When you think about it, money is a pretty funny thing. For a couple thousand years humans used precious things to represent this idea of “money” — ivory, colorful shells, precious gems, livestock, silver, and most notably gold. This worked well for humanity for a very long time… as long as the values were small.
The general inconvenience of physically carrying a whole bunch of “precious stuff” eventually gave way to paper certificates…
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Wow, what a difference a month makes! This time last month, the Tako family was buried under a veritable mountain of snow. Now, one month later, spring has definitely sprung.
Temperatures are warmer, and there’s more natural light due to the annual daylight savings time shift. This has made a huge difference in how much daylight we have, and I find myself itching to get yard-work done and prep the bbq for grilling season…
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Simple, yet profound. The longer I live and the (hopefully) wiser I become, the more I realize that the most of the important concepts in life boil down to just a few simple ideas. Simple, yet very very important.
Ideas like, “Spend less than you make”, “Optimize for the common case” or “Invest for the long term by buying and holding”. These are exceedingly simple concepts… yet when they’re practiced for an entire lifetime these ideas can lead to incredible financial success.
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Greater risk means greater rewards. That’s the mantra we’ll taught about stock market investing. Take the risk of investing in the stock market and you could lose money… but you might also make considerably more than you would in a bank account, or money market fund.
“Without risk there is no reward.”
That’s the story we’re told as newbie investors anyway…
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Last time I wrote one of these “Lessons On Investing” posts, the chosen stock was a HUGE success. It was one of those successes that everyone dreams about investing in. The kind that make you rich. I still criticize myself for not investing in the company 20 years ago. That company was Apple, Inc.
Investing successes are great of course, but we can also learn from investing failures. Some people even say you learn more from failures than you do from successes…
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What a difference a month makes! After the precipitous drop of our net worth in December, I wasn’t expecting to breach the $3 million mark again for awhile… but January was an exceedingly kind month. Our net worth came back with a vengeance — In our taxable accounts alone we saw a $125k increase in January…
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Every year right around the end of January, I try to plan out my dividend income and capital allocation goals for the year. I started doing this in 2017, continued the process in 2018, and still find the process useful enough that I’m doing it again in 2019.
At the most basic level, my planning process amounts to putting excess cash to work from our Big Fat Cash Pile AND trying to put that cash into smart places that generate a growing stream of dividend income. The devil is in the details of course…
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I’m not going to sugar coat the obvious here… the Tako family net worth declined in 2018. The year 2018 turned out to be a perfect showcase for stock market volatility.
Most of the year the stock market was in a happy place — The economy was growing, consumers were borrowing and spending more, and unemployment was also super low (all of which are important ingredients for a rising stock market).
It looked as if 2018 was going to be yet another year of positive stock market returns…
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December is gone and a new year has begun! Now that 2019 is here, it’s time I did one of those final “tally-up” blog posts which detail all of our annual numbers. I’m usually just as curious as you guys to see how much we spent … and earned in dividends for 2018!
This last year was just a blur of activity…
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