Hey everyone, a little snafu at the Edmonton airport yesterday. Get to the airport at 5am for a an early flight. Delay, delay, cancelled 4 hours later. Many flights were cancelled due to “weather” or “high winds”.

Never seen so many flights cancelled due to wind before. I wonder, does this have any relationship with high jet fuel costs?

Another thing, Westjet automatically rebooked me for Friday. Wtf? Cherry on top was that no hotel cost coverage was offered.

I check the email and there’s an option to “change itinerary” and so I click and see there are options for later in the evening on Thursday, which I selected, and successfully made it home (midnight).

I’m a bit perturbed that Westjet assumed I’d like to stay another night in Edmonton.

Imagine I’m an old person that didn’t click into the email on my smartphone to see if there was another option…

All a bit strange….Ben, what do you think? Should we publish a Brief?

On to business:

Eddie

Ps. Would love to make a push for more subscribers, because this journal community is awesome. Send along to your friends if you’ve been enjoying.

I saw an alarming statistic from Goldman Sachs.

40% of people earning $300,000 to 500,000+ are living paycheque to paycheque:

You could have an incredibly lucrative high finance job, lawyer, engineer, fill in the blank…earn half a million dollars every year and still feel like it’s hard to get ahead.

What’s encouraging though, is that people earning between $50,000 and $300,000 are doing a reasonably better job at actually advancing their financial futures than the +300,000 folks.

Much respect for those making their way to a fantastic income profile. Unfortunately, it’s easy to subconsciously gazelle your net worth away to zero every month, thinking, “I make lots, I’ll start saving and investing next year…”

And for those on more modest incomes, it’s a great reminder that you don’t need significant income to generate significant wealth.

And also a good reminder to catch yourself when you say, “if only I made more money…”

Is the dot dot dot filled in with “I can finally buy a luxury car and get a larger than necessary mortgage and fly premium class to Italy”?

Clearly it’s symptomatic of the system, bad money habits, always wanting what your instagram fake friends pretend they have that seems better than what’s right in front of you.

Salary doesn’t equal wealth.

So hopefully this little note today is a useful reminder to stay alert with yourself and think deeply about what more money means to your life now and how you use it to secure your future.

It certainly is for me.

Imagine it’s the year 2000, market is peaking and the dot com bubble is about to burst.

13 years later, the S&P500 finally breaks even.

Yes, periods like this happen.

People will point to that and use as an argument for for today and if AI/Concentration/Passive factors are resulting in a bubble, get ready for a lost decade from here.

One problem is no one can predict a bubble or its burst point reliably.

Second problem is it completely ignores the fact that most investors would be Dollar Cost Averaging along the whole way.

If you invested $100 in 2000, then $100 every month until end of 2013, your IRR with reinvested dividends is about 8%:

Unless you are a retiree living strictly off your portfolio, which has its own risk limitations (ie depends on the size of your portfolio and your withdrawal rate, asset allocation mix and therefore portfolio return expectations), whether we are in a bubble or not is irrelevant to the young investor in work and accumulation mode.

Don’t let the boomers scare you away from a good investing strategy:

Earn more, spend less, invest the difference; early, consistently, automatically, and reinvesting dividends for a long time.

Also, my worthless opinion on short term stock market? We have lots of room to run yet.

“It’s a great day to have a great day”

Henry William Bolte

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