We can not believe it’s Wednesday already. The Plutus team dug deep into our treasure box to bring you these awesome articles.
Here’s what we wanted to share with you this week.
Financial Bloodletting: Don’t Let This Happen to You. [Mantaro Money] — “Just as the parasite doesn’t want to kill their host, the active manager wants to keep their prey alive, whilst extracting the highest viable amount of capital… Do not allow yourself to be bled dry. Other, more humane, investment methods exist.” (Submitted by J. Money.)
Man’s Best Side Hustle? A Look at Making Money From Dogs With Rover. [Studenomics] — “A man’s best friend or a man’s best side hustle? If you love dogs and want to get more exercise in, you’re in luck because I’ve discovered a way to get paid for making new furry friends by using the dog walking app Rover. I’m going to show you how you can make money from .” (Submitted by Tarsha.)
Roth IRA For Kids: Why It Is An Excellent Strategy For Parents. [The Cents of Money] — “Guiding your kids on the path of saving for their future gives them a head start to financial independence. Creating a Roth IRA for kids provides more flexibility for your children before they reach adulthood than other options, as these funds can help pay for college, making a first home purchase, or retirement.” (Submitted by Tarsha.)
We live in an area with a series of three of four roundabouts that, despite having been there for years, continue to confound local drivers.
In fact, Washington D.C. is just 20 minutes south of us and is filled with roundabouts. Massive roundabouts that are, understandably, intimidating. Our roundabouts are tiny and well marked… not like some of the ones in the UK where it’s just a little metal circle on the ground.
I love roundabouts because they work. They’re more efficient. And I wish there were more of them.
I’m all for this Freakonomics podcast from 2021!
Should Traffic Lights Be Abolished? [Freakonomics] – “Could the humble roundabout really save thousands of lives? It is true that more than 35,000 Americans are killed each year in traffic crashes, and about a quarter of those deaths happen at intersections. All those crashes that kill 35,000 people also cause millions of injuries and nearly a quarter-trillion dollars in property damage, medical and legal costs, lost productivity, and more. What would all those numbers look like if some of our standard intersections with traffic lights were swapped out for roundabouts? Today on Freakonomics Radio: we consider this and many other roundabout questions, including the economics of the traffic intersection:”
OK I know that has nothing to do with money, per se, but I don’t care. I want more roundabouts and fewer traffic lights.
It’s Time to Rethink Retirement [Darious Foroux] – “Here’s what the structure of modern life looks like for most. In the early years of a child, the focus is on learning and playing. Once the playing is done, a teen starts their educational career. Then start a career. And save up for retirement. Those are the three main stages of life as we know it: Study, work, then retire. It might look like these stages are natural to human life, but that’s a wrong assumption. These stages are, like most things in modern-life, made up. This structure was created in the 19th century, when the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck implemented the first national old-age social insurance plan in 1889.”
And of course, I had to share this big news from last week – Billionaire No More: Patagonia Founder Gives Away the Company [New York Times] – “A half century after founding the outdoor apparel maker Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, the eccentric rock climber who became a reluctant billionaire with his unconventional spin on capitalism, has given the company away.”
Two weeks ago, which was the last time I curated an Apex Money post, I had the great pleasure of hanging out with a bunch of money nerds in Orlando for FinCon (including the delightfully experientially omnivorous J.D. Roth). Since I was going to be running around, I queued up a few posts that I’d been saving — including a post where he lost a little money in crypto.
When I say a little, it’s not insignificant numerically ($2,249.51 in four months) but given his investment, it was a loss of under 10%.
Compare that with the absolute horror stories you can find on Reddit and it doesn’t look that bad!
Quiet Confessions of Options Trading, Rental Real Estate, Crypto [My Money Blog] – “I still haven’t told my wife we lost 50% of our savings in Anchor. I’m putting what’s leftover from my paychecks into restoring it back to the initial amount, hoping she won’t notice. It will take me approx. 5 years with my current salary. We planned to buy a house next year.” ooooophf.
