This has been a banner year and unquestionably the best year in history. We’re completing the sale of an asset by December 2017 that will come in just shy of 5x annual earnings (not bad considering 36 months to 48 months is the norm for the industry it serves). The real benefit is that it gave us time to put together a personal finance product and we can officially kill the questions tab since there is no need to run a forum (too much time and we prefer adding the most value in one shot). All of this is good news for everyone reading this page: first we can give out our entire portfolio management strategy, second we can host more *free* Q&As for anyone who purchases either product and third there will be significantly less questions so we can focus on writing many more differentiated topics for free in 2018. To wrap it all up, on November 25 we will open up a Q&A for those who purchased Efficiency. Okay, okay bonus time… we’re going to meet some people privately in 2018 (more than usual) since we’ll unlikely launch any new product beyond the personal finance book in 2018 (we’re going to buy another internet company and will be drowning in work).
Why We Created A Questions Tab: At first, we assumed that we would create a forum. Then after the questions came in we assumed we would just have a questions tab. Then we realized 95% of the questions were around personal finance: Stocks, Real Estate and Crypto Currencies. Since we have invested a sizable amount in all three, we may as well create the product, sell it and kill the questions tab. This all came down to “demand testing” . Normally a demand test tells you if you should create the idea, in this case, it made a glaring opening for a brand new one. While we’ll lose money on it (just as we did with Efficiency) due to opportunity cost, we think it’s the least we can do and go back to free content and free Q&As. Everyone wins with this set up as we won’t have to answer 20 emails a day.
Why Only Three Categories: We’ll give away part of the punch line, our readership is in their 20s to around 40 years of age. They shouldn’t bother with bonds at that age. If they get rich they will be smart enough to diversify (we’ll include a brief page or two on that after the stock market section). So, we will focus on only those three topics. Our target audience will continue to circle people in their 20s and 30s, they got burned the most and have the most potential. We don’t believe in trying to change people’s opinions (past the age 35 or so) and we have already gotten multiple success stories from people who hit their first million after following a lot of the advice on here.
Introduction to Triangle Investing
We’re still working on the title but we think it is appropriate. A triangle is the strongest shape given that force is evenly distributed along its sides. Look no further than architectural design and you’ll see a lot of information about triangles. In addition, we’re covering the three most important asset classes for wealth. Sure we will touch on cash and bonds… the problem is that cash and bonds are are rarely used for wealth preservation (they are used to protect your money once you have it!). So with that said if you have a better title let us know, below is the introduction:
Timing is really everything, we had no interest in writing an investing book but realized all of the questions coming in from our Questions tab (now discontinued) surrounded investing and personal finance. Luckily, right as we finished Q3 of 2017, we got an offer for a website that we couldn’t refuse. When you suddenly free up 10 hours a week you have a lot more free time on your hands
Our opinions are heavily biased. We think most well off people end up living boring lives: 1) house, 2) a couple of cars, 3) no fun life experiences and 4) live to work when they are already rich. If we think about money as a tool the value begins to change tremendously. There are people who have ~$10M and are miserable because they missed out on life and are already 40-50 years old. Their pursuit of money was nothing more than a trap since they didn’t get to experience life at all. Now of course… We’re not saying money is meaningless. Far from it. There is a balance that needs to be struck and we’ll outline our *opinions* on when the balance is reached. We think everyone should be able to get to ~$1M in net worth by the time they are ~30 if they would like (our baseline value) but in this book we’ll disclose our own personal opinions. The numbers are higher, the timelines are faster and the long-term net-worth number is likely below what most people would expect. Besides. Who wants to die with a $50M net worth? It means you left $50M of fun on the table before the grim reaper hit.
The second item… we would like to highlight is that this is an opinion based product. The reality is that investing should be done entirely by yourself. There are no guarantees in investing. In fact, we would wager that a lot of the things we’re invested in will fail. That is the entire point of diversification. If we invest in say 5 different asset classes and 3 out of five succeed long-term that’s more than enough to live comfortably.
