Tag Archives: blogs

Are Markets Efficient?

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When investing your money you’ll hear many different forms of opinion. Experts like Dave Ramsey will tell you to invest in growth stock mutual funds, others will say that index funds are the way to go. Then there is a group of investors that says you can beat the market by buying “undervalued” stocks.

The question that arises is, is there such a thing as an undervalued stock, and if so, is there a reliable way to take advantage of this “market inefficiency”.

Your investment philosophy in stocks is largely dependent on your opinion on what’s called the Efficient Market Theory (EMT). This theory states that markets are fully efficient. In other words any given price in the markets reflects the cumulative “wisdom” of all investors actings logically on fundamental data regarding value.

Essentially the market, according to this theory, is always acting completely logically based on the current information. So at any given point the market isn’t overvalued or undervalued – it’s priced at the fair equilibrium price given the current information available.

Some practitioners and theorists have brought up concerns with the theory stating that it doesn’t accurately reflect the actual results we see in the real world. For example, in the tech “bubble” of 2000, were investors acting completely logically on the market’s information or was there inefficiency?

Ultimately you’ll have to make your own determination. At the moment there isn’t unanimous agreement by the community.

3 Finance Habits to Improve Your Bank Account and Your Sanity

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In James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, he concisely illustrates a very important point. Often we think that we need to design the most optimal habits in our lives. For example we need to have a plan to exercise two ours each morning with the proper amount of cardio, aerobic and strength exercises. While doing this can certainly be a great boost of confidence and personal fitness, Clear points out that most of the time we don’t need complex habits – we need two minute habits.

Creating habits is hard enough. For anyone who has tried to change their daily routine for the better, they know how much of a challenge shifting behavior can be. Yet nearly all of us fail. The reason? Our habits aren’t simple enough.

Clear tells us not only to start with two minute habits but to make the cues and catalysts for those habits almost automatic. After all, “You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.”

An area that I have personally been working on is the area of personal finance. I have thought about this topic a great deal in my personal life and have come to the conclusion that there are three key habits for anyone serious about controlling their money:

1) Pay Attention

Tracking your fitness has been shown to produced fitter people. Watching your personal growth has been shown to produce successful people. And measuring your finances has been shown to make richer people. Many studies illustrate this point. Simply staying on top of your bank balances, credit card balances, credit score and retirement accounts will leave you in a much stronger position. The reason is that we tend to improve things we pay attention to.

2) Plan Ahead

Creating a written plan and sticking to it is actually what separates us from animals. We have the ability to plan ahead and participate in what Ray Dalio calls “higher level thinking”. The plan doesn’t have to be complex. You can sit down with your advisor or do it yourself.

3) Learn

This blog isn’t intended to be the sole source of your financial information. But if you combine regular blog and book reading with input from your financial advisor you can improve your knowledge exponentially over time.

Conclusion: 

Do you want to bolster yourself to the top 1% of Americans? Do you want to experience less financial stress and uncertainty? Follow my three-pronged approach to 1) pay attention 2) plan ahead and 3) learn.

What I learned from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers

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Have you ever wondered why nearly all the top hockey players were born in January, February or March? Ever wonder why the smartest people in the world aren’t the most successful? Malcolm Gladwell’s book contains these exact answers and more.

I found his book extremely revealing. I came into the book thinking that success was almost completely determined by intelligence, hard work and intentionality. While these traits are significant parts of making the most with what you have, Gladwell illustrates that much of what determines success is due to completely unpredictable and random factors.

While much of our success is determined by luck – where we were born, who are parents are and their respective network and culture – a lot of these advantages can be recognized and limited. But we can’t just assume luck isn’t impacting these things – it always is.

Recently I’ve been reflecting on my current reads and taking notes to summarize what I’ve been getting out of the books. I did this for Outliers and took away a few key points. Here they are below:

  1. If you see a pattern, don’t assume it’s random, examine the history behind it
  2. Understand your own history and the apparent consequences/indications of what that means for you

I hope these two points are helpful. A key takeaway was to look at the contributing factors and history behind success. This, of course, is consistent with the title of the book!

How I Wrote a Book in One Summer – and How You can Too

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Most of us see writing a book as a daunting project – one that could take months, if not years to complete. But it doesn’t have to be this difficult. I began my summer in 2018 with the idea of producing a manuscript that was both clear and comprehensive. And that’s what I was able to do.

