of narrow-ruled paper (narrow-ruled, which is smaller than even college-ruled because that is how I like it), and set out everything I want to achieve that day. If I knock off the top 5 things, I consider it a success.
Here are some quotes I’ve come across the past few days online and elsewhere. What do you all think? … I’m not entirely decided on all of them … “Being rich is being able to buy whatever you really want, whenever you really want it.” – Robert Reich “There are two ways to be rich:…
Right now, we are watching a South Korean series that translates as “The First Shop of Coffee Prince”. My favorite reason for this show is the grandma, the founder of the original empire, the CEO of the family foods business, and the one with the money. I swear, this woman answers almost exactly as I would in a lot of situations.
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