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Financial Samurai

Slicing Through Money's Mysteries

Your X-Factor Is Key To Being Rich, Happy, And Free

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If you want to be rich, happy, and free, you must cultivate your X-Factor.

Your X-Factor can be building something on the side that makes money beyond your day job. Your X-Factor can also be developing a top 1% talent in a sport, music, or art that provides you a tremendous amount of joy.

Without an X-Factor, life may not be as fulfilling. Let me share why everyone should develop an X-Factor even if they have the best job on earth. Because goodness knows, living to work will eventually lead to tremendous regret.



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The YOLO Economy Is Here To Stay: How To Live Your Best Life

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Are you ready to live your best life in the YOLO Economy (You Only Live Once)? I sure as hell am! I believe the YOLO Economy is here to stay for the next 10 years. Everybody get excited!

When September 11, 2001 happened, I had just moved to San Francisco from Manhattan as a 24-year-old. The event was traumatizing, especially because I was at the top of World Trade Center North Tower hosting a Latin America conference that January.

9/11 reminded me again that life was fragile and uncertain. When I was 13, I had experienced similar trauma when a friend had died in a car accident.

By age 22, I had already decided I needed to save and invest as much money as possible to be free. A career in finance was not sustainable due to the long hours and constant stress.



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How To Convince People You Are Middle Class When You’re Actually Rich

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As the wealth gap continues to widen, it may be beneficial to learn how to convince people you are middle class when you’re actually rich. Otherwise, you might become target enemy number one when the revolution comes!

To get things out of the way, I feel rich. Not only do I feel rich, but I also have enough passive income to be time rich. Being time rich is my favorite form of wealth.

After chronicling my journey to financial independence since 2009, there’s really nowhere for me to hide. Hopefully, people will give me some credit for all the years of hustle since graduating from college in 1999.

To avoid the guillotine, my hope is that consistently writing free content 3X a week to help everyone achieve financial independence will be appreciated. After all, I’ve got nothing to sell, except for a severance negotiation book, which many readers have said gave them the courage to change their lives for the better.

Even when many large media sites put up a paywall during a global pandemic, Financial Samurai stayed free. My goal has always been, no matter your level of wealth, to provide access to anybody looking to improve their personal finances.

Besides, as a minority, there should be more leniency as well when the uprising comes. It’s cool to be a minority nowadays. That is, unless Asians are considered not enough of a minority worth fighting for. In which case, please have mercy!



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The Easiest Way To Make Money From Home

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Let’s say the next black swan event isn’t a pandemic, but a zombie apocalypse. Or maybe World War III breaks out due to a fight for scarce resources. Clearly, instead of venturing out into the wild, we all need to find the easiest way to make money from home!

The pandemic has been a little strange for our family. Before all the lockdowns began, I had already decided to try and make more money online. My son turned two in 2019 and we faced a new expense: $1,950/month for preschool. The weight of $2,200/month healthcare premiums plus $1,950/month preschool tuition started cracking my back.

We wanted him to go to preschool to learn how to play with others. With an anticipated more difficult pregnancy with baby number two and another expected 3-6 months of sleepless nights postpartum, preschool was supposed to be a welcome help in 2020. Then the virus came.



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What If You Go To Harvard And End Up A Nobody?

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Harvard University consistently is ranked one of the top universities in the world. But what if you go to Harvard University and still end up a nobody?

When I say nobody, I’m just talking about being an average person working an average job. Not someone still living in mom’s garage playing video games all day at age 40.

A happy life is all about managing expectations. If you matriculate at Harvard, whether for undergrad or graduate school, great things are expected of you. And if you don’t do great things, are you a disappointment? Many would say so. More importantly, you might even think so.

Education has been on my mind a lot lately after my son got into preschool. If he likes the school, it goes through the 8th grade. However, Is it worth spending tens of thousands a year in tuition for the next nine years? I’m not so sure!

In addition, I was a private high school tennis coach for three years observing how the kids went through the pressure of trying to get into a good university. I sometimes wondered whether their grind was all worth it.

Supposedly my high school is one of the best in the city, yet not every graduate goes to a university like Harvard. In fact, most attend regular schools any high schooler could have gotten into.



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Don’t Make Over $400,000 A Year: Look At How Goldman Analysts Suffer

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If you want to be happy, don’t make over $400,000 a year at your job. It usually requires long hours and lots of stress to make over $400,000 a year. Any envy you may have about people making high incomes is often misplaced. Earning multiple six-figures doesn’t just come to you. You’ve got to really work for it!

Further, if President Biden gets his way, he will eventually get around to raising the top federal marginal income tax rate to 39.7%. The combination of long hours, high stress, and higher taxes makes the grind not worth it.

