Financial Samurai

For the past two years I’ve taken the bus to work after driving for 7 years prior.  The company removed our free parking benefits and I wasn’t about to pay $350/month to park in a garage just 5 miles away.

I have a love hate relationship with the bus.  When it’s raining, and I have to stand outside shivering, I hate it.  When the bus skips my stop every so often, I hate it.  When the bus driver slams on the brakes a couple feet away from the stop light and we all go flying, I hate it.  When the bus is packed like sardines, but there are some very attractive riders I need to squeeze next to, well, I guess it’s OK.

My VIP Pass aka monthly bus pass costs $60, while taking a cab to and from work costs $30.  Hence, the cost breakdown is simply $60 for a bus, $350 for parking, and $600 for a cab every month.  Out of principle, I wasn’t going to spend 5-10X more on transportation if I could just ride the bus.

WHAT A DUMMY 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…

$1,780 is what it cost to book two last minute tickets to Lost Island.  I let the web page sit for a while, hesitant to click away a nice chunk of savings.  But what’s the use of money if it’s not spent?  We can save and save and save until we have some magical number we call “enough.”  Or, we can live for experiences that will last until our memories gray.

Why is it that some of us have spending paralysis over good times, but spend so easily on material things?  My fear was due to the impermanence of the experience, and the permanent loss of money.  That was some time ago when I had little savings.  It’s different now.  Memories are always what makes me smile the most.  It’s as if good memories blossom with time.

Readers, what are your thoughts on impulse spending for experiences?  Can spending on experiences be considered less imbecilic than spending on things?  If so, why should there be a difference?

The Samurai Fund: +2.1% YTD vs. -0.53 S&P 500.  I’m making room for a couple new picks to replace a couple existing picks due to inactivity and performance.  Shoot me an e-mail if interested and please read the guidelines first.

Yakezie Alexa Challenge: Stay tuned for a large update this Wed, Feb 24.  We’ll discuss what happens when the rules change on us, how to deal and flourish!  I will introduce a new initiative which should be able to help more members.  Keep on promoting others Yakezies!

HIGHLIGHT POSTS OF THE WEEK Read more…

What a coincidence that both Valentine’s and Chinese New Year fall on the same day.  In fact, if you’re Chinese who celebrates Valentine’s Day, this could be the luckiest year of your life!  For those who aren’t, you still have 20 more years until 2030 to change your identity.  Let’s look at a couple of similarities between Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year.

COLOR: Red is the default color for love and happiness.  Love > Money = Happiness as we explored recently.  If you’ve got love in addition to money, well then, you’re really one lucky barbecue pork bun!

TRADITION: The Chinese give young-ins “hong bao”, or red envelopes stuffed with money to sway them to be good.  Lovers also give their honeys money indirectly through dinners, flowers, chocolates, and spa massages, to sway them to do…. you decide.

Chinese civilization has been around for over 5,000 years.  Perhaps they are the original inventors of Valentine’s Day, spaghetti, sushi, and the running man dance.  Hmmmm.

The Samurai Fund: We are killing it team!  We didn’t capitulate on Toyota Motors, and dog poop Monster Worldwide wins this year’s #1 Super Bowl commercial.  TSF is up 0.13% year to date vs. the S&P 500 down 3.55%. As a result of our massive outperformance in this rocky market, Warren Buffet is giving us another $100 million to invest.  With these new proceeds, I invite Flexo to be our newest member.  His selection is Flextronics (FLEX), a vertically integrated electronics manufacture based in Singapore.  Welcome aboard!  (Click TSF link for updated chart.)

Week In Review: Gotta say, it was fun auditioning for Cosmopolitan Magazine with “How To Get Your Super Motivated Boyfriend To Marry You“.  The post turned off some women, found support from other women, while speaking to some fellas as you can see in the comments.  Of course, when the guys went back and asked how their girlfriends felt, they all disagreed.  After the 5th year of dating, have a read again and share your thoughts.

Every guy has some degree of SMB in them.  It’s not possible to always feel secure, never have any pressure, and marry the girlfriend by year two.  The 50/50 equal effort split is also just a pipe dream.  Someone will always feel more affection than the other.  Persecuted men out there, this one’s for you!  Helping ladies help men so men can help ladies sounds like a win-win scenario.

Rest of the Month: We’re going to slowly blend back into more personal finance related topics.  I’m happy to present a couple more guest posts, and at least one more book review and giveaway to readers.  As part of the Yakezie Alexa Challenge, I will continue highlighting your work here and on Twitter.  Perhaps you will do the same.

HIGHLIGHT POSTS OF THE WEEK 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…

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…

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.

The S&P showed five consecutive days of gains in the first week of 2010 to close up 2.68%.  Meanwhile, The Samurai Fund (TSF) outperformed by 200 basis points to close up 4.77%! For an actual fund of 17 positions, this is absolutely huge!  We are up almost $80,000,000 this week, and if we keep this up, the team is going to get paid like rock stars come year-end!

I’ve put up a permanent tab to track our names to facilitate accountability.  If you are one of the 17 contributors, please provide periodic updates in the page to keep this as realistic as possible.  There will be a review of the bottom performers end of the quarter, to potentially make room for 3 new entrants.  Nobody is safe in this meritocracy!

INCOME POLL: There’s a new poll on the south-right side bar, asking how much money you made in 2009.  The poll is totally anonymous, so feel free to contribute.  It’ll be interesting to see the income distribution of our community, to help me help you discuss more pertinent things. Read more…