By the way, honesty is the best policy. You can come back from an investment mistake but lying about it… that’s breaking trust.
Elon Musk’s college sweetheart auctions off billionaire’s mementos [CNN] – “The lot includes 18 candid photos of the entrepreneur as a baby-faced economics student at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as several other mementos of Musk and Gwynne’s time together. The glossy photos show the billionaire looking every bit the normal college student before his meteoric rise to success: goofing off in a dorm room, hanging out with his fellow resident advisers, and cuddling with his girlfriend.” This is weird right? I’m all for her cashing in, good for her, but the folks bidding on these items?
It’s been a long week for me, my friends. A long week but a short week. I’ve been fighting some sort of bug. A bunch of people came down with COVID after Fincon in Orlando last week, and I thought for sure I was one of them. But five negative COVID tests later (and five days recuperating), I feel much better. Somehow I dodged that bullet.
Fortunately, all of the downtime gave me plent of opportunity to read about money. So, here I am to close out another week with a nice stash of links. Enjoy!
Lived experience makes work better. [Behavioral Scientist] — “Solving problems requires more than just having powerful tools, you also need people who can use them properly. When it comes to fighting poverty, people with lived experience are essential teammates if we want to maximize the impact of any anti-poverty work.”
How to cut your water use in half. [Consumer Reports] — “When it comes to wasting water in the kitchen, the dishwasher isn’t the culprit — it’s probably you. Too many people rinse their dishes clean before putting them in a dishwasher designed to do that very job—and do it better than you can.” (True story: I know a woman who rinses her dishes completely clean before putting them in the dishwasher. What’s the point of even having a dishwasher in this case?)
How to save money on streaming services. [Consumer Reports] — “There are easy ways to simplify the confusing and expensive mess that streaming services have become. The following strategies can help you create a great plan for getting most of the shows you want to watch at a price you can afford.”
41 quick tips for health, wealth, and happiness [A Teachable Moment] — “Birthdays make you think, and this one’s no different. As that old dead Greek guy said, The unexamined life is not worth living. The point of aging is learning from past mistakes, figuring out what’s important, and passing this knowledge along. No need to make things more complicated than that. Almost six decades of living provide heaps of raw material. Here are some tips learned the hard way.”
And that’s it for this week. Jim will be back on Monday to educate and entertain you. I’ll see you at the end of the month. Until then, stay healthy and grow wealthy!
Today is Thursday. I’m J.D. Roth. And you are a money nerd. That means we’re all in the right place! Today at Apex Money, the four links (and one video) all require a certain amount of nerdery. They cover topics like student loan stats, net worth, and retirement spending. Boring to average folks. Exciting to Apexians like us. 😉
A humanistic concept of net worth. [Money and Meaning] — “Financial net worth is an advantage that some leverage for good and others flaunt or squander or worse. When I think about net worth I use a different measure. My assets are the relationships I’ve nurtured, the growth I’ve earned through deep exploration, my creative capacities, the perspectives I’ve gained by traveling the world, the beauty that I surround myself with, my curiosity AND the financial resources I’ve worked for.”
How much do retirees spend on uncertain health costs? [Center for Retirement Research] — “Lifetime health care spending by retirees above and beyond predictable premiums is high and uncer- tain. However, Medicare, Medicaid, and other insur- ers cover a large portion of these expenditures. As a result, 65-year-old households pay, on average, $67,260 in out-of-pocket costs over their remaining lifetime, which is about one-fifth of total non-premium costs.”
What a $2 million retirement looks like in the United States. [The Wall Street Journal] — “We spoke in depth with four retirees who saved enough to build comfortable retirements, with net worths ranging from roughly $2 million to $4 million. They shared insights about how they spend their time and money, what has given them joy or anxiety, and how their expectations of life in retirement measured up to the reality.”
For once, today’s video is about personal finance. Here’s our buddy, Rob Berger, with a 45-minute video on YouTube. It’s a beginner’s guide to bonds.
