Author: Jim Wang

The first story today reminded me of a story I heard when I had started working.

I was working in the defense industry and it was my first time working in a SCIF, which stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. It basically means your office is a big safe. You couldn’t bring in your cell phone, you had to enter a keypad to get in, and the area is locked down whenever someone isn’t inside.

Each day, one person is responsible for unlocking it. That same person is responsible for locking it up that night. If they’re not the last person, they pass it off to someone who is still there. In practice, the responsible person walks around the SCIF and calls out to see if anyone is still there. If they don’t hear anything, they just leave and lock up. It’s pretty simple… until it isn’t.

One particularly sad story was that someone had a heart attack on a Friday and fallen behind a bench. The “last” person walked around and called out to see if anyone was there… but heard no response. So they locked up for the weekend. They didn’t discover their co-worker until the next Monday.

The two lessons I took away from that were:

• Don’t die at work,
• Live a life where someone will look for you if you disappear for more than a day.

Retire Before Dead [Retired Before Dad] – “Early in my career, a coworker dropped dead in his cubicle one Tuesday morning. He was 60. That event changed the way I think about office work. He was good at his job, and he seemed to enjoy his role. But it certainly wasn’t his life’s passion. His death got me asking myself, what if I die before I can travel the world full-time again? Retirement suddenly became more urgent, even though I was only in my early thirties.”

The Financial Freedom Through Real Estate Conference is a conference put on by Dr. Peter Kim, of Passive Income M.D., and this year’s event is online and completely free. Last year’s event, which was much bigger, was held in Los Angeles and cost $800 so if you’ve had any interest in real estate as a path towards FI – you should register for this. It takes place from October 9 – 11 and once a talk is made available, you can watch it for the next 48 hours, then it’ll be taken down. (you can buy a lifetime pass sometime later)

How to Buy a Second Home that Pays for Itself [Good Financial Cents] – “Those who have the means to buy a second home are wise to take on mortgage debt in today’s low interest environment.”

Until tomorrow, Apexian!

This is one of my favorite jokes:

Do you know what the hardest thing about running a marathon? Working into every conversation.

You can replace marathon with practically anything someone is getting into whether it’s keto, becoming vegan, joining Peloton, etc.

FIRE, financial independence retire early, is no different. It’s easy to discover it, become infatuated with it, and fall into the trap of mindless adherence.

Don’t Set Your Happiness on FIRE [Emily Guy Birken] – “Unfortunately, focusing on money in the pursuit of FIRE can create a different kind of mindlessness. Rather than think through how you want to spend your money, you may end up exchanging mindless consumption for mindless financial accumulation. The pursuit of a higher bank balance can become your goal, rather than using your money to improve your life satisfaction.”

These medical bills were made into oil paintings and sold to pay off the $73,360 debt [Mashable] – “MSCHF, the group responsible for stunts like Finger on the App and MasterWiki, is bringing attention to the failures of the American healthcare system with Medical Bill Art. Three real medical bills were rendered into oil paintings and sold for the amount of money owed via the art market. The work is aptly called 3 Medical Bills.”

Reminds me of when John Oliver bought almost fifteen million in medical debt for $60,000 and then forgave it.

Hotels of Pyongyang – “Hotels of Pyongyang is a photography project documenting the hotels of North Korea’s capital and one of the world’s most mysterious cities. Frozen in time, the architecture is typically soviet and brutalist whereas the interiors are modernist, kitsch and sometimes bizarre spaces. Staffed by stoic, uniformed and charming staff, the hotels are a world unto themselves that North Korea presents to outsiders.” This is just a series of photos of hotels in North Korea… and it’s surreal.

I really enjoyed James Clear’s Atomic Habits, here’s a 15-minute video recap of the three life-changing ideas from the book by Thomas Frank:

Enjoy!

I’ve also liked the phrase that personal finance is more personal than it is finance. I’m certain it’s one of J.D.’s favorite phrases when it comes to money.

Much like body weight, there’s more to it than the mechanics and the math. If you want to lose weight, consume fewer calories than you expend in a day. If you want to save money, make more money than you spend.

The math is simple but the execution is much harder and much of that is because of what’s between your ears.

