Author: Jim Wang

Mark Cuban has done a good job of being the everyman billionaire – yeah he has a billion dollars but he is relatable and still remembers what it was like to not have a billion dollars. He does a video with Vanity Fair sharing his rules for getting rich here.

Mark Cuban shared his 9 rules to getting rich. Why I agree with six of them, disagree with two, and love one. [My Money Wizard] – My Money Wizard watches that vidoe and shares his thoughts on them. Personally, I think there was something to like about each of those rules though I think it’s better to think of them as guidelines to being principled with your money, but not necessarily how to get “rich.”

I would’ve preferred he go into how to find business ideas and start a business but I get how that might not get as many views. 🙂

This next one is tough because it’s about money but it’s not really about money.

When Rich Feels Like A Dirty Word [One Frugal Girl] – “As we were talking her dad walked into the kitchen. “Oh,” he said, “Little Ms. College Student has come for a visit. I’m surprised to see you here. Aren’t you too good for us now?” I was eighteen at the time and unsure of what to say. His words hung in the air around me. I loved this family like they were my own. My best friend’s mother had acted like a second mother when I was growing up. My best friend was like a sister to me. Suddenly I felt like an unwanted outsider.”

One of the unfortunate lessons in life is that sometimes you outgrow your life situations. You may have grown up in a circumstance but that doesn’t mean it’s where you should stay, physically or emotionally. Sometimes it’s important not to let the small-mindedness of others dictate how you feel. The world is a big place and you want to seek out those who will help you grow, not those who want to hold you back. Rich isn’t a dirty word unless you let it become one.

I once bet $1,000 on a single hand of blackjack. This was online and back in college when I did casino promotions. My actual deposit was $50 or $100 but before I made that bet, that $1,000 was 100% mine and I could’ve cashed it out. I lost the hand. I felt physically ill.

My man Bill Hwang lost $20 BILLION. Banks who lent him money lost billions. Unreal.

Bill Hwang Had $20 Billion, Then Lost It All in Two Days [Bloomberg] – “Starting in 2013, he parlayed more than $200 million left over from his shuttered hedge fund into a mind-boggling fortune by betting on stocks. Had he folded his hand in early March and cashed in, Hwang, 57, would have stood out among the world’s billionaires. There are richer men and women, of course, but their money is mostly tied up in businesses, real estate, complex investments, sports teams, and artwork. Hwang’s $20 billion net worth was almost as liquid as a government stimulus check. And then, in two short days, it was gone.”

My takeaway from that is that the system worked as intended. Hwang did nothing improper, banks lent him too much, and a couple got burned along with him.

Have a great weekend!

I think the recent rise in the popularity of minimalism is a direct response to decades of consumerism and consumption. If you go into the home of someone over the age of 70, it often has a lot of stuff. That stuff has emotional value to the homeowner but not often to the folks who would get it when that person passes.

It passes one generation, where the emotional connection to the item has little to do with the item itself but with the original owner. Then what? It’s really a burden. You’re giving people burdens.

Why I Did My Own Death Cleaning at 39 [No Side Bar] – “What will happen to your stuff when you die? […] It has to go somewhere, which means that someone still living at that time- likely someone close to you- will have to go through it all and make decisions on your behalf. Imagine your loved ones combing through piles and boxes of your stuff. Not knowing what to do with them because you didn’t make it clear what your wishes were. Imagine the time, the physical and emotional energy spent doing this. This is the burden on our loved ones that we have the opportunity to avoid. How? Death cleaning.” Morbid but accurate.

Prices [Restaurant-ing through history] – This post is just a list of years and meals with their prices. It’s a fun little trip through history and how much different meals cost at the time. As the years go on, there are more images of the meals which add to the fun. I don’t recognize any restaurant until 1964, which is $1.49 for a turkey dinner at Howard Johnson’s.

I also discovered a meal, Welsh rarebit, that is sauce over bread. It was originally called Welsh rabbit but had its name changed since it contained no rabbit. Fascinating!

The Man in the MTA’s Money Room [Curbed] – “Armored cars, pocketless uniforms, coin-sucking vacuums: Al Putre, who counts $1.5 billion a year, lets us inside.” Quick fun read about how to handle massive amounts of money.

