Welcome to Wednesday, Apexians. Glad to have you hear. As always, we’ve collected some great recent articles about personal finance that we hope you will find as interesting as we do. Let’s get right to them.
Let’s lead with our video today. I know we just shared something from The Financial Diet on Monday, but let’s go back to that YouTube channel again. It’s a consistent source of high-quality video content about personal finance. In this case, here’s Chelsea Fagan with a 27-minute video about the six secrets she learned working for rich people.
“I am extremely invested in the concept of financial transparency,” Fagan says. “There’s basically nothing about the finances of my business or my life that I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing — or don’t already share on Twitter — because I realize that one of the most insidious things about wealth is how keeping it secret can make you less accountable to the community that you live in.”
Trading sportsbooks for brokerages, bored bettors wager on stocks. [The New York Times, so possible paywall] — “The last time Americans showed any serious appetite for stock-market speculation was the tech-stock frenzy of the late 1990s. Since then, investors have embraced safer options, like set-it-and-forget-it index funds based on the premise that trying to beat the market is a waste of time. That started to change in earnest last year.”
The importance of having backup plans. [Financial Panther] — “I’ve now been self-employed for a little over a year and things are going pretty well. But of course, I’m not so naive to think that nothing can go wrong. Like any risk-averse lawyer, when I made the leap to self-employment, I did so knowing that I had a lot of backup plans in case.”
Implementing and refining the “Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy”. [Oblivious Investor] — “A couple of years ago, we discussed a paper [that] looked at an assortment of retirement spending strategies and evaluated them based on several different criteria. The authors then put forth a strategy that they referred to as the ‘Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy,’ which generally does a good job of satisfying the various (often competing) criteria…But the basic, two-step plan described above (and in the original report) leaves an assortment of open questions. And when it comes time to actually implement the strategy in a real-world situation, you must come up with answers to those questions.”
That’s it for today, my friends. I’ll be back tomorrow with even more info about how to master your money — and your life. See you then.