Wednesday Reads: Drop? What drop?

A round up of interesting or cool stuff I’ve read.

Image by Kai Vogel from Pixabay

Drop? What drop?

US stocks fall as investors mull how stimulus will impact inflation – Business Insider

US Treasury sell-off gathers speed on inflation fears – Financial Times

Stock markets drop as inflation risks prompt investor concerns – Guardian

Apparently the stock market dropped a few days ago.

I had no idea until I saw a few comments on Twitter.

Did I care? No.

Did I do anything about it? Also no.

My next automated purchase of the Vanguard FTSE All Cap Index Fund is due on the beginning of the month.

If it’s cheaper than last month, cool. If not, also cool.

Either way, I’ll keep purchasing every month and keep ignoring the financial news.

Makes for an easy night’s sleep!

Interesting links that caught my eye this week:

Financial Origin Stories

Cashflow Cop – Financial Origin
Mortgage Free by the Sea – Living A Life Less Ordinary
The FIRE Shrink – A Shrink’s Financial Origin Story

Three more fascinating, diverse financial origin stories.

Planning for (early) retirement

Monevator – Decumulation: a real life plan
Gentleman’s Family Finances – Why 57 isn’t that far away

Two useful articles about preparing for an early retirement. GFF talks about the four pots that will fund his family’s retirement. Meanwhile, The Accumulator goes into detail about his FI portfolio and the reasoning behind it.

Investing

Banker on FIRE – Why The Active vs Passive Investing Debate Misses The Point
Damien cuts to the heart of the active vs passive debate:

“In the meantime, I would venture to say that agonizing over which strategy is better might well miss the point. Instead of debating the merits of active vs passive investing, it’s far more productive to focus on actual investing.”

Of Dollars and Data – Have Fun Staying Poor
Nick Maggiulli covers his surprise at the reaction he received from certain parts of Twitter on announcing that he was rebalancing his portfolio by selling some of his Bitcoin holdings. The two key messages for me were 1) don’t concern yourself with what others are doing, and 2) if you make a lot of money off a single holding, take some money off the table and bank some of those winnings!

Quiet FI – Delisted Stock – Yep, I got Fucked
You have to feel sorry for QFI. His investing genius, ruined by the Feds! I had never heard of a stock being completely delisted before, but it doesn’t sound like a pleasant experience.

A Wealth of Common Sense – The Psychology Behind the Boom in Collectibles
Ben Carlson looks back to the Beanie Baby craze and draws some lessons for the current boom in collectibles.

Cool stuff that doesn’t fit in other categories so gets lumped together

Indeedably – Frozen
A great piece by Indeedably. Reminded me of an old Simpsons quote:

“I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me. It’ll happen to you!” Grampa Simpson

Full Time Finance – Foster Care Myths
My parents’ are foster carers. It was interesting to see the parallels between my understanding of their experiences and those described by FTF. Foster carers are definitely hugely underpaid and underappreciated.

Bully the Bear – Why am I pushing so hard?

“Every person has 24 hours each day. That’s 3 buckets of time with 8 hours in each. After subtracting 8 hrs to work and 8 hrs to sleep, we still have our last bucket of time. What we choose to do with this last bucket will determine how we are going to be like in the future. Choose carefully.”

Covid

Nature – The coronavirus is here to stay — here’s what that means
Guardian – Step by step: how England’s Covid lockdown will be lifted

The Nature article is just a survey of scientists, rather than a concrete study. Still, the article’s findings, that covid will become endemic, similar to the seasonal flus we get each year, seems likely to me. Meanwhile, here in the UK, the Government has finally outlined it’s road out of lockdown. Time will tell if opening all the schools at once on the 8th of March turns out to be a good idea or not!

Misc

TransferWise – World, meet Wise
It’s been a while since I last used Transferwise. To my knowledge, it’s the easiest way to make one off payments to another currency. Apparently they also offer more than just transferring, hence their changing their name to “Wise.”

Sovereign Quest – A new personal finance curation site launched by Indeedably. It’s already off to a great start. Definitely worth checking out.

Money Saving Expert – Working from home due to coronavirus, even for a day? Claim a year’s worth of tax relief. It only takes 2 minutes and could net you £62/year or £124/year for basic/higher rate tax payers, respectively.

Thanks for reading. Hope you’re all having a great week!