November 2, 2018
Credit card discipline… If you have the will power to pay off your cards every month to avoid finance charges, these cards can be a source of wealth. Imagine you get an unlimited cash back percentage of 1.5% and you use your card for $60,000 in purchases. That is $900 towards your Dollar Investment Club investment of $1200 per year ($100 per month)! At 8% a year, that $300 out of your pocket that could very well compound to over $58,000 in twenty years. Be the credit card boss and when you are at the club, be the one that pays the bills and gets Venmo cash from everyone else…unless you are running in London with members of the Jacksonville Jags, then keep your card at home!
November 16, 2018
The mid-term elections are almost in the books – except for… you guessed it… Florida – and they went pretty much as expected. Republicans are holding the Senate and the Democrats took back the House. As markets do not like uncertainty and the politicians are locked up for the next two years, regulatory gridlock may be good for investors, as a whole lot of nothing might be getting done for a while. But sometimes nothing can be better than something. The TV sitcom Seinfeld has been reported to have made more than $3 billion since syndication. A show about nothing all right…
November 29, 2018
“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” – Leo Tolstoy. According to BTN research, $522 invested at the beginning of every month for 40 years earning 6% will be worth $1 million dollars. In comparison, $1,021 invested at the start of every month for 30 years at 6% will also be worth $1 million dollars. Or put it another way, $250,560 becomes a million in 40 years while $367,560 becomes a million in 30. Time has an incredible ability to help us achieve our goals.
January 2, 2019
Average achievers tell themselves ”I can only do a little so I might as well do nothing.” High achievers say to themselves, “Even if I can only do a little, I’m going to do as much as I can.” You may not have the whole day, but you have 15 minutes. Put those minutes to good use. They are the little things that will take you to your goals. As the late Zig Ziglar pointed out, “I lost 37 pounds in ten months by losing 1.9 ounces- per day. I wrote ‘See You At The Top,’ a 384 page, 2 million copy best seller, by writing an average of 1.26 pages every day for ten months. People who are successful at whatever they do, reach their objectives, by a series of little things they do every day.” Daily discipline adds up. Ever watch a small drip of water into a bucket? Come back 4 days later and that empty bucket is now overflowing. Drip drip drip. Small repeating habits; it’s the stuff winners are made of.
January 28, 2019
In 2018, the best performing national market according to Bloomberg was Jamaica, up about 28% in US dollars. Now granted, this is a very small market and there are zero Jamaican stocks in US exchange traded funds, but this does point to the fact that as investors we have to continue to look for the best opportunities around the world. Our 328 million people in the US represents less than 5% of the over 7 billion people in the world, so there is and will be opportunities in international and emerging markets for stocks and bonds. “Ya mon, money flows to where it is treated best.”
