Author: Jim Wang

Money is such an interesting phenomenon. If you want to look at the strictest definition, it’s an agreed upon store of value and a medium of exchange. You work, you get paid, and that money has purchasing power everywhere you’d want to spend it. So simple, yet so complicated.

What do you spend it on? After you satisfy your basic needs, you start looking at entertainment, signaling, and all the other fun things money can buy.

But at its core, money is the same. It’s what you do with it that makes all the difference.

But have you considered how the existence of money has changed us? One person has:

How Money Forever Changed Us [More to That] – “It’s interesting how money is accepted as an inevitable force in our lives, yet when we take out the concept and wrap it in unfamiliar packaging, it seems weird and dumb.” This first post is long but full of fun illustrations and the last quarter of the post is where it starts getting really fascinating (when you see “Materialism isn’t about the accumulation of goods. It’s about the fulfillment of possibilities.” then you will have reached the good stuff), please enjoy it!

Speaking of things money can buy, ever wonder how baseball cards are authenticated?

How the world’s most expensive trading cards get authenticated [Popular Science] – “When a card arrives at our office, we first make sure it’s real, then assess its condition on a scale of 1 to 10. Because copies have sold for millions at auction, the Wagner used to be a popular target for forgeries. These are easy to spot: Up close, modern printing patterns look much different than the old methods. It also helps to have in-depth knowledge on what the collectible should look like. For example, a 1948 Leaf Bob Feller, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, always has a sort of out-of-focus look. If you’re not an experienced grader, you might examine it and say, “Oh, it’s blurry. It’s not real.””

I quit my job at the start of the pandemic to launch a company. Here’s what I’ve learned in the first 90 days. [The Profile] – “Today marks exactly 90 days since I started working on The Profile full time. Here are the 10 biggest things I’ve learned in the last three months.” She saved the best insight for last, make sure you read #10.

Did you know you can buy caves?

The Cave Kingpin Buying Up America’s Underground [Outside] – “John Ackerman has spent millions procuring a majority of the known caves in Minnesota, which add up to dozens of miles of underground passageways and likely make him the largest cave owner in the U.S. He collects and charts them in the name of preservation, but his controversial methods have created many opponents.”

I have a favor to ask – can you think of someone who would enjoy this? Please forward it to one person and it would make my day!

We’ve been home for over three months now and with a few exceptions, things have been going OK. Everyone in our household has remained healthy, no one has gotten sick (knock on wood), and we’ve been managing fairly well.

Every once and a while, I blow off some steam on Twitter:

Other countries are at different points in their lockdown and it’s interesting to see how life has changed for them, as it gives us a hint at what things may be like for us after this is all over:

“There Is Hope!” Dispatches From Asia-Pacific On The New, Post-Lockdown Normality [Mr Porter] – “As elements of normality return here, it’s easy to feel a confusing sense of guilt. My friends in these (now, very distant) places can’t meet, their children can’t play, their businesses can’t trade. And while the crisis in Asia feels economic rather than existential, perhaps our day-to-day can this time be a harbinger of hope rather than doom. Four men from across the Asia-Pacific region shed some light on lessons learnt, practices found and promise seen as their communities move into a new, post-lockdown normality.”

Just when you think it was all roses, here’s an article that gives me a little pause:

The Looming Bank Collapse [The Atlantic] – “The reforms were well intentioned, but, as we’ll see, they haven’t kept the banks from falling back into old, bad habits. After the housing crisis, subprime CDOs naturally fell out of favor. Demand shifted to a similar—and similarly risky—instrument, one that even has a similar name: the CLO, or collateralized loan obligation. A CLO walks and talks like a CDO, but in place of loans made to home buyers are loans made to businesses—specifically, troubled businesses. CLOs bundle together so-called leveraged loans, the subprime mortgages of the corporate world. These are loans made to companies that have maxed out their borrowing and can no longer sell bonds directly to investors or qualify for a traditional bank loan. There are more than $1 trillion worth of leveraged loans currently outstanding. The majority are held in CLOs.”

Hmmm… read the whole thing. It gets in deep into the weeds but useful to understand.

