Financial Samurai

So that’s it.  One quarter of the year is done, and a new quarter begins.  How’d you do?  Did you just meet expectations set forth in the 4th quarter of 2009?  Or did you beat expectations and prove to your shareholders and yourself that you’re investment worthy?  Executives of public companies go through this thought process all the time, and so should you.

There’s never been a better time than right now to go through all the clutter in the house and donate it all away.  Clutter should drive you nuts, because it’s a sign of excess.  Why do you need 7 pairs of jeans, 50 pairs of shoes, and all those magazines?  You don’t!  I don’t and I’m very disappointed in myself for accumulating so much junk over the years.

It really makes me sick to have so much stuff.  When I lived in a studio apartment, the place was filled with crap.  Now I live in a house, and it’s no different.  Consumerism has infiltrated me thoroughly.  On the bright side, thank goodness for counterbalancing mechanisms. If a person never feels full (sick of clutter), they’ll eat until they explode!  Today, let’s de-clutter and simplify.

MARCH FAVORITE POSTS ON FINANCIAL SAMURAI

* “The Mental To Physical Connection For A Healthier Lifestyle”

* “Insuring The Uninsured Is Worth It”

* “Wealth Is An Illusion Of Happiness”

Heads up Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and Bloomberg, if you want to do an interview, better let us know quick because The Samurai Fund is now up 11.5% vs. only +5.6% for the S&P year-to-date!  LEN, HAR, BIG are leading the way.

HIGHLIGHT POSTS FROM AROUND THE SPHERE Read more…

The last month of the first quarter is upon us.  Now is as good a time as any to revisit our new year’s resolutions to make sure we’re on track.  I’m on pace to achieve 4 out of 8 so far: 1) meet 36 new people, 2) see the good in others, 3) stay consistent, but not obsessive over this site, and 4) save 50% of my gross income.  Regarding the other four goals, I’m not on pace to make a million bucks, haven’t won any tennis tournaments, nor have I been regularly practicing my acoustic guitar or cooking skills.  Better get cracking!

With 10 months left in the year, it’s time to really ramp up the creative juices and think up some back-end business to help create additional income.  Tennis season is starting up and I plan on doing everything possible to give myself at least a physical edge over the competition.  Finally, from now on at least one hour every weekend will be dedicated to guitar and cooking.

In terms of predictions for 2010 it’s still too early to tell, but 4 of 5 have held up so far: 1) inflation and interest rates remain low with the 10-yr yield still below 4%, 2) the USD dollar has strengthened, 3) the markets have not double dipped, and 4) The Samurai Fund is outperforming the S&P 500 by 2.64% as of Feb 28.  Regarding #5, it’s just a matter of time before Facebook goes public and Twitter gets bought out don’t you think?  We’ll revisit the predictions mid year and see if they still hold true!

Readers, how are you guys doing with your new year’s resolutions?  If you wrote any prediction for 2010, I’d love to see them so feel free to post your links below.

FINANCIAL SAMURAI ARTICLES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED

* “Be A Sloth And Don’t ROTH – Why Converting to A ROTH Is A Mistake”

* “How To Get Your Super Motivated Boyfriend (SMB) To Marry You”

* “Do “C” Students Deserve “A” Lifestyles?”

* “Someone Always Farts In A Crowd – The Moral Hazard Of The World”

* “Let Freement Reign! Spending Paralysis, Material Lust and Obsession”

* “Where Americans Pay The Most To Live And Why”

HIGHLIGHTS FROM AROUND THE BLOGOSPHERE: Read more…

The Mon Oda (Crest)

Dear Yakezie Group,

It’s been just over a month since the Samurai Alexa Ranking Challenge was announced, and I’m pleased to report we’ve made tremendous progress!  With 35+ members strong, we are actively helping each other achieve our respective goals.  I’d like to use this opportunity to recognize several Yakezie members for their achievements and initiatives in helping the team.

* Daniel-San from Sweating The Big Stuff took the initiative to compile the list and keep track.  His efforts have in turn created a home for us members to visit once a week and get pumped.

