The Q&A this month wasn’t great due to redundant questions. So we’re going to have to review the basics and explain why we don’t answer the same old tired questions “Hi i have $200K how do i invest” or “but i am better than average at investing” or “should i switch jobs for a $10K raise”. All of these questions have been answered so many times and make zero sense to debate. If you put numbers into an excel sheet you’ll see that it never works out. So lets go ahead and begin.
No Dating Advice: We left that arena about 5-years ago. We realized that the vast majority of men who struggle in this arena are in two groups: 1) extreme nerds with no personalities and 2) unsuccessful people. Since the first one is easily solved (you go out a lot and force yourself to be social more and more), this leaves us with the second group. The second group will not like any content on this blog. We don’t sugar coat things, we don’t sell dreams like Tony Robbins and we don’t wait around trying to get people to take action. As we’ve said motivation is for losers.
If you need motivation, you will fail in your dating life anyway. It isn’t hard to talk to people in any setting: bar, club, coffee shop, grocery store or at a park. All you have to do is get used to it. The people who feel uncomfortable talking to strangers are typically extremely introverted or scared of being rejected. The big issue here is that fear of rejection means you actually care about the opinion of a stranger (again not a good thing). So. In the end? You have to focus on becoming successful financially (and physically appealing by being in shape). After those two things are done, all you have to do is talk to tons of people every week until your social skills improve. It’s really that simple and if someone is too lazy (or weird) to do this… their issues are too big for us to solve. It has been many years and people still claim that this is hard (it isn’t). Making money is 100x harder unless the person is extremely unattractive or strange.
Onto Making Money: Unless you get to a million dollars you shouldn’t bother with investing. This means you should not be “researching ideas”. You either dollar cost average into index funds or you create a “forever portfolio” which is basically 20% gold/crypto, 20% bonds, 20% stocks, 20% cash, 20% real estate. There are other versions of this but you get the point. You essentially want to get an equal amount of every major asset class and rebalance every 2-3 years or so (until you have a million at minimum).
Why would you do this? You should be TOO BUSY to watch and manage an active portfolio. If you didn’t even get to a million dollars it means you don’t make enough money. People seem to forget this part. If you’re making $100K a year, this just isn’t enough to get rich. Never has been and never will be. Even if you make $10,000 after taxes per month, it’s going to take you nearly a decade to get to a million (you will always have some living expenses).
Pause for a second. Run the math. If you only have $250K this means that you’re probably only making around $10K after tax a month (or less). How exactly are you going to get rich this way? You can’t. If you make $10K a month after tax that’s around $220K gross income (job/career).
220K/year = $110/hour. You should never think in hourly wages but we’re using it as an example. If you decided to work 50% more hours? That equals $110K per year. Guess what… That means your investment portfolio of $250K needs to generate at MINIMUM of 44% returns just to offset your opportunity cost. The chances are next to none that you will do this successfully. Only the top investors in the world could do this with a small capital base.
Review: you should ALWAYS choose to start a biz or get another form of income. Why? The 50% in extra income is LESS RISKY. You can guarantee you hit market returns (say 10%) while also making 50% more.
It gets better.
The final part is also always ignored. If you work a career making $220K and create a biz making $110K per year… You’re probably a millionaire already! Why? You can sell that business for $330K or so. It is insane that people don’t realize this when businesses are sold every hour of every day world wide. So not only do you have to beat the market by 40% you also have to beat the exit multiple upon selling a business. So if you are worth $110/hour or so… Guess what? You now have to generate 150%+ returns every year to justify spending your time investing. Good luck with that.
Life Stories: Life stories never add any value. This is how social interactions work. People use a lot of meaningless descriptive language when telling stories. This is great for a social interaction and is an utter failure for figuring out problems. If you can’t convey your issue quickly, you don’t know what the issue is.
When you’re trying to find answers you want to delete ALL descriptions and delete ALL of your personal background. Why? You reduce all of the variables. The chances of a truly unique situation? Probably under 1%.
If you look at all our old Q&As it’s the same thing and we started deleting them. “Looking to invest $300K, $400K, $350K” and none of them even have a second form of income. Go back to the above and you’ll see that you’re wasting your own time.
The second form of wasted time is “job changes”. Two different jobs paying about the same +/- 5-10%. This doesn’t matter either. Sorry. It doesn’t matter at all. If you make $110K or $120K there is no difference. You want to choose the position that either 1) leads to faster promotions – step up in income or 2) the one that frees up your time – start a second income stream.
The strange part is that we’ve said this for 7-8 years now and the people who have listened to us are also getting tired of it and message us privately! It is a waste of your time and ours. If you’re worried about an extra $5K you’re not going to get rich. Period.
How Do You Get Rich? We gave an extremely clear way to get rich in Efficiency. It will work for anyone with ambition. If you want the basics it is this: 1) choose performance based income and 2) save as much as you can to start any business you are good at – we recommend online sales. This is an ever green strategy.
People come into the Q&A over and over and over again expecting their situation to be different. It isn’t. If you expect to get rich off one position… those days are a relic of the past. Sure you might get ultra lucky and land as the #3 employee of the next Google. And. The chances are slim. So better to prepare for an evergreen strategy. Also. You can continue searching for the next Google as long as you spend your nights working on another project. If this is too hard for you? Then enjoy a lifetime of suffering.
It is better to put the pain up front, get rich ASAP and never worry about it again. The people who follow the evergreen strategy are rich by their 30s and get to enjoy 50 years of fun. People who try to short cut it usually end up falling behind every single year. They are never able to enjoy life (they peaked in high school/just after college and fell into a spiral of despair).
This Website Isn’t for Everyone: Our guess is that a lot of people found this and won’t like the content here as we don’t sell magic pills. We don’t sugar coat information. We say everything straight/direct/blunt so there is no misunderstanding. If this is “difficult” then the person is certainly not going to survive a negotiation or slog through long hours when everything seems hopeless.
This website is designed for people who have a chance in the first place. People who come on here and cry about being “behind” get no remorse from us. Either get onto the right track now (ie. today), or just quit and become a drain on society. It isn’t our life. If someone gets the concept here they can dig themselves out at age 20, 30, 40 etc.
Look Around: If you look around right now, you’re seeing who the real winners were in real time. The people who were making a killing are suddenly silent. Why? They only had one form of income. Again. This is a death sentence.
Cannot put that message out there enough. If you have income from different business lines that chances of going to are unlikely. We can use our own items as an example: online sales way up, real estate income definitely down and investment portfolio is up. You can argue that we should look into brick and mortar but we’re involved in three different online niches: two are booming right now and one is down 30-40%. Does this matter? No because the net is positive. Ie. diversification works.
To be clear here we empathize with the people getting killed by this and we do not believe it was un-preventable. That is a critical distinction. While we can feel bad for the people impacted by it, we cannot sit here and say it was “inevitable” because it wasn’t. There was a 12-year bull market (longest in history) where you could have started at least one form of additional income between 2008 and 2020. Relying on a single source just because it was going well isn’t the greatest strategy when you had a clear opportunity to develop multiple forms of income.
Conclusion: For the newer readers, please read this and understand that the major views will never change. If this is a problem then the blog is not for you. We only tailor to people who are self motivated and willing to run basic math into an excel sheet. Given that our angle is niche we generally only attract the top 5% or so of the population. With that out of the way we’ll get back to regular posting soon.
