Chuck Jaffee, a forty-year veteran financial journalist who regularly writes for the Wall Street Journal and is also a nationally syndicated financial columnist, discusses how money and investors’ attitude towards investing has changed over the last few decades.
Category: Investing
#390: Ask Paula: Help! My Bills Are Too High
We start this episode with two anonymous callers who have opposite problems: one says her bills are too high, while the other is worried that she’s saving too much.
Anonymous (“Izzy”) saves A LOT. She wants to relax about her spending more, and start including more joy into her life. How should she approach the next 10 or 20 years, so that she can enjoy her financial security?
A different anonymous caller (“Starlight”) has the opposite problem: her expenses are mounting. Her bills make her uncomfortable. She wants to shake up her investments so that she can tap her assets in order to make her payments. Ideally, she’d also like to buy a house in Europe within the next 10 years. How should she do this?
John liked the episode with Bill Bengen, where we discussed the 4% rule. However, he questions whether that rule should really be applied to the FIRE community.
Steve is a landlord who needs his property to cash flow, but doesn’t like to raise rents. What should he do?
Do you have a question on business, money, trade-offs, financial independence strategies, travel, or investing? Leave it here and we’ll answer them in a future episode.
Enjoy!
#388: “Feeling Anxious About Your Investments?”, with Scott Nations
Recessions are terrifying.
Market crashes often bring out the worst in people’s anxieties and fears.
This fear triggers us to act even more irrationally than usual – which can lead to making expensive mistakes in our investment portfolios.
In today’s episode, Scott Nations, who spent his career studying market volatility, describes some of the most common cognitive biases and irrational behaviors that investors make. He shares tips on how to master the mental game of investing, especially in turbulent times.
Here are a few irrational biases that destroy wealth:
#1: The disposition effect – Humans have a tendency to sell their winners and hold their losers.
Why? We get a dopamine hit when we sell a winning asset and lock in our gains. Meanwhile, sunk cost fallacy makes us want to hang onto the loser ‘until it comes back.’
How can we avoid falling prey to this?
First, if you’re thinking about selling off an asset that’s performing well, ask yourself: What’s the real motivation? Do you want to book a profit for the sake of booking a profit? Or do you believe that some underlying fundamental has changed?
Next, compare this decision to your investor policy statement, which is your written statement about your goals, timeline, risk tolerance, risk capacity, strategy and style as an investor. Is this decision aligned with your written personal policies?
#2: Status quo bias – Our tendency to overvalue our current situation, such as the mix of assets that happens to already be inside our portfolio. We demand a higher burden of proof to justify any change than we do to justify holding the status quo.
This is often triggered by information overload – when we feel overwhelmed by excess information and too many options, we react by doing nothing.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this the “paradox of choice” – the more choices we’re offered, the more likely we are to not make any decision.
How can we protect ourselves from this? One tactic is to adopt a low-information diet, in which we carefully curate the amount of news and information that we receive.
Another tactic is to look at our resources and imagine that we’re starting from a blank slate. If we didn’t have our current mix of stocks, bonds, real estate, crypto, etc. – if we imagine that we’re starting with our entire net worth in cash – how would we allocate our capital if we were starting from scratch?
#3: Overconfidence – Research shows that people consistently overestimate both their abilities and their predictions of positive future outcomes.
The majority of people think they’re an above-average driver, which is mathematically impossible.
Most people overestimate their probability of getting and staying married forever, of not grappling with fertility issues, choosing a winning investment, or becoming a millionaire.
Today’s interview guest says that he’s aware that, among all the cognitive biases he describes, he’s personally the most susceptible to overconfidence bias. Staying aware of his personal susceptibility helps him keep it in check.
#4: Loss aversion – The sting of a loss is more emotionally profound than the joy of a gain. As a result, our brains are hardwired to avoid losses, rather than pursue gains.
This closely relates to the sunk cost fallacy that fuels the disposition effect, which we described above.
We describe many more cognitive biases in today’s episode. Enjoy!
#384: Invest Anywhere: Six Strategies to Make Money in Real Estate
Welcome back to the third episode in our special series, Afford Anything Presents: Invest Anywhere.