Sound boring? Okay, bonds are a bit boring. But if you’re an investor, it’s important to understand how they work. And Berger is one of the best at taking complex, boring topics and making them digestable for folks like you and me.
Okay, that’s all for today. I’ll see you tomorrow as we head into the weekend…
Hey friends, it’s me again, Tarsha from the Plutus Foundation. I am so excited to share this week’s articles with you. Enjoy!
Here’s what we wanted to share with you this week.
The Surprising Inspiration to Declutter I Found at the Museum. [No Sidebar] — “If I could live for 1000 years, what would I keep? When I am gone, what do I want archaeologists to learn about me from my stuff? What about you?” (Submitted by J. Money.)
Do You Rent or Own Your Job? [Financial Panther] — “You can rent a job. Or you can own a job. It’s not easy to own a job. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with renting a job either. But for me, owning a job is the way I’d rather do it. If I’m going to have to work, I’d rather work at a job I made for myself, even if it means I have to take all the risks.” (Submitted by J. Money.)
Slow FI and the evolution of Friendships. [Dinks on a Bus] — “I’ve noticed how my friendships have changed and evolved. Some friendships have ended, and that has been hard, but for the most part, my friendships have changed for the better since slowing down my journey to FI.” (Submitted by Tarsha.)
Today is Tuesday, my friends. My name is J.D. and this is Apex Money, your source for interesting stories about money (and more). Here’s what I have for you today.
Does capitalism work? [Gotham Gal] — “Capitalism is still the most effective way to create opportunities, but it is time for a new era of capitalism where we take what works and focus on the weaknesses so that we can all succeed at the level we hope to. If we started doing that, perhaps some of the issues our communities are dealing with right now would ebb, and our economy would accelerate. Something has to change.” I love this. Thoughtful and nuanced. I’m a die-hard capitalist, but even I have begun to have misgivings. I have no answers, but our current system seems broken to me.
How young people learned to love Old-Money aesthetics. [Robb Report] — “This strain of discreet wealth has never really been out of fashion — it’s not like Ralph Lauren was ever hurting — but since the pandemic, it has entered the zeitgeist anew. As the adage goes, everything comes back around eventually. So if you’d written yourself off as a fuddy-duddy, we have good news: Your time is now.”
One woman’s quest to rescue the trash of New York. [Curbed] — “Typically, her haul doesn’t go straight to the Free Store; first, she drags it up to her apartment, where she sorts and repairs items. Then she puts some of the more valuable finds up for resale; books get posted online, while nice clothes, paintings, tchotchkes, wallets, and the like get sold at occasional sidewalk sales or on the neighborhood secondhand circuit.”
How to live a simple life WITHOUT the stark white walls. [Rich in What Matters] — “If you’re intentional about your life choices, if you dig deep and consider long and hard about how you want your simple life to look (and what you can realistically afford), then you’re being intentional. If the result is color, stuff, plenty of engagements in the diary, or more than three pairs of shoes, then great.”
Last of all, here’s a five-minute video that explains how to summon an army of worms — because you’ve always wanted to know how to do that, right?
Okay, wormies, I’ll be back on Thursday with more good stuff. But come back tomorrow too when our pals at the Plutus Foundation will be here with their Wednesday update from the personal-finance community.
Good morning, Apexians, and welcome to another week! J.D. here with some tasty money links for a Monday morning.
I’m going to start today’s Apex with an excellent non-financial video. Here’s Ed Yong talking about the hidden sensory world of animals. It’s a nine-minute Big Think production that explores how different creatures experience the world in different ways. It’s fascinating.
And let’s finish up with a handful of recent money stories, shall we?
Gas prices are high. So, quit buying gas! [Financial Panther] — “Transportation is typically considered one of the big three expenses for most families (with the others being housing and food). Since it makes up a big chunk of our income, doing anything to cut down our transportation costs can make a big difference when it comes to our finances. But to do that, you have to be willing to do things differently. And most of us aren’t willing to do that.”
