Author: Jim Wang

Are you superstitious?

I’m not superstitious but I also don’t tempt fate by NOT being superstitious. I also turned thirteen on Friday the 13th… but nothing bad happened (thankfully).

9 Bizarre Money Superstitions People Actually Believe [Wise Bread] – “Do not place your purse on the floor. This superstition is considered to be bad feng shui, because your purse is seen as a symbol for your wealth. Putting it on the floor is therefore a sign of great disrespect and disregard for your money.”

It’s only bizarre if it doesn’t work, right? 🙂

The Difference Between Lifestyle Creep and Improving Your Life [We Want Guac] – “Are You Buying This for Your Own Happiness, or Because it’s Expected of You? Check in with yourself to make sure you’re making this decision conscientiously. You don’t want to just go through the motions of purchasing what society tells you is good to buy. If I did what others expected of me I’d have stayed around my hometown Fearsville. I would have continued to practice a religion I don’t believe in and socializing with people who didn’t have my best interests at heart. No part of that scenario would make me truly happy. For your own self esteem and overall life satisfaction, make sure this isn’t just something you feel you need to check off of your Life To-Do list.”

Super-Concierge Doctors, High-Design Home Classrooms, and Catered Backyard Dinners: Lifestyles of the Rich and Quarantined [Washingtonian] – “Covid-19 has wrought lasting, horrific damage on the country—pushing millions of people out of work and killing more than 200,000, a disproportionate number of them people of color. But if the disease has upended our society, there are some slivers of Washington where people can afford an extra measure of comfort (on the hush-hush, of course). The parties are still on (now the tasting menu comes to you), the kids are still in classrooms (they just might be newly installed, high-design “homerooms”), and getaways still happen (they just might involve a new yacht rather than airplane tickets).”

On Needing to Find Something to Worry About [The School of Life] – “It sounds paradoxical and absurd to think that some of us might need to find something to worry about in order to recover our equilibrium. Worry is, after all, something we should rightly hate to have to suffer and should engage with only when absolutely necessary.”

That’s it for me! Stay safe and have a great weekend Apexian!

Cash management accounts are really popular now – it’s when a company offers bank-like services on top of their existing offering.

Companies like doing this because it gives your cash balance some interest and it can make that relationship slightly closer.

But there are risks, especially if the company runs into some trouble:

Beam Financial vanishing act a cautionary tale for partners of fintechs [American Banker] – “In a report CNBC published Thursday, several Beam customers told of realizing the app was down temporarily and unsuccessfully trying to withdraw their money. The report jibes with the Better Business Bureau’s entry on Beam, which says the bureau has received “a pattern of complaints” from customers about delays in receiving funds when closing accounts and issues when contacting customer services. The Beam iOS App Store page contains dozens of complaints from users who couldn’t withdraw their funds.”

It’s hard to know what will happen with Beam but the money should still be FDIC insured. What’s tricky is the partner bank said that they don’t know the account information – which I was surprised to learn. If Beam has all the information and they “lose” it somehow, how do depositors prove how much they had?

I suspect that it will all eventually unravel itself but that may take a while.

Make Money Fleecing Casinos on Your Next Trip to Nevada [Trip of a Lifestyle] – “We normally don’t gamble much since it’s generally a losing proposition. On this drive though, we came up with an interesting strategy to beat the house and make a profit in every casino we stopped at — without risking any of our own money.”

Me and my wife used to do this too on our trips and you don’t come out rich (a $350 haul is pretty good!) but it was still fun!

Common Causes of Very Bad Decisions [Collaborative Fund] – “Italian psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini was once asked why people keep making the same mistakes. He said: ‘Inattention, distraction, lack of interest, poor preparation, genuine stupidity, timidity, braggadocio, emotional imbalance, ideological, racial, social or chauvinistic prejudices, and aggressive or prevaricatory instincts.’ Let me add some more:”

Have a good day!

I don’t organize my inbox with a few exceptions (I label tax-related stuff) – and now one of my favorite authors has validated my approach!

