Apex Money Posts

Happy Tuesday!

Our first post today is one you probably didn’t expect to see in Psychology Today – it’s about how to discuss money in a romantic relationship.

Among other things, we learn that communication is like voting, it’s better if you do it early and often.

How to Discuss Money in a Romantic Relationship [Psychology Today] – “Fighting and bickering about money is the number-one source of tension and stress in romantic relationships. Winning the lottery with a scratch ticket or hitting the jackpot in Las Vegas might alleviate money problems in your relationship, but then again, I wouldn’t bet on it (no pun intended).”

Peter Lynch: The Wisdom of Walking Away [Kingswell] – “[Peter Lynch] earned a mind-boggling 29.2% annual return between 1977 and 1990, ballooning Magellan’s value to $14 billion by the time of his retirement. And Lynch did it by combining dogged (some might call it workaholic) research with a common sense appreciation for opportunities right under his nose. […] Unlike so many others, he knew when it was time to walk away — and then did so in 1990, at the height of his fame, with no muss, fuss, or lingering looks back.”

5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Retiring [Physician on FIRE] – “I recently retired after a 40-year career as a financial executive and accounting professor. My wife retired from being a busy pathologist at a regional hospital in Pennsylvania. […] It has not been too difficult, but we could have had a much softer landing with a little guidance. Here are five things I wish I had known in the years leading up to my retirement.” A good mix of financial and psychological advice.

It’s Friday, people, although it sure doesn’t seem like it over here. As I mentioned, our corner of the Pacific Northwest is one of those parts of the U.S. that’s been locked down by winter weather recently. Although we’ve had two days of rain and things are thawing, there’s plenty that’s still locked down. It’s like we got a second winter vacation this year…

Yesterday was my girlfriend’s first day back at work since last Thursday, for instance. I have several items on order from various vendors, but they’ve been stuck at local UPS and FedEx depots since Saturday. And the last time the mail carrier came by was last Friday. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.

But while I’m cooped up here in the house, I’ve had time to read some interest articles about money. Enjoy!

Americans are actually pretty happy with their finances. [Axios] — “More than half of Americans say that if they lost their job tomorrow they’d be OK; that they could find an equivalent or better job quickly; and that ‘my employers need me more than I need them.'”

You don’t need everything you want. [Vox] — “The American economy remains one of abundance. Said abundance isn’t equally distributed, of course, and lots of people really are struggling. But as angry as consumers say they are about the economy, they’re not, on aggregate, changing their spending habits. For many people in the country, life is pretty good. And yet, they often don’t feel that way. No matter how much we’ve attained, we always want more.”

What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation. [The Guardian] — “As the close of the school year neared last June, talk turned to final assignments (the English class was finishing Moby-Dick) and end-of-year fun (there was a trip planned to a local lake). It was, in most ways, a typical teenage afternoon – except that no one was on their phones. Buxton was wrapping up the first year of a simple yet novel experiment: banning cellphones on campus. Or, rather, smartphones.”

How to make sure pocket money teaches your kids financial skills. [The Conversation] — “A useful starting point is working out what the pocket money will be used for. Is it simply to give your child a bit of autonomy over spending (for example, buying an ice block from the canteen)? Is it to try to save for something special? Or is it to be used for all entertainment, clothes and on-trend desires like fancy water bottles?”

That’s it for now. I’ll see you in ten days. Jim will be with you on Monday. Take care!

Hey hey hey. Today is Thursday, money nerds. My name is J.D. and this is Apex Money. As always, I’ve rounded up some interesting stories to share with you. Take a look.

Americans are better off than you think. [A Wealth of Common Sense] — “I’m not trying to say things are perfect in today’s economy. There are problems and there will always be problems. But things aren’t as bad as many people make them out to be. We’ve seen real progress in this country over the decades, even though that progress hasn’t always been equal or fair. So many people today have nostalgia for simpler times that never actually existed. The good old days are right now.”

How to stop impulse shopping. [No Sidebar] — “Impulse shopping involves buying stuff on a whim. It can be as innocent as picking up a few extra goodies on an errand run or as serious as making a major purchase without thinking it through. Impulse shopping to any extent can lead to serious financial stress. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to be more intentional with the things that you buy.”

Six signs a home-seller is hiding something. [Lifehacker] — “Most of these problems are just bad luck and part of the home-owning experience, but sometimes the sellers knew there were problems in the house and decided not to disclose them. This is unethical and downright evil, but if you’re not careful it could happen to you.” [When we bought our last house, the sellers did some of this shit. Unethical and shady af. Makes my blood boil to think about it.]

That’s all I have for you today. It’s a slow week around here, mostly because I’m still wrestling with the fallout from our recent winter storm here in Oregon. Busy in real life always means less busy on the web.

What’s up, Apexians? J.D. here with another abbreviated week of money stories. I won’t bore you with the details, but inclement weather here at home has prevented me from reading (or posting) stuff on the internet until now.

But this afternoon, I’m warm and dry and have an internet connection, so let’s take a look at the stuff I’ve been reading.