How Financial Advice Triggers Painful Money Shame [Brave Saver] – “I cried the first time I went shopping for maternity clothes. I started a job shortly after finding out, but I waited as long as possible to tell my manager. I loathed grocery shopping once I started showing. I wasn’t self-conscious about my changing body itself, but rather what I felt it told people about me. They could simply look at me and know the deep, shameful truth: I was pregnant and completely unprepared.”

I also want to share a bias that is easy to fall into – it’s known as the fundamental attribution error. It’s when you attribute someone’s actions or outcomes on the “type of person” they are versus the situations and circumstances that person was put in.

Fundamental Attribution Error [SimplyPsychology] – “The fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or over-attribution effect) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing situational explanations.”

This is not to say people are not responsible for their actions, that would be swinging the pendulum to the other extreme, but a warning that you should consider outside forces a bit more when assessing a situation. We have an inherent bias towards blaming the victim, so it’s important to rethink initial assumptions.

If you don’t like going to the dentist, you may want to skip this next one because it will do you no favors:

My dentist saved my tooth, but wiped my memory [BBC Future] – ““I remember getting into the chair and the dentist inserting the local anaesthetic,” he tells me. After that? A complete blank.

It is as if all new memories are being written in invisible ink that slowly disappears.
Since then, he has been unable to remember almost anything for longer than 90 minutes. So while he can still tell me about the first time he met the Duke of York for a briefing at the Ministry of Defence, he can’t even remember where he’s living now; he wakes up every morning believing he is still in Germany in 2005, waiting to visit the dentist. Without a record of new experiences, the passing of time means nothing to him. Today, he only knows that there is a problem because he and his wife have written detailed notes on his smartphone, in a file labelled “First thing – read this”.”

See you tomorrow!

Today’s posts are a little bit different in that they’re not “core” personal finance articles. The first two are about, superficially, fraud and money but not in a way regular people can (also they’re not legal).

I share them to highlight some of the seedier sides of the Internet so that you can understand how these worlds operate and, hopefully, learn how to protect yourself better from financial fraud.

The last article is just a fun little study of how a poker cheat got caught.

FinCEN Files Show Criminals Moved Billions As Banks Watched [BuzzFeed.News] – “A huge trove of secret government documents reveals for the first time how the giants of Western banking move trillions of dollars in suspicious transactions, enriching themselves and their shareholders while facilitating the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins.”

That’s just the first part, the next part where they dig into the files… that’s the juicy bits and you can read them here – We Got Our Hands On Thousands Of Secret Documents. Let’s Break Them Down.

This article by Matt Taibbi is a good companion to the story.

Confessions of an ID Theft Kingpin, Part I [Krebs on Security] – “Ngo’s businesses enabled an entire generation of cybercriminals to commit an estimated $1 billion worth of new account fraud, and to sully the credit histories of countless Americans in the process.” (here’s part two)

The Cheating Scandal That Ripped the Poker World Apart [Wired] – “Mike Postle was on another tear. The moonfaced 42-year-old was deep into a marathon poker session at Stones Gambling Hall, a boxy glass-and-steel casino wedged between Interstate 80 and a Popeye’s in suburban Sacramento. The September 21, 2019, game, which Stones was broadcasting to audiences via YouTube and Twitch, had attracted several top players to the casino’s card room, a gaudily lit space done up like an Old West saloon. One pro from Las Vegas had flown in on a chartered jet with $50,000 in cash. Yet, as usual when he appeared on Stones’ livestream, Postle was shredding the competition; he was the evening’s chips leader by a comfortable margin.”

It’s easy to make the right play when you’re cheating. 🙂

The lesson of the day? Don’t cheat! (or lie or steal)

As we move into the weekend, which for most families feels exactly like the weekdays, I wanted to share an article that really opened my eyes to something fundamental about our society.

Our society often conflates money with value – we think of people who make more money as being “better.”

If you make more money, you must be [insert your definition of better here]. Smarter? Harder working? More efficient? Cleverer? It’s not universal and not in all cases, but I think, as generalities go, it holds true even if we don’t like saying it out loud.

How did we get to this point? The answer is simple – capitalism.

How Money Became the Measure of Everything [The Atlantic] – “Money and markets have been around for thousands of years. Yet as central as currency has been to so many civilizations, people in societies as different as ancient Greece, imperial China, medieval Europe, and colonial America did not measure residents’ well-being in terms of monetary earnings or economic output.

