Perfect Pitch FI

Just started this book by Ramit Sethi and I like its entertaining style so far. Honestly I find it much more entertaining than the white coat investor and I like his sense of humor and he also has the immigrant mentality background. And it’s purpose meshes with my blog, we both want our writing to help people to feel more comfortable about money. Also I like that he emphasizes that there isn’t one right way to get there for everyone. Do you want to save and invest 20% and get there in 30 years or 50% and FIRE (what I did). And we all get to choose how we want to be rich. Does being rich mean to you that you no longer need to work for money, but for your own personal satisfaction if at all? Does being rich mean living in a certain area? Or buying what you want? Or traveling where you want? Or not having to worry about money? Chapter 1: would you rather be sexy or rich (lol)  Why is managing money so hard? One thing is the information overload, all of the things on the news, what peo...

Chapter 8 and 9: The motorway and getting off the motorway And chapter 5 residency and your wealth The author calls the default investing strategy that he thinks you should use “the motorway “to Dublin, based on a saying in the Bogleheads guide to investing. Meaning there are many roads to A place but some roads are faster and more reliable. The fastest and most reliable way is low-cost index fund investing, with annual rebalancing. An example he gives is 40% US stocks, 20% international stocks in 40% bonds but he gives a link to his blog for many other reasonable investing portfolios http://whitecoatinvestor.com/150-portfolios-better-than-yours/ There are five investing factors within your control, risk, diversification, investing expenses, tax efficiency and behavior. Again, there are many factors outside of your control in investing but focusing on these factors will keep you on track on the motorway.  The two main risks are market risk and The risk of not meeting in that your i...

The white coat investor by James Dahle MD.  This is the book we started with in the book club because I feel that it is a great place to start for physicians. It discusses the physician situation in which you spend a lot of time in training and don’t really start to make money until your 30s generally and then you have lots of student loans to pay back. And then physicians often find themselves working so hard that they don’t have time or energy to pay attention to their personal finances. They may have never learned how to save money and may get caught up in keeping up with the Joneses. The downside of this book is that it may not appeal to some women physicians as it is written from a male perspective with a stay at home wife.  Even if you feel this way I think it’s still a great place to get started. Also it may be more helpful for physicians just starting out, but it is never too late to get started. I love the saying “you start by starting!”  Honestly I wanted to jum...

(Skip down to the bottom for a link to a recent podcast episode the author of The Hands Off Investor, Brian Burke made regarding the current state of the market) Section 3: evaluating real estate Next the book dives into how to evaluate the real estate offerings. Different real estate sectors include multifamily, single-family homes, offices/retail, self storage, warehouses, mobile home parks and land. General real estate strategies include buy and hold (hold periods common for 3 to 7 years), buy and flip, and development (considered most risky). Substrategies, in order of less risk and less return, to more risk and potentially more return, include core (least risky, less return more desirable buildings in urban centers), Core plus, value add (common strategy with moderate risk and moderate returns), and subsidized housing. There are also different classes of real estate ranging from class A (newer buildings in nicer neighborhoods) to class D (older buildings in rough neighbo...

In book club this month we review The Hands-Off Investor by Brian Burke about passive real estate (syndication) investing The book is divided into 5 sections 1. Investing in syndications 2. Getting to know the sponsor 3. Evaluating real estate 4. Evaluating offerings and structure 5. The investing process This post will review sections 1 and 2. I like that the book's structure fits to what the author thinks one should evaluate when trying to decide if syndication investing is right for you. After deciding if investing is right for you in chapter 1, finding a sponsor that you can trust and has a good record is the next step.  Personally I use real estate as diversification (currently 10% of my portfolio).  And honestly I’m really not interested in evaluating the numbers (I know that’s not great) however I agree that what’s most important is the sponsor and so I went in because I trusted the sponsors (or the people that referred me to them). The author states he believes that 20...

It depends on how much you need to live on! So the first step would be to see how much you have spent in the past year, or longer, to get an idea. The 4% rule, states that you can live off of 4% of your invested assets and that you will not run out of money. For example, if you have $1 million invested, each year you can pull out $40,000 without having to touch the principle, on average. Certainly if it’s a down year it’s recommended to not take out as much as 4%, and you can take out a little bit more in good years. Personally, as I am more conservative and risk-averse, so I would not want to pull out more than 3%, especially since I have had to retire early due to my health, and I’m also concerned about inflation and I must admit a little fearful in general. The more typical physician might live on about 100 K a year, (aka FATFIRE) so you would need about $3 to $4 million if you were living off of only invested assets for that. It’s good to take into account any additional income you...