* @Elle_CM from Couple Money has been amazingly selfless in retweeting my posts and many other posts.  She is exactly the type of member the Yakezie Group seeks.  @FinEngr created a Yakezie Twitter Group to keep track of us and follow.  Pls follow so the group can follow you back.

* Monevator, The Amateur Financier, Evolution Of Wealth created weekly wraps to specifically highlight posts from the Yakezie Group.  Meanwhile, Money Funk wrote a derivative post on how to increase your Alexa ranking.

* Eliminate The Muda and Planting Dollars have busted through their 200,000 goal and should obviously now shoot for top 100,000!

THE RULES HAVE CHANGED AND WE WILL ADAPT Read more…

The Yakezie 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 Yakezie 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…

Samurai On Waialae Beach At Sunset

As one can guess, higher paying jobs leads to higher costs of living.  In fact, more than half of the 20 cities surveyed by the US Census Bureau are based in Caleeforneea, as Governor Arnold would say.

How is it that California is so dominant in the expensive category, when the mass of settlers first arrived on Plymouth Rock 300 years ago?  3,300 miles is a long way to travel, especially on horse and foot!  The main reason for the unfettered move out west is simply warmth and sunshine!

Every time I vacation in Hawaii, I always ask myself, why the heck ain’t I here for good.  Let’s face it, more sunshine equals happier people.  Sunshine is the classic zeitgeber to help us wake up and get us motoring in the morning.  No sunshine leads to no photosynthesis, which means no plant life, and therefore no ecosystem.

After 10 years of living on the east coast, I can still feel the grey skies weigh down my soul every winter.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love the winter snow during the holidays, but I just love being in a cheerful mood more.  Here are America’s most expensive places to live based off median monthly housing costs.

TOP CITIES WHERE AMERICANS PAY THE MOST TO LIVE Read more…

“It’s not whether you have your MBA, it’s where it came from,” writes John Micklethwait, Editor-In-Chief of The Economist. I’m sure on at least two levels, he’s upsetting people. On one level, those without MBA’s are going to find it presumptuous that getting an MBA is a foregone conclusion.  On another level, there are thousands of MBA grads who didn’t attend the top tier schools who will take offense as well.

John is smart to be so opinionated because after all, the people who will be buying his magazine are those who have always wondered whether getting an MBA is a good idea.  He forces the assumption that if you picked up his magazine, you must get an MBA, and not just any MBA, but one of the top schools from his polls.

I don’t entirely agree with John, but let’s face reality, getting an MBA is gradually becoming the new standard for newcomers to the world of finance because some go-getter decided it was the right thing to do and succeeded to get others to follow.  The MBA is also too expensive to not try and go to the best school possible (although it’s not the end of the world).  The inertia is too strong to reverse now!

Here are some of the takeaways from the magazine: Read more…

I’ve decided to dedicate much of the rest of this month focusing on graduate schools, specifically the much loved and vilified graduate degree, the MBA.  The deadline for round 1 applications is fast approaching, and I’ve come up with a $1,000 giveaway that any aspiring MBA applicant, or grad school applicant for that matter may be interested in receiving.  Hence, feel free to spread the word and stay tuned!  For now, let’s start off with a layup as to why getting your graduate degree is a good idea, if you want to make more money.

Many personal finance publishers use Net Worth IQ as a way to track their financial progress.  NW IQ managed to gather a bunch of good data to digest and analyze.  A lot of it is just common sense such as the older you are, the greater your net worth tends to be.

This is the chart that stood out most:

Read more…

Given it’s the weekend, I’m not going to write too much, but two things worth highlighting given it relates to some of our previous posts.

1) Sam Bradford of Oklahoma got injured and his then #3 Oklahoma Sooner’s LOST to BYU (#20).  What does this mean?  He may never play up to his potential again, thereby losing $20,000,000 in guaranteed money by not going to the NFL last year.  Perhaps just as painful, Oklahoma will not be considered to play in the national championships again this year.