When One City Gave People Cash, They Went Out and Got Jobs [Reasons To Be Cheerful] – “Besides feeling less pain and anxiety about their lives and their financial situations, a surprising percentage of the program’s recipients got jobs. By the end of the first year of the study (2019, before the pandemic began) full-time employment in the recipient group had risen from 28 percent to 40 percent — double the increase found among folks who didn’t receive the money.”

This first piece will make you think, especially after the pandemic year(s), because it highlights a few important ideas.

The key idea is that the folks who inherit institutions couldn’t have founded it. This has a lot of ramifications, many of which were laid bare as the institutions go through a crisis. Old media went through this with the rise of social media and blogging. The government is going through this now with the pandemic.

Another idea that I took away, which applies in a lot of areas of life, is that the skills required to win a job are often not the ones that help you do the job well. For example, politicians are good at winning elections but they may not be great at governing, especially during a crisis. It’s a good read.

Founding vs Inheriting [Balaji Srinivasan on 1729] – “That older, institutional ideology is now failing. Over the course of 2020, public health failed, public schools failed, fire departments failed, and police departments failed. National, state, and local governments failed. Media corporations failed and even the US military failed. Just about every Western institution run by a political heir failed, because it was presented with the unanticipated shock of COVID-19. The widgets these heirs’ factories were cranking out were no longer suited for the occasion. And their failure has caused a crisis of faith in American institutions specifically, and in the postwar order more broadly.”

This next post pairs well with the first in that in cases where you will be leaving something behind for others, you have a responsibility to make sure they are able to accept that burden. Thinking about investing for seven generations has benefits for you (which is what the post is mostly about) but it’s also important that you teach the next generation how to do the same. Hoisting wealth on the unsuspecting can have deleterious effects.

Investing for Seven Generations [JL Collins] – “It starts with me. I no longer think of this money as mine. No longer is the objective to invest just for my lifetime. I think of myself as its custodian. Certainly, I am free to benefit from it, but only to the extent of staying well within the 4% rule. My first role is to nurture it and see it grow.”

Egocentric bias is a cognitive bias in which you overestimate your contributions and underestimate the contribution of others. This quick video explains the concept as well as its impact on your success (it’s really good):

When I worked in the corporate world, there was always the advice that you shouldn’t job hop. Moving around a lot was seen as a bad thing.

Except it was the easiest way to get a pay raise. 3% a year is fine for cost of living adjustments but if your entire career consists of raises like that (or even less), you’re going to fall behind new graduates. And fall behind badly.

So would it surprise you that the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks average tenure and it’s only like four years? The average time someone stays at a job is around 4 years and it’s been close to that figure for decades. The idea that you should stay at a job forever is probably something made up by the people who benefit from someone staying in the same job for 40 years and taking 3% raises each year.

Food for thought.

The Perfect Career Length [Happily Disengaged] – “My friend’s wife mentioned that a co-worker was retiring after 54 years of working at her company. The current owner of this company was 9 years old when this retiring co-worker started her tenure. And apparently, this company didn’t want to have a party for this lifer till our friend’s insistence made its way to top leadership. […] Is a 54 year work career a cause to celebrate? Is that a success… or complete failure?” 54 years is a loooooong time.

How to build an investment portfolio for Long Term Returns [Banker on Wheels] – “A 10+ time period is long and while Long Term Investing Strategies for Financial Independence should be relatively simple they need to cover key asset classes (at least 2-3 different ETFs in the Core Portfolio) that can boost returns in the long run. The great news is that given your Time Horizon and if you follow sound investment principles you have, by historical standards, no chance of losing money.”

Do you have an investing edge? [Monevator] – “In my professional capacity I’ve witnessed actual edge, firsthand. And pretty much none of these edges are available to the private investor.”

Cryptocurrencies have been blazing hot the last few weeks – the latest is, of course, the parody coin based on a Shiba Inu. What a world we live in!

