Plenty Of Fish In The Sea
.Plenty Of Fish In The Sea
Posted by TEBI on November 3, 2020
Look At It This Way
In Ernest Hemingway’s classic novella The Old Man and the Sea, a fisherman who had gone three months without catching anything finally lands a prize marlin and then spends three days and nights trying to reel him in.
On finally killing the giant fish, the man lashes the marlin to the side of his boat and heads for home with the trophy, only for marauding sharks to devour the carcass along the way.
The single-minded devotion of this man to dominating that one fish can be likened to the time and effort that some investors make in finding a bargain in the stock market.
Like the fisherman, their pride overtakes them and they lose all perspective.
Scary Stuff
.Scary Stuff
Jonathan Clements | October 31, 2020
IT’S HALLOWEEN, but not much frightens me—at least financially. My portfolio is broadly diversified, I have the insurance I need, and I have enough set aside for retirement. The highly improbable could happen, but I’m not going to lose sleep over that.
Still, even for those of us in decent financial shape, I see two key reasons for concern. We have no control over either—which is why they might seem scary—but we can take steps to limit the potential fallout.
Rising rates. I’m not forecasting a sharp increase in interest rates. But if that came to pass, not only would bonds take it on the chin, but also we could see grim short-term stock market returns.
U.S. stocks have spent much of the past three decades at what was once considered nosebleed valuations. The long decline in interest rates is a key reason. As the yields on bonds and cash investments have fallen since the early 1980s, investors have become increasingly willing to buy stocks, and that’s driven up price-earnings multiples.
How to Live Like You’re Already Retired
.How to Live Like You’re Already Retired
Posted by Jacob Schroeder October 16, 2020
The late poet Mary Oliver never worked an interesting job in her life, just as she wanted it. Her fear was that it would take away valuable time and energy from her true passion — writing poetry.
As she explained in an interview:
I was very careful never to take an interesting job. I took lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you get interested in it… Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day – which is what I did.
I am not a full proponent of her idea. If you spend eight or more hours a day at a job, it helps to have at least some interest in what you do. Still, Oliver makes a good point: There is no reason not to allocate more effort to the things that give us joy and less to the things that don’t. It may sound trite. But honestly think about how well you do this? I know I could do much better.
“Before The Leaves Fall From The Trees”
.“Before The Leaves Fall From The Trees”
Notes From the Field By Simon Black
October 26, 2020 Bahia Beach, Puerto Rico
The morning of June 28, 1914 began like any other normal day.
It was a Sunday, so a lot of people went to church. Others prepared large meals for family gatherings, played with their children, or thumbed through the Sunday papers. At that point, tensions had been high in Europe for several years; the continent was bitterly divided by a series of complex diplomatic and military alliances, and small wars had recently broken out.
Italy and the Ottoman Empire went to war in 1912 in a limited, 13-month conflict. And the First Balkan War was waged in early 1913. Overall, though, the continent clung to a delicate peace. And hardly anyone expected that most of the next THREE DECADES would be filled with chaos, poverty, and destruction.
And then it happened.
The First Law of a Plan B
.The First Law of a Plan B
Notes From The Field By Simon Black
October 19, 2020 Bahia Beach, Puerto Rico
In the summer of 1687, after years of study and reflection, the legendary English scientist Isaac Newton published one of the most important works in the history of the world. He called it Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and the insights Newton wrote about shaped the very world we live in today. Literally *nothing* in modern engineering, from iPhones to skyscrapers, would exist today without Newton and his three-volume treatise.
Among the many game-changing concepts he discussed were his now famous Laws of Motion. Newton’s first law of motion, for example, is often summarized as something like “an object at rest stays at rest, unless acted upon by an external force.” Makes sense. A rock isn’t going anywhere unless someone picks it up and throws it.
And this is true not only of objects in our universe, but of human behavior as well.
Nearly Half Of All Professional Women Make This Money Mistake
.Nearly Half Of All Professional Women Make This Money Mistake — And It’s Easy To Fix
By CD Moriarty Oct. 7, 2020
How to stop deferring to a partner on financial matters
More than one married female friend has confided in me she leaves the “money stuff” to her husband. My professional self shakes her head — these women are giving their financial power away, jeopardizing their retirement and making themselves ill-prepared for the realities of daily life without a partner. Unfortunately, these friends are not alone; among well-educated professional women almost half defer to their partners on financial decisions. This is true across ages and professions, even 29% of those in financial services do this, according to a recent UBS study.
Though many enter marriage with the intention of sharing financial responsibility, they change course once married. This is true even for millennials, who defer to their spouses even more than Boomers (54% vs. 39%, according to the study). This issue goes beyond men and women, as 41% of women in same-sex relationships defer financial responsibility to their partner.
