If you remember this fun, quirky, and often brutally honest show on ABC called Don’t Trust The B- in Apt 23, then you know exactly where this post gets its title.
The show aired from April 11, 2012 to May 11, 2013. It only lasted for a short two seasons, but it packed a lot into that one year.
For those unfamiliar with the show let me bring you up to speed.
June’s (Dreama Walker) plans of moving to Manhattan for her dream job and perfect apartment are ruined when the company that hired her goes bust. Broke and homeless, her luck turns around when she finds a job at a coffee shop and a roommate, Chloe (Krysten Ritter). The show also starred James Van Der Beek (from Dawson’s Creek fame) as himself.
In one of the funniest pilot episodes I have ever seen of a television show, it really gives you a sense of how quickly one life can change within less than 24 hours.
June loses her job and apartment within a few hours once the company she was hired to work for goes down in an FBI raid due to the head of the company embezzling billions from clients in an Enron type take down, which reminds you of the glory days of yesteryear of Wall Street darlings such as the likes of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers; the latter of which was in business for 150 years having started operations in 1850.
Some media outlets such as CNBC did an article on what happened to former Lehman Brothers employees after the collapse and some still had not recovered from the company shutting down in 2008 some 10 years later including those not being able to find full-time employment.
This show and the acquisitions or closures of places like Merrill Lynch, Bearn Stearns, which opened in 1923, and Lehman Brothers are reasons why you should be your own financial advisor.
Unlike how JP Morgan bailed out Bear Stearns in March 2008 or Bank of America did Merrill Lynch, you are on your own like Lehman’s when they filed for bankruptcy as no one came to save them because if you fail to manage your money, then no one is coming to bail you out.
Let’s go back to 2008. Banks were failing. Many were found to be a part of the subprime mortgage crisis, but like the scandal at Wells Fargo nobody went to jail. You think your money is locked up tight like Fort Knox until you realize it isn’t. That is why Roosevelt created the FDIC insurance for banks as without the $250,000 deposit insurance after the 1929 crash many no longer believed in the banking institution.
Just because someone is wearing a suit does not mean they know what they are doing. Many of the analysts and associates that start work for their prestigious firms such as Goldman Sachs are straight out of college and still wet behind the ears. Even though I once read that the average salary of a Goldman employee was around $622,000, that does not equate to financial smarts or riches. Many of these employees still blow money like you wouldn’t believe. Instead of saving stacks they are blowing them.
Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway. – Warren Buffett
I have read enough accounts of high paying professionals and tons of the employees would blow off steam in a place called Scores in New York or buying million dollar homes, private school educations for the kiddies and exotic vacations costing $5,000 a pop.
Look, to each their own. Just understand that you are your best line of defense when it comes to your money. Read every book you can on the subject. Save as much as you can.
I even overheard a 2nd year law associate say that you can make a lot of money in New York, but it costs too much for too little. You have to be a millionaire to afford an apartment or buy a home.
Part of the reason so many people are bad with money is because they do not learn about how money works. Please do not be one of those people. You must learn how money works. Learn the rules of the money game. Here are a few things you can do to save yourself the commission fee and invest those dollars instead.
Use a three-part investing strategy.
Part I. Automate your savings and investments. Decide on a number you can live with, set it, and forget it.
Part II. Determine where to invest. Go with anyplace that offer fees that are less than one percent such as Trowe Price, Vanguard, Schwab or Fidelity.
Part III. Invest your money. I prefer to go with several index funds so I can be diversified in case one sector goes crashing down then others are usually going up. You could do a mix of 20 percent real estate or REIT’s, 15 percent in International Funds, 10 percent cash liquid savings in a high yield savings account, 10 percent in a bond fund and the remaining 45 percent in a stock equity fund like the VTSAX at Vanguard. This is similar to the Yale’s investment manager David Swensen’s model. He has been able to get a return on investment of billions into Yale’s coffers making them one of the larhgest college endowments on earth with $29.4 billion USD. Only Harvard has a bigger endowment war chest with $38 billion USD.
Who is David Swensen?
According to the Yale Daily News, “David Swensen of the Yale University endowment is the doyen of endowment investing. Imitation, of course, is the sincerest form of flattery. Today, the Stanford, MIT and the Princeton endowments all boast former Swensen deputies at their helm. Each also has adopted the “Yale model” of investing pioneered by Swensen in the 1980s.”
So what is Yale’s “secret sauce”?
“Until 1985, Yale had invested in mainstream U.S. stocks and bonds with a smidgen of foreign stocks and real estate.”
“Swensen was the first to apply modern portfolio theory to sizeable multi-billion-dollar endowments. He understood that “asset allocation” explains over 90% of a portfolio’s investment returns.”
“The decision whether to invest in specific asset classes matters much more than picking the right stocks. Over the past 30 years, Yale has shifted the bulk of its investments into “alternative assets” like natural resources, venture capital, real estate and foreign stocks.”
When the market goes down, buy more. That is where the bargains are. That is how Sir Templeton made his millions. Sir John Marks Templeton was an American-born British investor, banker, fund manager, and philanthropist. In 1954, he entered the mutual fund market and created the Templeton Growth Fund. In 1999, Money magazine named him “arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century.” He purchased tons of stocks during the stock market crash when everyone else was getting out.
So do not let fear take over how you manage and invest your money.
Fortunes are made in recessions.
