Car and Cash-Flow Update

I jumped the gun, thinking I'd be able to get rid of the Subaru very soon, and move forward with purchasing a less costly vehicle. However, the buyers-to-be spooked, and I'm left with very little cash right now after I fully paid the car off to have the title handy to make for an easy sale.

Good thing my financier is flexible enough to "re-finance" the car again, giving me the same terms, same interest rate, same balance. Hopefully this is completed by week-end so that I can use my cash for something that I want to write about soon.

I recently applied for an unsecured loan from Prosper.com to temporarily ease my own personal cash crunch (that coincided with this summer's global credit crunch) from paying off the car in full, and my own 5-digit loan to my brother to buy down the rates of his revolving accounts. The way Prosper.com operates today facilitates the borrowing of money; it's quite easy. Lending, however, can be as perplexing as creating models to forecasting real estate cycles. The process of loaning people money is mechanically simple enough. Calculating risks and identifying hedging strategies is the pain.

Anyhow, the reception from lenders for my "loan application" was overwhelming. I suppose my now sky-high credit score, low running expense balance, and very low DTI ratio fueled the clamor from lenders.

What'll exacerbate my Prosper.com lenders is the fact that, once my old auto financier comes online with my old car loan, I'll drop Prosper.com like it's totally faux pas. I'm sure I was the Holy Grail of a borrower to my Prosper.com lenders, but oh well.

Once I have my auto loan, I'll have nearly $25K on-hand-- that I already have plans for. Come back soon, and see what I have planned for it! I think many of you will be shocked.

A Quick, Summarized Update

If you're one of the few that have been trying to follow this blog and lost hope from my lack of updates, my apologies! After speaking with one of my colleagues last night, I've decided I need to recommit to periodically post updates in some way, shape or form.

Just a real, quick 64,000 ft view of my personal fiscal updates:

- Just as everyone else has, the Retiree Portfolio has taken a beating from this past month's worth of market freefall. The great benefit of proper asset allocation, however, is the percentage loss of the Retiree Portfolio is nearly half that of the broad market indices. This comes at a time where Portfolio construction is about 80% complete, and therefore a bit bond-heavier from its final composition.

- I stopped thinking with my ego, my brain took over, and changed auto insurance coverage. This immediately saved me $1K / year.

When I got a substantial raise and moved away from the folks' nest 3 years ago, the first thing I did was buy a $50,000+ performance car. Then, I went ahead and bought my own insurance coverage from Wawanesa. Granted, Wawanesa is one of the most affordable providers out there, but after a couple of accidents and moving traffic violations, my insurance bill nearly doubled to $4K / year. Now, a couple years of playing nice and repairing my record, with two cars being covered (my own and my mother's) the premium has now dwindled by a third or so. Imagine my surprise when, for kicks and laughs, I called my parents' auto insurance provider who estimated that I could save yet another $1K! I couldn't resist the offer.

- When I purchased my latest car, something far more dependable than anything I've owned over the last few years because it's Japanese, for one thing, it still had an extended warranty that the previous owner had added on when he purchased the car new. The extended warranty was definitely the work of actuaries, as it excluded so many things with a higher likelihood of failure of which costs could easily add up, and covered few big-ticket items that, due to today's state of automotive advances, are very unlikely to fail. I didn't see the warranty as something necessary. I've been keeping tabs on Subaru to refund the pro-rated, unused portion of the coverage, which should be coming in next week. Amount = $1K. It's less than what I'd previously projected, but I'll take it.

- Still on the subject of my car, I decided to refinance my own car from Capital One Auto Finance to my own local bank. My monthly savings is $70 / month due to the new arrangement being .5% lower and the term stretched out to 72 vs. 60 months. From memory, the cost of extra 12 months of financing was something along the lines of $500-$700.

- My new job has been flying me out of town a lot. Although traveling has its consequences, one upside is the cost savings for having meals and travel expenses covered either by my company or our client. I estimate cost savings / month can range anywhere from $300-$600 / month.