Money Matters
.Money Matters
By Jonathan Clements
We make countless decisions—financial and otherwise—with little or no thought to the dollars at stake:
We purchase items that we know are overpriced and almost guaranteed to lose value, but we do so happily, because they have a meaning for us that’s far greater than their price tag. Think of artwork and vacation souvenirs that are purchased because they remind us of moments we treasure.
We prize family possessions for their sentimental value, even though they typically have scant financial worth. Indeed, after a family member dies, often the biggest squabbles are over possessions with no resale value. We spend endless dollars on our family, while rarely—if ever—asking whether we’re wasting money.
None of this is especially surprising or, I’d argue, irrational. We’re talking about the pursuit of happiness—and that involves making choices where we receive greater value than the dollars we’re forking over.
Instead, what’s surprising is this: When that emotional resonance isn’t there, we typically default to money as the yardstick for measuring someone or some thing’s worth.
Every Financial Document You Need To Gather Before You Evacuate
.Every Financial Document You Need To Gather Before You Evacuate
Lindsay Mott | September 23, 2020
Planning ahead by gathering everything you’ll need can help reduce your stress in the aftermath of an evacuation.
When the worst is happening around you, you might not have the time or the wherewithal to run down an itemized list of the important things you’ll need to get you through. Preparing for an emergency situation – such as having to evacuate due to a natural disaster – will take some time on the front end, but it will absolutely save you stress in the long run.
While many of us work hard to plan ahead for big life events, statistics show that most of us are not prepared for an unexpected evacuation. According to a June 2020 study by Allstate, 85% of Americans have not mapped out an evacuation plan.
How Your ACE Score Affects Your Money Habits
.How Your ACE Score Affects Your Money Habits
What is Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES)?
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are the traumatic events that occur during childhood between the ages of 0-17 years.
Money Triggers
Imagine grocery shopping one sunny afternoon. You have all the right ingredients in your grocery cart, and you’re ready to purchase. But you have a taste for Honeycrisp apples. You look at the price tag and see that the apples are $3.49 a pound. That’s, like, a dollar more than any of the other apples! You have money to purchase the product, but you experience a weird uneasy feeling in your gut. Your brain is running several ideas:
Girl, don’t waste your money on that! You can get cheaper apples at Kroger.
But on the other hand, apples are healthy, and you know what they say about apples and doctors.
You don’t have any money at all.
If I had a man (or woman) who supported me, I could buy apples.
I bet White people don’t have this problem.
We can’t afford that because papa is looking for a new job.
Now in the 35,000 thoughts that we run through our brain, which thought was the weirdest?
It was probably, “We can’t afford that because papa is looking for a new job.”
Why was that thought in your brain, you might ask? It’s because even though we are deciding on an action in the present, our minds can be triggered by Financial PTSD.
5 Emergency Funds That Will Prepare You For The Unexpected
.5 Emergency Funds That Will Prepare You For The Unexpected
Jaycee Tenn Mon, October 19, 2020,
If there is anything that 2020 has made glaringly apparent, it’s that the future is a series of unforeseeable events. This unpredictability has reinforced the importance of financial security, putting an immense amount of emphasis on savings.
In mid-2020 the amount of money held on credit cards in the U.S. hit $413.7 billion, according to an annual report from NerdWallet. Within each American household, the analysis estimated the average credit card debt to be $6,124.
Planning for the unexpected ahead of time is essential in keeping you away from credit card debt. And one way to help keep you out of the debt cycle is through emergency funds.
An emergency fund is a way to save for a specific expense by adding a certain dollar amount to that fund every month. The goal of an emergency fund is to gradually build your way to a certain expense so that by the time it comes to put the money down, the burden or worry of spending a large amount all at once dissipates.
Managing Money Is Ridiculously Simple—and Unbelievably Hard
.Managing Money Is Ridiculously Simple—And Unbelievably Hard
Jonathan Clements | September 26, 2020
Seems So Easy
Figuring out what we should do with our dollars is typically straightforward: We should save regularly, diversify broadly, rebalance occasionally and so on. Instead, the tough part is getting ourselves to do what we intellectually know is right.
Take the notion of buying low and selling high. Every investor knows that’s the goal—and yet, when the S&P 500 slumped 34% earlier this year, many folks just couldn’t bring themselves to buy stocks. For these investors, the knowledge was there, but that knowledge proved no match for the instinctual fear triggered by plunging share prices and the accompanying narratives of doom.
Other examples? Here are nine basic financial strategies that many people struggle with:
1. Save diligently. What could be simpler than spending less than we earn? It’s the fundamental step on which almost all other financial success is built—and yet so many of us find it so very hard to do.