How To Unlock Your Financial Creativity

How To Unlock Your Financial Creativity

April 12, 2023 by Anthony Isola

Exemplary financial advice springs from the least likely sources.

A case in point is music producer Rick Rubin. His book, The Creative Act, discusses unlocking creativity and maximizing productivity by applying easy-to-follow practical steps.  Who would’ve thought the producer of artists ranging from Johnny Cash to the Beastie Boys may have a second career as a personal finance guru?  There’s one verb that doesn’t apply to Rubin – Boring.

The same cannot be said for most verbiage written concerning personal finance. Jargon like Fixed Income, Equities, Duration, and others are a snooze/confuse fest waiting to happen.

https://tonyisola.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/image-52.png

Source: S.E.C. 

Many of Rubins’s principles perfectly match managing money.

Simplicity is the key to brilliance. Rubin refers to himself as a reducer, not a producer. Ten tracks are better than thirty. Nothing is more hazardous to a financial plan than bringing in complicated and expensive investment products.

As my colleague Barry Ritholtz likes to say, Come for the underperformance and stay for the high fees. Constructing a straightforward budget and savings plan may not win any Grammy Awards, but it will finance your retirement.

Collaboration is essential, and the best ideas come from unexpected places. Rubin launched many artists’ careers into the stratosphere. Working as a team and accepting constructive criticism are prerequisites. Too many investors overestimate their risk tolerance and behavior management skills.

Finding the right financial planner, insurance, estate, and tax specialists accelerates wealth creation.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned in my career is to embrace failure and accept it as a part of the creative process. The music business is a microcosm of life. The only way to learn is through trial and error. Rubin is a supercharged audience member, not a musician. His failure to make it as a Rock Star turbocharged his producing career. Making mistakes is part of learning, but constantly repeating them is not.

Losing money on cockamamie investments or delaying a savings program are ubiquitous investing errors. Doubling down or giving up gets you nowhere. Learning and regrouping is the right path.

The greatest rewards come from taking risks. 

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://tonyisola.com/2023/04/how-to-unlock-your-financial-creativity/

Here’s How to Make Filing Easier

Here’s How to Make Filing Easier

Jail, Jury Duty & 4 Other Things People Would Rather Do Than Taxes: Here’s How to Make Filing Easier

Heather Taylor  Mon, April 10, 2023 GoBankingRates

You may not enjoy filing your taxes, but do you dislike the process so much that you’d go to great lengths to get out of it?

In a GOBankingRates’ 2023 tax survey of 1,002 Americans, there were six activities overall that respondents said they would rather do than file their taxes. These include spending the weekend with their in-laws (25%), jury duty (14%), taking the ACT or SAT exam (13%), experiencing a canceled flight leading to a missed trip (11%), undergoing a root canal (11%) and spending the night in jail (8%).

What has led this many Americans to choose root canals and jury duty over filing their taxes? Let’s look at why so many feel hate doing their taxes and what can be done to make the tax filing process easier.

What Makes Filing Taxes Scary?

If you’ve ever felt scared or nervous about filing your taxes, you might wonder what is causing you to feel this way. You could be filing a simple return and still experience some anxiety surrounding the process.

Robert Persichitte is a CPA and CFA at Delagify Financial. Taxes, Persichitte said, combine boredom with fear. While it’s not hard to understand the boredom aspect, there are two specific reasons why we’re scared of taxes:

If you make a mistake, you could suffer a significant consequence.

It’s easy to make mistakes.

Most people have a story to share about a relative, friend or someone who knows someone who received a surprise bill from the IRS. If you forget something or do something wrong, you may face serious financial consequences.

And of course, it’s fairly easy and common to make mistakes. Persichitte said most people don’t learn in school how to prepare their taxes. Most Americans only think about it once a year, widening the gap between filing periods and making the experience of filing even a simple return troublesome.

How To Make Filing Taxes Easier

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jail-jury-duty-4-other-170016486.html

Can A Bank Seize Funds From My Checking For My Credit Card Payment?

Can A Bank Seize Funds From My Checking For My Credit Card Payment?

