Articles

Filter by Category:

All Risk Sentiment Debt Retirement Mindset Geopolitics Bonds Investing Life

You’re Not a Jerk If You Charge Your Friend Interest

If you’re going to loan money to family and friends, treat it like a real loan (with one caveat). It’s the best way to preserve the relationship.

Read more

It’s Okay to Love Money

Money is not evil.

And the love of money is not evil. You can be Scrooge McDuck and take a bath in gold coins if you want—I’m okay with that.

So, how can you get more of it? You start by getting up, taking a shower, showing up to work on time, and working hard.

We’ve talked about how people don’t work as hard as they used to. But a lot of people still work really, really hard—whether through physical labor, mental labor, or both.

And working hard for your money feels good... whether you’re making $20 an hour installing floors, $75,000 a year selling real estate, or a heck of a lot more performing brain surgery. If you’re sitting around, living off of unemployment checks, it just doesn’t feel the same.

From there, if you want more money, you have to be willing to take calculated risks.

Investors made a lot of money in bitcoin back in 2017, when it soared over 1,300%. That wasn’t luck—some guy out there bought $10,000 worth of bitcoin thinking, “This is probably going to zero.” But he took the risk and wound up making a lot of money.

The final piece of the puzzle: You need to be smart and frugal with your money every step of the way. It doesn’t matter how much money you make—you won’t hold onto it if you’re running up big credit card bills and paying lots of interest.

Be Happy for the Person with $1 Million in the Bank

Say you go to the ATM, and the woman ahead of you leaves the receipt on the counter. You catch a glimpse of the balance, and she has $1 million in the bank.

It’s okay to want a big bank account, too. But you should be happy for her! That money is there because of good things she did. It’s there because she worked hard and took calculated risks. It’s there because she was smart and frugal.

You might say she’s just lucky, but that’s pretty rare.

I’m not saying rich people are all saints. There are really scummy people out there who make a lot of money. But, regardless of how they behave in their personal lives, they’ve practiced virtues in their professional and financial lives that helped them get rich.

I’m not naïve—I know there are people who make money by fraud or other illegal stuff. I don’t believe in karma, but stuff usually catches up with people. (Like it did with the Ponzi scheme I witnessed in my Coast Guard days.)

Bottom line: If you want to make more money, practice the virtues that will make that happen.

Why Pro Athletes Struggle to Hold onto Money

My father used to tell me that wherever I was at any given moment was the sum total of all the decisions I had made up to that point.

The same is true for money. If you make poor choices about money, you’re going to have less to show for it. If you make good choices—about things like credit cards, car loans, your mortgage—you’re going to have more.

Some people say that money corrupts, but I don’t think that’s the case. It’s not the money—it’s when money comes too easily.

You see this a lot with professional athletes. They are very physically gifted, and sure, they work hard. But when they’re making $20 million a year, it loses all meaning. This is a big reason a lot of these guys have trouble holding onto their wealth.

There’s a saying that you want to be equal in character to your money. Because the virtues you need to make it are the same virtues you need to hold onto it—hard work, a willingness to take risks, and frugality.

It’s okay to love money. When you start thinking about it that way, it becomes much easier to make more.

Jared Dillian
Jared Dillian

 

Let Jared Help! Depending on your comfort level, we suggest picking one of these four options to get started:

  1. SHORT PRIVATE EQUITY: Jared Dillian’s new site aggregates critical stories on private equity’s downfall. With so much content, we had to create its own site—updated almost daily. Jared’s conviction in shorting private equity is stronger than ever. It’s completely free. Just bookmark and share it: ShortPrivateEquity.com.

  1. How Do I Start Investing? FREE Course: The thought of learning how to invest can seem intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be.

    With the right approach, you can kickstart your investing journey with the certainty you’re getting exactly what you need. How Do I Start Investing? is the perfect guide for when you’re ready to dive in.

  1. Jared Dillian’s Strategic Portfolio: Get access to Jared’s stress-free portfolio with this monthly newsletter.

    Timely, actionable investment ideas on exchange-traded funds that can help you mitigate volatility and build a resilient and profitable core portfolio, protecting you in bad times while prospering in good times. Yearly subscriptions available.

  1. The Daily Dirtnap: Jared’s macro newsletter for investing professionals. This daily letter takes a top-down approach, looking at the various asset classes, including stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities. Join over 4,000 readers who read his market insights every weekday.

  1. Street Freak: As the most active of Jared’s portfolio products, Street Freak is an aggressive stock-picking newsletter. It’s written for astute investors who crave creative, fresh macro analysis and forward-looking trade ideas so they can invest more opportunistically, without much hand-holding along the way.

    Adjusted for risk, of course. But this is not for the faint of heart. Jared and his readers are trying to make a lot of money here.

 

What the Coast Guard Taught Me About Fraud

We all start out know nothing about money. But if you don’t learn the basics, you leave yourself vulnerable to hucksters and frauds. That’s what happened to Jared’s Coast Guard buddies...

Read more

It’s Time to Live a Stress-Free Financial Life

Your goal is to live a stress-free financial life. That is the whole point of having money.

Read more

5 Things You Can Control Right Now

What’s happening now is definitely a recession. It might be severe, but it should also be short and swift. Until the economy recovers—and it will—focus on practical things you can actually control right now.

Read more

Get to Know the Fed—the Most Powerful Institution on Earth

The power of the Fed is unprecedented. There’s no parallel. So, you should know what the Fed is and what it does.

Read more

‹ First  < 10 11 12 13 14 >