- Since drycleaning expenses are around $100-$150 / month for my business casual clothes, I decided to take one month's worth of drycleaning expense money and buy super-cheap, admittedly lower-quality clothes for business-- from Costco. The shirts are <$20 apiece, machine-washable, and, contrary to the clothes that I usually take to drylceaning, I won't be having a panic attack if anything happens to the clothes. Burn spot? Discoloration? No problem! Chuck it away, and buy another $14.99 Kenneth Cole Reaction or Kirkland shirt from Costco. Bonus: My ironing skills are improving!

- My business banking account had $3K in it which I couldn't touch, while the bank was charging me a $15 / mo. maintenance fee, until I shut down my consulting incorporation as of a week ago. Today, I'm $3K "richer."

- I'm every-so-slowly cutting down the amount of clutter in my room. Psychologically, my mind feels calmer and more at ease, and there's absolutely no price you can get from that.

- Including all the short-term, real equity owed to me out there (roughly $3K from Marvell for one real estate transaction I provided assistance), I'm looking at a short-term cash reserve of $35K. What surprises me is that by adopting aggressive cost-cutting and income-saving practices, I really am within earshot of accumulating anywhere from $45K-$50K by year-end!

Future considerations:

- I'm still contemplating legally moving out to an income-tax-free state, such as Texas or Oregon. Fiscally, I could've done this already, quite easily. What's got me running into a mental impasse over this issue is whether the headache of maintaining a home out there while frequently flying back to LA is worth saving 10% of my gross income.

- Moving back home with the folks. Taking some of my savings and pay for expanding their home to make space for me while significantly increasing the value of their home, pushing it to exceed $1 million.

- I need to further analyze the practicality of owning rental income real estate vs. other passive income methods, such as owning a small business. For now, I'm sidelining rental income research.

- I want to obtain a certification that my employer said will provide me a 10% immediate raise ASAP. Come to think of it, if I pass that certification, each month I'll net additional money equal to the net amount / month that the existing rental income property that MT and I co-own brings in. So, why not get certified?

I really need to ramp up on the following:

- Find personal finance software for consolidated views of my finance and publish them here.

- Get together with colleague to put together financial modeling and reporting blog.

- Research small business ideas.

I know there are many, many topics I haven't touched upon that I promised to do. I'll work on them in the upcoming days.

Weekly Update

One of the things that I found absolutely intriguing about life is observing the trials and tribulations of myself and my buddies, and to basically see them (or myself, in some cases) take a step back and logically and emotionally assess themselves.

Take the behavioral impact that an aggressively increasing pool of cash, or significantly increased salaries, has on the average Joe's psyche. Perhaps because my association with my friends says a lot about our common psychology, I've only seen very few of them be able to manage largess increases in stride.

MT, JP, and I are guilty of going out and blowing it on "relatively" expensive toys such as nice cars, namely.

When one meets SK from Chicago for the first time, he looks like he's ready to start a bar fight at any second. You may or may not expect him to be frugal when it comes to his daily living expenses and assets, but you probably wouldn't expect him to be extremely philanthropic with whatever he's saved up to his family relatives and other "friends", who 1) he's already not on good terms with, to begin with, and 2) always end up screwing up their payments back to him. This has been going on for two years now, yet he still keeps getting into these personal loans while fueling is ever-growing hatred for them. ("Helping family out" is one thing, but helping out vainly + hating them more through the process is unnecessary.)

Financially speaking, my financial acumen is sometimes a bit more honed and advanced than sometimes those with more capital than I currently have. However, there are definitely those around me who are even savvier than I am, with less means than I have.

There are acquaintances and friends few and far between that have been low-key with their newly-found "micro-wealth". However, when I observe them and compare them against me, or SK, or MT, for example, anecdotally speaking, at least within my own circle of acquaintances, I think we've involuntarily proven the ol' saying, "Money does change people."