April 11, 2023 by Poonkulali Thangavelu   Bankrate

A bank cannot typically take money from your checking account to pay off your credit card debt

There are exceptions to this protection. For one, if the bank gets a court judgment against you that doesn’t rule out this offset, it could take your deposited money;In case you risk falling behind on card payments, negotiate with the issuer and look into other financial options so your credit score doesn’t take a hit”

If you owe your friend money, you could pay for their meal at a restaurant. This is called offsetting and is another way of canceling out the debt. But what if you bank with an institution that is also the issuer of your credit card and owe the bank money on the card? Can the bank offset this debt by helping itself to the money you deposit in your account?

Banks Cannot Use Offset For Credit Card Payments

The Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA), which protects consumers from unfair credit card billing practices, rules that banks cannot typically seize funds deposited into a consumer’s bank account to pay off their credit card. According to the FCBA, a “card issuer may not take any action to offset a cardholder’s indebtedness arising in connection with a consumer credit transaction under the relevant credit card plan against funds of the cardholder held on deposit with the card issuer.” The law recognizes that using an offset provision to go after your credit card debt would give the bank some leverage against you.

However, there are some exemptions to this rule that would allow a bank to take funds deposited to make your credit card payment. For one, you may have authorized your bank to pay off your credit card debt using the money in your checking account. For instance, you might have signed up for an automatic bill payment arrangement.

In spite of any such arrangement, though, if you dispute a credit card payment and ask the bank not to take the payment from your monies deposited, it would have to heed your request.

Court Order Could Allow Bank To Offset

There are other circumstances in which a bank could take money from your bank account to offset credit card debt. For one, the bank could go to court and get a judgment against you. If the judgment doesn’t rule out the offset approach, and there are no state or other laws that prohibit this action, the bank could take your money for the credit card debt.

And in case “the terms of a security agreement permitted the card issuer to place a hold on the funds,” that would also mean the bank can take your money to offset the credit card debt. However, a card issuer cannot routinely include terms in its credit card agreement that give it a security interest in a credit card consumer’s bank accounts.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bank-seize-funds-checking-credit-110029387.html

Humanity Is On The Cusp Of A Giant (6x) Leap Forward

Humanity Is On The Cusp Of A Giant (6x) Leap Forward

April 11, 2023  Simon Black Sovereign Man.Com

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake in the Pacific Ocean caused a tsunami to strike Japan.  You probably remember seeing this in the news, because, directly in the path of the tsunami sat the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

As the waves crashed into the reactors, the plant’s cooling systems lost power and the nuclear reactors overheated. Pressure built until explosions spewed radioactive materials into the environment.

Now, Japan realized that the Fukishma nuclear accident was a major anomaly... and that the historical data clearly show that nuclear power is safe. So they moved on and continued investing in nuclear.

Yet half a world away, Germany decided to shut down its own nuclear power plants because of what happened in Fukishima... even though Germany is obviously not prone to tsunamis and rarely experiences severe earthquakes.

It was a knee jerk reaction— not at all based on “science”. And instead of investing in nuclear, Germany spent tens of billions of euros on far less efficient renewable power.

One key problem, of course, is that Germany didn’t plan on having a fully renewable energy grid unil more than 25 years later in 2038.

So in the meantime while they would be building wind and solar energy plants across Germany, they planned on filling their energy void by importing natural gas... from Russia.

You can obviously see where this is going.

Germany made an emotional decision to shut off its nuclear plants and instead opted to import natural gas from a known adversary.

And now that the Russian gas is no longer flowing, today Germany relies on burning coal to generate enough electricity.

Rather than admit they were completely wrong to phase out nuclear power, Germany has turned the clock back to the early 1900s when the skies were clouded with thick black smoke from coal-fuel power plants.

But in reality the German government is trying to take its people back into the Dark Ages.

Let me explain.

I’ve talked about the importance of energy for a society’s economic prosperity. Lack of abundant “cheap” energy is one of the major forces of civilization decline.

And when I say “cheap” energy, I’m talking about the “Energy Returned on Energy Invested”, or EROEI.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, when wood was the world’s primary energy source, the EROEI was 5:1.

In other words, the amount of energy generated from burning wood was FIVE times as much as the energy required to gather the wood in the first place, i.e. to chop down trees, cut them up into logs, transport the wood, etc.