Charlie Munger calls bitcoin ‘disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization’ [CNBC] – ‘“Of course I hate the bitcoin success,” the 97-year-old Munger said during a Q&A session at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting Saturday. “I don’t welcome a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists and so forth, nor do I like just shuffling out of your extra billions of billions of dollars to somebody who just invented a new financial product out of thin air.”’ He has a good point about volatility making it a terrible store of value but otherwise, not sure Munger’s argument doesn’t also apply to cash.

99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice [The Technium – Kevin Kelly] – “Assume anyone asking for your account information for any reason is guilty of scamming you, unless proven innocent. The way to prove innocence is to call them back, or login to your account using numbers or a website that you provide, not them. Don’t release any identifying information while they are contacting you via phone, message or email. You must control the channel.” This is a good bit of financial advice, but the other 98 are better bits for life.

The movie, Catch Me If You Can, about Frank Abagnale (that starred Leonardo DiCaprio) is really fun. It also struck me as a bit outlandish and exaggerated but it’s a movie after all. It has to be outlandish and exaggerate for it to be fun. So it would not surprise me if it was totally made up too.

Could this famous con man be lying about his story? A new book suggests he is [WHYY] – “But though the movie claims to be based on a true story, creating the myth of Frank W. Abagnale Jr. might be the best con that Abagnale actually pulled. A new book contends that the story of the charming teen running from the FBI and pulling off all those impersonations without getting caught is mostly made up.”

When it comes to investing, it’s hard to know what will happen tomorrow or next week. Or even next year.

But there is one thing we can predict – how much you will pay for an investment. And often that tell you a lot about what will happen.

The predictive power of fees [Occam Investing] – “Investors can never really be sure of anything – we’re left to make the best of unprovable theories and confidence levels while navigating an environment in constant flux. But no matter how much changes in markets, no matter how many theories you choose to place confidence in, one thing will remain true regardless of approach. All else equal, lower fees will result in better performance.”

5 sustainability tricks to save you money [The Twenty Percent] – “January is the time for trying new things and changing aspects of your life. Many people are looking to live more sustainably, while others want to save more money. But why should you have to choose between the two? Here are 5 sustainability tricks to save you money.”

Don’t pick up! The rise and fall of a massive industry based on missed calls [Rest of World] – “Kumar’s friends and family members began ringing each other but hanging up before being charged for a call; the resulting missed-call alerts functioned as a kind of code between them. “It was decided in advance,” Kumar says. “We would say, if I’m coming to pick you up, I’ll give you a missed call, and you come out of your house.””

Your story: Why did 11 days disappear in 1752? [Augusta Chronicle] – “People living in Britain, America and other English colonies went to sleep on the night of Sept. 2, 1752, and when they woke up the next morning it was Sept. 14, 1752. Because the people thought the government was trying to cheat them out of 11 days of their lives, there were riots in villages. Eleven days (Sept. 3-13) were cut from the calendar, deleting them forever. These days simply never existed – no births, no marriages, no deaths.” (and you thought the U.S. sticking with English units was annoying!)

See you next week!

That was a line from Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement address and an exceptionally powerful idea – he gave this speech a year after his terminal cancer diagnosis.

You can watch his commencement speech here or read the transcript.

If you don’t, take this part with you: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

While a good commencement speech, it comes second to a speech that I’ve shared before (probably several times) but that has had the greatest impact on my life – The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. (transcript)

Brick walls are there for us to show how much we want something. They’re there to keep other people out.

I met Michael Quan a few years ago at FinCon, a personal finance blogging conference, and was excited to hear that he was coming out with a fun early retirement book. It’s not so much a “book” as it is a planner and journal that is colorful, fun, and most importantly, effective. There are a ton of books out there but I haven’t seen too many planners and Michael delivers. If you’re pursuing financial independence, you should check out The F.I.R.E. Planner – he’s done a great job making it accessible to anyone.

What’s at the bottom of the crypto rabbit hole? [The Escape Artist] – “People who understand this new world better than me say that where decentralised finance is now is the equivalent of where the internet was back in 1995-97 with clunky dial-up modems and most people unaware of the tidal wave about to hit markets, the economy and broader society.”