In the mid-19th century, the United States—and to a lesser extent other industrializing nations such as England and Germany—departed from this historical pattern. It was then that American businesspeople and policymakers started to measure progress in dollar amounts, tabulating social welfare based on people’s capacity to generate income. This fundamental shift, in time, transformed the way Americans appraised not only investments and businesses but also their communities, their environment, and even themselves.”

By the way, you should leave that article with an understanding of this fundamental piece of capitalism – it’s the idea that “basic elements of society and life—including natural resources, technological discoveries, works of art, urban spaces, educational institutions, human beings, and nations—are transformed (or “capitalized”) into income-generating assets that are valued and allocated in accordance with their capacity to make money and yield future returns.” Is that a good thing or a bad thing? 🙂

Why Does The Stock Market Go Up Over Time? [Four Pillar Freedom] – “The S&P 500 has never lost money over any 18-year period and during the worst 30-year period it still delivered 4.3% annual returns even after inflation, which was good enough to triple an original investment. Simply put, stocks go up over time. But why?”

Forget botox and beauty regimes… if you want to look better? Be generous…er?

Is being generous the next beauty trend? [ScienceDaily] – “Is being generous the next beauty trend?”

J.D. is back in the saddle for next week, have a great weekend Apexian!

There have been a lot of famous speeches… but there have also been many great ones that don’t get the shine they deserve.

One of the beautiful things about the internet is that if you have something you love, you can share it with the world. James Clear, who I first met when he had a personal finance blog called the Passive Panda, is most well know for what he’s written about habits (Atomic Habits is a great book). We haven’t kept in touch often the last few years but the one thing that struck me about him was that he was always learning.

Today, I want to share with you something that he’s put together (and he put this together a while ago) that I’ve greatly enjoyed. He’s collected a series of speeches/talks that he thinks are great but that most people have never heard of. You will recognize many of the names and, if you’ve been a long time subscriber of Apex, you may recognize a few of these speeches, but you can find some gems in here.

Please enjoy.

Great Talks Most People Have Never Heard [James Clear] – “I’ve been slowly searching for answers to that question and the result is this list of my favorite interesting and insightful talks that are not widely known. You may see a few famous speeches on this list, but my guess is that most people are not aware of many of them—just as I wasn’t when I first started looking around.”

I was tempted to put just that one link into this post, I think it’s that you need a bit of ha-ha to start the day too:

Comedy Wildlife Photography awards 2020 finalists – in pictures [The Guardian]

See you tomorrow!

If there’s a way to game the system, as we learned a few months ago in the pizza arbitrage story, people will find it:

Amazon drivers are reportedly competing against each other to snag new orders by hanging smartphones in trees outside Whole Foods stores [Business Insider] – “Amazon drivers are hanging phones from trees outside Chicago Amazon delivery stations and Whole Foods stores so that they will have first dibs on accepting new orders, according to a new report from Bloomberg.”

(also… These students figured out their tests were graded by AI — and the easy way to cheat)

7 Ways to Develop Better Money Habits [My Life And Finances] – “Have you noticed that whenever you do things haphazardly, it usually doesn’t turn out well? That’s why creating better money habits is so important to building the life you want.

Habits possess the power to transform your life, so applying good habits can improve your financial outlook. Below are some of the top tips for how to develop better money habits!”

It seems like we haven’t had a heist story in a while… so today I will present to you two heist stories.

The first is a story about a (very scary) heist on the high seas:

The day the pirates came [BBC News] – “For Sudeep Choudhury, work on merchant ships promised adventure and a better life. But a voyage on an oil tanker in West Africa, in dangerous seas far from home, would turn the young graduate’s life upside down. His fate would come to depend on a band of drug-fuelled jungle pirates – and the whims of a mysterious figure called The King.”

And this one is a little bit more white collar:

The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen [Texas Monthly] – “When federal agent Jim Reed drove in to a small airport in the East Texas city of Athens mid-morning on September 15, 2014, he was expecting to find a straightforward case of arson—an easy case for the new guy. He introduced himself to the Athens Jet Center’s co-owners, two brothers in their seventies named Wayne and Gaylon Addkison, who led Reed to a small jet, a 1971 Cessna 500 Citation I, that looked like it had been barbecued on a rotisserie. “It was burned in half,” Wayne Addkison recalled. “The nose tipped on the ground and the back half was on the ground too.””

