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thecleverdame · 5 years

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Control and Release - 11

Series Masterlist

TEDTalk!Sam x Reader

Summary: With the rest of the staff caught in a snowstorm, you find yourself acting as a personal assistant to the notorious Sam Winchester.

Warnings: Dom/Sub, humiliation, embarrassment, sexual objectification, mutual masturbation, spanking, cum play, fingering, anal play, orgasm control, dub-con, nipple clamps, breath play (more warnings as the story continues)

Words: 5.6k

Beta: @ilikaicalie

Parts Twelve and Thirteen (Fourteen coming tomorrow) are currently available on Patreon for a monthly pledge of $2.50. This includes early access to all my stories and Patreon exclusive content. >> CLICK HERE <<

You sit there naked as the shower turns on. There’s a part of you that knows you should leave, it’s the safest way to ensure a clean division between sex and, well, everything else. But the truth is all the logic in the world doesn’t stop you from getting up and joining him in the shower.

He turns toward you as you open the glass door and step inside, his hair slicked back. He moves out of the way for you to wet your hair before switching places. He doesn’t touch you, instead he watches as you lather your body with the hotel provided soap. His eyes follow as soapy hands move between your legs, then over your breasts. He waits for you to finish and then steps out, wrapping himself in a fluffy white towel, handing one to you before wordlessly disappearing back into the room.

You follow him, toweling dry, trying to act casual as he stands stark naked, rubbing his hair with the towel and slipping into bed. You do the same, walking to the other side and crawling under the sheets as he reaches over and turns off the light.

“Good night,” are his last words as he turns onto his side, facing away from you and settles in.

There’s a hand rubbing up and down your back as you lie belly down, still in the depths of sleep. Slowly you blink awake, the early morning sun shining through a crack in the curtains, cutting like a knife through butter into the dark of the room.

While you don’t know what time it is, it’s still early enough that no part of you wants to move. It’s Sam’s voice that brings you back into the land of the living and the realization that you’re still in his bed.

“You have to get up.” A big, warm hand spreads wide across your back, fingers fanning out. The feeling of his hands on you, skin on skin is a simple but rare pleasure.“It’s almost six and Pepper will be here soon. Our flight leaves at nine, and you need to pack.”

“It’s too early, just leave me here. I’ll live on the West Coast now.” you whisper, rolling onto your back. He’s hovering above you, propped up on one elbow looking bright eyed at this ungodly hour. “Do you ever sleep?”

“Rarely.” He pushes a strand of hair back from your cheek. “Really, you need to get up.”

“I’m moving.” With a final push, you force yourself to sit up and get out of bed. You're naked and it’s cold as you hop around the room, trying to find your clothes and get dressed. Still half asleep you walk to the door in a daze and he follows you. “Last night was...incredible. Really, I’ve never felt anything like that.”

He seems to enjoy your early morning confession, grinning as you yawn into the back of your hand.

“Go on,” he opens the door. “You can sleep on the plane, you deserve it.”

Five Days Later - Tuesday

You’ve spent the better part of two days staring at lists of phone numbers and calls. The computer does most of the cross-referencing, all you’re left with is a spreadsheet full of names, dates and times. Thousand of them.

It’s early afternoon when you realize that something’s wrong.

Before you were assigned to the endless pit of phone calls, Max had you sorting through and categorizing depositions, ensuring the transcriptions were correct. You know this case inside and out. You’ve heard every word of testimony a dozen times and that’s how you know that Kurt Jablonski, your client, swore up and down multiple times that he never made direct contact with a private investigator named Lea Hammond.

And yet here you are staring at a number identified as one of Lea Hammond’s burner phones making and receiving calls from an office line that only Kurt had access too. His calls are normally made through his security so it’s possible he’s naive enough to think that there wouldn’t be a trace, but you’re staring at the proof of their connection.

You’ve got no idea what this means, but it’s a huge case. Sam’s had teams flying back and forth from Florida for months.

Now comes the hard part, you have to tell Max.

You never returned his texts and he’s been giving you the cold shoulder. But you report to him, at least for this case, so there’s no way around it. You write down the names and dates on a post-it and head to the conference room where Max has set up shop with half a dozen other junior associates.

“Excuse me,” you knock lightly on the door frame and they all look up. Frank Walenchecz looks from you to Max and grins, which piques your interest but that’s not why you’re here. “Max, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“We’re kinda in the middle of something here.” He rotates his chair, eyeing you up and down. “I’ll find you later if you need me.”

Everyone in the room chuckles and your cheeks flush hot.

“I think you should look at this, I found something-”

“I said we’re busy.” He’s emboldened now, his condescending tone laced with an underlying hostility that you pick up on in a second.

“Max, this is serious,” you insist. “It says on the schedule that the team in Florida is going through final prep with Mr. Jablonski but-”

“Why don’t you worry about your filing and leave the thinking to the big boys, huh?” He tilts his head, making no attempt to hide as he stares at your breasts. “I’ll find you later, sweetheart.”

You can hear snickers as you shut the door, humiliated.

You wait. And wait.

It’s nearly six when you walk back down the hall only to find the conference room empty. He’s left for the day.

Wednesday

You’ve only been in the office for an hour, sorting through a new stack of documents when Lance Barton saunters up to your desk. He’s not exactly a friend, but the two of you are friendly per se. He’s a junior associate and just as full of himself as every other lawyer working at W & S, they all know how good they have it.

“Good morning,” he perches on your desk, shoving a paperweight to the side to make room for his ass.

“Hey,” you look at him, offering a genuine smile. He doesn’t say anything, just sits there staring at you with a shit eating grin on his face. “Did you need something?”

“Actually, I came to ask you that.” He chuckles, biting his bottom lip. It takes you a minute to understand exactly what he’s implying. When the realization finally dawns you’re so taken off guard that you don’t know how to respond.

“I-” you start, sitting back, staring at him in disbelief. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

You turn back to your work, trying to ignore him, but he doesn’t move.

“Come on,” Lance leans down, placing his hand over yours on the desk, you jerk it back in response, unprepared for actual physical interaction. “We’ve always gotten along, haven’t we?”

“Please stop.” You pull your hand away, clutching it in your lap.

“Max said you liked to play hard to get.” He whispers, now close enough that you can feel his breath on your cheek. “But he also said it was worth it, that you’re a wild little thing.”

You look at him wide-eyed, mouth falling open as nausea sets in. “Max told you that?”

“Don’t be shy.” Lance smiles, his eyes trailing down your body. “You just let me know the next time you need an itch scratched and I’ll take care of you.”

He saunters away, looking smug, leaving you gutted. You’d already guessed from Max’s reaction yesterday that he’d greatly exaggerated his relationship with you, but this is a whole other level.

Greg Smith from IT walks by your desk, eyes lingering too long and you know it has already grown into something you’re not going to be able to control.

Thursday

“Everyone knows your dirty little secret.” Pepper pours herself a coffee looking up at you. “I mean, you probably think you’re hiding it but I can see right through you.”

You almost choke on your spit, stopping to stare at her, swallowing hard.

“What are you talking about?” you stammer and she smirks, sipping her coffee.

“Oh stop it. The whole office knows about you two.” She shakes her head and you want to melt into the floor.

“You’re talking about….Max?”

God, you hope it’s only Max.

“Who else?” Pepper is always a bitch but she’s really enjoying this. “I knew there was something between the two of you.”

“There was and never has been anything going on between us.” You correct her, holding your head high.

“I could have told you he was a snake. They’re all wannabes with too much money who think they’re going to be Sam Winchester some day. It’s pathetic.”

“Whatever he said, it’s not true.” You want to ask for more details but you’re not sure you could handle it.

“He told everyone, might as well have sent out a newsletter. Every nasty detail, how you suck cock, how you begged him to fuck you...everywhere. He told Colin you’re too slutty for him. Too much of a whore for Max...that must be a new low.”

“Why are you telling me this?” you whisper, fighting back tears. There’s a swell of anger and humiliation rising in your chest.

“Because you should know. I might be a lot of things, but I’m not afraid to say things to someone’s face. I know you’re Sam’s favorite right now, God only knows why. But that doesn’t mean anything in the real world. Outside of his office, you’re just a small fish, fighting for room in the pond with the rest of us.”

She turns on her heels and walks away, leaving you stunned.

The last thing you want to do is see Max face to face, but you need to show him the information you found. While you’d love to see him crash and burn, it could affect Sam and you won’t let that happen.

You knock twice on the door to his small, windowless office and he looks up. His face hardens when he realizes it’s you. “Back for more? Can’t stay away huh?”

“What are you talking about?” You shrug, stepping inside and shutting the door. “It’s just us now, stop the act. I thought we were friends, Max. Why are you doing this?”

“What am I doing?” he asks, picking up a stress ball and squeezing it in his fist. “I haven’t talked to you in a week.”

“You’ve talked to everyone else. Telling stories about things that never happened.” Stepping closer to his desk you search his face for some kind of understand. You didn’t see this coming. Are you this bad of a judge of character? “Why are you trying to hurt me?”

“Why are you such a cock tease?” he spits, crushing the foam ball in his grasp.

“You know,” you back out the room, defeated, “the sad part is that I thought you were a good guy.”

“Why don’t you go find someone else to play your games with,” Max calls out as you leave and you hear the ball hit the wall with a soft thump.

Friday Morning

Sam waits outside the door to the conference room as Pepper hands him the latest update on the case. He opens the folio, reading through the documents. He’s always fully prepared.

“Do you need me?” Pepper asks, “Because I need to finish the notes from your call with Mr. Takahashi. You’ll need the final proposal before your one o’clock.”

“No,” Sam shakes his head without look up. “I should be back in my office by eleven. We’ll have time to review.”

She wanders off and Sam’s flips through page after page, scanning the notes. He’s not really listening, it’s your name that pulls him out of what he’s reading, moving closer to the open door.

“I’m telling she was practically begging for it,” Max explains.

“If Y/N was so into it then why are you so hot and cold?” Another voice asks. “You’ve been after her for months.”

“Because every other guy has already been there.” Max laughs. “I mean she’s a real whore, let me fuck her ass the first time. That’s how you know she’s been open for business.”

“Shit,” someone else grunts. “If you don’t want her, I’ll damn sure get in line.”

“Go for it man, two drinks and she was all over my dick like she hadn’t been fucked in years. She was starving for it.”

Friday Afternoon

“What is it?” Sam snips, looking for up for only a second. You haven’t seen him since you got off the plane in Boston last week. You know he’s been busy but you expected less hostility.

“I need to show you something.” You inch into his office.

“Can it wait?” He sits up, pulling off his glasses to stare you. He normally looks you up and down but right now his eyes are boring a hole into yours with an unwavering stare. “I’m busy. I don’t have time for you today.”

Jesus.

You take a breath, holding back with everything you have, you’ve wanted to cry for forty-eight hours but you didn’t think Sam would be the one to push you over the edge.

“Um-” you stutter, words getting caught in your throat.

“Um?” He raises an eyebrow. “Pull yourself together, use words like an adult.”

You swallow hard, tears brimming, as you try to swallow the thump in your throat.

“There’s something I came across when I was sorting through phone records for the Jablonski case.” You manage stable words, masking your looming breakdown.

“And you’re bothering me with this why?” He asks plainly as if you’re some low-level employee he’s never laid eyes on before.

“I just thought-”

“What did you just think? That because I fucked you I would suddenly have time for whatever this is?” His eyes are on fire and you wished you could melt into the floor.

“Jesus Christ, you’re a real dick, you know that?” you whisper, a tear running down your cheek, mouth trembling. “What did I do?”

His eyes light up, rage threatening right there under the surface. “Why aren’t you giving this to your project leader? Max has time for you, I’m sure.”

“I tried. He won’t listen to me.”

“Why?” Sam’s jaw locks, seething with anger. You’ve got no idea where this is coming from but you’re fully prepared to leave this building and never come back. “Stop crying, it’s pathetic.”

“Because,” you close your eyes, fresh tears falling, you’re really crying now. You stare at the floor, unable to take any more of his glare. “Because he’s mad at me.”

“Why is he mad at you?” He pushes as if he's waiting for some lurid confession.

“I wouldn’t sleep with him. He’s been an absolute asshole. He’s successfully made my life a living hell. I’m pretty sure he told everyone in the building that I’m a whore. I’ve got people I don’t even know whispering about me in the halls. I tried to show him but he won’t listen to me. I found something. I think it’s important so I came up here to tell you and now you’re...whatever this is. Please just take this so I can leave.”

You hold out a folder, wincing as he steps forward. He takes the folder out of your hands, but the next thing you feel is both his hands cupping your face, thumbs pressed into your cheeks.

“Calm down.” His voice is softer now, less commanding, more soothing.

You look at him, and gone is his threatening stare, it’s been replaced by something gentler.

“I haven’t done anything, to anyone.” you offer, stripped bare of pretense as you look up at him. “I’m just trying to help.”

“I jumped to some conclusions, I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.” It makes sense now, he’s heard the rumors. One of his hands moves from your face to your chest, placing his hand wide over your heart, resting between your breasts, guiding your breath. “I’m sorry.”

While it doesn’t excuse his actions you’re fairly sure Sam Winchester rarely apologizes, if ever.

“Okay,” you whisper, unable to dive any deeper, not right now at least.

“I’ll look through what you brought and take care of the Max situation.”

“I’m not a snitch,” you gulp, “I didn’t tell you to get him in trouble.”

“I know that. But you did tell me and I can’t have one of my employees talking about another like this. I won’t allow this kind of hostile environment for anyone.”

“He’s going to know I told you.”

“He’s going to know you told HR, because that’s how we’ll deal with it.” He sets the folder on his desk and picks up his phone.

“You’re done for the week. Go downstairs, I’ll have my driver take you to my house. You’re going to spend the weekend with me.”