Invest Anywhere is a new monthly series that runs on the First Friday of each month. It lays out the information you need to invest in real estate at a distance.
Many of you want to invest in real estate, but you live in a high-cost-of-living area. (Ahem, California and New York). The homes in your city are prohibitively expensive, and they offer lackluster returns.
You could invest in a lower-cost area like Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Omaha or Wichita … but HOW? That sounds terrifying.
We’re here to dismantle that fear, piece by piece, by sharing our knowledge and experience.
The Invest Anywhere series is dedicated to giving you the guidance you need to make smart, confident choices about investing out-of-state.
It’s co-hosted between myself (Paula) and esteemed real estate investor Suni Rao, who’s experienced everything ranging from buy-and-hold rental investing to (accidentally) wholesaling. She’s managed short-term and long-term rentals. She’s owned houses, multi-units, and even a mobile home park.
She joins me in this episode to talk about a variety of strategies that will help you make money in real estate.
Inflation, Illustrated
Hi there!
This post is an illustrated, pared-down version of my recent “Inflation, Explained” podcast episode.
It was created as a simple, easy-to-digest guide to help you understand the current inflationary environment in the US.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
What is inflation?
Simple definition: too […]
#361: The GameStop Revolution, One Year Later – with Spencer Jakab
Wall Street Journal columnist Spencer Jakab marks the one-year anniversary of that weird time when the subReddit Wall St Bets pumped shares of meme stocks like GameStop and AMC Theaters, triggering a short squeeze that forced several hedge funds to lose billions.
What did we learn from that experience? And how do we actually take down Wall Street? How do we launch a truly effective financial revolution?
We share those insights in today’s episode.
Enjoy!
#357: Practical Investing and the Efficient Frontier, with Joe Saul-Sehy
Discussing advanced investing topics with me is former financial planner Joe Saul-Sehy.
You may recognize him from the Ask Paula episodes, but we discuss financial topics shared in his new book “STACKED: Your Super-Serious Guide to Modern Money Management” – co-authored with Emily Guy Birken.
Enjoy!
#338: Why Investors Need a Latticework of Ideas, with Morgan Housel
Here are three lessons from this conversation with investment writer Morgan Housel:
Lesson #1: Great investors need patience and humility.
Lesson #2: Read broadly.
Don’t just read books about finance and investing. Read from a broad multi-disciplinary array of subjects, so that you can form a latticework of ideas.
Lesson #3: Play a strong defense.
On the surface, it seems like playing defense is a conservative strategy. Emergency funds and a strong income-producing allocation, for example, both sound conservative.
But in the long-term it could prove to be the opposite.
Enjoy this interview, which originally aired in April 2018.
#333: The End of Recessions?, with Ben Carlson
In the 1890s and early 1900’s, we had recessions every two years.
From 2009 to 2020, we enjoyed an 11-year bull run, the longest bull run in history. And when we finally had a recession, it lasted only two months. It was the shortest recession in U.S. history.
The duration between recessions is growing longer (these days, we average 10 years between recessions, as opposed to two years at the turn of the previous century).
And when recessions strike, we recover faster. The average length of recessions is growing shorter.
What does this mean? If we project these trends into the future, are we bound for the end of recessions?
That’s the question that kicks off this discussion with Ben Carlson, Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritzhold Wealth Management and the host of the Animal Spirits podcast.
#329: Challenging Your Confirmation Bias, with Economist Larry Kotlikoff
Have you ever thought about how an economist views financial planning?
Would you guess that it’s vastly different from how some financial planners approach this work?
Today’s guest, Laurence Kotlikoff, is a Professor of Economics at Boston University. The Economist named him one of the world’s 25 most influential economists in 2014. And he’s here to tell us this:
“What we, as economists, are saying with respect to personal financial matters — in terms of our advice — is almost a complete right-angle as to what conventional advice is providing on every topic. How to invest, how to think about investment risk, how to do basic planning for retirement, everything – every single thing – is quite different.”
Professor Kotlikoff has written 19 books and hundreds of professional articles and Op-Eds. He is a New York Times best-selling author, and his columns have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Boston Globe, Bloomberg, Forbes, and other major publications.