What's really changed, isn't our morals, as one would expect. What's changed is our perception of money, and far it travels. We start thinking in terms of $1000's vs. $100's. We're waiving $1000 fees, quickly assessing, in the most inaccurate way possible, our time we take to avoid this $1000 fee multiplied by my hourly rate ends up costing us more than simply taking the $1000 fee hit. What's changed is that we now earn more than our parents could've dreamed of earning, and that we adopt the whole "think rich, grow rich" philosophy.

That's not to say that those "think rich, grow rich" books are baseless. Their content probably delves much more into exactly how to "think rich" properly. Unfortunately, what I did was take the words "think rich" at literal, face value, and turn it into a personal finance disaster for the last 3 years.

Like I said, our morals haven't changed, for the most part. Seeing that I was drowning myself deeper and deeper in financial morass, I took drastic actions by eliminating the expensive car out of my life. Next was selling off the Pine Ave. condo. Both were both timely and timeless choices, especially the condo. Immediately after I listed it for 3 weeks and sold it at my staggering asking price, the market collapsed in the Long Beach area.

In parallel, I noticed that my career path was on the fast track of domestic extinction. Opportunity presented itself to still actually earn a very decent salary, although the pay was significantly reduced from my senior level consulting position, and yet acquire a whole new set of financial analysis skills-- to be paid quite well to learn and train, while usually people pay to acquire new skills out of their own pockets. By taking advantage of that, I realized that the budget squeeze would tighten even more so that I first imagined.

So, now, I'm back to realizing that the intrinsic value of an item or event relative its absolute dollar value really depends on the scope and context of the situation at hand. Factors include actual billable work-hours lost or gained, leisure hours lost or gained, opportunity cost or advantage, budget and financial impact on reaching goals and milestones, internal rate of returns, among other factors based on individual scenarios.

For example, if a favorable California real estate deal presented itself to me and I was interested in financing, then there's no sense in haggling over even $10,000 or $20,000 most of the time. I'd easily turn a blind eye and deaf ear to plasma TV / included new appliances incentives.

But, I'm willing to exert the effort to save $500 / year on auto insurance. Why pay more?

Meanwhile, I'm now not willing to shell out $1500 to an attorney for document review when the document contains only the minimally required legalese on it on rather insignificant issues. I've learned that, although it's recommended that one consults an attorney to review legal documents, it shouldn't be taken literally as to review *every* legal document, even if it's part of, say, a real estate deal. Attorneys charge per hour. Have them review what's necessary, anything that could cause an issue to waffle towards litigation. It cost me nearly one year's worth of Roth IRA contributions, $3000+, to realize this fact.

So, my cash flow is doing incrementally better nowadays.

SK's case was one where, even though he's been a mortgage lender / broker for the past few years, the first few years involved him trying to sell us on the ideas of ARM's and interest-only's and other exotic animals. SK was basically acting as a salesman whose main interest was pushing volume in order to increase his bottom line. Quite frankly, though, I don't think he sold these products knowing the long-term ill-effects they'd have. Despite all that SK told me, I had my personal reservations about these vehicles.

Fast-forward two years. My conclusions have been firmly villified. SK's outlook has changed accordingly. As if in step with this change, I've noticed that he's far more budget-oriented and financially analytical, maybe even slightly more so than I am. For example, I presented a foreclosure opportunity to him, because I saw a $4K-$5K margin from it. However, SK felt that if any unforeseen closing costs were added to our industry average estimates, it'd immediately eat into the net margin. Immediately, it dashed our pursuit. Furthermore, at that moment, it dawned on me that I could purchase a newly built home in a far more favorable area, even though at 2x the cost, through conventional RE processes, that exhibited greater resale and rental income potential. Why not?

MT, on the other hand, has acquired a significant amount of wealth, Unfortunately, his recent decisions may end up to be his cash flow's worst enemy.