Finally, more signs that maybe there’s going to be a second dip in the market:

The Rich Cut Their Spending. That Has Hurt All the Workers Who Count on It. [The New York Times] – “The steepest declines in spending during the coronavirus recession have come from the highest-income places.” The NYT article is behind a paywall so I shared a version on Pocket, but it does a bad job of parsing the charts so just scroll past that beginning part to reach the article. Here is the original if you have a subscription.

It’s almost Friday! Cheers to you if Friday means something different than any other day! 🙂

I opened a Robinhood account a couple of years ago but never did much trading on the platform, so my familiarity with their service was limited to a little poking around. I’m not a fan of day-trading stock (I’m bad at it) so free trades weren’t much of an incentive for me.

What I didn’t know was how easy Robinhood made it to sudden drop into options trading. Options trading can get really risky because it’s leveraged – each options contract is the right (or obligation) to buy or sell 100 shares of the underlying stock. There are situations where your potential loss is theoretically, though unlikely, infinite.

That’s what happened to Alex Kearns, a 20-year old, who took his own life after, on paper, it seemed he lost $730,000. What makes it even more tragic is that he most likely didn’t actually lose that much. The trade he was doing had two somewhat offsetting parts and only one of them was reflected in his balance – but either way, it’s a really sad story.

The lesson here is that you need to understand your investments.

Robinhood increases guardrails on options trading in the wake of a customer suicide [CNBC] – “Robinhood is making multiple changes to its platform, including making it more difficult to access to its options offering, in the wake of a customer’s death last week.”

Treasury to release names of some businesses that received PPP loans [Axios] – “The Treasury Department and Small Business Administration plan to release the names of businesses that received $150,000 or more in Paycheck Protection Program loans, the agencies announced Friday.”

File this next one away because some day you may need it:

How to fight an outrageous medical bill, explained [Vox] – “Five patients tell us how they pushed back — and won.”

Happy hump day!

Same As It Ever Was [Collaborative Fund] – “Things that never change are the most important things to pay attention to. Change gets most of the attention, because it’s exciting and surprising. But things that stay the same – how people behave, how they think, how they’re persuaded – is the real meat of history.” Make sure to read all four.

Re-Stacking Your Benjamins: Saving, Investing and Managing Debt in Uncertain Times [Stacking Benjamins Podcast] – Joe Saul-Sehy and OG from the Stacking Benjamins show did a two-hour community townhall discussing how to manage your money during the pandemic. They had on a few great guests from Fidelity Investments, TIAA, Morningstar and T. Rowe Price. I haven’t watched the whole thing yet but I always find these entertaining and educational so I plan to listen to it in parts over the next week.

How Heelys Rolled into Millions of Dollars – And Then Crashed in an Instant [Mel Magazine] – “A down-and-out middle-aged man struck gold with those ubiquitous wheeled sneakers. Suddenly, the stock tanked, the company was stripped for parts and the founder vanished. What happened?”

This Enlightening Map Shows the Literal Meaning of Every Country’s Name [Culture Trip] – “Have you ever wondered what the name of a country means? What it REALLY means? This map has the answer. It shows the historical meaning of each country’s name, as far back as their earliest literal translations go.”

See you tomorrow Apexian!

I remember when my dad turned forty. We got him a little troll with a shirt that said “40 isn’t old if you’re a tree.” As a kid, I didn’t get it but he seemed to enjoy it.

This year, I turn forty and, well, I get it now. 🙂

Pedal To The Metal: How To Build Wealth In Your 40s [Banker on Fire] – “Much as I hate to admit it, there will come a time when our glorious twenties and happy thirties will be well behind us.

If you are fortunate enough to have focused on personal finance matters early on, you may be entering the next decade with a sense of optimism and self-satisfaction.

For others, it may be an overwhelming desire to reach back through time and punch your younger self in the face.

Why-or-why didn’t we make the right decisions back then? Oh, just how helpful it would have been to have the benefit of two decades’ worth of saving and compounding…”

A short and sweet post that captures some of my personal thoughts on buying time:

The one thing you can’t buy is time [iRetiredYoung] – “That leads on to something else they say, which is that the one thing you can’t buy is time. There’s an argument this isn’t completely true, money can give access to better living conditions and healthcare, both of which contribute to enhanced life expectancy. But in general, we know what the saying means and have probably held it to be generally true.” Congratulations to 25 years!