But eventually people discovered that coal was a far more efficient source of energy, with an EROEI of at least 10:1. So the same amount of effort to mine coal, transport it, burn it, etc. produced twice as much energy as wood.

Obviously being able to obtain twice as much energy from the same amount of effort creates a LOT of social benefit; it means that there are a lot of excess resources available to invest in growth and development.

It’s no accident that the discovery of more energy efficient fuel sources, coupled with the invention of machines that relied on those efficient fuel sources, launched a steady, upward trajectory in human prosperity.

And with the discovery of oil as a source of energy (with an EROEI of 30:1 or more), growth and development really started to take off.

But now governments want to take us backward, to less efficient energy sources.

When they talk about renewable and “clean” energy, they often forget that solar panels and windmills don’t just appear out of thin air. Massive amounts of resources go into mining and processing the rare metals and minerals required to build solar panels, windmills, and batteries.

And in the end, renewable sources of energy typically have an EROEI of 5:1 – about the same as burning wood.

So in a mathematical sense, the climate fanatics’ “solution” is to take us back to a Medieval-era level of energy efficiency.

This is a pretty big deal if you understand the clear link between energy efficiency and human prosperity. Inefficient energy means that a society has to use up the preponderance of its resources simply to sustain itself. There’s very little surplus or growth. And that’s largely the way human civilization subsisted for thousands of years.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against clean energy. I am, however, against going back to the Dark Ages... which is essentially the “solution” that Germany and other advanced nations are proposing.

The obvious solution is nuclear power, which has a whopping 180:1 Energy Return on Energy Invested.

If the 2X increase in efficiency from transitioning from wood to coal set in motion the greatest growth of prosperity in human history, what do you think the 6X jump from fossil fuels to nuclear power would do?

And yet, because Greta Thunberg scowls at nuclear, governments want to cast society back to the stone age.

It’s crazy. Last November, the United Nations hosted a Climate Change Conference known as COP27. They talked about gender identity and taxing meat consumption. But they barely mentioned nuclear, which has lower carbon emissions than wind and solar, while delivering 36X more energy return

And this is why I call climate change the new ‘human sacrifice’.. Their policies are guaranteed to decrease efficiency, cost more money, stunt productivity, and trap more people in poverty...

... unless leaders finally get on board with nuclear.

The good news is that nuclear is inevitable. And we’re starting to see a shifting tide towards this obvious solution.

For example, when acclaimed Hollywood director Oliver Stone (who is a hard core leftist) was interviewed at the World Economic Forum last year, he slammed the climate elites for ignoring nuclear.

Stone is releasing a documentary called Nuclear Now arguing that nuclear energy is the best way to promote a cleaner environment without sacrificing productivity and quality of life.

Again, it’s obvious. There aren't enough resources to fully switch the world to inconsistent energy like wind and solar, to create the necessary batteries for storage.

Eventually people are going to wake up to that reality. And when they do, there is going to be a mad rush into nuclear energy.

That creates some very fertile ground for investing in the resources required for nuclear, such as uranium mining and refining.

Right now, the uranium industry is not receiving a ton of capital because of exaggerated fears of its dangers. When that changes, early investors in productive uranium companies with good leadership should do quite well.

I’m an optimist. I don’t think the future is going to be cold and dark with humans cast back into the Dark Ages.

I think when the world confronts the economic realities of energy scarcity, it will usher in a new renaissance in energy. We’ll all benefit. And the people who saw it coming will make a killing.

To your freedom,  Simon Black, Founder  Sovereign Man

https://www.sovereignman.com/trends/humanity-is-on-the-cusp-of-a-giant-6x-leap-forward-146739/

10 ‘Normal’ Money Habits That Are Actually Harmful

10 ‘Normal’ Money Habits That Are Actually Harmful

Andrew Lisa   Mon, April 10, 2023

Just because you get into the habit of doing something doesn't mean it's good for you -- and gnawed-on fingernails and cracked knuckles aren't the only proof. Some of the worst habits that tend to die the hardest show up not only on people's bodies but in their financial lives as well.