Weekly Update

-- not that I've been making good periodically posting weekly updates, but anyhow:

It seems like I made a friend for life when M.T. and I worked together for a total of *almost* 6 months. We truly came from similar upbringings and backgrounds, and shared similar visions and objectives. He was the first person to inspire me to explore real estate as an investment vehicle. And, based on the wise ol' teachings of M.T., my first big splash investing in real estate netted me largest tax refund checks I've ever seen by far-- nearly $14K worth!

Unfortunately, as it usually happens with anyone with any comparably significant sum of cash coming in, I may not have much of an opportunity to enjoy it.

First of all, as of two weeks ago, I finally accomplished what I'd set out to do as somewhat of an informal New Year's Resolution: to pay off nearly $30,000 of short-term debt. Nearly all of this were balances on various credit lines and accounts under my consulting S-corporation. So, I am officially SHORT-TERM DEBT FREE! (except for my auto loans)

However, I paid it off using the S-corp's gross receipts. What this means is, unfortunately, that $30K of money the S-corp earned and was ultimately used to pay off those credit cards need to have taxes paid on them. Keep in mind this isn't a W-2 situation, so no tax withholdings happened.

I'm guesstimating that the S-corp owes maybe somewhere around $10K in taxes up to this point in time, and likely no more than that. Why?

Since the end of March, all S-corp business has been terminated. Now, my source of income was through a W-2 job (but it's even questionable whether I actually do have this job-- long story...) that I accepted with which I'm taking a significant paycut of anywhere between 25% to 33%.

The amount I currently have in my S-corp bank account is something around $4K. Being conservative in guesstimating that I owe $10K in S-corp taxes, I'll need to grab $6K *somewhere* to cover the tax gap, which means I may end up covering it from my own personal assets.

Oh, well.

So, yeah, I got a new job. Paycut is big, yes. Was I nuts making this decision to take such a huge paycut? We'll see. I'm actually *slightly* changing my career path, somewhat, getting out of one industry hemorrhaging from stiff low-wage competition, leveraging my existing skillset and corporate experience, and getting into something else that, for all intents and purposes, can be regarded as in a growth state.

I'm still working on selling off my used '98 BMW M3 sedan (demand isn't as great as my previous BMW cars were when I sold them), and replacing it with something hopefully more reliable (e.g. Japanese), definitely more modern-- and yet still provide some edge in performance that I'll now permanently need to experience during daily driving, thanks to my race-track excursions.

My new boss and I talked about the prestige cars bring to their owners and remarked how generally people treated him nicer, with more respect, after he started scooting around in his new BMW. I agreed with him regarding my experiences when I had my own brand new BMW as well. But, I think I'm not so concerned with displays of vanity now. I just want something to reliably and cost-effectively transport me around, has ample pick-up, and above-average handling.

Regarding the Retiree Portfolio, it's not doing bad at all. Unfortunately, I scoped out the asset location only after the markets were well on their path to recovery from the February 2007 downturn, so I feel like I missed the boat on finalizing the equity portion of the portfolio. Even so, with the equity portion partway implemented, the retiree did capture gains as the market climbed back up to pre-downturn levels, if not higher.

The fixed-income portion of the portfolio was already implemented; to date, they've returned 0%.

I really need to figure out a way to automatically send portfolio updates in the form of charts or itemized breakdowns, or something similarly pretty, onto this blog.

A second retiree has expressed interest in the financial ways I've been helping out with the current retiree. Both have wondered if I'm interested in pursuing a career path in doing stuff like this for others. Unfortunately, I think there's more than plenty of "financial planners" and "financial advisors" out there, marketing their improperly allocated, unnecessarily risky portfolio offerings, making my method that I've adopted from others sound simply "second-rate" in comparison. Everyone wants to finish like a rockstar; no one cares for second-rate. Unfortunately, the majority of the people, including me before, don't realize we might unknowingly finish nowhere even near top- or even third-rate. Even so, their marketing muscle far outflexes mine. Who'd want to hire lil ol' me, especially with my unproven track record? Just because I've read more financial books than the average Joe doesn't make me a suitable advisor.