Why you shouldn’t organize your email [The Washington Post] – “When I left my desk I think [my inbox] had four emails. But what I don’t have is lots of folders. You can leave your email in your inbox or delete loads of stuff, put stuff you need to act on in a folder named action, and everything else you just archive. I think either works. It’s partly a matter of personality and partly a matter of habit. But what doesn’t work is this weird situation of, in trying to get your inbox to zero, you take your 17,000 emails and you start categorizing them and putting them into folders, which takes forever and makes precisely no difference in the likelihood you will find anything.” I’ve long been a fan of Tim Harford and this conversation covers a lot of different topics, more than just email.

The Opposite of the Latte Factor [Four Pillar Freedom] – “The problem with the latte factor, though, is that it emphasizes cutting out a tiny expense that is enjoyable for most people. So, despite investing more money each year using this method, your overall quality of life might take a dip.

Instead, what if you considered the opposite of the latte factor? That is, instead of cutting $1,825 from your existing level of spending each year, try earning an additional $1,825 each year.”

In times of need, you forget how badass you are.

To remember, try the Cookie Jar Method by David Goggins (it’s got some language packed into the two minute video):

If you don’t know who David Goggins is, this is his website and he certainly is a badass.

Now go be a badass and fill up that cookie jar!

Today is a bit of a grab bag of articles but the lead one is an interesting look into one of the biggest figures in personal finance – Dave Ramsey.

Some people love him. Some people hate him.

I think article does a great job showing you why people feel so strongly about him.

The man who wants to help you out of debt – at any cost [The Guardian] – “Millions turn to financial guru and radio host Dave Ramsey for his ‘tough love’. Many say he saved their lives. Critics say he ignores the structural reasons so many are in debt and poverty.”

5 Things Your Millionaire Neighbor Isn’t Telling You [The College Investor] – “It’s currently estimated that there are about 3,000,000 millionaires in the United States today. And given that there are about 300,000,000 Americans according to the latest Census data, that means about 1 in 100 are millionaires. Even more startling is that means that you probably know someone who is a millionaire, and you probably live within a stone’s throw of other millionaires that you don’t know.”

What Day of the Dead tells us about the Aztec philosophy of happiness [The Conversation] – “For the Aztecs, then, a happy life is achieved through balance. Individually, this means balancing one’s “face” and “heart,” but socially this involves friends, family and ancestors. Day of the Dead rituals help with this social balance.” The found the part about the ecosystem of minds absolutely fascinating.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Jerry Seinfeld [Harvard Business Review] – “If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life.”

See you tomorrow!

Every few years, you’re reminded about things that have shaped the arc of your life.

Just last week, something popped up on the homepage of Hacker News that was like meeting an old friend again. It was a link to Youtube to Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture and it’s amazingly powerful to watch. It marked one of the first times I really thought about how I did things, rather than the thing itself.

The lecture was given in September 2007… it was no small coincidence that I’d quit my job and be working for myself by January of 2008.

I had the pleasure of going to Carnegie Mellon and I even tried to take Randy Pausch’s course, Building Virtual Worlds, but never made it off the waitlist (it was the first few years it was available and everyone wanted to be in it… and there were far more deserving students than me). Sometimes I wish I had tried harder to get in the class but that’s the benefit of hindsight.

If you’ve never heard this lecture before, I’m excited for you. 🙂

Have a great day!

If you’ve been a subscriber to Apex for a while, you probably picked up on how I love a good heist. I don’t like the theft but I enjoy the meticulous planning and execution. Something about a bunch of things lining up tickles the sliver of OCD I have.

I’m less a fan of outright fraud. But I do enjoy reading about elaborate ruses because if those people used their skills “for good,” they probably could make even more than through fraud.

Case in point – have you heard of Rudy Kurniawan? He was the subject of a 2016 documentary “Sour Grapes,” which chronicled the elaborate lengths he went through to forge wine.

A True-Crime Documentary About the Con That Shook the World of Wine [The New Yorker] – “Rudy Kurniawan was a rich twenty-something with a naïve fondness for wine when he first started rubbing elbows with the high rollers at wine auctions, in the early two-thousands—“Just a geeky kid drinking Merlot,” as one veteran collector recalls. But he quickly developed a taste for Burgundy, a far more complex realm of connoisseurship, and was soon spending a million dollars every month on wine, much of it at boozy dinners with luminaries like the wine critic Robert Parker, who found Kurniawan to be a “very sweet and generous man.” Like other wealthy collectors, Kurniawan also sold treasures from his cellar. In 2006, the auction house Acker Merrall & Condit broke records selling off thirty-five million dollars’ worth of his wines.”