From the way people budget to the way they spend, save and invest, minor sins are easy to come by. Like so many bad habits, some people don't even realize they're making money-related mistakes at the time. Or they realize it but find it hard to change.

The following money habits have been normalized over the years but are still just as harmful as ever.

Not Following a Basic Budget

Many people have no idea how much money they spend each month. Perhaps unsurprisingly, younger adults are the least likely to keep track of their spending. No matter your age, your financial goals both big and small will die on the vine if you don't know how much money you're bringing in, how much you're spending, where you're overspending and the percentage of income that you're saving -- if you're saving at all.

Ignoring Your Credit Until It Matters

Despite the widespread availability of free apps such as Credit Karma and free credit trackers that come with most bank accounts and credit cards, plenty of people still ignore their credit for most of the year. They check in only when they're up for big purchases or loans, often finding that their scores are a whole lot lower than they had imagined or that there are mistakes on their reports that they could have corrected before the damage was done.

The truth is your credit is important 365 days a year. It affects the rates you'll pay, not only for mortgages and auto loans, but for things like insurance and utilities. It also impacts whether employers see you as hireable or whether landlords will take you on as a renter.

Knowing what's in your credit report is the first step to managing your credit. By tuning out, you're accepting a more expensive life.

Carrying a Balance on Your Credit Card

Many of America's credit card users carry a balance on their accounts -- which is exactly what banks want them to do. When you pay your statement balance in full every month, you pay only as much as is needed to cover your purchases.

If you don't pay your entire statement and carry a balance, on the other hand, the bank will hit you with finance charges. With the average credit card interest rate now hovering around 20%, that balance will find a way to grow even as you try to pay it down, leading to an endless snowball effect of new interest compounding on last month's interest.

If you pay your balance in full just two months in a row, however, finance charges -- and that toxic cycle of debt -- come to an end.

Automating Your Bills to a Fault

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://news.yahoo.com/finance/news/10-normal-money-habits-actually-200013138.html

Risky Business

Risky Business

Adam M. Grossman  |  Apr 9, 2023  Humble Dollar

OPEN A FINANCE textbook, and you’ll find discussions of volatility and beta, value-at-risk, the Sharpe ratio, the Sortino ratio, the Treynor ratio and many other quantitative tools for measuring risk. But what should you make of these metrics? Are they an effective way to control risk in your portfolio?

These tools do have decades of research behind them, and they can be useful. But I believe they’re also incomplete. Worse yet, they can be misleading. William Sharpe, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, once commented that his ratio was being “manipulated” by investment marketers “to misrepresent their performance.”

This highlights the first weakness of these quantitative measures: They’re formula-based and that gives them the appearance of being objective, but many of the inputs to these formulas are actually quite subjective. So subjective, in fact, that Sharpe has said, “I could think of a way to have an infinite Sharpe ratio.” To put that in context, a Sharpe value of more than two would be considered very attractive.

Another issue with quantitative measures is that risk is multidimensional. Consider the recent failure of Silicon Valley Bank. None of the quantitative measures referenced above would have detected the risk that ultimately brought down the bank. That’s because, in the end, the bank’s undoing had more to do with psychology than numbers. Depositors began to worry about the bank’s solvency, and those worries caused others to worry. Author Morgan Housel compared it to a stampede: A concern which, at first, was reasonable began to take on a life of its own, driving people over the line into irrational behavior.

The message I take from this: Risk is a bit like a hydra, the creature from mythology that had multiple heads. It’s awfully hard to pin down and even harder to quantify. Sometimes, situations that didn’t appear to carry any risk will suddenly experience a flare up. Other times, existing risks will present themselves in new ways and with a greater level of ferocity.

That’s what we saw in 2020, when COVID-19 emerged. There had been other virus outbreaks in recent years, including other coronaviruses. For several years leading up to 2020, in fact, the State Department had specifically called out the risk of a pandemic.

Here’s what intelligence analysts wrote in 2019, a year before COVID hit: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”

That was hardly the only warning. But if a pandemic had been on our radar, why were we so unprepared? That gets at another reality of different risks: It’s hard to know when to take them seriously. If a particular risk hasn’t been seen before—or hasn’t been seen in a long time—it’s difficult to know how to think about it. How do we distinguish between risks that are real and those that are just paranoid notions?

