The holidays are the giving season for charitable organizations, and if you are like us, your mailbox is overflowing with requests. We split up our charitable giving among causes that are close to us and ones that do good in the world at large. One of the challenges we have is weighing the relative impact our dollars can have on causes that are distant and … Continue reading Holiday Charitable Giving – Where To Focus?
It has been an interesting year for cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin just topped its all-time high this week at almost $20,000 – up 1.6x from last year at this time. The private, all-digital currency still has its skeptics, but it is getting broader acceptance among financial services companies and institutional investors. The pandemic may be remembered as Bitcoin’s coming of age. I wondered back in April if … Continue reading Bitcoin’s Coming Of Age?
Is there anyone more interesting & successful in the business world right now than Elon Musk? Really – I am in awe of this guy and all he is accomplishing. The sad thing, is that I bet ‘against’ him three years ago and can’t believe how wrong I was. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, Musk is flipping 4 entire industries on … Continue reading The Worst Stock Bet I Ever Made
Late at night on Halloween a notification came through on my watch that didn’t make sense: a PayPal billing alert. It said that I had a charge from eBay for $71. I buy a lot of things oddball things on eBay, but I couldn’t recall anything quite that expensive. When I looked, I saw a I had paid a recurring fee to eBay for 5 … Continue reading Paying Attention?
With the Presidential election this week, I thought I would do a quick portfolio check to see where our retirement portfolio is sitting before the markets react. It seems a big enough change-point, that I would keep track of where we are at – at this moment in time. The good news is that despite the pandemic sell-off in March, we’ve weathered the 2020 storm(s) … Continue reading Election 2020 – Where Are We At?
If you’re not familiar with the name Bill Bengen, you probably are familiar with his work. Back in 1994, he published his Trinity Study suggesting that a 4% withdrawal rate of retirement savings would be ‘safe’ for most retirees, based on historical financial returns. Bengen – now long retired himself – has been in the news updating his thoughts on the ‘4% Rule’, as he … Continue reading Optimistic Update To The 4% Rule
I read through a good online discussion of retirement spending/investment probabilities this weekend. Someone was asking early retirees in a forum if they felt a 90% probability of out-living your retirement nest egg was enough, based on a online calculator like FIREcalc. I’ve written about FIREcalc probabilities before and using Monte Carlo analysis to help pressure test your FIRE plan. It is a great tool. … Continue reading Is 90% ‘Good Enough’ Odds?
I recently listened to an interesting podcast with investor Peter Schiff of Euro-Pacific Capital. He’s the guy that earned the title ‘Dr. Doom’ when he correctly forecast the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession. He wrote a book about it two years before it happened. Schiff – a self-described libertarian capitalist – did a 3 hour interview with Joe Rogan recently. He raised … Continue reading Bubble Economy?
I love cars, but I hate car dealers. Unfortunately, it seems that over-engineered, unreliable electronics are making us more reliant on dealer service than ever. That makes cars more costly than ever. Related: Sports Cars: ‘Every Day This Man Takes A Vacation’ Our sports car recently suffered a blow to its stereo/navigation system. I stopped at the grocery store a couple miles from our house … Continue reading Taken To The Cleaners – Dealer Service
People make investments out of many things that they enjoy as hobbies – classic cars, antique watches, sports memorabilia, and other collectibles. I have a lot of collections of things, but I’ve never viewed any of them that way. One of the biggest collections we have is LEGO models & sets. I have many sets from when I was a kid and we’ve bought & … Continue reading Colorful, Collectible Bricks
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