Tag Archives: System

Atomic Habits: What I Learned from James Clear’s Book

business, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We all know habits are important – whether for our personal fitness or our finances. Yet nearly all of us acknowledge the fact that we don’t have the best habits for our personal development.

This book, which I read and reflected on the last two weeks, revealed just how important habits are. I took away many points – some of which I already knew and some of which were completely foreign.

In summary, I learned that habits are crucial for success. They form by a cue and often are formed in large part by our environment. Controlling your environment is a huge part of success. Making your habits Obvious, Attractive, Easy and Satisfying is what the book was really about.

One thing that really stood out to me was the fact that many of the most successful people got to where they are because of environment and habits. Good habits can come from accountability partners, from creating a good environment or simply working to create the obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying habits the author talks about.

I would highly recommend the book for anyone interested in habits or personal development.

Getting on the Grid: The Importance of Communication

business, Communication, Success, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We all like to think, especially here in the U.S., that we’re capable of doing nearly all of the things we set or minds to– and doing them well.

While it’s certainly true that almost anything we set our minds to can be done well, the reality is that we have to pick a few things to become great at. Everything else has to either be left in a mediocre/neutral/average state, delegated or abandoned.

While this might sound like a negative, pessimistic view, it’s actually the truth. There is only so much energy, time and resources in our limited life to do everything we set out to do.

With that in mind, we can understand that facilitating our strengths and weaknesses will ultimately determine our success in life. A big part of this is delegation and communication.

Communication, at it’s simplest level, is just transferring knowledge or feelings from one party to another. And the main way this happens is through connection–through authentic mutual understanding.

Your ability to connect, and therefore communicate, plays a massive role of where you’ll be in 20 years. Take time to focus on it, focus on your strengths, and focus on others.

Does Active Management Have a Place in the Modern Investment Portfolio?

business, investing, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As index funds have become more and more popular a rising question has been, does active management still make sense for the average investor? Answer is of course not simple enough for a yes or no answer. However there are a few pros and cons we can look at for the two options. First let’s look at the advantages of passive management:

1) Relative autonomy 

Time is often saved from having passive investments. While of course there is initial research that goes into selecting the underlying ETF’s or mutual funds, once set up your strategy you will have relatively low time costs going forward.

2) Lower expenses

With passive management comes low expenses. Over the long term expenses can eat into  a large portion of your returns so paying close attention to this is crucial.

3) Lower taxes

Active management usually means less trading and less trading means both less transaction costs and less capital gains tax. Both of these add up in the long term.

Now that we’ve covered a few of the pros of passive management let’s dive into some of the pros of the alternative…

1) Potential for greater returns

By definition a passive manager can’t meaningfully beat their respective benchmark. However with active management everything changes. There is also ways a chance for outperformance. Of course the flip side of this double-edged sword is that you can underperform, which is often the case.

2) Lower volatility

Depending on the management style you are able to experience lower volatility in your investments from active management.

So which should you choose? After everything is said and done the thing that matters the most is your returns relative to the corresponding benchmark index. For example if you’re comparing a large-cap active fund verses and S&P 500 index fund.

Once you’ve selected your funds for comparison you need to determine if a) your fund has outperformed the benchmark in the past enough to cover expenses and additional active costs and b) will the fund continue to perform this way or better in the future.

If you can answer yes for both of these questions you may have a great candidate for an active portion of your portfolio.

The last option you have available is to execute the active management your self. This is a whole different story that deserves it’s own separate discussion for a different post. For the time being focus on comparing returns both pasts and potential for the future.

Maximizing Your Tax- Advantaged Money: How Much You Need to Make The Most of Tax-Free Money

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Some of the best tax-advantages are provided by the government for retirement. For example just the 401K alone lets you put aside $19K per year into your employer-sponsored retirement plan. In addition you are allowed to contribute $6K (as of 2019) into an IRA. You can also open these accounts as a Roth account.

A Roth account, whether 401K or IRA allows your contributions to grow tax-free after you pay taxes upfront. This is in contrast to the traditional 401K and IRA which each are contributed to pre-tax but only grow tax-differed. Meaning, you aren’t taxed until you decide to take your money out.

But in addition to these two massive tax-advantaged accounts, you are also able to set aside an additional $3.5K into an HSA(Health Savings Account) account. The account is for the purposes of health expenses. However if you decide, say, when you’re 65 that your HSA is large enough and that you won’t need all of it, you can take out as much as you’d like for non-health purposes. The only catch is that the withdrawal is taxed.