Stunning! You can watch the documentary on Netflix.

How fraudsters dupe the art world [The Verge] – “The Civil War-era desk, designed in 1876, looked too good to be true. Ornate, fashioned from walnut, maple, and oak, it was created to honor Union infantryman John Bingham. […] It was also a fake.”

How live-streamed $375k deal for Pokémon cards ended in disaster [The Guardian] – “It had been billed as a record-breaking deal that would make serious investors covet 20-year-old trading cards featuring pictures of cartoon monsters. Instead, a $375,000 (£287,000) cash transaction ended in disaster on Tuesday, when the buyer opened a sealed box that was supposed to be full of rare first-edition Pokémon cards live on YouTube – and found that the contents had been faked.”

“Disaster” is a bit of an overstatement because the buyers never lost their money – they discovered things were amiss on the live stream and kept their money. It’s probably worse for the seller (if you believe he/she wasn’t the perpetrator of the fraud). Still wild though.

Have a great weekend!

I just finished reading Scott Galloway’s The Algebra of Happiness and one of his rules (for health) is that you should sweat more than you watch other people sweat. It’s a more eloquent way of saying “work out more than you watch sports.”

It’s not a bad rule… and a twist on Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken in the sense that you should not do what is easiest because it’s not what is always best for you, especially in the long run.

It Pays to Choose the Harder Options [Your Money Blueprint] – “These collective harder decisions are what will allow me to live a much more fulfilling life of health, wealth and happiness. The easy path will get me nowhere but unhealthy, unhappy and poor.”

It’s something we all intuitively understand but very hard to put into practice every day. Consider this a little reminder for you and, to be perfectly honest, for me.

‘Ruined my life’: After going all in on Amazon, a merchant says he lost everything [The Sydney Morning Herald] – “Barak Govani made a big bet on Amazon.com earlier this year that he now regrets. He shut his New York Speed clothing store on Los Angeles’ storied Melrose Avenue, packed up $US1.5 million ($2.1 million) in inventory and shipped it to Amazon warehouses around the country, putting his fate in the hands of a company that has routinely presented itself to the world as a friend of small business. Today, the 41-year-old retail veteran is broke and couch-surfs between his mother’s home and his sister’s place. Govani hopes to start anew by getting Amazon to pay him for inventory the company destroyed after suggesting his products could be fake – an accusation Govani strenuously denies.”

I really like this analogy.

Predicting Retirement is Tough, but it Gets Easier [Lazy Man and Money] – “I like to think of long-term financial planning (for retirement or even college expenses) as being like a hole of golf. You have to take a big shot with your driver to get as close as you can. Then you focus your attention more and more until you are making a manageable putt.”

Til we meet again Apexian! 🙂 [tomorrow]

The 4% rule has long been held up as a retirement gold standard. If you withdraw just 4% of your retirement each year, it’ll last you until you leave this world.

Sometimes it’s seen as too conservative, but that is in part by design. Bill Bengen came up with the 4% rule because he looked at the worst possible case from 1926 until “now” to come up with a safe maximum withdrawal rate of 4.5% (it involved someone who retired on 10/1/1968 and “suffered through years of poor stock market returns and high inflation.”). Then he chopped off the .5 to reach 4% – so it’s clearly on the safer side of safe.

First, an article that dives into the 4% rule, followed by an update.

Is the 4% Safe Withdrawal Rate Obsolete? [Can I Retire Yet?] – “But the era of the simple 4% Rule may be drawing to a close. We are now hearing from some respected voices that it, too, is rigid and simplistic — relying too much on historical data, and not enough on current financial conditions. Most alarmingly, we are being told that it might be too generous for these extreme economic times, that the actual safe withdrawal rate for today’s retirees could be less than half of the traditional 4% rate. If true, that would mean you must save twice as much!”

Woah. So is it safe or not safe enough?

