Financial Samurai

Rock Balancing in San Francisco

After my parents pep talk in the 9th grade, I realized there were two things I had to do in order to survive high school: 1) use my brains and 2) develop some pythons.  In other words, getting good grades, joining student government, and being a history buff wasn’t enough.  Sure, I may have an easier time getting into some fancy college, but how was I supposed to get into girls?  “Hey pork chop, did you know that General Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, marking the end of The Confederacy and the Civil War?  Lez go out tonight!”

“Girls, Girls, Girls” by Motley Crue played incessantly in my head at the time.  Frankly, I can’t imagine it being much different for a lot of other teenage boys.

I made it a rule to balance the mental with the physical by playing sports.  As a teenager,  I had a strong fear that I was going to be stuck in nerdom if I didn’t.  I was a study machine who needed balance.  The sports that attracted the most groupies were football and basketball, but I was too chicken sh*t to bang down low.  I chose tennis instead, which had decidedly less groupies.  Good thing all you really need is one!

In the 11th grade, this cute girl slipped a note in biology lab with a cut out from Teen Magazine entitled, “You Know Your Boyfriend Is A Keeper If..“.  To my surprise, #1 said: “Your man is the captain of his high school varsity tennis team!“  Shwing!  As captain of the HS varsity team, needless to say we had a frolicking good time….. studying for our biology lab final of course.

THE OLDER THE WISER, PERHAPS Read more…

Well folks, the weekend of love has arrived!  Some are going to eat by candle light, while others will walk the beach during sunset here in California or Hawaii.  For my friends out in Snowmageddonville, perhaps marshmellows in front of the fire place while playing a fun game of Scrabble.  Amazingly, there are some who believe their significant other when they say, “don’t get me anything.“ If you actually believe this line, you also mistakenly believe taxes aren’t going up next year!

I’m absolutely sure there are those against the Valentine movement, how it’s one big marketing gimmick for guys to spend more money than they should.  Unfortunately, you’re right, but there’s no stopping the movement. If you end up doing nothing, not even a small gesture like a back massage, you’re screwed, and not in a good way!

The one thing I caution ladies not to do is push.  The more you push about what you want or want to do on Sunday, the more your guy won’t want to do anything.  If you keep hinting about chocolate covered strawberries, you’re going to get one big fat biscuit of nothing!  So shhh, let the man figure something out and get creative.  Of course, ladies can always do something for us men too yeah?  Nah, it’s always on us men.

WHAT AN OPPORTUNITY FOR SINGLES EVERYWHERE! Read more…

Brad Helps Rebuild NO

First of all, congratulations to the Saints for winning the Super Bowl!  The odds makers were so off favoring the Colts by 6, and setting a ridiculous 57 over/under total point line.  Someone out there made a nice chunk of change.  Was it you?

For some reason, there is a thumbs down movement regarding this year’s commercials.  I don’t think people were paying close enough attention.  If they were, they’d be raving!  The underlying theme of my top five picks revolves around love, be it loving something, or falling in love.  You’ll see what I mean.  Enjoy!

SAMURAI’S TOP 5 SUPER BOWL COMMERCIALS FOR 2010 Read more…

Kaneshiro Takeshi

“Why won’t he marry me?” pops up a lot nowadays.  Seemingly beautiful, smart women can’t find the love of their lives, and when they do, they can’t lock them down.

Women have it tougher today.  It amazes me how some can juggle career and motherhood so well.  Those who do deserve a gold star because there are only so many hours in a day.

What’s less talked about is the pressure society puts on men to succeed.  Women need to know that men have it rough too.  Society expects us to provide, and provide some more!  Ever since I was a kid, my parents stressed the importance of education, so that I can make enough money to support a family and support them.  The pressure was latent, but immense making each poor grade or non-promotion that much more stressful.  When you’re a teenage boy, frankly all you want to do is chase girls and not plan out the next two decades of your life!