“The weekend?” You look up, wiping tears as your mind tries to shift off of Max and into whatever this new territory is. “I don’t have anything with me.”

“You won’t need much.”

Sam’s house is a huge, modern home in Newton, Massachusetts. You know from listening to Pepper that he has a loft in Boston but this sprawling architectural wonder is his real home, far outside the city.

Dealing with him on a more intimate level it’s been easy to forget that he’s filthy fucking rich. He’s made more money than most people can dream of and this house is a jarring reminder that you’re in his world now.

The driver walks you to the door, punches in a code and ensures you’re inside before leaving. The floors are dark wood and everything else is stark white, it makes the place feel almost antiseptic. You take your shoes off and trail down the hallway that opens up into a generous living area, twice the size of your entire apartment. There is a couch, several chairs, and a coffee table. The walls are bare, save for one huge painting hanging on the wall, it’s all dark colors and strange shapes.

You continue exploring, wandering down a narrow hall to the right and find the kitchen. It’s just as devoid of personality as the rest of the house. He could feed a small army and you wonder if he’s ever lonely being one man with all this unnecessary space.

There’s a labyrinth of empty bedrooms, filled with furniture and not much else. At the end of this hall is his room, it’s unmistakable. In contrast to the rest of the place, there are splashes of color. The door to his closet is open and you slip inside, flipping on the light to find hundreds of suits, pressed and hung with meticulous care. There’s a second closet filled with his casual clothing, sneakers, and gym clothes. It sparks a lot of thought about what he’s truly like outside of the professional world.

Is this it? Is all this naked space his life? It seems...unfulfilling.

At the end of the closet, there’s a dresser with two pictures sitting on top. You pick one up and examine it. It’s a family, mother, and father, a young boy and a baby. It’s easy to guess that the baby is Sam, this was a life that was taken from him.

The second photo is unmistakably Sam with a mop of wild hair hanging over his forehead. He looks to be in his early twenties and he’s smiling bright and happy, eyes lit up with joy. He’s got his arm around a beautiful blonde who’s pressing her lips to his cheek. This Sam looks alive, warm and inviting. Another version of him from a happier time.

There’s a faint sound and you set the picture down, shutting off the light and scrambling out of the room. You find him in the living room, slipping his suit jacket off and laying it over the back of a chair. He looks up, a half-smile crossing his lips.

“You,” he points to you, shaking his head. “Just saved me from an utter disaster. I have twenty lawyers on that case, five paralegals and you’re the only who caught the phone calls.”

“It was something?” you question, moving closer.

“More than something. Kurt hasn’t been telling us the truth. If we had moved forward with our current strategy he would have ended up in jail and our reputation would have taken a massive hit.”

“Well, I’m glad I could help,” you offer, still reeling from the rollercoaster of a day you’ve had. “Before you say anything else, there’s something I need to say.”

“What is it?” he asks, getting closer.

“I know you have a lot going on. You’re busy and you don’t always have time for me. I understand that you’re blunt and like to get right to the point. But I can’t handle the way you spoke to me today. I enjoy what we have, but I won’t be around someone who treats me like that.”

He waits for a beat, eyes honing in on you, his head tilting as his tongue darts out. You can practically see the gears turning.

“I overheard a rumor and took it as truth. I, of all people, should know better,” he offers. “I don’t share. I’ve never played well with others and when I heard what I did, I reacted. I am sorry for that. I asked you to trust me and I need to trust you in return. It’s the only way this works. I trust you to keep your word, make good on your commitments. I will never speak to you that way again.”

“Good.” You gulp, feeling suddenly small in his living room. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

“Agreed.” He moves past you, reaching out to squeeze your arm as he heads off toward the kitchen and you follow. “Are you hungry?”

“Yea - Yes. I am. I was so worked up all day, I haven’t eaten anything since last night,” you confess, almost afraid of what kind of strange, kale-infused delicacy he’ll offer you.

“I’ll make something.” He opens the refrigerator, looking back you. “How do you feel about beets?”

“What I’m about to do is all about trust,” Sam explains as you sit naked in his lap, knees on either side of his thighs. His cock is thick and hard, trapped between your bellies.

“I know,” you nod, one hand on each of his shoulders. Your nails sink into his skin, holding on like he’s already begun. You look him in the eyes, searching for understanding. “I trust you, I’m just...nervous.”

“You’ll like it.” He nods, both hands holding your hips tightly. “It’s an incredible release.”

His hand wedges between your bodies again, finding your clit, rubbing a few last times before he gets started. He’s spent the better part of an hour getting you worked up, you're wet and throbbing, ready for more.

“Lift up,” he instructs and you rise up on your knees as he takes his cock into his hand and slips the head into your pussy. “Now lower down, take it all.”

You stare at him as you slide down his dick, not stopping until you’re filled to the brim.

“Jesus,” you gasp, eyes fluttering closed for a moment. He’s thick, a wonderful stretch that sends little jolts of pleasure up your spine.

“Hands behind your back.”

You comply, placing your wrists together at the base of your spine. He picks up his discarded tie, reaching around and securing your wrists. The fact that he doesn’t need to see to be able to properly tie you up, has you both excited and concerned.

Sitting back he looks at you, then down to where you’re sitting on his dick.

“Fuck yourself on my cock, slowly.”

Lifting up you hum with satisfaction, feeling the drag of him inside you. It’s only intensified when you sink back and find a rhythm, even and constant, as you stare at each other. After a few minutes he starts to breath faster, mouth clamped shut as he studies your face. One hand comes up and slides around your throat. His fingers nearly reach the back of your neck, thumb pressing into the opposite side under your jaw.

He squeezes, not hard, just enough to make you feel the pressure and you whimper, sliding up and down his shaft. Leaning all the way back in the chair, he reaches between your bodies with his free hand and begins to carefully rub your clit.

Your mouth falls open as the pleasure builds, everything between your legs slick and throbbing. His cock alone would be enough to get you off like this, you’re not used to the stretch yet, you doubt you ever will be, but it’s a wonderful challenge as you lift yourself up and down in his lap.

“Feels so good,” you whisper, biting your lower lip, his thumb moving faster over your swollen clit.

“Stick your tongue out,” he instructs. You blink, feeling the all too familiar shame creep in as you drop your jaw and stick your tongue out.

He keeps you just like this as the minutes tick by, your whimpers and moans sound even more desperate with your mouth wide open, tongue hanging out like some kind of slutty porn star.

Tugging at your hands you almost falter, only to have the hand around your throat grow tighter, holding you in place.

“You don’t have to ask permission to cum, just let it happen.” And with that his lips curl and his fingers clench and suddenly you can’t breathe. You knew this was coming, he’d prepared you for it but the first time you can’t help the panic, your heart speeding up.

For five seconds you are open-mouthed, fighting for air and then he lets up and you suck in a huge breath.

“Don’t stop fucking,” he reminds you. You’ve slowed down but you pick up the pace, sliding back and forth more than up and down. “Tongue back out.”

You comply and his grip tightens until you can’t breathe again and this time it’s longer. His thumb works faster over your bud, his hips rise up, keeping his cock moving inside you.

This time it’s ten seconds, and by the time he lets go your whole body is hot, sweat breaking out from head to toe.

You expected more pleasure, it’s not exactly bad but also not the pay off you anticipated.

After a few deep breaths, you stick out your tongue and ride him as his fist closes around your throat, tighter than the two previous times. His thumb presses firm, you feel your orgasm building as he squeezes the last breath out of you. You start to squirm, pulling at the restraints out of instinct. A desperate gagging sound leaves your throat and you’re getting closer and closer and then it happens at the same time. Your vision starts to go spotty and you cum at the same time. He eases up, but barely, still controlling the air supply as you jerk on his cock.

You’re floating and then there’s a rush of pure euphoria. It’s a tingling, weightless feeling that seamlessly melts into the pleasure of your orgasm and the whole world fades away. There’s nothing else, only the feeling of your body rolling up and down and an incredible pleasure between your legs.

Unsure how long you’ve hung in this transcendental state, you blink, vision clearing only to find Sam staring at you, both his hands cupped around your cheeks, holding your head up.

“Wow,” you whisper smiling like a fool, looking at him from under hooded eyes as an overwhelming wave of satisfaction and bliss sets in. “Thank you.”

“It looked incredible.” His eyes are lit up and moving quickly, searching your face.

“Untie me please,” you request softly, not entirely of sound mind yet.

He blinks, hesitates for a moment, then one hand leaves your face to reach behind you to free your wrists. Without thinking you wrap yourself around him, both hands sliding behind his neck as you rest your head on his shoulder.

His palms slide up your back, holding you as you come back down to earth, thumbs stroking back and forth until your breathing is back to normal. Once you’ve semi-recovered you sit up, inches away from his face as you look at each other. He’s even more handsome up close, the little wrinkles around his eyes and the pink of his lips are beautiful.

Wordlessly you lift yourself up, letting his cock slide almost of your pussy before sinking back down, finding a pace that makes your thighs burn as you ride him, desperate to give him the same release he’s just gifted you.

“Fuck,” he groans, head tipped back, the muscles of his neck straining. The two big hands on your hips pull you down onto him, holding you in place as he cums, spurting warm inside you until he’s finished.

After a few minutes, he lifts you up and off his semi-hard cock, rubbing his knuckles directly over your cheek, a tender caress that makes your eyes close in response.

“Now, get on your knees and suck my cock until it’s clean.”

“Sam,” you start, watching the subtitles on the muted TV as a newscaster talks about the upcoming election. “Why am I here?”

“What do you mean?” he responds, only half paying attention.

“I’m in your house, in your bed. You said you want to me stay all weekend. Don’t get me wrong, I want to be here, but I didn’t think you would want someone in your personal space.”

“I don’t mind having you in my personal space as long as it’s at my request.” He explains evenly, glancing up. “I’ve been busy this last week. My schedule is only going to get tighter. Weekends might be the only time we get to see each for a while. I won’t have time for the same interactions while I’m at work.”

“That makes sense.”

“Are you alright with that? Do you have a cat that needs to be fed?”

“No, no animals, no social life to speak of. We’re perfect for each other.” You smile and he grins looking back to the screen.

“What will happen to Max?” you ask, laying on your back staring at the ceiling of his bedroom.

“Do you care?”

“No. I’m sure he deserves whatever he gets,” you nod, the feeling of the last few days washing over you again.

“What happened to make him so upset?” Sam’s inquiry seems genuine.

“I turned him down. Some men are like that, for whatever reason they can’t handle being told no. Honestly, I had no idea he was that upset with me. I can only imagine what they all think of me. It’s so embarrassing.”

“You’re not the one that has anything to be embarrassed about.” His eyes go back the report in front of him, sliding the screen up but still talking. “Even if everything he said was true, it shouldn’t matter.”

He goes back to his work, reviewing some document that can’t wait until Monday and you lie there, pretending to watch a rerun of Frasier that comes on after the news broadcast.

“Sam, can I ask you something?”

“It seems like you’re going to regardless of my answer.” He glances at you.

“Are you happy?”

He stops, looking up and forward before turning to staring at you as if you’ve just asked him to hop on one foot.

“Is anyone?”

“I am.” You roll onto your side. “I mean, I’m not over the moon every day, but I’m content and I have moments of real, true happiness.”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“I was just thinking about you. I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have asked-”

“It’s fine.” He sets down the tablet on the nightstand and rolls onto his side, propping his elbow on the pillow. “No, I’m not happy in a traditional sense. I’m satisfied. I’m focused, I accomplish things no one else would ever be able to. There are a lot of things you have to give up to have the career I’ve had. I built something. I gave up happiness for success, it was a conscious choice.”

“Don’t you want more than your job?”

“No.” He shakes his head without hesitation. “When you add too much into the mix, things get messy.”

“Is that why you have me? I mean, you’re a pretty big deal. I can’t imagine you’re desperate for dates.”

“I don’t date, I have no desire for that. Having people in your life makes you unfocused, they’re distractions.”

“I’m not a distraction?” you inquire. A psychologist would have a field day with him.

“You are exactly what I need you to be. I’m not a robot. I have the same base urges as every other red-blooded American male, but instead of marrying the first pretty girl with long legs that liked my money, I decided to leave sex in its own category. My life is compartmentalized, things run smoother that way.”

“Do you have friends?”

“Not anymore.” His voices wavers, just a little but you catch it, trying your best to not let on. “For me friends are either a liability or a disappointment. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t fall into one of the two categories.”

“Geez, which one am I?”

“You’re not my friend,” he states, eyes narrowing. “You are a category all your own.”

“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.”

#tedtalk!sam #Controal and release #sam winchester x reader #sam winchester smut #sam winchester fanfic

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sunshineweb · 3 years

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51 Ideas from 2020

Dear Tribe Member,

Despite the despair all around, I trust 2020 treated you well and that you and everyone around you are keeping safe and healthy.

Right before the year ends, I thought I’d share a handful of ideas I’ve learned, re-learned, and wrote about in the past twelve months. Here are 51 of them categorized under the subjects of investing and life. I hope you find these useful, as much as I did.

Investing 1. Losing Money on Stocks is NOT a Shame People talk about regret aversion and how we make decisions to avoid regretting an alternative decision in the future. But I would rather call it ‘shame aversion,’ because most of the time most if you see guilt or shame as a more powerful emotion than plain regret.

So, we feel guilty for not investing in rising stocks when we see our friends making money on them. We feel guilty of not having invested in stocks when the prices were down, and we knew (now, in hindsight) that we should have sold our houses then to invest.

We feel bad accepting we made a mistake that causes us to hold on to our losing stocks (bad businesses) because the shame of such acceptance would be too heavy to bear on our already frail hearts. So, not only would people bet heavily on hot stocks in frothy markets, but they would also double-down when these stocks fall to avoid the shame of turning their paper losses into real ones.