Bengen weighs in:

Bill Bengen Revisits The 4% Rule Using Shiller’s CAPE Ratio, Michael Kitces’s Research [Financial Advisor] – “How do you determine the “safe” portfolio withdrawal rate (what I call “SAFEMAX”) for clients at the beginning of retirement? My research over many years indicates that an initial withdrawal rate of 4.5% sustained all portfolios from 1926 up until now (when we assume that you had a tax-advantaged account, annual CPI adjustments and a minimum of 30 years of portfolio longevity).”

Like all rules of thumb, your thumb isn’t the same safe as another’s thumb. Plus you have the hand. The air around you. And whether that hand is in an inflationary or deflationary environment (the analogy is starting to fall apart, I know :))… but this adds a little color to the otherwise static number of 4%.

Now for something fun – bootlegging in a place where you aren’t supposed to have alcohol!

Bootlegging in Karachi: A Sinner’s Story [Roads & Kingdoms] – “Our anonymous correspondent on the intimate ties between Karachiites and the dubious men who supply them with illegal alcohol. […] My bootlegger and I have a routine, fine-tuned through trial and error. I hand him the bag. He takes bottles from the footrest and stuffs them into it. I give him the cash and ask him if the city is calm tonight. He makes a retort about my tendency to ask too many questions. The transaction done, Bilal speeds off. I return, victorious, to my friends in the restaurant.”

Have a great day Apexian!

Every year, I read Warren Buffet’s letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. It’s entertaining to read and offers a glimpse into his approach to investing and, in many ways, life. (and I ogle at the dividend yield of his stock holdings)

Today I want to share another letter, this one by someone who is also very successful but perhaps not as well known – Howard Marks.

I’m suggesting it because it offers a good framework for understanding the what and why behind investing in a low interest rate environment. He offers his opinions and predictions, or more accurately a series of probable outcomes, and it’s a good framework to understand what the future might hold.

Coming Into Focus [Howard Marks, Oak Tree Capital] – “In this way, low rates make risk aversion a challenging thing to practice and risk taking much more palatable. The alternative is to accept today’s lower promised returns. But most people opt for the former, and that means risky asset classes become crowded with eager capital, something that’s not beneficial for risk-adjusted returns. Bad things tend to happen when FOMO – the fear of missing out – takes over from risk aversion, or the fear of losing money.”

How My Investing Has Changed After Financial Independence [Physician on Fire] – “I recently read Dr. Bill Bernstein’s The Investor’s Manifesto. Dr. Bernstein, a retired neurologist, financial historian, prolific author, and manager of ultra high net worth investors, is famous for saying ‘If you’ve won the game, stop playing.’ What he means is, if you have all the money you need to live the life you want, why not dial down the risk and shift your investments to safer, less volatile assets, i.e. more bonds and fixed income instruments, and a lower percentage of stocks.”

How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time [Valley Girl Newsletter] – “A friend of mine told me this story about wild ducks — Wild ducks migrate in the winter not because of the cold but because of the food. If you feed them, they won’t migrate. Keep feeding them for a few years in a row, still won’t migrate. Then stop all of a sudden, they won’t migrate, and they’ll die. The moral is that you can tame wild ducks, but you can’t wildify tamed ducks (that’s why there isn’t even such a word as wildify). So you have to be careful not to lose that hustle.”

A Brief History of Word Games,/a> [The Paris Review] – “When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren’t invented until 1913. The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in our lives that I figured it must have been around for centuries—I envisioned the empress Livia in the famous garden room in her villa, serenely filling in her cruciverborum each morning­­. But in reality, the crossword is a recent invention, born out of desperation.”

See you tomorrow Apexian!

Today’s post has nothing to do with money but it’s so important that I wanted you to see it.

It is not easy to read and recounts stories of torture, so I would not be upset if you decided it wasn’t for you. But if you can, read it. When you hear about what China is doing to Uighurs in Xinjiang, such as this CBS News Hour piece, this is what they’re talking about.

I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps. This is my story. [Varsity] – “In the first installment of our new series shedding light on current humanitarian crises, Victor Jack sits with Ӧmir Bekali, a Uighur Muslim who recounts his imprisonment, torture and indoctrination at the hands of the Chinese state.”

We’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.