I didn’t complete this task out of sheer discipline. In fact I put very little upfront effort into completing the first draft. How?

I all begins with habits. I made a point to start the summer with a new routine. Each morning I would produced about a 500 word chunk that could be added to one of my chapters. As time progressed throughout the summer I began to enjoy the process of writing each morning.

As writing became a daily habit my confidence began to grow. I went from a 10,000 word manuscript to a 25,000 word manuscript to a 40,000 word manuscript. And before I knew it I had completed the first draft of my book.

To be frank I didn’t finish editing the book until the end of the year. What I really did last summer, which I find to be the most difficult part of writing a book, is complete a first draft on little disciplinary effort.

My book, which just came out this January, proves to anyone, including those who hate writing, that book creation doesn’t have to be as tedious as we once thought. The key to success is to start and make writing part of your daily routine.

What is Personal Finance

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What is personal finance? And Why does it matter?

Those are two very interesting and important questions to ask as one either begins their life as adults, or being asking questions they’ve never approached before. For the past five months or so, this blog has predominantly been centered around personal finance, both the investing side, as well as the money management side.

I realized that before I continue this journey with all of you, I need to take a moment to explain what Personal finance actually is. Personal finance clearly deals with how individuals manage their money.

While the topic briefly touches on the analysis and performance of businesses and organizations for investment purposes, it predominantly centers around the individuals’ approach to managing each dollar in and each dollar out.

Personal finance answers questions like:

What are my financial goals? What use do I have for money? What should my investment approach be? How much do I need to be saving? How large should my house purchase be? Should I buy this trinket or save the money?

Many of these questions are simply answered through quiet reflection or by asking your friends and family for feedback. However, some of these more complex questions like how to invest your money, or how to craft a financial plan can often be better answered by a financial advisor.

Why does personal finance matter? 

There are three basic reasons why you should pay attention to your finances:

1. Money has impact

2. Money can be complicated

3. Money is emotional

While we of course don’t have the time to go into the details of Personal Finance in one blog post, I hope this gives you a great picture of what this topic is all about.

Building An Empire: Your Real Estate Investing Options

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Real estate investing has become a sexy topic for many real estate channels, blogs and books. There are those who say buying a home is a great financial step. However those who want to go beyond the typical goal of homeownership, there are a wide variety of options.

Direct vs Indirect vs Hybrid

When you first decide to put money into real estate, you have to ask yourself how much you would like to be involved in the process. For those who want to buy or manage property directly, there is direct real estate investing.

If you don’t want any part in the investment process you can consider the real estate indirect investment options. These are things like REIT (Real Estate Investment Trusts) and syndicated real estate funds.

The hybrid between indirect and direct investing is partnerships. With a partnership you find someone to either provide the money and credit or do the more involved part. Basically you only are require to take part in part of the real estate investing process, whichever you decide as partners.

Step 2: Picking your strategy

If you decide to invest indirectly into an REIT or syndication you will need to do research and decide on one. For those who determine on either a hybrid or direct investment approach exploring strategy is your next step.

There are many strategies out there like flipping, buy and hold, BRRRR method (Buy, Rent, Repair, Refinance, Repeat), property development, house hack and a few others.

Finally: Choosing your Property Type

After picking which strategy to deploy, you have to determine which kind of property you’d like to buy. Examples include single-family, multi-family (duplex, triplex and four-plex), commercial office, commercial retail, industrial, commercial residential (apartments)

Funding

The last step in acquiring property is deciding upon a funding method. There are a few ways to do this. You can either buy the property cash, which of course is less common, or you can buy one using other people’s money (OPM).

Funding a property using other people money can either come from a bank or somewhere else. If you’re using a bank to buy residential property there are two basic kinds of loans that are usually deployed, either a conventional loan or an FHA loan. The FHA loan is basically a loan that requires less of a downpayment in exchange for paying (PMI insurance).

With an unconventional funding source there are usually two places to get it from: the seller (called seller-financing) or outside places. Seller financing can be fairly straightforward but let me explain that the other outside sources of financing can come from friends, acquaintances, or private lenders.

Conclusion:

Whichever form of real estate you decide to buy, whatever strategy you decide to employ,  and whatever funding method us use to buy them, real estate remains a solid investment option. Real estate can be consider a reputable option up there with stocks and business ownership. Next time you’re thinking you want to invest use these steps to uncover your own real estate path.