My dear friend, there is no shame in losing money on a stock or any investment. Everyone loses at some point in time, and there is not a single investor who has never made a mistake.

Of course, that does not mean you bet your house on stocks – even the best ones. Losing ₹ 1 crore on a ₹ 100 crore net worth is not the same as losing ₹ 1 crore on a ₹ 2 crore net worth. So, you should always be worried about losing big money permanently. But that worry should show up in the kind of work you do on your process to pick stocks, not after you have already lost money.

Investing or money are such insignificant parts of this beautiful thing called life that you must not lose sleep over them, forget losing your life.

Markets change, cycles turn, everything passes, and there are numerous opportunities one gets to rise after a fall, clean the dust, give up any guilt or shame of falling, and start walking again.

The noted British writer and speaker Alan Watts said –

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the Gods made for fun.

Russian philosopher and novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky agreed in a way when he said –

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

Learn from your mistakes, but stop taking them, or yourself, so seriously.

2. When Not to Sell Your Stocks My biggest lesson in compounding is that saving more, thinking long-term, and allowing compound interest to work in your favour act as accelerators for wealth creation. There is nothing complex about this.

You can even be the world’s worst market timer and still build great wealth over 3-4 decades only if you do one thing – keep buying quality investments, and never sell.

Of course, the idea of buy and hold is simple, but not easy to practice.

The act of ‘not acting’ on a longer timeframe is made up of hundreds of small decisions that lead to the ultimate decision to ‘not act.’ Also, businesses change from time to time, and so do emotions, and so do the behaviours of other investors around us, and so do conditions in the stock market and of our portfolios. And that’s why sitting on stocks – the ones that remain high quality – is not as simple as it sounds. And that’s why patience is one of the most important yet difficult skills one must cultivate while investing in the stock market.

George Baker made a powerful remark which Thomas Phelps quoted in his book 100 to 1 in the Stock Market –

To make money in stocks you must have “the vision to see them, the courage to buy them, and the patience to hold them.”

Patience is the rarest of the three and is not an easy skill to develop however easy experienced investors or advisors may make it sound. But if developed and practiced well, it pays off handsomely in the long run.

That’s how fortunes are made in the stock market.

3. Catch the Compounding Train, Even If You’re Late When you look at the compounding graph it gives an impression that getting an early entry is the only way to benefit from it. But even if you catch the compounding train late, it can still get you to your destination –

A prospective Berkshire Hathaway shareholder in 1992 had no way of knowing the specific actions Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger would take to build value over the next quarter century…[In spite of that] The search for the “next Berkshire” is a near obsession for many value investors. We all want to get in on the ground floor of something great and compound wealth at 20 percent over a half century or more. However, for the vast majority of us, that dream is pretty much impossible to achieve and there is a risk that costly mistakes might be made in the process of pursuing it…However, what can be known, and likely has predictive value, is how management views capital allocation, the quality of a company’s culture, and the general capabilities of the managers involved…In 2016, there is no doubt that there are companies one could invest in on the ground floor that will become phenomenal success stories in the decades to come. There is substantial doubt that investors will be able to identify those companies. However, today there are many candidates for investment where the companies are already well under construction and we can get in on a higher floor.

4. Investing Math is the Simple Part “Investing is simple, but not easy,” said Charlie Munger.

Why? Because…

Understanding that sensible investing is about buying a thing worth Rs 100 at Rs 50 is simple, but actually buying something worth Rs 100 that falls to Rs 50 is not easy.

Working on spreadsheets is simple, but not twisting spreadsheets to fit your version of reality is not easy.

Calculating past growth and profitability numbers for a business and understanding whether those are good or bad is simple, but actually trying to understand a business deeply enough to visualize how it will look like in the future is not easy.

Knowing that a business has moat as seen from its superior profitability and clean balance sheet is simple, but understanding whether this moat is sustainable or fleeting is not easy.

Calculating book value of a company is simple, but understanding whether that book really has value, and roughly how much, is not easy.

Knowing the results that numbers shout out of financial statements is simple, but knowing which of those results are signal and which are noise is not easy.

Knowing how DCF works is simple, but looking at businesses with a DCF frame of mind is not easy.

Calculating precise intrinsic values for businesses is simple, but trusting approximations that really work is not easy. (Keynes said – “It’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.”)

Knowing beta is a measure of volatility is simple, but appreciating that volatility isn’t the real risk you face in investing is not easy.

Earning alpha from an investment for a year or two is simple, but appreciating with complete humility that it is next to impossible to sustain it over a long period of time is not easy.

Understanding that money can multiply 100x in 25 years when you compound at 20% annually is simple, but sitting through these 25 years patiently when others are cashing in after having made 5-10x is not easy.

The celebrated American physicist and a great teacher Richard Feynman said that there’s a big difference between ‘knowing the name of something’ and ‘knowing something’.

Math helps you know the name of a lot of things, which is simple. But it’s your mindset that helps you really know things, which is not easy.

Of course, understanding basic math is a prerequisite for becoming a smarter investor. But if you need math to tell you whether you are doing right in investing or not, you are doing something seriously wrong.

5. The Math of Debt Alcohol math. Wine multiplies itself by itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it’s hard to stop at one glass, it will be impossible at three. Addition is multiplication. ~ Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

Debt math is exactly like that. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it’s hard to stop early, it will be impossible later.

Economics has a term for this – debt spiral, which is a situation where an individual, or a business, or a country sees ever-increasing levels of debt. This increasing levels of debt and debt interest becomes unsustainable, eventually leading to debt default.

See this chart.

In 2004, at the Berkshire Hathaway AGM, a 14-year old shareholder asked Warren Buffett to share his top finance tips for young people.

Buffett replied –

If I had one piece of advice to give to young people, it would be just to don’t get in debt. It’s very tempting to spend more than you earn, it’s very understandable. But it’s not a good idea.

6. The Getting Rich Quadrant

Just to explain a bit about the illustration in case you have any doubts reading it –

High income-low cost is the best combination that can take you to self-created riches, but only if you are able to invest the surplus so created sensibly, and for the long run

High income-high cost is the life a lot of people working in white-collar jobs live. We enhance our lifestyle with every increase in income, without much consideration to calling it ‘enough’ and creating greater surpluses as incomes rise. It’s like running on a hedonic treadmill (Wikipedia explains hedonic treadmill as an observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes). This is a must-avoid situation when you start earning good income.

Low income-high cost is a disastrous situation if not corrected early in time. In such cases, people borrow from the future to live in the present, and the situation can get really painful and unmanageable with time. If you find yourself in such a situation, the first thing to do is to move to the low income-low cost quadrant, by spending as less money as you can. Moving straight to a high income-high cost quadrant could be difficult as incomes could be decided by various external factors. However, first moving to the low income-low cost quadrant before finally shifting to a high income-low cost quadrant is relatively easier.

If you are in a low income-low cost situation, congratulations! Now you just need to find ways to move to a high income situation. This is easier said than done but you may search for ideas around you to grow your income. Maybe, start a side business, work on additional jobs, or ask your boss for a raise. However, if you are stuck in this situation for long, and only have a tiny surplus available, the only way to get rich is to invest so well that you can compound even this small sum greatly. This, in most cases, is hope against hope and impossible unless the investment Gods have destined for you multi-baggers after multi-baggers.

Someone wise said –

Save part of your income and begin now, for the man with a surplus controls circumstances and the man without a surplus is controlled by circumstances.

I hope you are already doing this in your pursuit of financial freedom.

If not, I hope the above quadrant guides you, even if in a little way.

7. Financial Freedom At the start of 2020, I spoke at the Value Investing Summit in Kuala Lumpur, on the subject of ‘financial freedom.’

Click here to watch the video of my talk, or watch below.

There are intermittent audio issues due to a problem with the microphone. But I know you are wise enough to not complain about the same and instead able to connect those dots looking at my slides and your own wisdom.

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8. Notes from Warren Buffett’s Latest Letter Click here to download the notes.

9. Virus is NOT risk Virus is NOT risk. It is an uncertainty. Learn to differentiate between the two please.

Risk is measurable, like the odds of winning on any roll of a fair dice. Uncertainty is not measurable. It is and unknown unknown.

Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing. Risk comes from looking to Mr. Market for advice instead of opportunities. Risk comes from focusing on the outcome (what will happen in the future) and not the process (what can I do now). Risk comes from acting like others are acting, and mindlessly. Risk comes from investing in fundamentally bad businesses when their stocks have fallen, especially when you start to believe their cheapness provides you value. Risk, ultimately, comes from focusing on return and not risk.

In short, YOU are the biggest risk to your investments, not COVID.

Human nature has not changed between these two times –

Image Source …so just manage the risk called YOU…like the virus that knows how to manage itself well.

10. Becoming An Investing Buddha When it comes to investing, making money in stocks when everyone is making money in stocks isn’t a big deal. Rather, it’s the ability to handle good and bad times with equanimity, combined with courage and decisiveness, that really matters in the long run. Of course, most of us simply aren’t wired to be equanimous at most of the times, and it’s terribly difficult to rid ourselves of the emotions of ecstasy (when things are looking up) and misery (when things are looking down). And that’s why ensuring that we avoid all of those ways that can cause us wealth destruction – trading, timing, high fee, inadequate diversification, and leverage – is paramount. Everything, including our triumphs and disasters, anyways shall pass. But the equanimity with which we allow them to pass will keep us sane always.

Anyways, considering the rough waters that we have sailed through in the markets this year, I made this illustration that contains the iron rules of becoming an investing Buddha, or the one who invests in such a manner that allows him to be at peace at all times.

As Lord Krishna taught Arjuna, as we wade through the ocean of life, it throws up all kinds of waves that are beyond our control. If we keep struggling to eliminate negative situations, we will be unable to avoid unhappiness. But if we live a life of sanity and learn to accept everything that comes our way, with equanimity and without sacrificing our best efforts, that will be true Nirvāṇa.

11. Owning Stocks is a Long-Term Project In the long journey of the stock of a high-quality business, the daily short-term jumps – or volatility as they call it in business news – that makes people nervous are “non-events.” Annie Duke writes in her brilliant book Thinking in Bets –

In our decision-making lives, we aren’t that good at taking this kind of perspective – at accessing the past and future to get a better view of how any given moment might fit into the scope of time. It just feels how it feels in the moment and we react to it.…We make a long-term stock investment because we want it to appreciate over years or decades. Yet there we are, watching a downward tick over a few minutes, consumed by imagining the worst. What’s the volume? Is it heavier than usual? Better check the news stories. Better check the message boards to find out what rumors are circulating.

Even noted psychologist Daniel Kahneman agrees –

If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It’s the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you’ll be miserable.

12. Why Value Investing Works I read a post some time back wherein Jack Schwager, the author of Market Wizards series, when answering a question on whether value investing works, turned to the wisdom of Joel Greenblatt, one of the foremost experts on the subject. Schwager quoted this from his interview with Greenblatt – “Value investing doesn’t always work. The market doesn’t always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn’t work. And that is a very good thing. The fact that the value approach doesn’t work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term.”

13. Oh, EBITDAC! “Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine,” so said Lord Byron. Well, laughter is great. A meme circulated on Twitter some time back suggested that companies suffering from the global pandemic will trot out a new performance metric: EBITDAC, for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortisation and coronavirus. It’s apparently not a joke. Some companies are actually tweaking their figures to avoid triggering defaults on loans, like this German firm that has added back €5.4 million profits to its first quarter that it said it would have made were it not for the hit caused by lockdowns!

In simple terms, EBITDA, the elder brother of EBITDAC, is a measure of a company’s overall financial performance and is used as an alternative to simple earnings or net income. EBITDA, however, can be misleading because it strips out the cost of capital (debt) and essential investments like property, plant, and equipment (because it is prior to depreciation).

By the way, Charlie Munger has said this about EBITDA —

…every time you see the word EBITDA, you should substitute the words bullshit earnings.

Not sure what he has to say on EBITDAC!

14. How to Get Rich Bloomberg carried this nice piece from Nir Kaissar and Barry Ritholtz, where the authors write to answer this question – How do you get rich? By earning a lot or saving a lot? Here is Barry’s point of view on the subject of “frugality” –

I am not, nor have I ever been, a fan of “sustained and disciplined frugality.” With that said, here’s what to keep in mind:

1. Focus on the big things; the little things will take care of themselves 2. We all only have so much internal discipline, a consequence of limited mental bandwidth. Don’t fritter it away on things that don’t matter very much. 3. Spending should always be a function of what you can afford, not a slavish devotion to some puritan ideal. 4. Money can bring security, comfort and happiness, but beyond a certain point returns on having more of it diminish rapidly. 5. Experiences tend to beat material goods in terms of money well spent.

First, the big things: Your education, your career choice, your work ethic, who you marry, who you work with, your skill set, your compensation, your health, your outlook, how you think about the world and the commitment you make to yourself about continually learning and improving. Get those right, and those $5 lattes become pretty irrelevant.

Basically, the advice is this – avoid the hedonic treadmill and you will be much better off in your financial life. “Hedonic treadmill” is basically a theory positing that people repeatedly return to their baseline level of happiness, regardless of what happens to them. It is an important concept to grasp when it comes to understanding happiness, which we often lose in forever chasing rainbows.

15. The 60/40 Solution While searching through my collection of resources on Peter Bernstein, the author of “Capital Ideas” and “Against the Gods,” I came across this brilliant article he wrote for Bloomberg many years back, titled The 60/40 Solution, wherein he talked about the lessons from history (emphasis mine) –

The constant lesson of history is the dominant role played by surprise. Just when we are most comfortable with an environment and come to believe we finally understand it, the ground shifts under our feet. Surprise is the rule, not the exception. That’s a fancy way of saying we don’t know what the future holds. Even the most serious efforts to make predictions can end up so far from the mark as to be more dangerous than useless.