Back to the topic of me:

ETF's have been performing nicely. I believe Europe is up a whopping 10% since Feb. '07. The black sheep is the REIT, which black-eyes with -4%. All were purchased in late January '07. (Once again, a dynamically, real-time portfolio link here would would suit my lazy self right about now.) The following spreadsheet that I manually prepared will do for now:




MT and I discussed a possible scenario of me purchasing an equal-partner equity share in one of his other properties, on Pearblossom Ave. I think it's either in Euless or Denton. I don't remember-- we visited it very quickly when we were both in Dallas / Ft. Worth, months ago.

I think MT is pushing me to take more management duties for Winder Court and playing a more active liaison role with the management company. MT and I agreed to analyze rental rate increase feasibility for our Winder Court property. I feel as if he's leaving it up to me to be the decision-maker on rental rate increases, tenant feedback and concerns, and cash-flow planning and vacancy costs. Winder Court is MT's diamond in the rough: it's the only 100%-occupied property in his portfolio ever since he 1031-exchanged out to Dallas.

Winder Court rents have been well below comparable rental rates in the area, by as much as $100-$200 / unit, since purchased. Initially, we were interested in increasing rents upon purchasing it, but were concerned about not understanding renter's rights in TX. Well, it's been a year now. I plan on contacting the management company tomorrow to discuss courses of action.

I might either buy half of Pearblossom or completely buy out Winder Court pending further analysis. MT's lured into some property flipping activities and may wind up wanting to becoming liquid enough to have the capability to seize opportunities at a moment's notice. Between our joint efforts and his capital, along with the assistance of 2 attorneys and an assistant in Dallas, we're pilot-testing this scheme with one property whose outcome in June will define the feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and profitability potential of the plan.

Weekend Update

As of now, I am now only about $3000 away from being short-term consumer debt-free. "Freedom!"

Also, you cannot imagine how ecstatic I am about my hefty 2006 income tax refund-- and how old or outmoded I feel for being more excited spending Friday night deriving how my CPA (or, rather, her software) ended up fetching me such a handsome sum of >$10K! My mortgages' interest were the largest contributors. It took me 3 years to finally believe what M kept trying to tell me about his real estate investments...

(I'm eager to completely revise and recalculate my "rent vs. owning in Socal today" scenario, now that I finally have all relevant net costs and figures for ownership.)

Unfortunately, the flip side is I can just see the majority of it vanish into thin air. Although I'm patting myself on the back for being completely aggressive with paying down my consumer debt, somehow I have to figure out how and when to address catching up paying my 2007 S-corporation owed taxes. I figure there's roughly $10K I owe there.

Back to better news, we've been receiving solicitations for Winder Court with significant appreciation. M, my business partner, has decided he has sufficient trust in me that he's given me the authority to make the final decision in holding on or capitalizing our value appreciation.

Adam, my finance-guru ex-coworker, provided guidance by advising I should make the decision by comparing it to putting our down payment into a 5%/annum fixed-income asset or annuity.

Whether we sell it off and collect the gains, or hang onto it for a while, it's a win-win situation for us. In our first year of a 30-year fixed mortgage, the equity paid by our tenants added up to almost being equivalent to the hypothetical gains from our down payment sitting in the above fixed-income asset. This only increase in later years, provided we continue experiencing similar optimal rental levels.

M is convinced that we should 1031 any liquidated funds into a couple more SFR's in the Dallas area after my fact-finding mission was inspired by a seminar that we both attended in his neighbor's garage. Apparently, there are brokers out there who are willing to service the wealth of Californians into properties in Texas and eliminate the legwork we SoCalers would usually have to exert.

To wrap this entry up, of all things, I'm giving serious consideration to "legally move myself to Texas"-- meaning, buy an SFR there, execute address changes for all my accounts to this new SFR there, even change my driver license and car registration to be over there, yet have my employer subsidize my room/board/per diem expenses as I still spend the majority of my time physically located in SoCal.

a not-so-brief introduction of my investing history

There are many ways to gauge one’s life. Two of the most popular ways to assess the quality of one’s life is usually either by the amount of happiness, or the amount of money—or both.