Indeed, those who dwell too much on prospective risks face a risk themselves: They’ll be dismissed as worrywarts. Investor Nouriel Roubini, for example, has earned the nickname Dr. Doom for his perpetually glass-half-empty outlook. He’s a serious economist, but many people roll their eyes when he delivers yet another downbeat forecast.

Investor William Bernstein, in his book Deep Risk, discusses “the four horsemen” of portfolio risk. In addition to inflation and deflation, which are common concerns, he includes devastation and confiscation—the sorts of things that would be associated with a breakdown of civil society. Are these real risks? I wouldn’t dismiss them—and I credit Bernstein for being brave enough to raise these questions—but it’s also difficult to know what reasonable steps you might take to protect yourself against them.

Risk is tricky also because it’s a master of disguise. Even when we have a good understanding of a particular risk—such as market bubbles—we can still be fooled. Not unlike viruses, market bubbles mutate. They always come back looking a little different each time. That allows them to slip through our defenses. That, in fact, is how I would characterize much of what happened in 2021, when all sorts of newfangled investments rose to prominence—SPACs, for example, and thousands of new crypto “currencies.”

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://humbledollar.com/2023/04/risky-business/

Money is Everything

Money is Everything

APRIL 8, 2023

I have a difficult time understanding the level of apathy that so many people have towards money. I’ve never held a “money is everything” attitude, but as I ponder such an audacious statement, I realize it’s not so far from the truth.

PIMD welcomes Physician On Fire as our guest post. POF is a personal finance website created to inform and inspire both physicians and our patients with insightful writing from a physician who has attained financial independence and the ability to retire early.

Apathy may not be the best word to describe others’ treatment of money. Ambivalence isn’t quite right, either.

People do seem to care about money and they certainly want more of it, but I don’t see a lot of people making the wise and sometimes difficult choices that will help them actually grow their money and achieve financial independence.

My wife and I were talking about this very thing. I was talking about people wasting money in pointless ways and she said “a lot of people just don’t care about money.”  I guess not, but how could they not? Without thinking, I blurted out “But that makes no sense to me, because money is everything.”

I realized what I had said and how it sounded, and I backpedaled a bit. I wasn’t about to launch into a Gordon Gekko style “Greed is Good” speech, but I had a legitimate point.

What I meant to say was that Money is Anything.

Money can become so many things.

More free time

Your children’s education

Dinner at a five-star restaurant

A life-saving AED for your church or community center

Super Bowl tickets

A well for clean water in a third-world country

Retiring some day

Two Months in Spain

Food and medicines for a no-kill animal shelter

A new house

Money is whatever you want it to be.

Who doesn’t care about a single one of those things listed above? Not anyone that I know. But if I don’t know you and if you literally care about none of the above, I’m sure you can come up with a list of things you truly do care about on your own. I promise you there will be things on your list that money can buy.

Because Money is Everything.

You Should Care About Money

Money is a taboo topic in many circles; most people don’t like to talk about money. I’m not like most people in that regard.

At home, we openly discuss money matters. I want our boys to grow up to be smart with money, and avoiding the topic is not going to get the job done.

There are many reasons I want my boys to care about money and reasons I think you should care about money, too. There are the many facts above — that money can be exchanged directly for many things that can improve your life, the lives of your loved ones, and that of those who may be thousands of miles away.

But there’s more to it than that.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://passiveincomemd.com/money-is-everything/

How to Build a Strong Financial Foundation, Brick By Brick

How to Build a Strong Financial Foundation, Brick By Brick

APRIL 8, 2023   Financial Pilgrimage

Nothing may be more critical to your financial future than a strong financial foundation. However, if you’ve been on social media and ventured into finance, you’ve probably seen a few stories about overnight millionaires.

These people may have gotten rich from getting in on a cryptocurrency early, or others boast about how their online business generates six figures per month. I’m not saying there aren’t true stories of people that have been successful in these spaces. Though I am saying that the money has likely been made by the time these trends make it to the mainstream. That, or they are trying to sell you a product on the back end by giving the appearance of success.