All of history and all of life is stuffed full of the unexpected and the unthinkable. Survival as an investor over that famous long course depends from the very first on recognition that we do not know what is going to happen. We can speculate or calculate or estimate, but we can never be certain. Something very simple but very penetrating stems from this observation. If we never know what the future holds, we can never be right all the time. Being wrong on occasion is inescapable. As the great English economist John Maynard Keynes expressed it some 80 years ago, “A proposition is not probable because we think it so.” The most important lesson an investor can learn is to be dispassionate when confronted by unexpected and unfavorable outcomes.

16. Make-Lose Vs Lose-Make Nassim Taleb, out of my journal, explains the concept of path dependence, which is the dependence of outcomes on the path of previous outcomes, rather than simply on current conditions –

Ironing your shirts then putting them in the washing machine produces a different outcome from washing your shirts first, then ironing them.

The reader can either trust me on this, or try the experiment with both sequences on the next Sunday afternoon. Now, assume that your capital is around one million dollars and you are involved in speculation. Apply path dependence to the reasoning.

Making a million dollars first, then losing it, is markedly different from losing a million dollars first then making it.

The first path (make-lose) leaves you intact; the second (lose) makes you bankrupt, insolvent, maimed, traumatized and more generally unable to stay in the game, thus unable to benefit from the second part of the sequence. There is no make after the lose.

Reminds me of Warren Buffett’s “Rule No. 1 – Never LOSE money.”

Consider a weak, fragile business. It is path-dependent. With stretched balance sheet, large capital requirement, and inadequate capacity to suffer, a prolonged weakness in the economy can destroy it. It is then difficult for it to rise from that ruin. When you own such a business, you have to do a lot of praying to the economics gods. Such a business starts from a “lose” and now it’s difficult, almost impossible, for it to “make” back what it lost.

On the other hand, a robust and anti-fragile business, with clean balance sheet and low capital requirement, which has built a capacity to suffer over years, is not path dependent. It can survive a weak economy. Even if the weakness persists, at worst, it may lose what it has already made, which is better than starting with losing it all.

So, check out what you already own in your portfolio. Is it in the “make, then lose” category, or “lose, then lose everything” one?

Stick with the former. Discard the latter.

17. The Dunning-Kruger Effect

18. Chance Has No Memory In activities largely involving luck (like fair coin toss, gambling, investing), past outcomes have no effect on the current outcome. Chance occurrences do not have any relationship to things that happened before.

The probability of a child being a boy or girl is, theoretically 0.5. Since chance has no memory, that’s the same probability EVERY time. Even in a family of 10 daughters, the probability of the eleventh child being a son is, theoretically, 0.5. In a country like India, that’s an important thing to remember for parents with first 2-3 daughters but still wanting another child believing that would be a son.

Now, it may sound simple but a lot of us struggle with this idea.

People have a hard time remembering this when they invest in stocks. For example, when I see that my past 3-4 stocks have not earned me quick returns like what other stocks have earned for my friends, I am more inclined to bet on the next stock thinking, “It hasn’t happened in a while, so it’s bound to happen soon.”

It’s like Ranveer Singh singing in the movie Gully Boy, “Apna time aayega…” (my time will come).

19. Formula for Survival in Life and Investing While reading notes from the 1989 AGM of Berkshire Hathaway, I came across this passage where Warren Buffett was asked about his approach to risk and investment decision making, and he replied –

Take the probability of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain times the amount of possible gain. That is what we’re trying to do. It’s imperfect, but that’s what it’s all about.

As an equation, it reads thus –

Success in investing = (Probability of gain X Amount of possible gain) – (Probability of loss X Amount of possible loss) = A positive number

Michael Mauboussin describes this concept as expected value. It’s actually a very simple concept.

In essence, you don’t have to be right a lot, you just have to be right about your big bets at the right time. Here, while the probabilities matter a lot, so do the consequences i.e., amount of possible gain/loss.

It’s important to get that equation right.

If you are willing to buy a stock, say, priced at 60-70x P/E or more, thinking the probability of it going higher is good, also remember the consequence of a period of weakness/slowdown in business. Such expensively priced stocks ride on high expectations, and the consequences of a small slip could be really bad.

Given that we often tell ourselves false stories to avoid the truth, with our minds clouded by denial, optimism and negative decision-making tendencies, the expected value idea can help us avoid the landmine of expensive, hot and bad stocks that cover a large ground in stock investing.

Buffett says, “In order to succeed you must first survive.”

So here’s the mantra.

In life, to live, simply avoid dying (till you can).

In investing, to succeed, simply avoid ruin (till you can).

20. Why We Make Bad Decisions Short answer – We have design flaws. We are fairly sure we are way above average, and we are also sure we see everything perfectly.

Long answer – Ray Dalio wrote in his book Principles –

The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots. Together, they make it difficult for you to objectively see what is true about you and your circumstances and to make the best possible decisions by getting the most out of others. If you can understand how the machine that is the human brain works, you can understand why these barriers exist and how to adjust your behavior to make yourself happier, more effective, and better at interacting with others.

21. Not Everyone Should Pick Stocks Despite the growing popularity of investing, not everyone is suited to manage his or her own stock market investments, it is not a matter of pride if you are able to do it or a matter of shame if you are not able to do it well.

The idea is to just let your savings compound at rates that help you maintain your purchasing power over years. Whether you do it through your own stock picking skills, or hire a fund manager, does not make a difference. The only condition is that your money must be handled well.

Seeking help is always a good idea. And accepting that you may not be capable enough to manage things on your own is even better.

Your stocks don’t know you own them. And, whatever those people who entice you to get rich through investing may promise you, please don’t see investing in stocks as a way to get rich. Such ideas are often masked by survivorship bias, which is a logical error of concentrating only on people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not. So, taking inspiration from other investors who have made good money from “100-to-1 stocks” and ignoring others who followed similar processes but ended up with disasters can lead you to false conclusions about your own potential as an investor and stock picker.

Look at investing as a way to keep you rich i.e., help you grow your purchasing power. Look at your work – job / profession / business – to make you rich and thus focus more energy and focus there than on the stock market.

22. Stock Prices: Information or Influence? In one of his papers on qualities of great investors, Michael Mauboussin writes that investing is an inherently social exercise. Stock prices often go from being a source of information to a source of influence. Consider the history of stock market bubbles. As stocks surge, people who own them get rich on paper. This causes envy among people who do not own the surging shares. Their mind shuts down and they end up buying stocks at extremely high prices (even Newton did that!). This feeds the process. Everyone wants to get on board the stock’s gravy train because everyone else is. Wise investors do not get drawn into such whirlpool of influence. They ignore the views of others and use their own minds. This is difficult, though, as it requires the trait of not caring what others think of you, which does not come naturally to humans. Mauboussin writes that the crowd is often right, but when it is wrong you need the psychological courage to go against the grain.

23. Beware the Excel Spreadsheet Here is how we twist spreadsheets to fit our versions of reality when it comes to investing in stocks –

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24. The Only Way to Win in Investing Here is a story I read recently –

A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine.

Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young boy. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.

“What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!” So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.”

The man sent a bill that read:

Tapping with a hammer………………….. $ 2.00 Knowing where to tap…………………….. $ 9,998.00

Knowing where to tap – the process – makes all the difference, whether you are working with a hammer or with your money.

25. When Long-Term Investing is a Bad Idea Long term investing is a good idea. Forced long term investing is not. When your premise does not work out, or you no longer believe in a stock, you must sell, even if it means a loss. A lot of investors hold on to bad stocks just to get their “money back.” This, I believe, is one of the biggest reasons to lose money in stocks. Remember that the deeper you fall with bad stocks, the more you must gain back to get your money back. And it is often a bad idea to try to get your money back the exact way you lost it.

When it comes to losing stocks in your portfolio, always remember the first law of holes – If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

26. A Pocket Guide for Wealthier Life I recently made a pocket-zine for my kids that contained some lessons on living a good life.

They loved holding and reading it as much as I loved creating it.

Well, call it a positive feedback loop, that zine has led me to create one more. This time on the most important things in personal finance.

I call it – Personal Finance for Smart People: A Pocket Guide for Wealthier Life.

Click here to download the PDF version.

Please note that personal finance is, well, personal. So, it is OK if you reject all the ideas in this zine. See these ideas in context of your own financial goals and circumstances.

27. Investing’s Five Most Irrelevant Facts

* * * Life 28. Imagine! Here’s a note from Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk –

Visual thinking is a great way to understand complex or potentially confusing information, and also a way to organize your thoughts and improve your ability to think and communicate.

Imagine someone talking to you, and starting with the word – “Imagine…”

You are completely hooked, isn’t it?

Consider this excerpt from Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, where his father helps him visualize about dinosaurs –

We had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home and even when I was a small boy my father used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopedia Britannica, and we would read, say, about dinosaurs and maybe it would be talking about the brontosaurus or something, or tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, ‘This thing is twenty-five feet high and the head is six feet across,’ you see, and so he’d stop and say, ‘let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard he would be high enough to put his head through the window but not quite because the head is a little bit too wide and it would break the window as it came by.’ Everything we’d read would be translated as best as we could into some reality and so I learned to do that – everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying by translating.

Then consider how Warren Buffett visually convinced me why gold was a bad investment…

I will say this about gold. If you took all the gold in the world, it would roughly make a cube 67 feet on a side… Now for that same cube of gold, it would be worth at today’s market prices about $7 trillion dollars – that’s probably about a third of the value of all the stocks in the United States… For $7 trillion dollars… you could have all the farmland in the United States, you could have about seven Exxon Mobils, and you could have a trillion dollars of walking-around money… And if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67-foot cube of gold and looking at it all day, and you know me touching it and fondling it occasionally…Call me crazy, but I’ll take the farmland and the Exxon Mobils.

I’ve tried my hands at visual thinking this way –

You may want to check out my Wall of Ideas for more such examples of visual thinking.

Now, visual thinking is not a new lesson that I would attribute to Elon Musk. But imagine the kind of businesses he is building, to save the world, which he had originally visualized when he was under ten years of age.

When it comes to investing, you can avoid yourself a lot of pain by just visualizing your life after you’ve lost a lot of money trading and speculating in the stock market. If the visuals unnerve you, don’t do anything that would get you into such a situation. That’s also the concept of inversion.

I personally used visual thinking when I was deciding about quitting my job to start Safal Niveshak to help small investors become better at their investment decision making. Of course, when I had started planning my future after a job, the first visual was that of – not being successful in my future work, getting over my savings, and having to return to a job.

But another visual I saw was of helping people, enjoying the freedom of doing things my way, and spending a lot of time with my family. And I thank my stars that this was more powerful than the visual of losing everything.

29. Chop Wood, Carry Water Many of us get caught up in the end results of what we’re working toward or the way things will be when we finally achieve something.

I lived the same way till a few years back.

I thought that once I achieved some future state – promotion, financial independence, enlightenment, the top of the mountain, etc. – I will finally be content. I lived in the future or the past … in my head.

But the truth is that none of these destinations brought me any lasting contentment. Further, getting to where I wanted to go or being “successful” never meant that the work that led me there went away. Instead, I realized that contentment can only be found in every ‘now,’ in being fully present with ordinary daily activities – with chopping wood and carrying water.

It’s only when I was able to find fulfillment in life’s ordinary activities – like eating, walking, writing, cleaning the floor, or washing dishes – I could finally be at peace. It was just me, and my doing. And I realized, this is all that mattered. In this, there was everything.

You see, once you finally achieve “enlightenment,” you must still chop wood and carry water. You must still do your work, do it well, and when you find success, do it again.

Tom Barrett explained on his blog Interlude Retreat –

We travel to the ocean or to mountains, rivers and canyons, in part to escape the mundane world of work, but also to experience the awe that arises more spontaneously in nature’s magnificence. We give ourselves an incredible gift when we can experience some of the same awe in the mundane world of our daily lives. The weed that grows in the crack of a sidewalk is a phenomenon as miraculous as the redwood tree that towers into the sky. The raindrops that streak the window are no less an occasion for awe than the spray that dampens our face at the waterfall. The fingers that tap a keyboard are as worthy of praise as the feet of a ballet dancer.

When we open awareness to the tasks in our lives they become lighter. When we are able to be in the moment, we no longer feel compelled to watch the clock. Whatever your work might be, bring all of yourself to it. When you are fully present, you may find that your labor is no longer a burden.

Wood is chopped. Water is carried. Life happens.

30. Have courage Life is not always easy. But you get through it with courage. There will be times in your life where you’d rather hide or run or bury your head in the sand than face whatever challenge is in your way. In those times, I want you to remember to be brave and show courage. Also, do not be afraid to take risks. You can accomplish great things by taking the right kind of risks. Do not also be afraid to make mistakes, but make sure you learn from them. There are, after all, no mistakes…only lessons. Most importantly, when you fail, get back up, dust yourself off, and try again.

31. Be kind, always Put kindness first. Kindness is when you empathise with others in their troubles, when you treat others the way they want to be treated, when you think and act selflessly without expecting anything in return, when you appreciate others for their work, when you forgive others for their mistakes, and when you carefully listen to someone sharing their problems. “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle, everyone’s lonesome,” said Marion Parker. Given this, learn to deal kindly and compassionately with others. That is your only hope to happily live yourself and leave this world a better place than you found it.

32. Seize each day Steve Jobs, as he shared in his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, read a quote early in his life that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ This is what Jobs told the students – “It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past thirty-three years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” Keep this perspective that you don’t live forever and should focus on doing what really matters, today. This moment, this day, is all you have. Seize it.