This next and last post of the day is from 2017 and if you’ve ever heard of the term ‘hygge,’ this article (while not mentioning that one) discusses a few other terms similar to hygge:

The ‘Untranslatable’ Emotions You Never Knew You Had [BBC Future] – “From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.”

Enjoy the day Apexian, try desbundar with abandon, and I hope to see you tomorrow!

I would like to ask a favor of you.

Regardless of your politics, I would like you to watch this six-minute video with an open mind.

It’s just six minutes. But it encapsulates what many are feeling.

Learn about Tulsa.

Learn about Rosewood.

Have a good weekend.

When we had our first kid, we opened a 529 plan in the state of Maryland. The tax benefits on the front side are are minimal (you don’t get much of a deduction) but it grows tax free as long as you use the expenses on education. It’s a pretty solid deal and now that we have three kids, we increase our chances at least one of them goes to college. 🙂

If you don’t know 529 plans too well, my friend Robert at The College Investor has a great guide.

529 Plans: The Ultimate Guide to College Savings Plans [The College Investor] – “Nearly every state in the United States has some type of 529 plan to help families save for college. These plans are designed as tax-advantaged accounts – which give you tax benefits to save for college.”

Speaking of kids, a little over a week ago, I was excited to watch the SpaceX launch. I was trying to explain to our kids how amazing it was that a private company was in charge of sending human beings into space. They got excited about it because everyone loves space and I’m tempted to show them Apollo 13 sometime in the near future. We’ll see when that might be but I remember loving that movie.

If you get jazzed up about space too, you might enjoy this article about the Voyager mission:

Voyager: Inside the world’s greatest space mission [BBC Future] – “In 1977, two spacecraft started a mission that has redefined our knowledge of the Solar System – and will soon become our ambassadors on a journey into the unknown. BBC Future looks at their legacy, 40 years after launch.”

The power of the transmitter on Voyager is around 12 watts and peaks at 20 watts – equivalent to your refrigerator light bulb!

Kidnapping: A Very Efficient Business [The New York Review of Books] – “In Argentina in the early 1970s, leftist guerrillas started snatching executives of multinational companies and demanding ransoms. This culminated in the payment of $60 million to the Montoneros, a Peronist guerrilla group, for the release of the brothers Juan and Jorge Born, executives at the grain-exporting firm Bunge & Born and the sons of its president. The ransom seems noteworthy for its heft—at about $275 million in today’s money, it stands as the largest one paid in a conventional kidnapping case.”

How’s that for a side hustle?

When I heard that Minneapolis was going to “defund and dismantle the police department,” I was surprised. Completely shutting down the police department doesn’t feel like the solution – you still need policing.

But “defunding” doesn’t necessarily mean what I assumed. The police are called upon to respond to many situations where they are not the best solution. They respond because they’re often the only solution available – which is not a good thing. Defunding would mean shifting budget away from the police department so it can go to other programs so those programs can respond to situations they are better suited for.

Like in any budget, there’s excess and unnecessary spending. I saw it first hand in the defense industry – you spend the money or you don’t get as much next time. It’s better to waste it on a few expensive toys now than have your budget cut and need the money for something important later.

Defund the police? Here’s what that really means. [The Washington Post] – “To fix policing, we must first recognize how much we have come to over-rely on law enforcement. We turn to the police in situations where years of experience and common sense tell us that their involvement is unnecessary, and can make things worse. We ask police to take accident reports, respond to people who have overdosed and arrest, rather than cite, people who might have intentionally or not passed a counterfeit $20 bill. We call police to roust homeless people from corners and doorsteps, resolve verbal squabbles between family members and strangers alike, and arrest children for behavior that once would have been handled as a school disciplinary issue. […] Defunding and abolition probably mean something different from what you are thinking. For most proponents, “defunding the police” does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety, and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight — or perhaps ever. Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need. It means investing more in mental-health care and housing, and expanding the use of community mediation and violence interruption programs.”