The Super Motivated Boyfriend (SMB) is a curious being.  He is a potential gem to any women out there with enough polishing.  Polish him too much and he loses his edge and rolls away. It’s important to understand his ambitions, for once you do, wedding bells won’t be far away!

FIVE TIPS FOR GETTING YOUR SMB TO MARRY YOU Read more…

A Sliced Heart

With Valentine’s Day coming up, I thought it’d be nice to dedicate some of this week’s posts to relationships.  Few things are as rewarding as finding the one you want to grow old with.  I can be stranded somewhere in Kabul, and so long as the one is beside me, I am happy.

That said, does true love have a price?  If a genie gave you the option of having $100 million dollars but never finding the love of your life, or finding that special someone but always living just above the poverty line, which would you choose?

Before answering the question, think about all the fun times you had in your prior relationships, some that could have been.  Not all bad right?  Now think carefully whether after a certain point, more money can really bring you more happiness.

My theory is that “love” will be the landslide victor, however, at the margin men will have a greater tendency to choose money over love, while women will gravitate towards love over money.

The Samurai Fund: -3.13% YTD vs. the S&P 500 -4.4%. Lenar +15%, Berkshire +11%, GE +4% and STE +6.15% continue to be stars. While MWW -18% and Toyota -11.3% are the biggest dogs.  If Toyoda-san didn’t apologize on Friday, I would have sold the stock in a heart beat.

Samurai’s Alexa Ranking Challenge: Is growing strong!  I’m very happy to see so many people progress and support each other.  Forget about all about SEO, link ratios, and yourself.  Keep up the content and the promoting of others!  If you would like to join, read the post, let us know in the comments section with your rank so Daniel-san and I can track.

HIGHLIGHT POSTS OF THE WEEK Read more…

As the new year deepens, now is the most exciting time for job hoppers everywhere.  I’m convinced we’ll see more employee turnover at various industries than over the past two years combined.  We’ve got two years of itchy people waiting to leave their firms for better opportunities.  Are you one of them?

If you are, remember one thing: join people, not firms. Isn’t that the same you ask?  No, it is imperative you differentiate between the two.  Joining great people means working with people you respect, and working for people who support you.  Working with great people means not hitting the snooze button five times because you dread going to work.  When you see people get promoted within the ranks, you cheer for them instead of secretly contain your jealously.  Great people encourage each other to succeed. Read more…

Ready, Set, Go! From now on, all advertising revenue after operating costs will be donated to charity!  I’ve finally got off my rump to figure out this peculiar aspect of blogging.

For the past 6 months I’ve been very disinterested in advertising.  The only thing that did interest me was practicing “free-writing”, meeting new folks, and learning new things.  I played around with various advertising platforms like Adsense early on, and I just scratched my head wondering who would click on ads such as “600% Penny Stocks”?  What if the advertiser was a scam?  For those who use Adsense, more power to you.  It’s my own personal issue for not being entirely comfortable with their platform.

As I learned more about advertising online, I realized there were other solutions to my pre-screening desires.  One solution is to sign up with affiliate advertising networks such as LinkShare (thanks Matt Bell), where I can screen hundreds of advertisers beforehand to provide relevant solutions or interests to readers.  We still will never know with 100% certainty the veracity of the products (Enron anybody?), but at the very least, it’s one level higher than putting up contextual advertisements where we have no control over.

It’s important that advertising never alters the spirit of this site. We will not be like politicians, swayed by corporate interest groups and their tantalizing dollars.  If there’s a product we like we’ll endorse it and introduce the product to others.  If not, we just won’t bother no matter how attractive the incentives.  Making money online is a learned skill that takes time to cultivate.  The best ads are those which are unobtrusive and relevant.

MIND SHIFT Read more…

This is a guest article by one of the community’s most well regarded bloggers, Flexo from Consumerism Commentary. Flexo is currently on a ten-day, ten-venue tour.  You can follow him on Twitter @Flexo.  Please enjoy and share your thoughts!