33. Embrace your imperfections As we wade through life’s muddled waters, especially as young adults, we tend deep down to be hopeful that we will eventually manage to settle down well and find perfection in a number of areas. We dream of one day securing healthy relationships, deeply fulfilling work, happy family life, and the respect of others. But life, as it is, has a habit of springing surprises, and rushing us in its overwhelming tide. It sometimes deals us a range of blows, leaving our dreams shattered. And like a favorite cup or plate, we sometimes crack. We may even break.

Obviously, you must not throw yourself away when this happens. Instead, you can relish the blemishes and learn to turn these scars into art – like ‘kintsugi,’ an ancient Japanese practice that beautifies broken pottery. In Zen aesthetics, the broken pieces of a ceramic pot should be carefully picked up, reassembled, and then glued together with lacquer inflected with gold powder. The Japanese believe the golden cracks make the pieces even more valuable. It embraces the breakage as part of the object’s history, instead of something unacceptable to be hidden or thrown away.

It is beautiful to think of kintsugi as a metaphor for your life, to see the broken, difficult, or painful parts of you as radiating light, gold, and beauty. It teaches that your broken places make you stronger and better than ever before. The times when you get hurt and broken, you can feel totally rotten. But there can also be a strange beauty in the way you process the cracks in your life and the lessons you take from them afterward. You can decide to cover up, or you can decide to walk out into the world as yourself, with your cracks shining gold.

34. Find your true desire, then live it In a thought-provoking lecture many years ago, British philosopher and writer Alan Watts told the audience this –

Students…come to me and say, ‘We’re getting out of college and we have the faintest idea of what we want to do.’ I always ask the question, what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life? …Students say, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers, but as everybody knows, you can’t earn any money that way. Let’s go through with it, what do you want to do? When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him: you do that and forget the money. Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life full of what you like doing, than a long life, spent in a miserable way. After all if you really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. The only way to become a master of something is to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is…Therefore, it’s so important to consider this question: What do I desire?

What you desire is the reason for which you get up in the morning. Go, search for it. And till you find it, keep looking and do not settle.

35. Live like a verb, not a noun I recently came across this thought-provoking paragraph from the English actor, comedian, and writer Stephen Fry, while browsing a notebook I had scribbled thoughts in some years ago – “Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it. That is your punishment. But if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing — an actor, a writer — I am a person who does things — I write, I act — and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.” Learn to give yourself permission to ‘do’ what brings you the greatest joy – except, say, getting involved in drugs etc. That’s the way you will find satisfaction in life. What will lead you to a fulfilling life isn’t the nouns you may use for yourself – dancer, writer, investor, teacher – but the verbs you will be – the growing, learning, and pursuing that will happen in the process.

36. Forgive over and over and over You are going to have your heartbroken. Whether it’s a fall out with a friend you thought you were close with, or that career that you wish you got. It’s life, it’s going to happen. Take it for the lesson it was and move on. And never hold on to grudges against others and yourself. When we harbor unforgiveness and blame others for all our misery, it slowly eats us away, breeding hatred, and destroying our relationship with that other person, and also with our inner self. But when you decide to forgive, it is like an instant miraculous healing process. It is the key to moving on.

When people do not act as you would wish them to, exercise the muscles of your good nature by shrugging your shoulders and saying to yourself “Oh well.” Then let the incident go. Also, try to be as kind to yourself as possible, by forgiving yourself for mistakes made. The Greek philosopher Epictetus advised, “Do not measure yourself against others or even against your ideal self. Human betterment is a gradual, two-steps-forward, one-step-back effort. When you learn to forgive, others and yourself, and let go, you will be surprised to discover the lightness and freedom that unfold thereafter from within you. Forgiveness won’t necessarily erase all your pain. But it does mean that the hurt is no longer center stage.

37. Do not take life so seriously Our DNA is 96% chimpanzee, so what’s the point of taking life any seriously than a chimp does? Laugh at yourself when you make mistakes. Do not worry about things you cannot control.

You get around 80-90 trips around the sun. Embrace them and enjoy your ride to the fullest. 99% of what you will think as problems won’t even be real problems anyway, just situations your mind would make into some big and unnecessary drama. So, remember to relax. Do not live in your head so much.

38. Value People In his book, The Education of a Value Investor, Guy Spier writes about a story of one Ian Jacobs, a Columbia Business School graduate who successfully applied for a job with Warren Buffett. Along with his cover letter, Jacobs enclosed a cheque to compensate Buffett for his time in evaluating this job application. Jacobs’s cheque showed how much he respected the value of Buffett’s time. Guy writes –

The key, in my experience, is to value people as an end in themselves, not as a means to our own ends. Mohnish (Pabrai) often quotes a beautiful line from the Bible, “I am but dust and ashes.”

Thanks in large part to Mohnish and Warren, I began to realize that I ought to focus more on what others need from me instead of constantly trying to get them to fulfill my own needs. This might sound obvious, but it’s been a huge psychological shift for me, and it’s really changed the way that I live my life.

This is so unlike what happens in the financial services industry where people selfishly work for their own incentives, others be damned! And this is one of the key reasons for my disgust with this industry.

It is important to see and treat people not as ladders on which one must climb to achieve one’s personal success, but as part of a wonderful ecosystem where one can survive and prosper only when others survive and prosper.

Like here is what Buffett has a key part of his Owner’s Manual –

We will be candid in our reporting to you, emphasizing the pluses and minuses important in appraising business value. Our guideline is to tell you the business facts that we would want to know if our positions were reversed. We owe you no less.

In other words, Buffett treats shareholders and managers in his acquired businesses as he would wish to be treated if the positions were reversed.

This is in fact the Golden Rule or ethic of reciprocity – One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.

39. Don’t worry too much about making money It won’t change the way you live. Time spent earning enough money is time reasonably well spent. Time earning an excess of money far beyond that required to meet one’s needs, however, is time wasted. So, know how much is enough.

As far as saving money is concerned, take it seriously but not too much that you compromise your and your family’s present. Especially when you are making a reasonable income and are already saving enough, remember what Warren Buffett says –

…who is to say whether it is better to defer a dollar of expenditure on your family – on a trip to Disneyland or something that they’ll get enormous enjoyment out of – so that when you are 75, you can have a 30-feet boat instead of a 20-feet boat. There are advantages to spending money on your family when it is young – giving them various forms of enjoyment, education, or whatever it may be. But it’s crazy to be spending 105% of your income.

40. Don’t put off “living happily ever after” for another year. Don’t assume you’ll have another year. You won’t get this life again. No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. Life will not lengthen at your command. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. Stop being busy. Tell the ones you love how much you love them often enough. You could be very happy with almost nothing if you had a loving family, and you weren’t competing with a lot of other people who had more than you did.

41. How to Get Rich Quick Get rich quick by doing these five simple things –

Create value for others;

Contribute to someone, without keeping score;

Say what needs to be said;

Learn something new, something scary; and

Reject false shortcuts.

42. Deal well with your fears. We’re all fearful…of some things…and many things. I’ve never seen any person who has no fear. However, in dealing with fear several times over the past few years, I have realized one very important thing.

It is that, in our life, the issue is not really ‘fear’ but rather, what we do despite it. We can either get managed by fear, or manage it. We can either acknowledge fear or fall into an emotional whirlpool. We can either accept fear or pretend that it doesn’t exist at all. We can either give up or get up in the face of fear.

In fact, fear is what keeps us safe at most times in our lives. Fear keeps us out of harm’s way. All we need to have is the courage to manage it. Now, nobody can give us the courage. Even if Buddha were sitting right here next to you, he couldn’t give it to you. You have to practice it and realize it yourself. You have to make a habit of mindfulness practice to get over your fears. Then, when fear strikes you, you will already know what to do.

43. Life is Short

Most of what happens to us in life is anyways beyond our control, and we must learn to let it go.

But I firmly believe in what Mark Twain said –

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Now is the time, my dear friend, to explore, dream, discover. Because life, as we may live it, is really short.

44. You Are A Black Swan Black swan is a Latin expression, which was commonly used as a metaphor to describe something impossible or something non-existent. It came from the old-world belief that all swans are white since no one had seen a black swan before. Every time someone spotted a white swan, it was confirmation of their belief i.e., “all swans are white.” But this long held notion was invalidated the day first black swan was spotted.

A black swan event has following three attributes, writes Taleb in his book –

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

Apart from the central theme of black swan, Taleb’s book is choc-full of mind stretching ideas. I’ll leave you with the very last passage from The Black Swan which I found remarkably comforting. Taleb writes –

I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff or a rude reception…We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favour of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth – remember that you are a Black Swan.

45. Enjoy the Journey Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM) is the autobiography of American writer and philosopher Robert Pirsig, wherein he chronicles his motorcycle journey across the country with his son. It is however much more than just an adventure tale. Through his journey, Pirsig explains his philosophy on life, creating a manifesto through motorcycle maintenance.

There are many lessons to be learned from this book, but a handful of persist throughout the story that can help reshape your perspective. Like, here is what Pirsig writes on how we lose so much time on unnecessary affairs that we move swiftly past what is really important –

We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.

Then, here is Pirsig’s idea of how to fix the world –

The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle.

One of the most beautiful lessons I take from the books is the idea of enjoying the journey instead of just waiting for the destination. As Pirsig writes –

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you are no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.

46. What We Leave Behind I read a beautiful, new post from Prof. Scott Galloway titled What We Leave Behind, wherein he writes how the fastest path to a better life is regularly assessing what we leave behind, and that money or wealth are not as important parts of the equation of what we leave behind as we usually think about. Spending time with our children is.

Prof. Galloway writes –

Money is a vehicle for the transfer of time and work from one entity to another. So, if we spend less money on one thing, we can invest more time on another. Could we invest less in stuff, less in commuting, and more in relationships? I’ve been howling in the money storm for so long. Believing my worth to others was a function of the stuff I had, or didn’t have.

We proffer admiration, affection, and a sense of awe on people who aggregate wealth. But that affection is often misplaced, as wealth can lead to greed and lack of empathy. This is an opportunity to spend less on stuff, spend less time commuting, and reallocate that capital and time to our partners and children.

On my podcast, the Prof G Show, I interviewed philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris. I asked him for one piece of advice on how to be a better man. He offered that rather than trying to parent, cajole, discipline, or guide your children, your real purpose is just…to love them. My nine-year-old has been having a hard time with corona. I’m spending less time correcting, explaining, arguing, and more just loving…sitting in his room when he’s doing homework, engaging in conversation, and watching The Simpsons together. We’re on season 5, there’s 31.

And…we’ll get there.

This is such a refreshing thought. It reminds us to examine our lives way more often and with deeper reflection. We are building a legacy every day, whether or not we are intentional about it. As we move forward through these challenging times, let’s keep our hearts and minds fastened on that we will leave behind.

47. Meditation Meditation has been a great tool to help me learn to be mindful, which is to be present and aware, moment by moment, regardless of circumstances. And when it comes to investing, I find mindfulness to be one of our best defenses against behavioural biases. Why?

You see, the stock market is by definition, anxiety-inducing. Ben Graham called stock price fluctuations represented by Mr. Market as manic depressive. Look at people trading inside dealing rooms. Or just look at the talking heads on business television and you will know what I’m talking about. Amidst this chaos, a state of mindfulness can help you put your mind in a healthier, more balanced and unemotional state.

You won’t be worried about short term fluctuations in stock prices.

You won’t act in haste or on impulse.

You won’t be distracted by regrets of your past performance or worries about your future returns.

You would keep yourself immune to the news and noise all around.

You would try to do your best work in the present, with utmost focus and discipline.

These are all necessary attributes you need to achieve success as an investor. As Charlie Munger says –

A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. And that is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success.

This is all what meditation and mindfulness can teach you, and much more. Try it to see for yourself.

48. A Father’s Lessons for a Good Life I made a pocket-zine for my kids that contained some lessons on living a good life. They loved the idea and the lessons. I loved their smiles.

Click here to download the PDF version.

49. Weathering Life’s Storms In ancient Greece and Rome, many prominent thinkers subscribed to a philosophy called Stoicism. As part of this philosophy, they practiced a thought exercise called premeditatio malorum, which means premeditation of evils.

It simply means taking a moment to think through everything that could go wrong with a particular plan. It means visualizing a bad future.

The idea behind premeditatio malorum is that by contemplating calamity, we rob future hardships of their bite and appreciate what we have now. In other words, anticipating adversity is likely to diminish its power on us when it actually strikes.

Now, meditating on the worst that may happen to us seems like a negative way to live life. On the contrary, this exercise is calming, because it leads us to prepare ourselves mentally and otherwise to deal with an uncertain future. Also, if we take time to think through the bad things that may fall upon us, what Charlie Munger calls the places where we may die, we may find ways to not go there in the first place.

Imagine getting hit by the corona virus, or losing your job, or the stock market tanking and your investments getting wiped out. Then, while letting the future be because you anyways don’t control it, try doing things that may keep you at safe distance from these possibilities as much as possible.

In particular, while practicing premeditatio malorum, the Stoics frequently reminded themselves that both they and their loved ones were mortal, and bound to die one day, and that life was inevitably transient. This is one of the best ways we can indulge in this thought practice, by meditating on mortality.

As the Stoic philosopher Seneca advised –

Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day … The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.

50. Start Preparing for Tomorrow We often blame our past and worry about our future.

The fact is that – and you also know this – life is in living NOW. It’s all about the…

Things we learn now;

Choices we make now;

Habits we form now;

Actions we take now; and

Enlightenment we receive now

Regretting about the past – “If only I could’ve started investing earlier!” or “If only I had not made that investing mistake!” – is like wasting time and energy on the impossible. And worrying about the future – the Tomorrow – is like having no belief in your capabilities.

If you can live in the present, connect with it, accept it, and experience the joy of flying in the NOW, you would surely head towards a brighter Tomorrow.

In fact, the best possible way to prepare for Tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today.

