Monthly Archives: September 2017

What Color is the Sky? A Book Celebration (and review)

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“It’s a wonderful thing to behold when you see someone take control of their finances AND their life.” – Finley

I finished my 2nd read of “What Color is the Sky” this weekend. What Color is the Sky is the 2nd book by a personal friend of mine, Michael Finley. As I said in the title, this is both a review and a celebration of a great book. I believe it is one of the best investment books available because it delivers useful, actionable, information instead of vague concepts. Because of this I have personally bought and given away over 40 copies of this book to friends and family  (and I hope to give more in the future, and that people read them!). A great feature of this book is that each chapter is 2 pages long and covers 1 topic. The book delivers a wealth of information in a short enough read for the average person. The average person doesn’t want to or have time to read 30 pages about stock market bubbles, timing the market or index investing. Finley delivers concise, precise, useful information that shouldn’t tax your attention span.

There are 5 stages in the book.

Stage 1 is simply Finley giving you a pep talk. He wants you to know that you are able to manage your own investing, or at least that you should be able to find someone to help you along but who won’t screw you (like 95% of financial “advisors” (salesmen) these days).

Stage 2 includes a lot of chapters informing you about what smart investing is NOT.
Smart investing is not trying to guess which one stock will do good each month.
Smart investing is not listening to your uncle who is not educated on investing.
Smart investing is not trying to find the best managed mutual fund and changing it each year or two.
Smart investing is not  investing in something because everyone else is (housing bubble, tech bubble, tulip mania).

Stage 3 includes a many chapters informing you about what smart investing IS.
Smart investing is investing in index funds (or target date funds which are made of index funds).
Smart investing means you are diversified through various classes of investments (US, international, bonds, REITS).
Smart investing is understanding opportunity cost, the rule of 72, taxes and different types of account you can save money in (401k, 403b, 529, IRA, ROTH or traditional).
You could skip right to stage 3 of the book if you are really bursting to get the knowledge of what you should do, but if you do you need to go back and read the start of the book. This whole book needs to be read, by everyone and I will buy it for you, if you need me too. As Mike often mentions in the book, he is not paid by Vanguard to promote their product, he just believes they are doing what they do the best. Similarly, I believe Mike is providing the most unbiased, useful, actionable (helps you actually make investment decisions) advice in an easy to understand format.


Stage 4 builds on stage 3 with more practical actionable advice.
Discusses buy and hold (vs selling constantly to buy “winners”), different asset classes such as large capitalization stocks, small capitalization stocks, REITS and bonds.
Discusses international vs domestic stocks.
It also discusses rebalancing your portfolio, asset allocation as well as one of my favorite topics the 1 and done fund, the Target Date Fund.

Stage 5 is rather short. It encourages you to continue your financial education with recommendations of some good books. It encourages you to seek fee-only advisors if necessary.

Finley also uses a chapter to provide his vision for the future. He speaks about institutional investors, who are collectively losing million of our dollars to fund “managers”. Many large state and company investment funds offer poor funds. He wants to change that. We must demand the change and to do that you must be informed.
Finally, Finley encourages you to share what you have learned. As is his life goal, educating and empowering others to become the best they can be, he encourages the readers to help others learn more about investing and personal growth. That is part of what I am trying to do by writing this blog and this post, teaching others what I have learned in hopes that it will make their lives better and ultimately, make the world a better place. Active fund “managers” are generally providing negative value to the world and we need to stop that, so do your part, learn, become educated, get rich and live a rich, fulfilling life.

You can find Finley’s book here on Amazon (as I said I get nothing from this, he doesn’t even know I wrote this until he will see it on Facebook). I will buy you the book if you don’t think you can afford it. Leave a comment below if you’d like me to buy you a copy. You can’t afford to not read this book and I can’t afford for you to not read this book! Changing the way the whole market operates is in my, your and the world’s best interest. Forward to a better future!

You Might Need $3 Million to Retire at Age 65

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You might need $3 million to retire at age 65 (if you are 28 years old today, which I am). See how I came up with that number below.

The purpose of this post is not to scare you into thinking you’ll never save $3 million dollars. It’s to expose you to how to think about how much you need to save for retirement. You might not need $3 million. But how much do you need and how do you calculate that?

Most people have no idea how to save for retirement, how much to save, where to save that money, etc. In everyone’s defense, there seem to be a lot of questions and it seems daunting to learn. But in reality, it is not that difficult to invest your money for retirement. I have already written a blog post about how you should invest in a target date fund in your 401k (as much as you can a year) and call it good. You (may) not need any other investments.

But a good question people should have is “How much do I need to save for retirement?”
If you were to retire today some people say you need $1 million.
That number is created by using the 4% rule, meaning you can withdraw 4% of your money a year to live off of. $1 million x .04 = $40,000 a year to live off of (plus social security).

It can also be called the 25x rule. This means you need 25x the money you will need each year to live saved. If you want to live on $40,000 a year 25 x $40,000 = $1,000,000

This is fine for today’s retirees, but for people between the ages of 20 and 30 we might have a different number to shoot for.

We have to consider inflation. To account for inflation any number of year from now there is a very simple formula.