Very few people become wealthy through a cryptocurrency or penny stock that goes through the roof. Most people that try end up losing money. Anyone touting the success of a business has likely spent thousands of hours building it up. There are very few shortcuts to wealth.

There is nothing wrong with taking some risks to build wealth. We all romanticize the individual that only spent $1,000 to build a six-figure business. Those situations are rare, though. The more likely scenario is that businesses will fail, and if the person hasn’t already established a strong financial foundation, they will be in big trouble. A financial plan built on risky investments, debt, margin, or any other speculative position could collapse at some point if the economy takes a turn.

The Importance of A Strong Financial Foundation

Building a strong financial foundation may seem like a risk-averse approach. However, I’d like to share why it’s not only the safe thing to do but why it can set you up to take more significant risks down the line.

Let’s start with an example. Think back to the Great Recession of 2008. The era leading up to 2008 felt a lot like it does today, only more so in real estate. Today, we hear of people going all in to try to be crypto millionaires. That approach has worked for some. However, you don’t want to be the one holding the bag once the musical chairs end. Unfortunately, that’s what happened in 2008 in the real estate market.

Homebuyers that shouldn’t have qualified for certain mortgages were duped into buying homes, many with adjustable-rate mortgages. They could afford the payments when interest rates were low, and the job market was strong. Eventually, interest rates started to tick up, making their mortgage unaffordable.

These issues resulted in millions of people going into foreclosure and eventually crashing the housing market. As a result, the job market was terrible for years. The poor housing market created a downward spiral where millions of people were eventually kicked out of their homes. Nearly 10 million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosure between 2008 and 2014. In addition, bankruptcies increased by almost 75% after 2009.

After all that, who were the ones standing? Those with a strong financial foundation. Don’t put your family in a situation where a down economy can cause your financial situation to collapse.

Here’s where the second part comes into play.

 To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://financialpilgrimage.com/strong-financial-foundation/

Worry About the Right Things

Worry About the Right Things

Posted April 8, 2023 by Michael Batnick

“Do you know the difference between me and you?

Me: Happy, happy, happy, dead.

You: Worry, worry, worry, dead.”

– Catch-22.

The last few years reminded us that it’s more important to know how it feels to lose money than to make it. The only way to develop respect for risk is to experience financial pain. Once you’ve been burnt, you can develop a healthy anxiety around your personal finances.

Such is the case for a friend of mine. I’ll call him Rich. He’s known to be a worrier for much of his life. At first, he worried about the right things, like what he spent, saved, and even where he lived. Simple, manageable, and firmly within his control. His focus on financial efficiency served him well and allowed him to retire earlier and more comfortably than planned. He won the game.

When you dream of being in that position, you probably imagine all your worries falling by the wayside. Not for Rich. Now, the thought of losing it is what keeps him up at night. There’s nothing constructive about his obsessions. It’s always about things that are completely out of his control.

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”- Dune

Rich’s focus on the wrong things not only gives them power, but they leave the right things under-attended. He understands that bear markets are part of investing, yet he can’t embrace their inevitability. His success hinges on his willingness and ability to withstand discomfort. Financially, he’s able, but he’s not willing. Throw out the spreadsheets.

Instead, he worries about what impact the Fed, China, or WW3 might have on his portfolio. This is what’s left for him to contemplate after accounting for the things we can control, like diversification, the stock/bond mix, and a cash buffer.

Do you see the pattern here? He’s focusing on the risks he can’t entirely eliminate. Pure risk. As Cliff Asness said, “You get compensated for the risk you can’t diversify out of.” Everything else is somewhat actionable. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough. What makes it so hard is that his concerns are reasonable. Yet, he has no influence over any of them. Reasonable doesn’t always equal rational. Risk is inevitable. What is inevitable should be embraced.

Rich has a wealth management team taking care of most of the items above. He should feel comfortable with experts at the wheel, yet he spends plenty of time second-guessing them. Catastrophic scenarios are baked into his financial plan. And still he catastrophizes. He’s invested in a way that acknowledges the fact that anything can break at any time. Still, it’s a far cry from the predictability he craves. Rich is so caught up in the how that he often forgets his why.