When I was ten years old, my grandfather would draw me a house with windows and doors. He would tell me how many brick lengths the bottom and sides needed, and how many brick lengths each window and door would take.

Then he asked me how many bricks it would take to build the whole house. If I had trouble answering, he wouldn’t get upset.

He would simply say: “This is how you build a house. One brick at a time.”

Well, this is also how you prepare for Tomorrow.

By seeing it now, and then, as Charlie Munger would have loved to see you do, working backward to achieve it.

As Stephen Covey writes as his second habit of highly effective people – Begin with the end in mind.

Well, that’s where you should also begin – End…Tomorrow. Then work backward.

51. Fear Here is a beautiful poem from Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese poet well known for his book, The Prophet, that strikes a chord deep within.

FEAR (Khalil Gibran)

It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way. The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear, because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.

* * * Benjamin Franklin said, “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.

I’m so grateful to have you share this journey with me in 2020, and I look forward to continuing our connection in 2021, whatever it may bring.

Stay happy and healthy.

Happy 2021.

With respect, Vishal

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taleenelgharib · 3 years

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The Inventory Management Secrets of Dropshipping

The new tech-based world has brought upon many industries the privilege of using elaborate softwares to manage their inventory, and experts have perfected this Inventory System by gradually developing them from the spreadsheets, to barcodes, to RTLS, to cloud computing.

Many inventory management systems exist to fit the requirements of each company or organization, and it is quite easy for businesses to get their hands on the perfect inventory management software to fulfill their needs. Although such software is within reach and quite easy to make use of, not many businesses are familiarized enough with the importance of inventory management in managing smooth business operations.

Our industries today have developed in such a manner that some businesses don’t even have to worry about their inventory because they don’t have any! We’ve seen a lot of online shops on different social media platforms that have to fill out a customer’s order and send them off to a single source, which will then sell it to the customer. Such businesses don’t really worry about the elaborate process of hiring expert teams of software developers to create an inventory management software to fit company needs, or even use cloud computing as a means of keeping up with their inventory.

This is called dropshipping. A certain business doesn’t keep any of its goods in stock. Instead, it works as a supply-and-demand type of business, where when a customer makes an order, the business contacts a third-party organization that has all the inventory. This third-party organization will take care of the rest. The third party is known as the dropshipping supplier and the business is known as the merchant.

When merchants rely on such a business method, they have the advantage of looking at other aspects of running a business. With no inventory concerns, they can shift their focus on things like marketing strategies, attracting customers, and providing excellent customer service.

Easy, right? Well, not really.

Although the smaller business is running smoothly without any inventory management worries, the involved third-party requires an extensive system to keep up with such businesses. These third parties are known as wholesalers or retailers, who usually provide their services to several smaller businesses.

How do the dropshipping suppliers manage their sales with their merchants?

Dropshipping is not a difficult process overall. The supplier must first provide a product data feed, which is a list of all the products and their attributes that will be advertised and sold by the merchant. Efficient dropshipping operations can only occur with a solid relationship between the merchant and supplier, and it primarily requires a means of communication. This includes the way in which orders are made, such as email-based orders, phone orders, or via the website.

Ultimately, the dropshipping supplier functions as a normal, greater organization behind several smaller branches of businesses buying and selling their products. Their inventory management systems should encompass the basics that many companies rely on to manage their stock.

While the dropshipping store can be run at home, the suppliers likely have a warehouse where all the inventory is stored. The supplier will definitely have an enormous amount of inventory and a number of employees working to manage it.

Retailers such as Amazon, for example, have their own internal inventory management system. At the Amazon Fulfillment Center, once the products reach the warehouse, they are barcoded and categorized according to their RFID tags. The products are then organized in the storage area according to size, and whenever an order for a certain product is made, employees will track it down using a barcode scanner.

All the information about the product itself is uploaded on the warehouse database through the RFID barcode scanning. This permits employees or the warehouse manager to keep a close eye on their current stock. The slightest mistake can disrupt the entire merchant-supplier chain and eventually lead to many unhappy customers, as well as unnecessary losses for both the merchant and the dropshipping supplier.

Such an easy-to-use system can provide the dropshipping supplier with all of the bellow benefits:

- Real-time updates on the inventory

- Easy access to the database

- Ability to track products in the warehouse

- A restock schedule

- Organized stock

- Prevents over- and/or understocking

- Saves time and money

The merchant doesn’t have to worry about such technicalities due to their zero-inventory system, but they are greatly affected by the performance of the inventory management system adopted by the dropshipping supplier. In order to prevent any major losses, the supplier must hire a team of experts to develop a good software that fits the goal requirements of the organization.

The software must be able to provide information about the amount of stock, expiration dates, upcoming restock schedules, and product locations through the unique barcode each product is given when it reaches the warehouse. Such a method usually requires manual labor for the barcode scanning process, but RFID tags also have fixed readers that usually do not require human interference.

An additional benefit to RFID tags is the ability to adopt an RTLS method of inventory management. RTLS stands for Real-Time Location System, which can provide all the necessary real-time updates of both inventory and employees under the GSM network (Global System for Mobile Communications). This method can potentially decrease human labor, and thus decrease possible human errors that may occur during barcode scanning.

What happens is that the corresponding System will be constantly scanning all the inventory and giving real-time reports that will be directly uploaded onto the database. This is a better inventory management system, as it is more efficient than just barcode scanning.

The performance of the dropshipping supplier in terms of inventory management efficiency is what ensures smooth operations with the merchant. On the merchant’s end, operating through dropshipping is definitely easier than having an entire warehouse dedicated to stock. Running such a business can be done from home, as the only step a merchant has to worry about (especially if they’re an at-home merchant or a small business) is finding the right dropshipping supplier.

#inventory management #dropshipping #software

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idontneedasymbol · 7 years

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SPN Kills/Deaths by Species

I stayed up way too late last night and now I’m joining all the death stats nerdery that has been going around (waves at @chiisana-sukima and @durenjtmusings !) Much of what I was doing was attempting to categorize some aspects, such as the type/species/nature both of the deaths and the killers.

First off, what dies! As you might have guessed, you do not want to be a human in the SPN world. A good half of everything that dies in the show is human (and that's not counting supernaturally affected humans).

So what is killing them? A lot of different things, but humans are the winners, with hunters accounting for more than a quarter of all deaths. Demons are the runner-up contenders, with angels close behind:

In the run of the series, there is only one death by purely natural causes, and even that is arguable (the heart attack victim Dean reaps; the little girl he first saves and later reaps becomes a metaphysical quandary.) There are a few more deaths by accident, like Fiona and Gavin drowning. But almost always when you die in Supernatural (as is the case in most TV, I expect), it's someone's fault.

These numbers change quite a lot if you take out the main protagonists (Sam, Dean, and Castiel) -- demons are by far the biggest killers then, and it becomes clear that Cas is doing the largest share of angel kills:

Though as Crowley is still counted in the above tally, the demons are getting a main character boost as well. (I’m considering analyzing protagonist vs antagonist kills as well...)

Regarding the categories and definitions, I simplified/streamlined a lot to get a more coherent look at the data. For the purposes of these categories (any of which, please go ahead and argue out with me!):

Human: plain vanilla human, such could exist in the real world.

Human (supernaturally altered): Humans that have been changed by the supernatural such that it may be argued they're not quite human. This includes psychics, the demon-possessed, "Croats", not-witch immortals like the Thule, etc. It does not include those monsters that were once human but that have their own categories, like vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies (for the purposes of these stats, I count Zombies as raised undead; 'zombified' but apparently living humans like Croats count as altered.)

Monster: A catch-all, includes anything from formerly human monsters like wendigos, to things like ghouls which might be a different species, to apparently entirely inhuman beasts like lamias and hellhounds. (I might separate out inhuman creatures, but there aren't that many in the canon.)

Ghosts: Counted as "dead" when they move on, either banished by salting & burning or voluntarily choosing to go.

Animal: plain real-world animals (mostly pets, poor dogs), not supernatural creatures like hellhounds, which are listed under monsters.

For the killers I adjusted this a little, differentiating between:

Human - under supernatural influence: Croats, curse victims, those affected, usually not by choice, such that they are probably not acting of their own volition, but generally not completely transformed (Arachnae and such count as monsters).

Human - with supernatural power: Humans willingly using supernatural powers/becoming supernatural, but are still for the most part recognizable human rather than physically transformed. Psychics, the Thule, the Stynes.

Gods include primeval powers such as Amara and Death.

There's also Magic, which mostly refers to curses like the rabbit's foot, which may have been created by a specific person but had no specific target (the Werther Box deaths are under this category.)

There are a few deaths left out. Anyone who gets resurrected isn’t counted. Neither are historical deaths (the Titanic, plus Eva Braun in “The One You’ve Been Waiting For”.) The few towns Lucifer and Amara wipe out are also not included as there aren’t clear numbers for them; however both Cain’s and Godstiel’s massacres are counted (only the bodies/graves seen onscreen.)

All data pulled from this spreadsheet, a modified and expanded version of the SPNwiki's indispensable Table of Death. (Note that my sheet is very much a work in progress, with a lot of incomplete entries. Feel free to copy and muck with it for your own statistical pleasure!)

Next up -- Team Free Will kills by species (also known as, wow Dean kills a LOT of vampires.)

#statistics #spn meta #the table of death #my post #meta #my meta

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ralphlayton · 4 years

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Always On Influence: Costs Less and Better ROI – Here’s Why

Virtually every marketing tactic is under evaluation right now as B2B marketing departments react to the domino effect of changes in consumer spending during the pandemic. Many B2C marketers are putting a pause on their influencer marketing investments as the world of travel, hospitality, retail, sports and entertainment have changed dramatically. In the business to business world, things have changed as well but not anywhere near as significantly and not always at the expense of lowered marketing budgets. The trend in B2B is digital and self serve from virtual events and prospect engagement to buyers now conducting the majority of their research and interactions on their own before making purchase decisions. Influences on those purchase decisions are not coming from field marketing, trade conferences or experiential events. Influences on B2B buyer behavior is decidedly online and digital, including through education and recommendations from industry experts. Smart B2B marketers realize this and have continued to engage with B2B influencers to co-create content of value to digitally savvy customers. For example, take this new Future of Agile Teamwork resource from Monday.com (client) featuring teamwork and productivity insights from Carla Johnson, Shama Hyder, Deb Lee, Jay Acunzo and eight more marketing and design influencers. The smart marketing team at Monday.com is more than capable of putting out useful advice on productivity for creative and marketing teams on their own (and they do), but they also realize their customers pay closer attention to individuals than brands. Trusted experts have the attention of buyers who can then be reached, engaged and inspired to take action a lot more effectively during good times or a pandemic than through the brand voice alone. There's a certain set of costs to creating such a resource, including strategy development and planning, influencer identification and engagement, content development, design, development, promotion, influencer activation for sharing and overall campaign management and measurement. For some B2B marketers, there's a temptation to think of influencers as an add-on to brand content and therefore, only engage influencers when they need them for their planned quarterly campaigns. The issue with this approach to influencer engagement is a lack of engagement. The thing is, Influencer Marketing is a relationship business. If the only time someone reaches out to you is when they want something from you, how motivating of a relationship is that? I'll answer that - it's not. The marketing team at Monday.com understand this and are investing in more than one-off campaigns and influencer activations. Every marketing department must be accountable to performance and investing in relationships with the voices of industry experts that your customers trust can create an excellent return for everyone involved: customers, influencers and the brand. That ongoing investment in time, effort and resources to develop, maintain and activate relationships is what Always On Influencer Marketing is about. We've highlighted other examples of B2B brands implementing ongoing, always on influencer marketing programs before, but to help B2B marketers better understand why Always On influencer marketing delivers more efficient and effective marketing performance, here are the top 5 reasons why always on costs less and delivers better ROI than one off influencer content campaigns.

1. Pay to Play Doesn't Always Pay Off

One off influencer engagement tends to be a transactional experience. That's fine if the brand doesn't intend to work with the influencer again or if they always expect to pay a certain fee for that influencer's participation. Some B2B influencer programs are set up to be fully paid programs. Many successful influencer programs have strength in numbers of influencers involved. While there is a certain increase in accountability for the influencer's performance when they are paid, it can get very expensive pretty quickly once you start adding well known influencers. A more organic relationship between brand and influencer can take a little more time up front, but doesn't cost anywhere near as much as a one-off, paid influencer campaign. An ongoing relationship-based approach also means more micro-activations in between campaigns which can extend the value and performance of a campaign without any additional costs.

2. Old Friends Know the Brand Ropes

With influencer marketing and content collaborations, there are aspects that require significantly more ramp up time with new influencers than with those who already know your brand. New influencers need to be researched, vetted, reviewed and approved, recruited and engaged to provide great content. After all that, they need to be persuaded to promote the content as well. Doing all of this with an intermittent brand influencer requires a lot more hand holding and brand education than with influencers whom the brand works with on an ongoing basis or at least engages with some regularity. That additional discovery and management time can add substantial cost to campaigns.

3. Return on Relationships

One of the great benefits of having a trusted industry expert collaborate with your brand is the inevitable advocacy that can occur during their conversations and engagement with their networks. Word of mouth is still the most powerful form of advertising and you don't really get that kind of invested and proactive advocacy with influencers who are only engaged for one off projects and nothing in-between. Influencer management does require a well organized effort, but not a very expensive effort. The return on that investment in time to engage on social channels, email occasionally, do a virtual happy hour and recognize in brand content is far, far greater than the cost.