A good majority of us yearns to become as rich as possible, as quickly as possible. I’m certain that’s why some of you stumbled here—looking for how you can be rich like those guys on late-night infomercials who guarantees it in 30 days, or your money back.

Since I’m nowhere near being qualified as a psychiatrist or a self-esteem coach, I’m of no use there, so therefore—well, no, I’m not nearly as qualified being a financial adviser or a CFA either, really. But, I wasn’t intending this blog to be a psychological / emotional advice column. Well, alright, I'll help out if I can.

Meanwhile, I’ve been “investing” for the last 15 years in one form or another. The majority of my investing can be considered pop or voodoo investing, really. Call it gambling. Seriously, some experts go so far to actually call it “pornographic.” Investing = pornography?

A little investing / finance background of me:

I opened my first mutual fund account at Coast Federal Bank roughly 15 years ago. Later on, Coast Federal was bought out by Home Savings who was ultimately purchased by Washington Mutual. I remembered we bought B-class shares of-- whatever fund it was. The "broker agent" just seemed like such a nice fellow, indeed. He exhibited *much* more skill and knowledge than anyone in my family-- how could we simpletons know any better than a full-time money-managin’ dude?

Since savings account rates were barely 2% back in those days, I started socking money away into what I thought was the safest investment vehicle at the time, CD's (certificate of deposit). They returned about 2.1% or so. To diversify by intending to experience dramatic capital growth, I subsequently discovered "growth" mutual funds. MANY years later would I realize there was almost no "growth" in "growth" funds-- that account balance only grew because of the one right thing I did: DCA (dollar cost averaging). From mutual funds, I tried my chops, well very little of it really, in the ridiculous dotcom tech-wreck (after I got out of college). Once the glamour of that turned into gloom, back into mutual funds I went, still with Washington Mutual.

Let’s pause for a moment: did I know what I was doing? No, my gut feeling told me I didn’t. My brain agreed with my gut: I *knew* I didn’t. My problem was I didn’t know *how to invest correctly short of working on Wall Street.* OK, let’s proceed.

Getting slightly desperate as I was turning into a thirty-something, I scammed myself into some investment newsletter promising at least 25% CAGR, whose subscription was one of the most regretful big-purchase mistakes I've ever made. Yes, there were some other stupid big-$$$ screw-ups I made, which I’ll disclose maybe some other time. It’s truly depressing to think of how I actually *could* be halfway to being a millionaire by now. Would’ve, should’ve, could’ve. I digress.

As I was contemplating subscribing, my gut feeling told me the newsletter was a sham. However, let’s deny gut feeling even though, well, more often than not, Mr. Gut Feeling was totally on the dot.

Boy, did the newsletter-owners take me to the-- brokerage account! Not only did I lose the $300+ in purchasing the subscription, I lost significant money on the investments themselves. Good thing the authors let me know about the foreign tax withholding on dividends, too. Their answer: a one-line description of an easy-to-complete federal tax form. I'm sure it'd come as no surprise to you that this easy-to-complete form turned out to be, well, not really that simple.

Let’s not forget that one reassuring sales-pitch popular among newsletter-authors: “I’m invested in the same stocks that I’m picking for you, so you’ll be assured that we’re in this together!” The problem is, how credible is the proof? A webpage with dollar figures divvied up among stocks—with pretty pie charts, lots of commas and digits? Hold on tight, because I’ll make myself a millionaire in 5 minutes, too!

So while I’m being dumped gruel onto my dish for my main investment vehicles, all along my side appetizers of stock gambling was a total wash as well.

The final chapter of my pornographic investment history was when I opened up my own business. My CPA helped establish my SEP IRA and steered me towards the American Funds family. A remarkable event, indeed: it was the first time I witnessed considerable equity growth. Only then, did I know for sure my calculator was working, because my calculations equaled to what the statements were showing. Maybe my CPA is onto something…

I almost forgot about my real estate antics.