How to avoid becoming miserably rich. [A Teachable Moment] — “Accolades and pleasing strangers were influential to me a few years ago. Like drinking seawater, this desire can never be satisfied. Aging makes you think about things differently. The transitory nature of life clarifies what’s important. Enjoying the moment and cultivating established relationships with colleagues, friends, and family maneuver to the top of the pecking order.” [I related strongly to this piece.]

“Why I plan to collect Social Security as early as possible.” [Go Curry Cracker] — “I plan to collect Social Security as early as possible because, even though I plan to live a very long time, I can’t bequeath a Social Security income stream and the long-term ROI of delay is not an obvious win over just dumping early SS income into an index fund.”

How often should you check your finances? [Wallet Hacks] — “How often should you be checking your bank account? Emma Chamberlain says she never looks at it. At first glance, that sounds crazy. How would you not know where your money is? Or how much you have? That’s when I realized that I don’t check my bank account all that often either.”

Okay, that’s all for today. Time for me to go shovel the sidewalk!

What do you think about predictions?

I think they’re fun.

But I don’t think anyone ever puts too much stock into predictions.

We enjoy them because of the escapism, a look at what could be in the coming months and years, but no one truly believes them. In sports, we love reading them because it lets us enjoy a sport even though it’s not being played. In finance, we pretend we know where the markets will go.

Practically every prediction of the markets in 2023 thought they’d crash. We were on the verge of a recession. It did the exact opposite.

2023: A Year in Returns [Novel Investor] – “2022 ended with fears of a recession, rising interest rates, and higher and rising inflation costs. It was the first year in a long time where both stocks and bonds were down. “Experts” predicted more of the same. 2023 proved them wrong. A diversified portfolio, made up of broader asset classes, returned 12.8% for the year. US, International, and Emerging Market indexes, broadly, were up double digits. In fact, the S&P 500 even set a new all-time high!”

Multigenerational Living Often Makes Sense. That Doesn’t Make It Easy [The Walrus] – “OW THAT I live with my mom, my preferred mode of communication with her is by text. We’re in each other’s faces enough these days. Her first messages come in the morning, before sunrise, when she hears my heavy tread from her suite downstairs in our Vancouver Special, a mainstay structure in the city’s residential areas. Once deemed boxy and cookie cutter, the architectural equivalent of a Honda Element, Vancouver Specials are now touted for their ability to accommodate two households, one on each floor. I’m in the kitchen, making my eight-year-old’s school lunch, when my phone buzzes and my mother puts in her breakfast request.”

It’s been a while since I’ve shared a “heist” of some kind. Today, I fix that:

The Billion-dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury [The Atlantic] – “Yet there, at his life’s lowest, the remarkable happened. A contraption he’d rigged up in his driveway—a car trailer decked with solar panels and a heavy battery—got the attention of people with real money. Carpoff could scarcely have imagined it. He’d never gone to college and had no experience in green technology. His invention, he thought, was “crazy, harebrained.” But investors saw the makings of a clean-energy revolution.”

Have a great weekend!

One of the fascinating topics many people talk or write about is the transition into retirement.

You can read a million articles about the finances of retirement. How much you have to save, how to draw it down, the safe withdrawal rate, different retirement accounts, etc.

When many people retire, they leave a big part of their lives and identity – their job. They may have kids that have grown up, moved out of the house, and so leaving a job means they lose another big piece of their lives. It’s a difficult transition.

That’s why I loved reading our first article from Fritz of Retirement Manifesto – it’s good if you’re about to retire, in retirement, or just know someone about to make this transition.

5 Things You Need To Know Before You Retire [The Retirement Manifesto] – “Once you’ve retired, you realize there’s much more to a successful retirement than money. There are a lot of other risks beyond the financial ones. Risks of becoming depressed, getting bored, being lonely, and feeling lost. Focusing on these risks is a critical, and often overlooked, step in the retirement planning process.”

Keeping on the retirement theme, here’s the second shoe in the form of a post about retirement from Sundar Mohan Rao on Humble Dollar:

More Than Money [Humble Dollar] – “In the brief time I’ve been retired, I’ve quickly learned that money—despite being the centerpiece of most retirement literature—isn’t the sole answer to my retirement needs. Instead, there are many ingredients required for happiness.”

Historical U.S. Stock Market Returns Through 2023 [A Wealth of Common Sense] – “If you want consistency, the stock market is not the place for you. Or is it? Returns are certainly inconsistent over the short run. However, longer run returns are relatively consistent if you extend your time horizon.” If you learn this one lesson, you will have conquered investing.

See you tomorrow!

The first time I’d heard the term Last Lecture, it was from Professor Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University. My biggest (academic) regret was not taking his class, Building Virtual Worlds. There was a massive waiting list and I let that deter me.

His Last Lecture is a fantastic talk about achieving your childhood dreams and is a must watch for every single human being. He gave it on September 18th, 2007 and would die on July 25th, 2008 of pancreatic cancer.

