It’s now late December and the year 2017 is drawing to a close. For the stock market it’s been a pretty incredible year — the S&P 500 has returned 18.76%, and the Dow has returned 24.51%.
It’s years like this when many investor thoughts turn to harvesting those gains, and rebalancing portfolios into neat orderly asset allocations…
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This blog post all started with me throwing two gingerbread houses in the trash.
Every year our kids go to this annual holiday party and make cute little gingerbread houses. The kids enjoy a few minutes of fun, and then we take our gingerbread houses home after the party.
In a day or two they “mysteriously” get thrown in the trash. I feel really wasteful when I do it…
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Woohoo! Today marks the two-year anniversary of MrTakoEscapes! Yes, I’ve been blogging for two full years now! With 206 posts published, I figured somebody would have tried to stop me by now!
In celebration of this personal milestone, I decided to take a little break from my usual posts and celebrate with the ultimate in decadent beverages…
Read moreLast week I popped the big question — What would you do with $10 Million Dollars? I got a ton of great responses from readers in the comments. (Apparently having a lot of money is very a popular idea. Go figure!)
Even though you can spend $10 million dollars in a million different of ways, I found many reader responses had similarities…
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Wow, it’s December already? The month of November absolutely flew by this year. Time flies when you’re recovering from a tiring month of overseas travel I guess.
At the beginning of every month, I write this regular post to review our expenses, dividends and investment changes for the prior month…
Read moreHoly Tentacles! Have you looked at the stock market recently? In the span of two weeks my portfolio shot-up by 10%. That’s incredible!
The stock market is having a holiday party, and we’re all invited! But what exactly is moving this crazy market? Is it tax changes? Is it politics? Should we even care?
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Last week I was shaking my metaphorical fist at judgy relatives, and expressing my frustration about the consumerist culture here in the States. It’s hard for people to believe that we actually choose frugality, rather than having it forced on us. Despite our financial independence and growing portfolio we see little need to increase our spending.
Not everybody believes us though…
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Happy Holidays! It’s a big holiday weekend in the United States, and the biggest shopping weekend of the year. If you’re the sort of person who reads financial independence blogs (instead of shopping), you’re probably hanging-out at home with family.
The holidays are the time of year when families gets together. Mostly to do a lot of eating, and plenty of talking. Our family is no exception. We eat. We talk. We play a few board games. We eat some more…
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Profit Margins. For a business, profit margins are the difference between incredible success and incredible failure.
Maintaining big profit margins is no easy task — only a few companies can maintain large profit margins over long periods of time. In it’s heyday Microsoft (MSFT) sported net profit margins of nearly 40%…
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