So in essence your HSA can become a glorified IRA if you decide you don’t need it for medical expenses!

Each of these three options together amount to $28,500 a year. In order to take advantage of the full benefit you will need to earn about $85K to $95K in most states so that you can still pay your living expenses.

The bottom line: there are many options for tax-advanced money. It just comes down to making enough and budgeting wisely. So what do you think, is it possible for the average personal to maximize their contributions?

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

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Building An Empire: Your Real Estate Investing Options

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Different Stock Investing Strategies

business, stocks, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I am going to briefly cover the top most widely used “investment” strategies for stocks. Technically not all of these methods are investing because a few of them involve short term trading.

1. Stock Index Mutual Funds

There are many types of indexes. Indexes are essentially a predetermined basket of stocks that are formulated using a set of rules. For example the most widely used index, the S&P 500, is an index that incorporates the 500 largest companies in the US and weighs them in the index accordingly. There are other indexes such as small-cap indexes or tech stock indexes. The bottom line is that with an index you are purchasing a tiny portion of a large basket of US stocks that is going to reflect your sector of choice.

2. Actively Managed Mutual Funds

Actively managed indexed funds are very similar to indexes except for 1 key difference: They aren’t bound by a predetermined set of guidelines. For example an active mutual fund might have a focus on large-cap stocks or international stocks, yet there aren’t any rules on how much of each of these have to be purchased. This is different from an index where the predetermined weight of each stock is set in stone. Out of this difference comes an increase in management fees because of the funds active, and therefore more costly management structure.

3. Value Investing

This is the method used by the smartest and most successful investors (in my opinion). Warren Buffet is the most famous example of this. Value investing involves determining a company’s value (regardless of current perceived value) by looking at a balance sheet and income statements using fundamental analysis. As the investor sees a price drop well below it’s determined real value the value investor can seize up good deals and hold on for the long-term.

4. Day Trading

This is a common strategy by short-term investors who use primarily technical analysis (looking at charts and trends) to make “investing” decisions about which stocks to buy and then sell quickly for a profit. The risky thing about this is that if you accidentally buy a stock or ETF that suddenly drops in price, you could get stuck with a plummeting investment that was truly overvalued.

5. Random Strategy

This strategy is specifically for people who don’t know what they’re doing and don’t even pretend to try to act like it. They randomly purchase stocks that “sound cool” and then hope that they rise in price. By far this is the stupidest strategy just behind day trading. You can lose your shirt much easier with mindless/random investing or day trading than you can with the other strategies I outlined above.

Conclusion:

Whatever you do, please don’t choose route 5, and preferably strategy 4 as well. Not only is day trading risky and the fees expensive, it has also be statistically been proven to outperform traditional investing methods over the long-term.

Money: Where it Comes From

Currency, gold, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Most people like money. They either collect it, or simply view it as a means to buy their next meal. The fact remains: money is useful. But why do we used money and where did it come from?

It is commonly thought that money arose as a result of the need to barter. This isn’t necessarily the case. There isn’t any society that we know of run completely on barter, even in ancient times. However people did barter a little, and the rest they either gifted or gave away as a form of debt.

At some point the use of debt was coupled with the use of commodity currency. Depending on the people group or the time period in which it was traded, money could be shells, wheat, precious metals, and eventually physical coins. It was after this first occurrence of coins around 600 B.C. by the Lydians that coins started to become more commonly used.

As time progressed, and more and more groups of people used coins, a representative form of money emerged. This was basically paper or some other useless thing, that was available to trade for something of value, like gold. These “certificates” became more and more widespread.

Other societies have since gone back and forth between representative money and actual commodity currencies. The U.S. started out with gold and silver coins as its money. At some point it started a gold certificate or what’s known as “the gold standard”. These could be traded in for a physical amount of gold. Then, with the actions of President Nixon, the gold standard was abolished and we have since been using what’s called fiat currency.

Fiat Currency is just paper, or electronic money, that can’t be turned in for any amount of gold or silver. The only way it has value is because the government says it does. The very nature of fiat currency, as with most currencies, is one of inflation. Since we have gone off the gold standard, prices have “gradually” gone up. What used to cost $1 now costs $10.

The beauty of our current system is that instead of bartering or becoming indebted every time we want something, we are able to trade currency for things of value. In giving someone a dollar, we are giving them something that is widely able to be “traded” for something else of value.

While our system of money in the U.S. certainly isn’t perfect, it has done a great job in facilitating the transfer of assets, resources and services from one side of the economy to the other.