True to my former self of "buying high, selling low, and ditch any great opportunity", I jumped onto the real estate bandwagon very recently. I eschewed a Rowland Heights rental property in 2002-2003 for a mere sum of $90,000, which I'm confident is now worth north of $500,000 today. But later on, I purchased my own condo in downtown Long Beach, CA back in the latter-half of 2005, right when word of the housing bubble peaking began gathering steam. See what I mean? You'd think by now I'd learned my lesson about "buying low, selling high." Then, halfway through 2006, I entered my first foray in income properties with a four-plex in Texas.

Since then, I sold off my condo in late 2006 with a surprising gain (it was a surprise since I didn’t expect *any* gain at all), and the four-plex is treating me quite well. I guess the condo sale was one relieving outcome, and a highly motivated one, after looking around me and noticing listings being active and revised downwards for 6 months or even longer for comparable properties.

So, that's my wobbly road to non-riches in a nutshell. For those of us whose main job or career doesn't have anything to do with finances or investing, we tend to think of finance and investments as the stuff of weird-math nerds and multi-trillion-dollar big-money firms, or something equivalent to black magic. There's too much static out there, and we could care less, as long as our savings comes out ahead tomorrow vs. today. So, why don't we just “set and forget” our investments: toss the keys to our retirement to a skilled CFA or broker?

I’d say this is a good point to stop and draw the line in the sand. I’m done with investing blindly. I’ll stick with regular pornography for now. And now, a cliché: a new leaf is being turned.

Only within the last year or so have I stumbled upon some ideas that, although the returns seem meager at face value, may ultimately end up be a worthy lifelong strategy.

Before creating this blog, I've spent some time scouring the Web for other people’s personal experiences and anecdotes applying investment principles. Sure, I've seen some "projected portfolios", and some over-the-top macroeconomic analysis and websites. Other websites I've seen contain seldom-updated, extremely vague personal diaries written by other confused people trying to find the ultimate investing solution, or displaying their account balances but leaving the audience to wonder precisely how it was executed, what their positions are. And yet others simply RSS a quote ticker. Greeeaaat.

Of all the research I’ve done, only one website displayed a real-time, running counter of that person’s asset portfolio by simply multiplying asset units with unit value. Neat.

Confused about finance and investing, like I’ll admit I have been? I'll attempt to simplify and demystify it. Here is where you’ll find epic tales of missed opportunities, lessons learned, some projects and ideas, strategies, and true dollar figures—both mine and the people in my life.

I like to think of myself as always being a humble student of the infinite wisdom of finance and investing. Even more so, I have absolutely no interest to be condescending or arrogantly presumptuous to fellow investors, conveying any notion that *you* need a course from *me* because I know just slightly, but not thoroughly, more than you do. My approach is to explain strategies, execution steps, my reasonings, and engage in conversation with you (or maybe just myself, I guess) about what I've done. I'll leave the "courses" to the "experts."

I cater to no special interest (except to retire sooner myself), and am only funded by myself in this venture. Other than the funds my parents used to raise me from infant to teenager (such as bailing out of jail), I never freely took a monetary obligation without paying it back. I think. Eh, well, if any friends of mine are reading this and I haven’t paid you back, let me know. Pronto.

The strategies I'll employ require no exorbitant minimum starting balance, or options exclusively for the privileged or truly loaded. I'm as average Joe as they come: I was born with a plastic-vs.-a-silver spoon from a Gerber's bottle, I laugh at any possibility of an inheritance or becoming an estate recipient, and, at least for this lifetime, I can never claim TFB status.

I'm starting small, so if you follow my progress and mistakes, you'll be able to see how I'm rewarded and punished, what challenges I face. Stats and numbers I’ll post serve not only to feed my selfish exhibitionist qualities, but also to backtrack past projections and outlook.

Lastly, some of you readers are my friends. You may find me anonymously referring to past experiences which I may tie together with my own knowledge and experience. I’m sure I already have everyone’s consent in doing so.