It Only Takes One Toxic Employee To Infect The Entire Team [My Quiet FI] – “There is a disease spreading across offices everywhere, and no, I’m not talking about COVID-19. I’m talking about the power one single toxic employee can wield. And left to their own devices, they become an office plague, infecting and destroying everything they touch. Like cancer they need to be cut out before it’s too late.

Because make no mistake about it, these people will literally kill your culture.”

A police station is no different than an office.

Last Christmas, a movie featuring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx titled Just Mercy shared the story of lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s quest to exonerate Walter McMillian. We don’t watch many movies in the theaters (three young kids!) so we didn’t catch this one but it’s a story that needs to be more widely shared.

60 Minutes covered this story in 1992 and pulled it from their archives:

UPDATE: Google made Just Mercy available for free on Youtube.

Incredible stuff.

A little context before this next post – Patrick McKenzie is an American who has lived in Japan since 2004. I first learned about him on Hacker News when he was working on and writing about his side project, Bingo Card Creator. I enjoy reading his writing and this article is a fascinating insight into his perspective on work and business in Japan.

Doing Business In Japan [Kalzumeus] – “I heard a great line about this once, and unfortunately I cannot remember the source: “Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.” The best employees aren’t compensated with large option grants or eye popping bonuses — they’re simply anointed as “princes”, given their pick of projects to work on, receive plum assignments, and get their status acknowledged (in ways great and small) by the other employees.”

A treasure chest hidden in the Rocky Mountains for a decade has finally been found [CNN] – “Thousands of brave souls have ventured into the Rocky Mountains for the past decade, searching for a treasure chest filled with gold, rubies, emeralds and diamonds.

But that adventure has finally come to an end. The treasure has been found.” (we first mentioned this in September of last year)

I want to see what was really in the chest!

Lastly, before you go – what’s your guess as to what’s happening here?

Belgian man has been receiving pizzas he never ordered for years [The Brussels Times] – “A 65-year-old man in Flanders says he is “losing sleep” because he has been receiving pizzas he never ordered for nearly a decade, sometimes several times a day.”

Free food for life!

Hey Apexian – Last Friday, J.D. shared how he lost readers when he spoke up about social and racial issues.

No matter what position you take, even the most innocuous ones, someone will hate it. Many someones will hate it. Then suddenly, they will turn on you, call you horrible names they’d never have the guts to say in person, and then unsubscribe. It will not matter how much you’ve helped them, sometimes those animalistic instincts take over.

But I don’t mind losing people this way. I’d rather not have them in my life.

Then there are those who are just as passionate but are willing to have a conversation. Those conversations are important because that’s how you learn and grow. They may be uncomfortable because you are forced to reconsider your world view but it is necessary to lean into them because they are rare.

How the Personal Finance Sphere Upholds Systemic Racism [Our Next Life] – “Words mean things, and debt and slavery are simply not comparable on any level. An enslaved person could not declare bankruptcy and escape slavery. A person in debt does not transfer that debt to their children and their children’s children the way all an enslaved person’s offspring were owned as chattel from birth. And with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, even escaping a slave state for a free state didn’t guarantee a former enslaved person’s freedom. They could be forcibly returned to their “owner” by the “good guys” in the abolitionist state. There is no world in which you can equate that to debt, something that can be paid off and eliminated and which does not deny you personal liberties beyond simply having to dedicate some of your income to its service.”

You can walk away from that post thinking “I don’t mean that when I use that word,” but closes your mind to the possibility that the words you use are hurting people. It speaks to your intent and not to the result of your words, which ultimately is what matters.

Embracing Conflict- my talk at the EconoME conference [rich & Regular] – “As a first generation immigrant of Jamaican parents, I’ve had to pick and choose the aspects of the culture I wanted to carry forward and what parts I’d rather leave behind. Naturally, my selective adoption of cultural practices created an internal conflict because the more I let go of my born identity, the less I identified with people who’d nurtured it…my family.”

Here’s his talk (it’s 9 minutes and the first few mirror his post, but keep going):

Powerful.