Lumber: A Demand Drive Rally… On Steriods [RCM Alternatives] – “Unlike most other commodities, lumber is used in a product with a long decision-making process. Housing has a long timeline. While the production of a 2×4 is rather quick, the cycle from tree to house is much longer. And because of that abnormally long period of time, lumber futures have the possibility of overlapping economic cycles and seasons. With that amount of lead time available how did this commodity get so under-bought, so under-produced and so under-supplied to cause a 300% increase (!!!) from it’s typical price?”

Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud [Current Affairs] – “I’ve been among those who have ignored cryptocurrency for a long time, but Vox has told me I am no longer allowed to, so I’ve read up on it. And I have to say, Schweikert is partly right: “selling it as a revolution” is a hugely important part of why cryptocurrency is succeeding. But as is generally the case when someone is trying to sell you something, the whole thing should seem extremely fishy. In fact, much of the cryptocurrency pitch is worse than fishy. It’s downright fraudulent, promising people benefits that they will not get and trying to trick them into believing in and spreading something that will not do them any good. When you examine the actual arguments made for using cryptocurrencies as currency, rather than just being wowed by the complex underlying system and words like “autonomy,” “global,” and “seamless,” the case for their use by most people collapses utterly. Many believe in it because they have swallowed libertarian dogmas that do not reflect how the world actually works.”

This first article is going to open your eyes and perhaps challenge some of your assumptions on what makes a “good family.”

The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake [The Atlantic] – “If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.” There are some eye-opening statistics in this article, especially near the end.

The biology of dads [Aeon] – “The bodies and brains of fathers, not just mothers, are transformed through the love and labour of raising a child”

Overnight Millionaires [A Wealth of Common Sense] – “You can’t possibly hope to offer someone financial advice without first understanding how they view things like risk, spending, saving and the emotions that come about from difficult money decisions.”

Some scams are just so obvious that you wonder how people think they could’ve gotten away with it!

South Africa’s lottery probed as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 drawn and 20 win [BBC] – “An unusual sequence of numbers drawn in South Africa’s national lottery has sparked accusations of fraud after 20 people won a share of the jackpot. Tuesday’s PowerBall lottery saw the numbers five, six, seven, eight and nine drawn, while the PowerBall itself was, you have guessed it, 10.” What are the chances??? (the exact same as any other combination, lol)

I think grit is important. I want grit to be important.

But how important is it?

The Weak Case for Grit [Nautilus] – “It might surprise you to find out how little evidence there is to support the idea that boosting students’ “grit”—their propensity to tenaciously attack difficult problems they encounter rather than give up—is a reliably effective way to improve their school performance or to close long-standing education gaps. After all, you’ve probably heard otherwise. Grit is everywhere. By the time you read this, it will have been a golden child of the world of education for well over a decade. It’s a sexy, appealing idea: grit predicts success, grit can be measured, and grit can be improved.”

The article made me think that trying to boil down a human being’s success into a 10-question test may be a bit too simple. 🙂

COGS: How I Bankrupted MoviePass [Napkin Math] – “MoviePass is my favorite business of all time. For a brief, glorious period between 2017 & 2018, the company sold an unlimited movie watching membership for <$10. All you had to do was pay the fee and you’d go see all the flicks your heart could possibly desire. My favorite theater in Mountain View, California sold a ticket for a leather recliner for 15 bucks. Essentially, MoviePass was selling dollars for cents. Unsurprisingly, people enjoy being given free things! Their subscribers jumped from 20,000 to 3,000,000 in the span of a year. All of my friends had it. We would go to Century Cinema 16 at least once a week just to chill. Each of us were easily costing MoviePass north of 60 dollars a month, all for the low price of 10 bucks." The Rise and Fall of a Double Agent [The Walrus] – “It’s not mentioned in the account of his arrest, but the first thing officers likely did after they cuffed Ramos was reach into his pocket and grab his BlackBerry. That device, and the network it connected to, was at the heart of a sprawling FBI indictment that accused Ramos of racketeering activity involving gambling, money laundering, and drug trafficking. But that doesn’t quite cover the scale of his operation.”