I think May has to be my favorite month of the year to live in the Pacific Northwest. Everything is green and blooming from previous rain showers, and the weather finally gets warm and dry enough to spend an entire day outside with the family.
Most of the year here is cold, cloudy and wet. We spend a lot of time indoors playing board games, reading books, watching movies, hanging out with friends, and trying to stay dry….
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Now that spring is here, the rain is finally starting to dry-up in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). For all the readers that don’t live in the area, we have a very bipolar weather pattern — 4 months of constant rain and clouds in the winter, and then 4 months of absolutely no rain in the summer.
It’s a weather pattern as regular as clockwork…
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I need to admit I made a mistake. At first glance, master limited partnerships ( ‘MLP’ for short) always seemed like the kind of investment I would automatically dislike — With flat share prices, large debt levels and high dividend yields. They ticked a lot of my “don’t invest” boxes pretty quickly.
It should come as no surprise, that I’ve essentially ignored MLP’s for years…
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It’s long been a goal of mine to have a dividend income that roughly matches our family’s annual expenses. I say *roughly*, because in any given year we might have a random irregular expense that causes us to overspend our cash generation a little.
(The purchase of a new car, an expensive family vacation, or repairing the roof on our home would be good examples of this)
This year, I’m going to be pretty close to that goal…
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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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