Americans keep moving to where the water isn’t. [Vox] — “Faced with growing costs from extreme weather disasters and the certain reality of a warmer and more disrupted future, Americans have been responding by not only moving toward riskier areas, but also moving away from safer ones.”
A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world. [The Guardian] — “Every vending machine is a battleground. Profits are ruthlessly haggled over. Competition for spots is intense. Broadly speaking, the vending game is built on deals between operators (who own machines and have the skills to install them, fix them, constantly fill them with fats and sugars) and site owners (who have the rights to advantageous pieces of land).”
The fatFIRE movement is the polar opposite of Quiet Quitting. [Fortune] — “If quiet quitting is simply doing the minimum a job requires in a quest for a more equal work/life balance, FatFIRING advocates the opposite. It tells people to lean into work rather than lean out, and hustle as much as they can to achieve the same thing most workers want: freedom.”
That’s it for today. Come back tomorrow for another dollop of the good stuff.
Today’s going to be a bit of a grab bag of posts, starting with one by JD and how he lost money in crypto. It’s
I lost money in crypto so that you don’t have to! [Get Rich Slowly] – “On November 23rd of last year, I decided to conduct a little experiment. The best way for me to learn about cryptocurrency, I decided, was to have some skin in the game, to actually buy some. So I did. I put $5000 each into five different “coins” — a $25,000 investment. I bought Ehtereum (ETH), Cosmos (ATOM), Enjin (ENJ), Cardano (ADA), and Solana (SOL). Don’t ask me why I chose these particular coins. I had reasons at the time, but I can no longer remember them.” We’ve all been there buddy. 🙂
Wealth Clarifies [Rational Reflections] – “Accumulating wealth means different things to different people, but I think Morgan Housel’s assessment is about right: Most people aspire to accumulate money in order to spend it, which of course is the exact opposite of having wealth. This irony is one of those self-evident realities that few people stop to seriously consider.”
Two surprising reasons behind the obesity epidemic: Too much salt, not enough water [The Conversation] – “Throughout my many years of studying obesity and related health conditions, I’ve observed that relatively little is said about two significant pieces of this very complex puzzle: lack of hydration and excessive salt intake. Both are known to contribute to obesity.” Very interesting.
Happy Thursday! I’m (Jim) currently at FinCon right now, a conference for personal finance creators, and so this post was put together earlier in the week. J.D. and I will be here until Sunday, doing conference things, and hope these picks can satisfy your craving for posts about money (and other articles I find interesting). 🙂
Enjoy!
Pros and cons of being wealthy [Monetavor] – “You want to be rich. Perhaps very wealthy indeed. Who wouldn’t? Debating the pros and cons of being wealthy seems as one-sided as a boxing match between Warren Buffett and Muhammad Ali. However I’ve given this some thought – inspired by a strange and unfounded fear I’d be the £195 million winner in the EuroMillions – and there are quite a few bad points.” Some good points in this about the downsides of fantastic wealth.
I like this next one because it shows how spending just 20 minutes a week can have a big impact:
20 Minute Tasks to Improve Your Finances This Year [Jessi Fearon] – “Did you know that if you spent just 20 minutes a week focusing on your finances, you’d have spent a total of 17 hours on your money in just a year?! Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking. “Uh, Jess, 20 minutes a week is nothing.” or you’re thinking, “20 minutes a week?! I don’t have that kind of time.””
This next article is about raising kids but has quite a few parallels with other areas of life, even if you don’t have kids (especially the emotional regulation section):
Ancient Traditions Reveal 2 Rituals That Will Make You An Awesome Parent [Barking Up The Wrong Tree] – “When the kid world is so divorced from the adult world, children feel exempt from responsibilities. Instead of getting emotionally rewarded by being a part of the family team, they find reward only in Roblox and Minecraft. But when their primary context is family tasks, they want to be a part of them – both the responsibilities and the benefits. This doesn’t sound as odd if you talk to the older generation. They grew up knowing they were expected to help in the family store or on the farm, not to live in a totally separate child-centered world.”
