Category Archive

Happy Halloween! There are Monsters and Gremlins out to gobble up your treats, Freedom Fighter! Except this fright night will happen 365 days this year if you don’t keep watch. Maybe you’re building your war chest, waiting for the opportunity to deploy massive capital. Or, you’re working your steady-as-she-goes savings plan every month. Maybe you’re just keeping that emergency fund full? Somewhere, you’ve got cash. Now some investors like fat stacks of cash – “cash is king” – and some people do not – “cash is a drag.” But hey – some trick-or-treaters like Snickers and some prefer candy corn. Whichever cash camp you fall into, one thing is true: you want the highest interest paid on your savings. Period. …

Here on GYFG, transparency is the name of the game. I put my money where my mouth blog is, and show you everything: both what works and what does not. Today it is time to check under the hood of my own PeerStreet experience, and let you know how it’s going. To recap, it’s been a year since I started investing in hard money loans through the PeerStreet platform. Within five months, I built up my initial $5,000 seed investment to $73,000 and in early 2018 I topped my total account value off to make an even $100,000. As I write, the current value of my total investment (across two accounts) is ~$103,000. I want to show you the actual Peer Street …

Here is part three in this Warren Buffett series (part one & part two), covering a few of the sections I have pulled out from the last 50 years of Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders, which I finished reading in October of 2017. Although the entire 50-year series was filled with a ton of business and investment wisdom, all the pieces that I pulled are from the past seven years. I admit a probable recency bias, whereby after reading almost 700 pages, I remember more of the recent letters than the older ones. Needless to say, you bet I will be reading through all those letters again in the future. For the selections of this post, I pulled Buffett’s insights and comments …

It’s been quite some time since we’ve witnessed the kind of volatility we saw over the past two weeks of trading (1/29/18 to 2/9/18). But I really don’t know how anyone can be surprised that we finally got this long overdue correction in the stock market. Corrections are natural and healthy. Perhaps it’s because we’ve had such a long run of upward motion this time that people acted as if they’ve forgotten this! If you look at the peak to trough correction of the date range referenced above, the S&P 500 experienced a -12.1% decline. These are the types of opportunities that justify building up an opportunity fund (what I like to refer to as “dry powder”). Note: I will use …

Today I am sharing a Post that was originally published on Financial Samurai and is a piece I wrote almost two years ago. With the recent market sell-off, I thought it timely to share this post with you because selling options is best when volatility is elevated. I have always believed that risk is a function of education. The financial media may have you convinced that options are very risky and you may even believe they are weapons of mass destruction. But what if I told you that if you use options the right way (which is not to speculate) that you could actually take less risk using them than by buying stock outright? And in doing so you would increase …

It wasn’t too long ago that I thought in terms of $1,000 to $10,000 buckets. As our income and net worth have grown, so too has my approach to thinking in terms of absolute dollar buckets. As we work our way towards a seven-figure net worth, I can’t help myself but think in terms of $50,000 to $100,000 buckets now. I recently reported our net worth at $664,391, which is broken down into the following buckets (slightly different composition then my December financial report indicates since I have deployed some cash since then): (1) Equity in our home at $180,409 ($450,000 Market Value – $269,591 Loan Outstanding) (2) Company Stock $105,045 ($317,045 market value less zero-interest loan of $212,000) (3) Cash at …

It’s official: the Grim Reaper and I are now partners. However – let me be clear – we have agreed upon a firewall between our respective functions. The Grim Reaper himself will continue to fulfill his duties in transitioning people from life to death (I’m not into the whole blood and guts scene), and I also stay out of the realm of deciding whether someone’s time has expired or not. Additionally, I made him promise that he can’t take anyone earlier then they were naturally going to go or I just wouldn’t be able to participate in this arrangement with a clear conscience. It’s a matter of morals and ethics. My role in this arrangement is solely financial. I agreed to put …

Did you know you can invest alongside the grim reaper? Yes, you can actually profit from death. I know this sounds morbid and probably a bit shady, but let me explain. At the end of this post, I think you will realize that the alternative investment class discussed today provides a win/win for all parties involved, and may just be the perfect addition to your own portfolio. I’m constantly searching for new opportunities to allocate capital, specifically into investments that provide a HUGE margin of safety. This is because, unlike most, I approach investments with a risk focus first. Only after I understand the potential downside do I even begin to contemplate the potential upside. The investment vehicle that allows …