The third item… None of the items here go against Efficiency. If your cash flow is not up to at least $10K a month there is no reason to bother with investing. You’re better off following all of the ideas outlined in Efficiency. Your first course of action is to get two streams of cash flow and there will never be an exception to this rule. If you are currently in a Career making $120K a year, this is not good enough. You should focus on following the rules outlined in efficiency, getting the second source of income to living wage… then think about investing. You’ll need money to buy ads and scale your business.
The fourth item… Now that we’ve beaten the main points to death, the last item is coming to your own conclusions. While we are giving out what we’re investing in as of January 1 2017, we would recommend checking back in every year or two to see if we’ve flipped the portfolio.
The fifth and final item…. Our numbers are not for everyone. Some people want $100M+, other people only need $500K so please keep this in mind when looking at our opinions. If you plan on having more or less money, that will make an enormous difference on your portfolio management strategy. Our numbers (rough approximations) are given out in the first chapter which will give you an idea of the risk tolerance we run with. The three asset classes we will cover are: 1) Crypto Currencies, 2) Stocks and 3) Real Estate.
Table of Contents: 1) Financial Benchmarks and Overview; 2) Overview of Stocks; 3) Overview of Real Estate; 4) Overview of Crypto Currencies; 5) Overview of Bonds/CDs; 6) Portfolio Overview by Age; 7) Putting it All Together. The Table of contents is certainly shorter, that said the length of the product is likely going to exceed Efficiency (at least similar) by the time we are done with it. The best part, is all of it will essentially be original content since it is more of an opinion based book. When it comes to investing there is no “right” way to do anything so each reader is going to make their own adjustments. Will you use a 1031 exchange to build a small real estate portfolio that is gifted to your future kids? Will you skip real estate entirely and get exposure through REITs? Will you ignore crypto currencies which are likely the most important innovation we will see in our lifetime? (yes you can still be rich without them) Will you focus on nothing but small cap stocks? So on and so forth.
A List of Great Updates… For You
1) More Frequent Interaction: By organizing as such we can now do more frequent Q&As in 2018. All of the content will be out and you won’t have to pay for any questions going forward. We won’t have the time to create any new products unfortunately. Even if there was demand we already know (and see) that 2018 is going to be a lot of work. The good news is that Q&As will be frequent and free for all of the people who enjoy our work…. 2) Release of All ToolsBy creating an opinion based product, we think sales will be lower relative to Efficiency but it has been worth it as several people have already implemented a lot of the strategies successfully. No one will agree with everything in the product but at least our tools will be out there for a few bucks… 3) More Meet Ups: With the structure set up if you’ve built a relationship with us, you can expect us to reach out if we’re ever in your area. (you know who you are!) While we anticipate drinking out of a fire hose for all of 2018, this usually results in a want and need to go out more when a task is complete… 4) New Topics: We’ll be able to post on differentiated topics going forward, while our post on selling an internet company wasn’t popular we think it will be a *huge* topic in the future since it’s where we’re investing a lot of time (we are biased of course). We live in an era where you can personally reach millions of people and be paid for your efforts without being tied down by some signaling entity (a prestigious firm) that grants you the right to an “important opinion” 5) Ideas Include: We are becoming more interested in: 1) scaling and fixing internet companies, 2) crypto currencies and the broader impact it will make – a large business opportunity for anyone young out there and 3) commercial real estate. We dabbled in commercial real estate in the past as highlighted by some older posts but we should probably revisit them again. 6) More Ideas Driven by *You*: Probably the best update, is we’ll allow the readership to drive more posts here and there by posting on twitter. It has been interesting to see the audience evolve and we’re going to keep up with what our readers what to hear since it has changed quite a bit over the last five years. We can’t think of a better way to help than to write on what people want to know more about.
