101–110 of 245 posts
Rule #0: Be born into a privileged family. Your parents will raise you in a wealthier suburb where the schools are good and you network with other similarly privileged kids. The crime rate is low, so you’re less likely to end up injured or killed by violence. Air pollution is also likely lower, so less odds of death by asthma. Privilege gets you into college, where you study with other even more privileged kids, obta…
Rule 11 deserves a rethink. There is an official policy that cash will lose some % of its value each year! Holding 25% of your wealth in cash is planning to throwing away years of life. For this sort of dead-basic investment advice, there is no point being ready for situations where a cash position is advantageous. People are much more likely to panic, do something stupid or get ground down by inflation. It is better…
I don’t follow the Harry Browne portfolio advice, but I have read Craig Rowland’s very good book about it [0], and I disagree. The Permanent Portfolio has had pretty good overall returns extremely consistently despite its low (25%) stock allocation because it holds four assets with poor correlation and rebalances between them, and because one of them is cash. These assets each do well under different economic conditi…
Rule #0: Be born into a privileged family. Your parents will raise you in a wealthier suburb where the schools are good and you network with other similarly privileged kids. The crime rate is low, so you’re less likely to end up injured or killed by violence. Air pollution is also likely lower, so less odds of death by asthma. Privilege gets you into college, where you study with other even more privileged kids, obta…
How are white males a privileged class? The top 1% sure, but the average white male? If anything, white females are a privileged class.
The way to think about it is take one of those poor white men and imagine he is black while the other things (wealth, schooling, location, etc) remain constant. While anything might happen, statistically that person's outcome would be worse as a black poor man than as a white poor man.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where I've ended up is keeping some money aside to scratch whatever (mostly pretty conservative) investing itch I have and leaving the rest to a financial advisor. He's done stuff for my family for years and my feeling is that especially if I'm not going to actively manage my full portfolio, I'm better off with someone else doing it than just throwing the money into some index funds and calling it a day. (Though ther…
Have you back tested this hypothesis? It’s very unlikely to be true over a long period, say 15 years.
Putting money in a small number of index funds and not even looking at them probably isn't a bad strategy and the costs are pretty low. But it's not bulletproof.
I look at the financial advisor/firm as a form of diversification in part. I also keep my own portfolio small enough to have some (hopefully) intelligent opinion on whether the investments still make sense. (Including a decent weight on index funds.)
Rule 11 deserves a rethink. There is an official policy that cash will lose some % of its value each year! Holding 25% of your wealth in cash is planning to throwing away years of life. For this sort of dead-basic investment advice, there is no point being ready for situations where a cash position is advantageous. People are much more likely to panic, do something stupid or get ground down by inflation. It is better…
You obviously havent had your bank account frozen for no reason. I have! Trying going without cash for 6 weeks, not knowing if transactions have gone through, direct debits have been paid etc etc. Going around in legal loopholes where the bank ombundsman wont talk to you until you have exhausted the banks complaints dept, but the banks complaints dept wont talk to you, so you get no where. Its fucking legal intimidat…
> Rule 7: Don’t use leverage. > Using margin accounts or mortgages (for other than your home) puts you at risk to lose more than your original investment. As this says, margin accounts used in a certain way can put you at risk to lose more than your original investment. However, they are sometimes necessary to make investments with little to no additional risk. For example I may own $50,000 worth of XYZ Corp. and wan…
This isn't really leverage. Your brokerage is just extending you temporary credit to paper over the fact that stock trades take two days to settle. You're never net long more than 100% of your investment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Harry Browne didn’t like TIPs and didn’t think they would protect when things got bad. He preferred holding gold coins in a country outside the one you live in.
Which seems like an utterly unrealistic strategy for most people which likely comes with many problems of its own, especially in the event of a massive financial system collapse.
Rule #0: Be born into a privileged family. Your parents will raise you in a wealthier suburb where the schools are good and you network with other similarly privileged kids. The crime rate is low, so you’re less likely to end up injured or killed by violence. Air pollution is also likely lower, so less odds of death by asthma. Privilege gets you into college, where you study with other even more privileged kids, obta…
This is an awful, overly-simplistic, unproductive, and arguably inaccurate mindset to have in life.
I don’t mean to imply that successful people didn’t work hard. I have worked hard. But had I grown up as some of my primary school colleagues did - on the literal wrong side of the tracks - I likely would not have had nearly the same success in life and would not have a portfolio to worry about in the first place. At best, I’d be hopeful for a union job with a pension.
Browne wrote a number of books I found helpful, such as How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. http://harrybrowne.org/ (corrected title)
(to be fair this is already mirrored in the several rules, Rule 8 and others)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uhm, mattress is optional, but the form of notes (or equivalent) is not. Words have meaning. Cash you have physically and it shelters you from incompetent/rogue financial companies and governments. If you use "cash" to mean something else then what is the word for cash?
Like everyone else, a liquid and very low risk (modulo inflation) financial instrument. (The definition is often a bit broader in financial statements.) I'd posit that, in this day and age, $100K (or whatever) in bank notes is going to do you very little good if you lose access to all your accounts.
You clearly misread my question. I'll rephrase for legibility then: What is the word for cash (as in "physical money not in a bank") if you use "cash" to mean the opposite ("money in a bank")? Is it now a concept so rarely used that term is unnecessary?
Also wow, didn't know you can't buy a car or a house with cash in US anymore, interesting times. Which year did it become illegal?