Sam Bradford From OU Injured

Oh well, that’s life.  Who needs the money anyway when you can have so much fun in college and get your degree?  However, all you prospective pro athletes, please feel free to shoot us an e-mail for advice.  We’ll look out for you, even if the Sooner faithful won’t look out for Sam by telling him to stay!

Related Post: “Forgoing $50 Million For The Love Of Football”

2) The September/October issue of Washington Monthly come out with a new type of college ranking.  I thought it was intriguing because they basically bash US News & World Report’s methodology, due to the blatant cheating by some faculty at Clemson and University of Florida to manipulate the results.

Washington Monthly’s believes that “America’s colleges are those that work hardest to help economically disadvantaged students earn the credentials that the job market demands.  They contribute new scientific discoveries, and they emphasize the obligations students have to serve their communities and the nation at large.” Hence, they offer three broad rating categories: Social Mobility, Research, and Service.  See the full report here.

The 10 Best Universities in America

1. UC Berkeley (#21 in US News)

2. UC San diego (35)

3. UC Los Angeles (25)

4. Stanford University (4)

5. Texas A&M College Station (64)

6. South Carolina State University (NR)

7. Penn State (470

8. The College of William & Mary (32)

9. University of Texas – Austin (47)

10. UC Davis (44)

Several observations: 1) California schools dominate.  2) There’s only one private school in the Top 10.  3) The traditionally perceived elite schools are not there except for Stanford.  Is spending $50,000/year to go to private school in the east coast worth it?  Hard to say after reading the report!

Related post: “Survey Says: Get 1,300 On Your SATs & A 3.9 GPA And You’re Set for Life!”

Hope everybody is having a great weekend!  Upcoming posts will be about Net Worth, The Right Sports, and How Everything Is Relative.

Keiju,

Financial Samurai

Slicing Through Money’s Mysteries

A very interesting article in the New York Times highlighted PayScale’s survey of 1.2million college graduates to find out what they made right out of school, and 10 years after graduation. If you look at the picture, it’s interesting to note that the majority of schools are: 1) Private Schools, and 2) Highly Ranked in US News & World Report and other popular college rankings.

The average SAT and GPA scores of these 20 schools are roughly 1,300 and 3.7, respectively. Hence, one could argue that the key to making a six figure income 10 years out of school is simply high test scores and good grades! As such, it behooves all incoming 9th graders to recognize their grades accumulate from 9th to 12th grade, and not to mess their chances up of getting into Dartmouth, UPenn, and Yale.
 

IN THE LONG RUN

I really used to think education was not very useful since we forget much of what we learn. But, as I grow older, it becomes apparent that many of the most successful people we know have been very well educated. Barack Obama went to Columbia for his BA, and Harvard Law School. George Bush Senior went to Yale, and even Bush Junior went to Harvard. Say what you will, but anybody who becomes the President of the Free World is successful in my eyes. In the long run, the cream rises to the top, be it whip cream or sour cream. Read more…

I remember the moment I got my college diploma, I swore I’d never go to school again. At the end of the day, we forget the majority of things we learn and who wants to do homework anyway? All this changed when the Dotcom bubble exploded and I was left wondering whether I’d be the first person let go given I had recently joined my current job in 2001. Last in First Out, or FIFO as they say.

We had gone through 5 rounds of layoffs in 1.5 years, and I heard the 6th one was just right around the corner. As long as the firm would have me, I’d keep on working, but just in case, I needed a backup plan. I decided that surfing back home in Hawaii was not the proper backup plan so I came to a compromise and applied to the nearest part-time MBA program, which so happens to be ranked Top 10 in US News & World Report and the WSJ. The program promised the rigors of the full-time program, with the same professors and international opportunities all within 3 years. Upon looking further into my company’s policies, they offered to pay for my MBA so long as I was in good standings. The MBA program was a hedge, just in case I was one of the casualties, as one could potentially transfer to the full time program once accepted.

The 6th round came and went, and I was still left standing. Unfortunately, the company tuition reimbursement policy was canceled just two weeks before my acceptance. I decided to join anyway b/c at the end of the day, the economy was still shaky, and I didn’t want my application time spent go to waste. What the heck I thought. Be grateful for the opportunity.

Read more…