I’m sure some of you who don’t make over $400,000 a year think you’ll happily go through a lot of suffering to make such an elevated income. My hope is that you actually do so you can realize making a top 1% income or even a top 0.1% income is not very fulfilling.

I’m also sure some of you who are currently making over $400,000 a year are happy with your current situation. I mean, who cares about finding love or spending time with your kids when you can make so much money! Zoom calls 8X a day for the win!

For the disbelievers out there who think it’s worthwhile to make $400,000+ from a day job, let me share some insightful feedback from a recent Goldman Sachs analyst survey about their well-being.



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The Value Of A Severance Package Has Gone Way Up: Take Advantage!

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It dawned on me a severance package can be valued like a risk asset (stocks, bonds, real estate etc). The value of a severance package can go up or down based on its projected income, your need for a financial buffer, and your ability to negotiate properly.

For those of you who are strategically looking to leave your job, enhanced federal unemployment benefits have also increased the value of a severance package. After all, unemployment benefits are a key income stream that come with a severance package.

Even though enhanced unemployment benefits are no longer, they will likely come back again when things turn sour.



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The Best Money-Making Solution After Being Rejected By A Company

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Have you just been rejected by a company you desperately wanted to join? Are you now feeling melancholy because your future isn’t going as planned? Don’t worry! I’ve got a money-making and heart-mending solution for you.

In Three White Tenants, One Asian Landlord, I wrote about my experience getting rejected by over 100 tech companies back in 2012. As part of the unemployment benefits process, I was required to apply to at least five companies a week.

Instead of trying to use what little connections I had in the tech industry, I just applied to jobs that sounded suitable online. Googling each company’s job openings and then applying directly on each company’s website was the most efficient way to go. But it wasn’t the most effective.

If I saw a job that sounded really good, I probably would have asked a friend at the company to help “move my resume along” or ask for a warm introduction. Alas, no job sounded that good. And I had no relevant connections. At the time, what I really wanted to do was take a break from the grind.

One thing to think about when using connections is this: if you get the job, you may always wonder whether you got it because of your connections or because of your abilities. This disconcerting feeling is why solopreneurship feels so good.



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How The Rich Get Richer: Strategies For Competing In A Rigged Game

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How the rich get richer: helping you compete in a rigged game

Let’s look at how the rich get richer. After all, half the battle is staying rich for multiple generations.

Making money is like playing a competitive sport. You train hard all your life for those moments on the battlefield where you win all the spoils or go home empty-handed. You console yourself after a loss for having tried your best, but eventually, you realize the game is rigged.

For the past 12 years, I’ve played USTA league tennis. It’s a great way to stay in shape, meet new folks, and keep the competitive juices firing. Everyone needs to balance mental activity with physical activity if they want to stay healthy.

For the past six years, minus one year off due to the birth of my son and one year off due to the pandemic, I’ve played at the 5.0 level. It’s a treacherous level filled with ex-college players and even ex-pros. Few have a beer gut and everyone has at least one weapon, be it a cannon serve or a heavy topspin forehand.



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Three White Tenants, One Asian Landlord: A Story About Opportunity

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All any of us want is an opportunity to try and succeed. We don’t want handouts. We just want the opportunity to try. Unfortunately, opportunities don’t come evenly.

I realized the other day that all my tenants are white. I’d never thought about my tenants’ racial makeup until I read an article by Washington Post journalist, Michelle Singletary, entitled, “The Legacy Of Slavery Made My Grandmother Fear Investing.”

Michelle writes how discriminatory policies of the past shaped the way her grandmother approached investing. Her series of articles provides an interesting personal perspective on why there is a racial income and wealth gap today.

Here are some passages from her article that stood out:

When my first employer introduced a 401(k) retirement plan, I sought advice from Big Mama. But she actively discouraged me from “gambling” in the stock market.

“That’s for White folks,” Big Mama said. “They can afford to lose money.”

“The legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and the New Deal — as well as the limited funding and scope of anti-discrimination agencies — are some of the biggest contributors to inequality in America,” says a 2019 report by the Center for American Progress

So, yes, it’s going to take more than a financial workshop to overcome the anxiety my grandmother lived with all her life and passed on to me.

There was only one investment that Big Mama trusted: her home.

The last line about Big Mama trusting only one investment, her home, really resonated with me.

This article will share some of the following insights:

  • Why there are so many Asian landlords and small business owners
  • Why real estate and small businesses are so highly valued among many minorities
  • How the lack of equal opportunity changes behavior
  • Where the belief of not depending on anyone but yourself comes from


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