As a writer of a public blog about money and investing, I get plenty of feedback from the internet. Not all of it is positive. There are definitely trolls. Sometimes though, people ask really insightful questions that are worth sharing. Sometimes even the trolls ask really good questions.
Today’s post is about one such question. A reader recently wrote to me and asked…
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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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Unique thinking has always been something of a rarity among the human race. Humans are social creatures that like to fit in. We love to talk, tell stories, share ideas, and even copy some of the best ideas. We also tend to follow the people we believe to be authorities.
This behavioral tendency leads to fads and faddish behavior. Take for example Tulip-mania…
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To understand how our February went down, you first have to understand that we were “snowed-in” for a significant portion of the month. The local news called it “Snowmageddon”, but my kids called it “fun”…
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If you spend any time reading this blog (or other financial independence blogs), you might begin to develop something of a false impressions about this whole financial independence thing — specifically that we’re really hardcore people. Extremists.
Occasionally I get emails from people saying, “It’s great what you’ve achieved, but you’re so hardcore I could never do that…”
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In 1981 a researcher named Ola Svenson asked a series of students in Sweden and the United State how they would rate their driving ability. The result — a full 93% of the U.S. students rated their driving ability as “above average”, and 69% of the Swedish students did the same.
Clearly it’s impossible for the entire 93% to be above average…
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When you read blogs or news articles about geoarbitrage, it’s almost always the childless couples that travel the world. They leveraging the lower cost living of regions like Southeast Asia, Central or South American, and even Eastern Europe.
These “nomads” will stay in a location for a couple of months, enjoying that locale to its fullest…
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As a child of the 1980’s, I was among the generation of kids that grew-up with the first really affordable home computers and game console systems. These early computers and game consoles taught us all the important skills we needed to succeed in life — Stomp on the bad guys to win. Eat the dots and avoid the ghosts…
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If you remember back from high school history class, the Luddites were a group of English textile workers in the 19th century who smashed textile machinery as part of a labor protest. The Luddites were unhappy with new machinery taking their highly-skilled (and decently paid) jobs, and replacing them with low-skill, low-paid jobs operating modern textile machines.
Now days, the term luddite is more often used to refer to “someone who is opposed or resistant to new technologies or technological change.”
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