Why does he invest in the first place? For two main reasons: to sustain his lifestyle over a few decades and ensure his assets grow to match his future liabilities. Healthcare costs are already a burden for his wife, and they have skyrocketed. That’s it. He doesn’t care about making a ton of money or beating a benchmark. He only cares about being able to afford the best care for his wife. So, he can’t afford not to own stocks. They’re the best vehicle to ensure she gets the best care in the future.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2023/04/08/worry-about-the-right-things/

Why Stealth Wealth Is the Best Way To Handle Your Money

Why Stealth Wealth Is the Best Way To Handle Your Money

GoBankingRates

Stealth wealth, as explained by Experian, is all about financial privacy. In today’s society, broadcasting wealth on social media or even just among coworkers and friends can make you a target for exploitation. Whether bad actors attempt to hack your accounts or loved ones come with their hands out, showcasing your earnings may have unfortunate consequences.

Keeping information about your income and assets private can help protect you from a wide range of uncomfortable and potentially unsettling situations. Individuals who practice stealth wealth often have significant amounts of money, but few people know about it. They keep it under wraps in order to safeguard their assets.

For many people, stealth wealth may be one of the best ways to handle your money and create a stable financial future. Here’s what you need to know about the money trend.

What Is Stealth Wealth?

It’s unclear when the trend started, but in 2008 at the height of the Global Financial Crisis, the Tampa Bay Times reported on the effect that the downward economy had on recently minted millionaires.

As it noted, millionaires weren’t as ready to flaunt their riches as their predecessors. Many of them were living more reserved lifestyles, patiently waiting for the economy to turn around. They held onto their wealth instead of spending it on material things and those that did were greatly rewarded.

Fast forward 15 years and many of the OG stealth wealthers have kids who are coming of age or entering adulthood. They have likely learned from their parent’s financial practicality and played coy with their net worth. Whether they have established a name for themselves in business or simply live off of family money, they aren’t as willing to showcase their wealth to the world.

What Are the Benefits of Stealth Wealth?

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.gobankingrates.com/money/wealth/why-stealth-wealth-is-best-way-to-handle-your-money/?utm_term=related_link_1&utm_campaign=1219259&utm_source=yahoo.com&utm_content=2&utm_medium=rss

Dave Ramsey: 5 Ways To Become a Millionaire Fast

Dave Ramsey: 5 Ways To Become a Millionaire Fast

John Csiszar   Fri, April 7, 2023

The thought of “becoming a millionaire fast” appeals to nearly everyone, but it’s actually a rarity. While some speculators may get lucky and hit it big, more often than not those trying to get rich quickly fail — sometimes losing everything. But this doesn’t mean that becoming a millionaire is a Herculean task.

In fact, many pundits, including Dave Ramsey, offer a path to becoming a millionaire that — while requiring diligence — doesn’t involve any extraordinary effort, or taking on undue risk. While each person’s definition of “fast” may vary, following Ramsey’s tips can put you on the path to becoming a millionaire well before the traditional retirement age. Here are some of the most important.

Get Out of Debt

Dave Ramsey isn’t the only financial expert who emphasizes what a killer debt is to your long-term financial goals. Rather than setting money aside for savings or investments, when you have debt, it essentially just goes down the drain. And with the high interest rates that credit cards charge, your debt can become a runaway problem in a very short period of time.

According to the Ramsey Solutions National Study of Millionaires, 9 out of 10 millionaires never took out a business loan, and 73% never carried a credit card balance in their entire life. According to Ramsey, every time you go into debt, you dig yourself into a deeper hole financially. Since your most powerful wealth-building tool is your income, according to Ramsey, you don’t want to be sending it to creditors instead of investing it for yourself.

Build an Emergency Fund

The primary reason for having an emergency fund is that unexpected financial surprises can and do occur. If you don’t have an emergency fund to cover those expenses, you’ll have to take out a loan or go into credit card debt. Since debt is a huge step backward when it comes to becoming a millionaire, it’s a situation you want to avoid. According to Ramsey, the first thing you want to do is build an emergency fund with at least $1,000 in it. After that, you’ll want to build up an emergency fund covering three to six months of your expenses.

Make a Budget

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