Three of my friends experienced difficulties in their lives around the same time, about ten years ago. I’ll call them Alex, Brian, and Chris. Each had their own problems to deal with, but they chose to ignore their difficulties and search for easy answers that focused on short-term solutions rather than long-term success. Before long, their lives erupted in chaos. That chaos helped them make positive changes, but the outcomes would have been predictable to anyone paying attention.

Alex worked for a non-profit organization since the day he graduated college. It was a great job and he loved his work. He could have chosen any career with his wide variety of talents and his strong aptitude. Alex had the potential to earn signficiantly more money than he would while working for that organization, but he knew since high school he wanted to move his life in this direction. Living with this job was difficult, however.

Alex chose to remain in an apartment near his friends so he commuted three hours total every day. For his meager salary, he worked 80 hours a week including weekends. Even if he wanted to earn extra income on the side, he had no time because his life was completely consumed by his job. And it continued to affect him financially, unable to afford rent, food, and basic necessities.

After a late night at the office, Alex returned to his apartment and found all of his belongings removed from the bedroom and piled in the living room. He hadn’t paid his rent for a few months, nor did he communicate his problems, so the unofficial landlord kicked him out. Read more…

The Yakezie Alexa Challenge

There’s a fun hypothesis saying that you are the average of the closest five people around you.  I believe this to be true, do you?  What’s interesting about the blogosphere community is that anybody with enough intention can start a website.  Some are interesting, some are not, but regardless we can all compete with the ProBloggers and the Huffington Posts of the web in our own niche way!

Alexa is a dynamic website ranking and information company owned by Amazon, which has over 40 million users world wide.  The tool bar is free, and easy to download.  The Alexa Ranking Challenge is straight forward.  If you’re outside of the top 200,000, get in the top 200,000 within 6 months.  I can’t even name 100 sites, let alone 199,999 sites.  Can you?  If you’re already in the top 200,000, get in the top 100,000.  And if you’re already in the top 100,000, get in the top 50,000.

There are some who poo poo the Alexa ranking system, and I recognize their two main arguments:  1) The system only tracks visitors who have the Alexa Toolbar installed, and 2) There are cases where some websites with bazillions of users have a worse ranking than sites with less users.  We don’t know why, because we don’t fully know what goes into the calculations.  It may be because readers don’t visit and just read off their RSS.  That said, the Alexa ranking system continues to grow, and is the best system we got.  At least 40 million webmasters around the world think so, and there has to be something to it if Google, Facebook, Yahoo and YouTube are ranked #1, #2, #3, and #4, respectively.

Since starting this site, I’ve been rejected as a guest poster, didn’t even get responded to, let alone make it as one of the 7 finalists for one site’s staff writer tryouts, denied admission to a personal finance blog network, and even got my first carnival submission rejected.  But through all the rejections, I took comfort in my friend, Alexa, who is always by my side motivating me to keep going.  I’m sure many of you have been rejected as well.  Here’s your chance to create our own network of powerful friends by joining in on the challenge!

BENEFITS OF BEING IN THE TOP 200,000 Read more…

Was there ever a time when you thought you had to do more just to get noticed?  You’d put on antics, pretend to be someone you’re not, and self praise one too many times when all you had to do was just be yourself.

I want to share with you my favorite Glee (FOX) video, which begins just after the Glee cast performed a wild, hair wig routine for the opposing team. The video reminds us that simplicity, accompanied by genuineness triumphs always.

This site won’t be all things to all people.  If it was, we’d lose our authenticity.  Thanks for joining our community so far and happy Martin Luther King Day.  Let’s remember what he stands for!

Readers, ever catch yourself doing something that wasn’t you?  Why do you think you were doing that unusual thing, and why is it so hard to just be ourselves sometimes?

Keigu,

Sam Samurai – “Slicing Through Money’s Mysteries”

Follow on Twitter @FinancialSamura and subscribe to our RSS Feed.

PS: You can watch the entire episode of “Hairography” here.  Once you juxtapose the two performances (29min mark), you may appreciate the short clip even more.