1.03^37 = 2.98 

(a quick review of powers, 1.03^37 means 1.03×1.03×1.03… 37 times)

$1,000,000×2.98=$2,980,000

What do the above numbers mean?

.03 shows an inflation rate of 3% per each year (which is a historical average of US inflation)

37 = 37 years in the future (when I’ll be 65)

2.98 gives you the answer of how much less money will be worth in those years (inflation).

So 37 years from now it will take $2.98 dollars to buy something that costs $1 today.

So you can take today’s money $1,000,000 and multiply it by the inflation rate 2.98 and get that you’ll need $2,980,000 (or basically $3 million) in 2054 to equal $1,000,000 today.

And that is why you might need $3 million dollars to retire.

So the basic formula

1.03^ (years until you turn 65) x how much you want to live on per year in today’s dollars x 25

Example:

(1.03^37) * $40,000 x 25 = $2,985,226

This means you would need $2.9 million dollars ($3 million) to retire.

Of course, this doesn’t take into account the fact that many basic services of today like food, healthcare, housing, transportation, will likely cost less in the future. You might not need near this much saved! But then again, you might. It never hurts to over plan. If you find yourself in a position with too much money you can always give it away.

I don’t want to scare people away from saving for retirement if they don’t think they’ll have $3 million. As this CNN article says, even though a lot of people say $1 million today the average person who’s 65 only has about $148,000 saved which would be $148,000 x 2.98 = $441,000 if you were to retire in 37 years. Now we agree that like CNN said, $148,000 is probably  a little low, but not starving low. So you likely want to shoot for between $441,000 and $3,000,000. Use the rule of 25x to think about how much you might need to withdraw from your investments but also remember to account for inflation!

If anyone would like to review their own personal retirement numbers with me don’t hesitate to contact me. I really enjoy reviewing these numbers with anyone.

My IRRATIONAL Fear – Short term market collapse

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You NEED to understand that the market is risky, in the short term, but so is every other place to put your money, including under your mattress (inflation risk!). – Axel Hoogland (yes I quoted myself)

My IRRATIONAL fear is a short term stock market collapse (meaning stock prices go down for a year or 2, similar to 2008 market collapse) (Learn about what the stock market is here).I am afraid of this because I am continually telling people to invest their money in the stock market. Most people are already invested in the stock market (but don’t know how their money is being managed or what exactly they are invested in). Some are only invested in bonds (which is risky as you are losing money to inflation). Some will pull their money out of the stock market at the first sign of trouble or market dip, which happens often (dips) but usually the market recovers quickly and they would lose on the gains. When investing in the market people should always ask themselves “What do I need this money for?” You NEED to understand that the market is risky, in the short term, but so is every other place to put your money, including under your mattress (inflation risk!).

My greatest fear is being wrong. I hate to give people incorrect information. It is ok to be wrong on some things. If you recommend someone eat at a restaurant they will be upset with you if they don’t enjoy it they will choose to never eat there again and might just stop taking your advice on restaurants.

If you recommend something to do with investing people’s money, something that they don’t completely understand themselves, and they seem to lose money (even if it is only for a short time and then it comes back in a year or two) they may hate you forever. People will be sure that there was a better option for them to invest their money in. They will not know what that option was, but they will be sure it was better than following your advice.

Someone is is almost always better at doing something for you than you will be at doing it for yourself. Some things require training to learn how to do. Many people do not feel comfortable fixing their own car. They take it to an expert, a mechanic. They don’t feel they have access to the right tools or knowledge (and that’s often true) so they pay someone to do it for them.

Unfortunately many people are happy to let an “expert” manage their money, for a large fee! The problem is these people are not experts, they are “salespeople”! You don’t let the car salesman fix your car and you shouldn’t let a “financial salesman” manage your money. The truth is that as a whole all fund managers will underperform the stock market. This is because of the fees they charge and because they are bad at guessing (yes they are guessing) which companies will perform better than average on any given year. Whenever someone sells a stock remember someone is on the other side of that deal guessing that that stock is going up! As a whole, all managed money will underperform (measured by percent returns to clients after fees) the total amount of unmanaged (index funds) market. Certainly some money managers will pick good and outperform the market and many will underperform and pick worse stocks than the market average, but all charge high fees. That is why index funds generally are the best place to put your money. To further diversify you should put your money in a Target Date fund which automatically transfers your money to bonds (safer investments) as you reach retirement.

A question people often ask is

Q.The stock market is high, should I pull money out of the market?

A. I ask them “What will you do with your money it if you do “pull it out” of the stock market?” The stock market should always be at the highest it’s ever been because the world is growing in population, thus businesses are making more products to sell.

As Mr. Money Mustache recently posted about, there is always a recession coming, so instead of worrying about it, it is better to understand what might bring it about, understand what you are investing in and why, and ride the storm out. A benefit of all this is that if people understand what causes recessions, over spending followed by underspending, we (may) be able to avoid wild cycles and instead keep a nice steady rise in abundance in the future, that is my hope by helping to educate people on “The Stock Market”.

Now that I’ve shared my fear with everyone, and why it’s not a rational fear, you should continue to learn about investing and why it is probably one of the most important things you can understand for yourself and for the world. You can learn more about Target Date Funds (where everyone should start investing) from this post or this video.