4. Repurpose with Purpose

Many B2B marketers want to know what do you do when you are implementing and Always On influencer marketing program? With one off campaigns, when the project is done, it's done. But with always on, one of the most efficient tactics marketers can do to optimize and maximize the value of influencer contributions while also creating positive signals for the influencers is to repurpose content. The key to repurposing with the purpose of achieving value at multiple levels is in the planning. When influencer contributions are captured, they can be categorized by topic and archived in a spreadsheet or database. Then when a newsletter, blog post, social channel, presentation, contributed article, ebook, infographic, explainer video or any other kind of content needs that perfect quote from an industry expert to give credibility to the brand, you have it right there. Repurposing influencer content like this as part of regular brand content creates value for the brand through credibility, it creates exposure for the influencer which they will appreciate and it provides useful and inspiring content to customers. Everybody wins!

5. Advocacy at Scale

After working with influencers over the past 8 years or so, many have become friends. Friends take a genuine interest in their mutual success and when a B2B brand can effectively develop real relationships with industry experts over time, those connections can become an incredible source of brand or product advocacy in the marketplace. You might pay an influencer for certain types of work from time to time and engage then organically for others, but it's the relationship over time with their point of contacts at the brand and/or agency and especially with each other through a community that develops the kind of mutual trust, respect and admiration that manifests into recommendations that reach people that are virtually impossible to reach otherwise. To do this with a community of influencers is truly a brand accomplishment and one of the best examples I've seen is the AdobeInsiders influencer community. Rani Mani and Monica Grant do an incredible job fostering a community of influencers that can't wait to advocate for Adobe and the values they share. In our research for the 2020 State of B2B Influencer Marketing Report, we found that those B2B brands that were most successful, shared certain characteristics. One of those traits was the tendency to practice Always On influencer engagement. In fact, 20% of marketers surveyed implement always on programs and 56% implement a combination of campaigns and ongoing influencer engagement. There is confidence in the value of creating relationships with industry influencers and working to engage them over time. Given that the most successful B2B brands at influencer marketing also use always on influencer engagement hints that there's also greater marketing ROI in those relationships. If you would like to get access to the 2020 State of B2B Influencer Marketing Report, you can sign up here.

The post Always On Influence: Costs Less and Better ROI – Here’s Why appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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samuelpboswell · 4 years

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Always On Influence: Costs Less and Better ROI – Here’s Why

1. Pay to Play Doesn't Always Pay Off

2. Old Friends Know the Brand Ropes

3. Return on Relationships

4. Repurpose with Purpose

5. Advocacy at Scale

The post Always On Influence: Costs Less and Better ROI – Here’s Why appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

from The SEO Advantages http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OnlineMarketingSEOBlog/~3/PrqnLfohUf4/

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bettydgunter90 · 4 years

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Realty Matters: Risk Management

When talking to prospective clients for my property management business, I always say, “rental property management is really about Risk Management.” I often tell the story of a client, who had previously decided to self-manage. Although he always tried to do the right thing, a small, innocent error led to a spiraling sequence of unfortunate events. The story was an example of how small errors may go undetected, unknown, and remain unrealized, until something goes wrong. Consequences in total were severe, not only financial misfortune, but it also left a lasting and profound psychological impact. But, if nothing goes wrong, is there any risk?

Risk is measured using statistics and derived from both quantitative components and qualitative factors. Qualitative factors are a challenge, particularly for individual or small unit-count property investments. Included are interpersonal relationship dynamics, such as behavior, which is possible to recognize but a challenge to quantify.

Qualitative risk management planning effectively reduces or eliminates consequences — and is the focus of this column — with most benefits achievable without statistics. An annual assessment exercise allows most real estate investors to improve business practices, whether doing rehabs, long-term holds, lending, or some combination. It is not difficult with the right tools and understanding and will elevate your business to the next level resulting in larger gains and smaller losses. Critical thinking and arithmetic are the only things necessary for implementation.

Statistics Deconstructed

The path to eliminate problems before they occur

Calculating risk is an attempt to determine probability of an outcome. A conceptual understanding of how those numbers are derived is critical for effective implementation of risk management practices. A grasp of risk theory only requires a bell curve illustration and a sprinkling of a few statistical terms when combined with practical real estate examples.

The bell curve figure has a symmetrical area under the curve that (eventually) totals 1.00 (one). Where:

μ = [mu, (pronounced “mew”)] is the data mean, the average, (expected outcome or return)

𝝈 = [sigma] the standard deviation, shows six equidistant intervals, known as the range (99.7% of 1.00)

Any given point in the graph is a probability of an event or an accumulated series of events. Events are plotted in relation to the frequency they occur (height) and distance from average (left or right of centerline). Closely plotted points indicate the deviation from average is low; loosely plotted points mean less predictability (the deviation from average is high).

Grasping the concept of risk theory is important for Risk Management planning

Roughly speaking, events that occur with high frequency are prone to have more variation than events that occur less frequently while less frequent events may mean less variation. Symmetrically speaking, consider that high frequency events having low consequence may have an aggregate severity equal to low frequency events having high consequence. Reducing variation of outcome through tighter controls reduces total severity of consequence, which is how you will apply risk management to your business.

Example of Risk Management indicators in real estate

Imagine two Renters, A & B. Renter A paid rent consistently late, on the fourth day of the month with rarely any variation. Plotted on the curve, the average would show a high frequency of late rent as averaging –four. Renter B is different. The average is one, which would indicate rent is paid on average a day early. Except many of the plots are largely spread out into the negative teens and twenties, with a few plots at 30, 40, and 60. Which has higher variation? Which has more risk? Which can you be more confident of getting paid rent on a given day?

As a separate event, the number of opportunities that a basement will flood may be far less than opportunities for rent to be paid on time, yet, the financial consequence may be quite severe. A sump pump with battery backup is installed, so all should be okay, right? Now evaluate the same two renter households. Consider Renter A vs. Renter B. Would you consider the likelihood of tampering with the sump pump between Renter A and Renter B as the same? Why or why not?

Statistics attempt to bring together all events of different types, each having probabilities and frequencies of their own, and normalize them into a single measure (expected outcome) that you determine is important. Managing the causal factors that impact the outcome is up to you.

Application of Risk Management Principles without Statistics

The key is to identify possible causes that prevent achieving the expected outcome.

It has been established now, with the iterative cycle of real estate operations, even though an event never gets tested or realized (a failure does not occur), that risk remains inherit in the system. A step most overlooked is a critical thinking exercise that accounts for possibilities of what can go wrong. Possibilities considered are possibilities managed. Proactive vs. Reactive.

Identification of 95 percent of causes are either obvious or routine enough to identify with a smidge of critical thinking. Reducing variation and consequences of those causes is a qualitative and subjective exercise. Tighter controls and mitigation plans are how risk management can be applied to your business to reduce losses and improve gains. The sum of all the individual multi-factorial events and iterative processes (e.g., getting paid rent on time, having contractors show up on time, detecting water leaks or pests before they become a problem, etc.), over time add up to the expected outcome.

Risk Management Methodology

There is a simple methodology that does not require the use of any statistics to assist with managing mistake-prone qualitative risk factors:

Consider what can go wrong (this is often the hardest part)

Determine how bad the outcome would be (consequences)

Determine how likely it is to happen (likelihood of occurrence)

Determine the risk level of the event with application of a risk score

Manage the event; eliminate or reduce the likelihood; mitigate the consequence.

How it works:

Below are some examples to subjectively score criteria. Consequence criteria may be how severely could it cause financial or legal harm and likelihood indicates likeliness or propensity for realization.

With each event, determine the consequence and likelihood of occurrence to apply a risk score and determine if it requires some form of mitigation management. With Renter B, for example, perhaps a remote monitoring alarm should be installed that would warn you of a high-water level. Consider how to mitigate, and then re-assess:

Eliminate the possibility for the event from happening (risk of ceiling fan breaking, replace with a dome light instead if the market isn’t sensitive to having ceiling fans).

Substitute with an alternative option (unreliable and poor-quality maintenance contractor, utilize a more competent and professional contractor that gets it done right the first time).

Utilize automation and controls (put in place as a proxy assistant to make operations easier and results in less hassle for both you and the tenant — could be software and hardware).

Administrative controls with clear policies and procedures (move-in and move-out procedures, and security deposit management are a big source of dispute, or have your own Terms and Conditions, or quality standards that you expect contractors to follow).

Develop policies, procedures, practices and guidelines, for renters and contractors to mitigate against possible symptoms of dispute. Provide training, instruction, and supervision.

The matrix shown above is an interactive spreadsheet that contains a series of multiple worksheets with internal linking as a roadmap to assist with Risk Management planning. It is available for download through the links provided at RealtyMatters.Online/Column/June-2020. It contains an exhaustive list of 60+ categorized risk components that is applicable to most investment strategies. Go to the links identified to get your free copy.

Please Tell Me What You Think

For those statisticians reading, please tell me how I did.

A simplified Risk Management Approach in Real Estate online course or module for the individual small unit-count investor category is lacking. Would you find value with something like that? Write to me and let me know. Go to RealtyMatters.Online

For Column Notes, Resources and Language Translation for this Column, go to:

RealtyMatters.Online/Column/June-2020

The post Realty Matters: Risk Management appeared first on Think Realty | A Real Estate of Mind.

from Real Estate Tips https://thinkrealty.com/realty-matters-risk-management/

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projectlabsco · 4 years

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Best Project Planning Software of 2020

How do you get a project off the drawing board and into the execution phase? With a plan. But project plans are unruly beasts that need to be reined in. That’s where project planning software comes in—a project manager’s best friend.Project planning software is a tool that gives project managers the means to control costs and keep to their schedule. It is how deliverables get delivered, on time, within budget and meeting the quality expectations of stakeholders. Planning software also has features that keep track of your progress and assess whether you’re meeting your planned goals. Yes, project planning software is massive. It is an umbrella under which a number of foundational tools reside, such as team collaboration, task management, Gantt charts, timesheets, resource management, dashboard and much more. If you’re looking for a project planning software that meets this criteria, it’s a crowded field and getting denser every day. Below are some of the best project planning tools available today, with their pros and cons. Take a minute to look over these options and get the tool you need for your next project. 2020 Best Project Planning Software Rankings 1. ProjectManager.com ProjectManager.com is a cloud-based project management software that offers a full suite of project planning software features. With Gantt charts, task lists, calendars and kanban boards, users can choose how they want to plan their project, depending on its scope and complexity. Megan: If i wanted to mention our ability to plan budgets and resources, what should i mention? Please leave a comment here. To speed up the process, ProjectManager.com has templates to help you set up your project plan, or you can import a spreadsheet with your task list to create a new project instantly. Not all projects are the same, so ProjectManager.com has customizable columns to set up your online Gantt chart how you want. To keep projects from bogging down when you execute the plan, ProjectManager.com gives you the flexibility to pivot quickly as projects change. Simply drag-and-drop start and end dates on the Gantt to their new time. It’s that easy. Once the plan is in play, project managers have transparency into the process to make sure the actual progress matches the planned progress. The duration bar on the Gantt is shaded to represent progress in completing that task. Plans are only as good as they can be executed, of course, and ProjectManager.com knows how to make your project plan a springboard for better productivity. You can assign from their Gantt plan and team members can work collaboratively, adding relevant documents and commenting at the task level. Automated features like dashboards, reports and email alerts make tracking even more practical. The real-time dashboard tracks six project metrics and one-click reporting offers a deeper dive into project data. This lets project managers know instantly if the project is going off the rails and get it back on track faster. Meanwhile, email notifications keep team members alerted when deadlines are looming, or there have been changes made to the tasks. Everyone is kept in the loop. The project plan is a living document and ProjectManager.com makes it easily adaptable to real-life working conditions. ProjectManager.com features resource management tools that keep the team’s workload balanced and easy timesheets to help monitor time spent on those tasks. The project plan is only one part of the whole project that ProjectManager.com helps you control. To see just how much control over your projects you can get with ProjectManager.com, take a free 30-day trial. 2. Smartsheet Smartsheet is an online project management software that is used in many industries to track and manage work. It is suitable for large and small teams, whether working in an agile or more traditional methodology. In terms of project planning, there are collaborative tools, due date tracking, Gantt charts and kanban boards. It plots milestones and track tasks. Where the software suffers is that it requires understanding both spreadsheets and project management. It’s divided between these two points and so ends up not serving either one fully. In terms of features, it’s resource management reporting tools are complicated. That makes its dashboard more difficult than it needs to be. There are no timesheets, which is a key feature for tracking teams hours and tasks. This could be a deal-breaker for project managers. 3. FunctionFox FunctionFox is web-based time and project management software used by industries such as advertising, marketing and public relations companies. It tends to be used more in the creative fields to plan and track projects. It has tools for tracking multiple projects, forecasting workloads and communications. FunctionFox is not ideal for every industry or the teams that work within those fields. For example, there’s no kanban boards, which is a visual planing tool that helps avoid workflow bottlenecks. Task management is only available for more money and even at that payment level you’re just getting a categorizing tool, not something that manages the task details or dependencies. 4. Zoho Projects Zoho Projects is a cloud-based project planning software tool. It’s used by large and small teams in many industries to plan and track projects. It offers collaborative features and can be used within an agile framework or with more traditional methodologies. It does have a soup-to-nuts menu of features for project planning, such as Gantt charts, kanban boards and milestone tracking. There have been some complaints about the software include difficulty integrating with other apps. Reports are not thorough and lack data. There’s also a lack of privacy among users and clients. The interface can sometimes be difficult to maneuver. The Gantt charts are overly complex, and it would be nice if projects could be exported to a spreadsheet to share with clients who are not subscribed to the software. 5. ClickUp ClickUp is a cloud-based tool that is mostly good for collaboration but has some project planning that works with businesses of varying size. It has communication, task assignment and status alert features. There are also events and reminders, which help with collaboration. It’s project planning tools include Gantt charts, kanban boards and progress tracking. It has multiple project views and is flexible and customizable. It allows for recurring tasks. The problem with ClickUp is that its offering is really strong in collaboration, but weak with project planning. It has a lot of the tools that are essential for project planning, but they’re not robust. If you’re looking to create and control a project plan, you’ll find ClickUp lacking. The overall design is also flawed in that it doesn’t make it easy to see all the task data at a glance. Reporting is also lacking, with limited data. They could use improving. 6. Mavenlink Mavenlink is a project management software that focuses on collaborative tools to enhance business performance. It features time tracking, resource management and budget tools. It’s project planning features help track due dates for tasks and can build plans on Gantt charts and manage workflow with kanban boards. It also has reporting to add visibility into a project, program or portfolio. Project managers have complained that rather than reducing their workload, the software actually makes more work for them. For one, there’s a steep learning curve. You can’t share with clients, either, if they’re not paying for the software. It’s really more of an enterprise software solution – less plug and go and requires time and effort to configure. The reporting isn’t without problems, though, such as naming and categorization of project metrics isn’t clear. There’s no space to add comments when approving or rejecting timesheets without them being published across all entries. 7. Forecast Forecast is a project planning and resource workload visibility software with transparency across multiple projects. It has tools like kanban boards, which make it ideal for scrum teams. Files can be attached to tasks, which are then tracked throughout their life cycle. There’s also project scoping, resource allocation, time tracking and team collaboration. It is flexible enough to be used by startups and enterprise ventures that are looking to boost their productivity. The trouble with using this is that things don’t always work as they should. This creates road bumps that slow down a project’s progress. Timesheets are also not easy to use. Though it can help scrum teams, those that work within the larger agile framework will find the software frustrating in its rigidity. Even scrum is not fully served as there is no retrospective management. ProjectManager.com is a cloud-based project management software with all the features project managers want to better plan their projects. Online Gantt charts link task dependencies to avoid bottlenecks. Kanban boards help team members work more productively. Collaborative tools are designed to give team members the autonomy they want to get the plan executed more efficiently. Try it today with this free 30-day trial. Related Posts from WordPress https://ift.tt/2VzYYz0 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