But… how did a parked plane catch fire? Read and find out! 🙂

See you tomorrow!

One of the ironies of growing up is that when you’re young, you’re supposed to fit in.

As you get older, to succeed, you need to stand out. That and so many other “unwritten” rules are not taught to our young people and so many miss out.

10 Unconventional Money Rules to Live a Richer Life [Side Hustle Nation] – “In this episode, we’re looking at 10 “unconventional” money rules. These are suggestions that hopefully spark some introspection and conversation. Because the “conventional” wisdom clearly isn’t working for a whole lot of people!” Nick is joined by Rich Jones, who runs Paychecks and Balances, to talk about unwritten money rules.

‘Rule of 6’ – 6 steps to save more money this Autumn [The Twenty Percent] – “The government has doubled down on its ‘rule of 6’ approach to social distancing. As this phrase looks set to dominate this Autumn, I decided to apply it to your finances too. This post will detail my ‘rule of 6’ – 6 easy to follow rules to help you save more money this Autumn.”

Remember the golden rule – “don’t be a jerk.”

It doesn’t pay to be a jerk at work, research finds [CNN] – “When we’re young and preparing to enter the workforce, we’re trained to set aside our innocent, wide-eyed hope for the tough skills needed in a dog-eat-dog world. Sure, being assertive and developing a thick skin may serve you well, but adopting a mindset where you’re just out for yourself, it turns out, might be good for nothing.”

Be nice today! 🙂

An 800 FICO credit score is an exceptional credit score. If you have an 800, you’re pretty much set when it comes to anything requiring credit. (the max is 850)

You might think that an 800 is hard to get but it’s actually not that difficult. It does, however, require you to avoid mistakes and our first post discusses what he’s done to achieve this (including debunking a few myths).

How to Maintain an 800 Credit Score Without Staying in Debt [Financial Pilgrimage] – “One of the myths of having a good credit score is that you must carry a balance on your debt every month. This simply is not true. In fact, if you read on you’ll learn more about how we continue to maintain an 800 credit score despite being completely debt free for two years.”

Social inequality: Why you need to become financially privileged NOW [Five Year FIRE Escape] – “There is something I have been noticing lately on my financial journey. There’s definitely social inequality, and life isn’t just easier when you have money. Life is WAY easier. Unfairly easy. Covid has made this painfully obvious to me.” Easier said than done… but it does highlight how COVID is hitting people differently. (it’s a broader post than about the pandemic)

Roth 401K Withdrawals [The FI Tax Guy] – “The Roth 401(k) is still a relatively new account. Taxpayers and practitioners alike are still learning its contours. Things get even more complicated when you roll money from a workplace Roth 401(k) to a Roth IRA.” A quick(ish) explainer if you’ve been thinking about a Roth 401(k).

With a garden at home and plenty of goodies from our local CSA, my wife and I have been eating more salads than usual. If you’re looking for more inspiration, here are some ideas:

20 Rules For Making the Best Salads of Your Life [Bon Appetit] – “It was puzzling at first: We’d go to a restaurant for the grass-fed strip steak or sourdough pizza but leave thinking about the salad. Sky-high towers of leafy greens, flat wisps of multicolored radishes, Caesars of all styles. We wondered: What were chefs doing to make salads so…exciting? Turns out we had a lot to learn.”

See you tomorrow Apexian!

I’ve never considered myself a strong organizer and this is especially true when it comes to digital information – files, images, etc.

But I recently stumbled onto this PARA method and I find it interesting, I hope you do too:

The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information [Forte Labs] – “Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system. One that supported and enhanced the work you do, telling you exactly where to put a piece of information, and exactly where to find it when you needed it.”

What is Your Biggest Financial Risk? [White Coat Investor] – “There are a lot of financial risks in your life. I frequently run into people who are worried about the wrong ones though. They seem to have little insight into what their biggest risks are. Our biggest financial risk frequently changes as we move throughout life and I think it is important to recognize and protect yourself against your biggest risks. Here are some of the financial risks that you might run at some point during your life:”

And to round out the week, here’s a fun little article for you to keep yourself entertained. 🙂

The Stowaway [Truly Adventurous on Medium] – “A global wave of high profile crimes has INTERPOL, Scotland Yard, and American detectives chasing a shadow. Can the best conman of his generation stay one step ahead of the unofficial global task force obsessed with taking him down?”

Have a great weekend!