Our first article comes from Graham Weaver, founder and managing partner of the private equity firm Alpine Investors, and a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He also gave a Last Lecture on how to live an asymmetric life. Our first article is a blog post that covers what he talked about (in case you weren’t in the mood to watch it):

How to Live an Asymmetric Life [Graham Weaver] – “I learned that, yes, it is possible to reduce one’s downside, but it is not possible to eliminate it. The better strategy is to seek opportunities where the possibility of gains wildly outweighs what you can lose, which is typically capped at 1x your investment.” It starts with a brief story about investing but the meat is in body of the article when he writes about how to build an asymmetric life, very well done and starts off with a banger – Do Hard Things.

100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying [The Guardian] – “Whether it’s taking fruit to work (and to the bedroom!), being polite to rude strangers or taking up skinny-dipping, here’s a century of ways to make life better, with little effort involved” There are some silly ideas on this but you may find a few one’s you’ll try.

Why do some artists become famous? [Big Think on Youtube]

It’s Jim again and for the first time in 2024 – so Happy New Year!

I want to start off the year with something bright and cheery as we look back on the ways the world got better in 2023.

The Year in Cheer: 177 ways the world got better in 2023 [Reasons to be cheerful] – “Cancer fatalities in the US are down 33 percent from 1991, amounting to 3.8 million deaths avoided. […] In California, a 400-acre oil field is being transformed into a nature preserve. […] Curved blades in next-gen hydroelectric turbines allow 99 percent of aquatic life to safely swim through them.”

OK one post looking back, one post looking forward. Those are the rules!

24 Rules for 2024 [Jonathan Clements on Humble Dollar] – “WHAT SHOULD YOU DO with your money next year? The same things you should have done this year, and the year before, and the year before that. The rules for a successful life—financially and otherwise—are, I believe, pretty timeless. What rules? Here are 24 of my favorites.” #3 is always good advice but don’t skip #12.

Finally, I love a good allegory and Katie from Money with Katie draws up a great one about money and preferences:

Learning to Like Beer in a World Full of Champagne Propaganda [Money with Katie] – “The families we see on TV? Upper middle class, at least. The personalities we see online? Most live (or pretend to live) top 1% lifestyles, often fueled by the very fact that the job of “influencer” pays handsomely, even if your niche is “van life rock climber.” The average car payment in the US is $729, which means—depending on where you live—even a short trip to the grocery store will probably surround you with relative opulence.”

Welcome, my friends, to the first Friday of 2024. I hope you had a good week. I’m here to make it even better by sending you into the weekend with some great stories about money — and more! Take a look.

How will you measure your life? [Harvard Business Review] — “Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”

The long shadow of checks. [Bits about Money] — “And thus we come to an important fact about the U.S. payments ecosystem: every way of moving money between banks was designed in relation to the capabilities necessary to facilitate nationwide clearing of paper checks. The most common method of interbank payments in the U.S. wears this history in its name: ACH stands for Automated Clearing House.'” [Long but fascinating.]

The Munger Operating System: How to live a life that really works. [Farnam Street] — “Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology…I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say ‘I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it. I think that only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.'”

Lastly, here’s a a 23-minute video that really opened my eyes to the hidden power of my iPhone.

I knew it was possible to automate common actions, but I thought it was overly complicated. It’s not. Watching this video (and learning how to use the iPhone “focus” modes) has been enlightening. Did you know you can map actions to double-tapping the back of your phone? To triple-tapping it? To triple-clicking the side button?

Mixing all of these things together — alternate inputs, focus modes, shortcuts, automations — can let you do some really cool stuff. Now I have my phone set up to automatically play Taylor Swift whenever it connects to my car stereo! Life is good. 😉

Hello, friends, and welcome to another day of Apex Money. Let’s jump right into the stories I’ve collected for you today.

How to reset your finances in the new year. [Gen Y Planning] — “The one (and possibly only) step you need to take to level up your finances next year is simple but may be uncomfortable: Check your bank and credit card statements. The goal is to get a clear sense of where you are now, what triggers impulsive spending, and what can be improved moving forward. Many credit card companies provide an annual spending report – read it!”

Would you rather owe taxes or get a refund in April? [Bitches Get Riches] — “In the short term—say, between when you pay your taxes and when you file your tax return—someone is benefitting from holding onto your tax dollars. If you get a tax refund, that someone is the government. They get to hold onto the extra cash you withheld for taxes for a few months or even a year, using the money any way they please in the meantime. It’s like you just gave the government an interest-free loan, entirely on their terms. And yet we feel grateful when they give our own money back to us in the form of tax refunds!”

“The best gift-giving advice I’ve ever received.” [Small Potatoes] — This is one of those articles from which it’s impossible to get a good pull-quote, so I’ll just give a quick pitch. The author gives examples of three great types of gifts…then suggests a fourth type of gift that can be used in any circumstance. I liked this.

Today’s little bonus feature isn’t a video. Instead, it’s yet another weather website. I know, I know. There are a bajillion different weather sites. Who needs another one? I agree. But this one is different.

World Weather Online offers a cool map of the entire world and allows you to view a variety of current weather conditions: temperature, precipitation, humidity, cloud cover, etc. It’s not super useful, I know, but it’s fun.

I keep wishing I had a way to display this on a separate monitor just so I could sit and stare at it now and then. (Yes, I’m a weird. Surprise!)