When everything’s going great, people like to take the credit for their good fortune, but when things go south, they start blaming something or someone else. With investing, when people lose money, they like to blame the money and the pursuit of money for their own problems. And they blame the players and actors underlying the money – the market, wall street, financial advisors – for putting them in their precarious financial situation. They blame everybody but themselves.
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Warren Buffett has become a household name due to his massive success in the investing world. What makes him unique is that his story, and the investments he makes, are not particularly compelling. He does not take big swings at risky investing plays. Instead, he looks for high-quality companies that are fairly valued and invests heavily.
In 60% of cases where a family’s fortune is blown, it’s usually exhausted in one generation by the children of the person who created the wealth, according to Roy Williams, president of wealth consultancy The Williams Group. In 90% of the cases where a fortune is blown, it’s gone by the second generation, by the time the grandchildren die.
How do life insurance companies make money? From the law of averages. On average, the life insurance company collects more in life insurance premiums than it will ever have to pay out in death benefits. That’s because with hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of policyholders with life insurance policies, most pay more in premiums than their families will collect in death benefits.
The camp seeking passive income to increase your retirement savings with safe consistent returns? Or do you fall under the camp seeking to build wealth through a compounding passive income stream?
No matter which camp you fall under, no doubt you’ve considered both stocks and real estate as passive investment options and the reason you’ve sought out passive income opportunities is because you either don’t have the time or feel like you don’t possess the expertise to actively trade stocks or actively invest in real estate.
Nobody likes road and freeway construction. It’s loud, annoying and slows traffic.
How many times have you cursed while waiting for a road worker to turn his sign from STOP to SLOW? And how many times have you passed the same construction site for months on end wondering when it was ever going to be completed and why so many workers were standing around.
What comes to mind when you look at the chart above? What could the chart possibly be tracking? The EKG of a defective heart? Altitude measurements of the various Tour de France stages? The stress level of an air traffic controller during peak hours? None of the above. The above chart represents the Bitcoin price over the past three months.
In the modern connected, Internet age, following the herd may not only be ill-advised but also downright dangerous – in both social and financial matters. On the social side, connected devices and social media have spawned various fads and crazes of varying levels of stupidity and danger, with some fads even resulting in deaths. Some of the most unbelievably stupid recent stunts have included the duct tape challenge, the car surfing challenge, and the choking challenge just to name a few. So what explains this mass madness?
Privacy anywhere is hard to find these days, but on the Internet, it simply doesn’t exist unless you really put a lot of time, money and effort into it. In an age of interconnected devices, your every step and action is being tracked and monitored whether you think so or not. Your cellphone tags your location every second of every minute of every day. Your Google search log records your private thoughts, interests, and impulses.
In business, there are two ways to improve the bottom line, either by 1) putting your assets to more productive use to improve the inflow of income or 2) reducing the outflow of expenses. In investing, to improve cash flow, you can either 1) find investments with the better returns for the cash you already have or 2) reduce your expenses to free up more cash for your current investments.