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andrewdburton · 4 years

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Exposed! Mr. Money Mustache’s 2019 Bachelor Spending!

Purchases like this really blow my budget.

These days, I do a fair amount of informal financial coaching for both old friends and newer acquaintances.

It’s a pretty amazing experience, almost as if I were a real doctor – people let down their guard and talk about the details of their financial lives, without the usual hangups and secrecy that tend to plague our society when it comes to the subject of money.

Often, even taking this first step is a huge leap towards creating a more wealthy and prosperous life. Money conversations are not something we should reserve only for our paid professional advisers. We should speak about it openly with our friends and family, and support each other in a lifelong quest to make the most of our lives.

Through these hundreds of little sessions, I have started seeing a pretty consistent pattern:

People who struggle with money see the whole subject as a swirling, confusing mess. Income and spending, debt and retirement accounts are everywhere. They describe the situation in a long, meandering paragraph.

People who are good with money have this stuff more mentally sorted. They can quickly list their income, their assets and debts, and most importantly they know how much money they spend each year.

People who have been good with money for a long time have moved even further. They might not track it very closely, but they still maintain a growing surplus – because living well within their means is just a natural habit, which means there is no conceivable way they can run out of money in their lifetimes. People in this category sometimes need to be coached away from the habit of being too “cheap”, and towards making the most of the opportunity of a lifetime.

As an MMM reader, you are headed straight for Option #3 above.

But you may have to move through #1 and #2 to get there, which means sorting things out and tracking your spending.

Tracking Your Spending is Fun, Useful, and Easy (Yes, really!)

I can already hear your collective groan as I give you this prescription, but adding up your past year’s spending is one of the most useful things you can do with a Saturday morning, and here’s why:

You can see where your money is going to waste and where you can make really easy improvements that completely change the course of your life

You will get the courage to switch jobs, houses, cars, and other life decisions as your fuzzy swirling financial paralysis transforms to a crystal clear understanding of money – one of life’s most useful and fun tools.

You can immediately see how much money you will need to retire. (just take your annual spending and multiply it by 25 as recommended by the 4% rule)

I’ll show you my spending if you show me yours.

Road Trippin’ in a Tesla. I keep this cost low by bartering carpentry or business help with Tesla-owning friends, or renting them on Turo.

Now for the fun part. I like to think that I live in “Category 3” of that list above – most of my major life expenses (housing, cars, health, food, clothing) are lower than average, because I have simple tastes and I love optimizing things.

Meanwhile, I have several sources of income which add up to many times more than my living expenses (stock index funds, real estate investments, this website, and side hustles like carpentry and operating the MMM HQ coworking space.)

So I haven’t been tracking my spending for a while. But a couple of years ago I went through a major life change – the former Mrs. MM and I split up and moved to separate households in the same neighborhood.

With the old routines shaken up, and new things like hosting more parties, outfitting a new home and increased friend/family/long-distance-relationship travel, how has my bachelor spending been transformed?

It’s time to find out.

How Do You Track Your Spending?

My expenses are really easy to track: I funnel all my spending through a rewards credit card, which saves me about $2000 each year. (in 2019 I used the two highest-paying cards from Capital One which you can find here.)

Meanwhile, I hook up a third party financial app to automatically monitor these transactions, alert me to any unusual activity, and – the best part – automatically categorize and add everything up for me. I’ve been using one called Truebill for a couple of years*, and it has the simplest interface of anything I’ve tried – you get results like this:

Recent screenshots from my own Truebill account. (Sorry about all that cash sitting around earning nothing, I will put those little green employees to work ASAP!)

Truebill is great for tracking and improving spending, and you can also track with Personal Capital, which I have used for the last five years or so mostly for keeping tabs on all my net worth (see my 2013 article on that).

BUT you can also all this quite easily with no apps at all, just by downloading the full list of your 2019 transactions from your bank and opening it up as a spreadsheet. In Capital One (which I also use for my checking account), I just clicked on each account and there is a link for “Download Transactions” right at the top of my transactions list.

For me, it was extra easy because I used the same bank for both checking and credit cards, so everything shows up on a single login screen like this – kudos for Capital One for doing this so well since most banks have pretty bad websites:

Lots of useful stuff on my capital one home screen (don’t worry, balances and account numbers, etc. have been modified for public sharing)

So whether you use an app or a conventional spreadsheet, tracking your spending is quite useful, to know where you are now.

But the biggest message to take home from the result this:

These are not your “living expenses.” This is your current level of spending, something that is entirely under your control.

There is always a trick for everything, and you get to decide how many of these tricks to apply.

For my part, I try to use only the tricks that save me money and make my life better in some way. For example, I do my own carpentry and I use my own legs for transportation, because these are a win/win for me. But I do pay an accountant to do my taxes for me. Your own choices may be completely different, but it’s important and empowering to use that word – choices.

Special Notes Before I Share This

Many fun and even “fancy” things in life don’t have to show up as expenses – like parties at the MMM HQ, which is actually a business rather than an expense.

The table below will shock some, offend others, and hopefully inspire you to at least consider a few new things. But because of my unique life situation, I have made a few unusual choices. I’ll explain them in advance so the table will make more sense.

Do I really have zero medical expenses?

Yes, and I have for my whole life – this is a probably combination of dumb luck (genetics) and hopefully-smart luck (I made a guess that 1-8 hours of outdoor physical work, bikes, barbells and salads every day would be good for my health and so far it seems to be working.) But I know this is not a lifelong guarantee, because there are no guarantees.

What about kid related expenses?

My little 13-year-old is pretty low-maintenance these days: he develops stuff on the computer, plays the bass and rides scooters with friends. When we are together, we do these same things along with hikes and bike rides and the odd road trip. Other kids are into more expensive activities and that is wonderful if they enjoy it and you can afford it. This table includes the half of his food and necessities that I pay for, but does not include any money that changes hands between Former Mrs. MM and myself over these final four years of our co-parenting project. However, I am infinitely grateful for how happy and cooperative our arrangement has become, and suffice it to say that nobody needs to feel sorry for either of us in the financial sense either.

How can you even sleep, with no house insurance and no health insurance?

This really depends on your personality type – and mine may be unusual in this regard. I simply don’t worry much about things like theft, accidents, fires, disasters or anything else. I certainly know they are possible, but my mind thinks in statistics and probabilities rather than emotions or fears. In other words, I’m a bit of a robot. And the robot in me says, “On average you will make a profit and you can afford any worst-case consequences, so why buy insurance?”

For people in situations where losing a material possession would be a big deal, insurance may be appropriate. But I also still like the old-school advice of “don’t buy stuff that you can’t afford to lose, and take really good care of the stuff that you do have.”

But this will all be covered in more detail in an upcoming article about health insurance, including an interesting new option I am just about to try this year.

What Else Are You Hiding From Us?

My businesses pay for some stuff (blog-related trips, this computer, tools, etc.) that happens to be fun for me too – this may prevent me from spending personal money on other fun stuff.

Charitable donations, which now total over $300,000 (see previous article), are also not part of what I consider spending. To me, these are a reallocation of a good part of this website’s income to causes that need it more than me. But I probably wouldn’t be brave or badass enough to give away much money, if I were only earning the bare minimum needed to cover my lifestyle spending in the chart below.

And I don’t include income taxes in my spending, because if someone really lived on a level of retirement income to cover even twice this level of spending they would pay no tax. In my situation, I do earn more than I spend, and pay plenty of tax on it. But much like the charitable donations described in the last article, I think of income tax as just another way of contributing a small portion of this super-lucky surplus back to society.

It’s really not a big deal – and I find that statement to be true in all areas of life: as you get older and your material desires drop away, fewer and fewer things seem like a big deal.

Okay, let’s get into it!

MMM’s 2019 Bachelor Life Spending (all figures are for the full year)

CategorySpendingCommentsHousingMortgage + Insurance0Bought the current house ($315k) with cash, and I have been self-insured on houses for the last 5 years or so. Not for everyone but it feels right for me.Property Taxes$1735My current place is a 3Br/2Ba home in an “up and coming” (i.e. working class) central area. Downside: pickup trucks everywhere. Upside: cheap to buy, and located on creek and bike path. Walk/ride everywhere!Maintenance and Renovation$4699Renovated my kitchen (IKEA), plus assorted painting + lightsUtilities – City$1227Electric + Water + Trash service. Average electric = $24/month including electric car charging.Utilities – Heat$353Natural Gas service (incl. hot water)Household Items $294Things like lamps, picture frames, vegetable peelers, wine glasses at places like Target.Total Housing$8308FoodGroceries$4615Mostly fresh, organic higher-end stuff. For one active man and 1/2 time of a growing teen boy. Costco/Sam’s whenever possible, plus Whole Foods for more specialized items, and because it’s within walking distance.Restaurants$910Many more nights out in this new life – expensive but fun.Beer/Wine/etc$203Total “Food“$5728Medical CareHealth Insurance$0I decided to self-insure for 2019 as an experiment (because the US coverage mandate was removed), to see if I found it stressful/scary. Article on this to come!Medical Bills$0Had a truly fortunate year again – capping 45 years with just about zero medical costs so far. Will not take this for granted!Dentist$0Confession: I have only been ONCE in the last 25 years. Complacent because I’ve never had a cavity. Teeth are fine and clean. Am I pushing my luck?AutomotiveGasoline$22.621999 Honda Odyssey – used mainly for construction hauling. I do lend it frequently to friends, but they return it full of gas. But I walk and bike for all of my in-town transportation.Maintenance$0She had a perfect year (although with low mileage, car breakages are rare)Car Registration$545For van, cargo trailer, and Nissan Leaf shared with former Mrs. MMInsurance$397Mainly for the Leaf because it includes comprehensive (long story) – this is my half of the shared policy cost. Still using Geico and it’s great.Automotive Total$965Travel Total$3702Plane tickets, car rentals, airport transport. Interestingly, most accommodation was “free” due to staying with friends, credit card points and AirBnb Referrals.Entertainment$400Plays, Books, Netflix, Google Play movie rentals, even a couple Oculus VR video games.Mobile Phone$300I’m still on Google Fi. It’s $20 per month+data, a solid value for lower data users – I like the free international coverage.Internet$600This is expensive because we buy Longmont’s gigabit fiber internet, but well worth it for a household of blogger/video gamer/youtubers.Total$21,470Hey, not bad! Total “Barebones” $13,068My real (still luxurious) living expenses without the travel and $5000 kitchen renovation. Still includes restaurants, booze, cars, gadgets from Amazon, and living in a 3 bedroom detached house! ……………………….……………

So, What Now?

Well, this was a pleasant surprise. I had felt like I was living a total billionaire’s life in 2019, because it has been so packed with interesting people and places and experiences. I always buy whatever I want – after considering whether it will really make me happier – and this leads to a feeling of almost dizzy abundance. But I guess abundance just isn’t that expensive.

2020 is shaping up to be an even bigger year of personal growth and better friendships and hard work. I’m drawing up the plans for an exorbitant second-story deck off of my bedroom. The Tesla Model Y comes out in just a few months, and I am in love with it.

It could get expensive.

Stay tuned and I will let you know how it goes!

In the Comments: do you track your own annual spending? If so, how did you do last year? If not, what is your reason?

*About Truebill: I heard from Haroon Mokharzada as he was just founding the company, and was impressed with his background of seeming to be on the “good guys” team. So I have been a casual user ever since, just to follow their progress. The Truebill service/app is now good enough that I can see it being useful for many people – not just for tracking spending. And they have a sizable development team and a large and growing base of happy users. Nice job y’all!

Affiliate notice: While I have no financial relationship with Truebill, this blog may get a commission for other recommendations within this page, including Personal Capital, Airbnb and the credit card recommendations. And many thanks if you do use them!

from Finance https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2020/01/27/mmm-2019-spending/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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damonbation · 4 years