At any given time, every investor must always decide three things:

1) How to invest their new cash flow

2) How to invest their existing cash

3) How to reposition their existing investments if at all

As long as enough money is coming in to cover your expenses, life is fairly good. As our cash hoard grows, there’s also less financial stress because you can more easily cover unanticipated emergencies like a furlough.

In general, having 6 – 12 months of living expenses in cash or cash equivalents is good enough for the average person to sleep soundly.

There might come a point, however, when you will have excess cash. Perhaps you were undisciplined in your monthly dollar cost averaging strategy or maybe you got a bigger windfall than anticipated.

Whatever the case may be, your financial anxiety will be replaced with the fear of missing out on potentially bigger gains in risk assets like stocks and real estate. Given your peers are all getting rich, you will want to follow suit.

If enough greed kicks in, you will end up taking on more risk than you can comfortably withstand, and sometimes bad things will happen. Your financial stress returns once again. Hence, one benefit of following Financial SEER.

No matter how much money you have or how much you make, you will always have to work on managing your financial stress. After all, the more money you have, the more you have to lose! When you are broke, you’ve only got upside.

Money is mental. Psychology is why during market sell-offs, there will be headlines about stocks re-testing Great Depression lows. And during bull runs, there will be headlines about how the sky is the limit and you just can’t lose.

I didn’t do much right financially in 2018 except for continuing to aggressively save. But I did make one move with my existing savings that helped reduce financial stress. 

When you’re young, you spend time accumulating wealth. When you’re old, you should spend time protecting wealth.

Multi-millionaires go broke all the time because they exposed themselves to too much risk and temptation. Think about all those pro athletes who would still be rich if they had just kept all their money in a bank.

Since 2010, money market and CD rates have been particularly horrible. Retirees depending on fixed income were forced to take more risk. And thankfully, such risk has paid off as the S&P 500 and the real estate market across various parts of the country took off. Further, we’ve all been able to refinance our mortgages at rock bottom rates.

But now, rates are finally moving up given the Federal Reserve has raised their Fed Funds rate multiple times since 2015. No longer do you have to lock in a CD for five years to get only a 2% rate. No longer are you only getting 0.1% on your money market account either. Remember those dog days? You can now get a 12-month CD paying 2.5%+ or a money market account that pays 2.45%.

With a 12-month CD rate paying 2.5%, you’d think that you could get a much higher rate if you decide to lock up your money for longer. Unfortunately, the best rate for a 5-year CD is currently about 3% in 2018, hardly high enough to lose four more years of liquidity.

As a result of a flattening yield curve, financially savvy individuals should optimize their cash and build a CD Step Stool and NOT a CD ladder. The first step is a one-year CD and the second step is a two-year CD at most. With each expiration of the CD, the strategy is to re-invest the proceeds in another 12 – 24 month CD. Only if the yield curve steepens should you consider building a CD ladder where you’re investing in three, four, five, seven, and 10 year CDs.

Let’s look at various financial scenarios where building a CD Step Stool may or may not make sense. 

Once your housing expense is under control, the next thing to tame is your consumption habits. The most common waste of money today is buying an automobile. New cars are simply too expensive for the median household income. But because car manufacturers have created ways for consumers to stretch with financing and leasing deals, consumers succumb to marketing persuasion and buy cars they cannot comfortably afford.

If consumers follow my 1/10th rule for car buying, almost all of one’s financial problems, as it pertains to a car, will go away. If you spend only 10% of your gross income on the current value of a car, you won’t sweat paying insurance, paying tickets, or paying for maintenance or damages. If you want a $30,000 car,  find a way to make $300,000.

Now that we have a viable solution for automobile buying, the next bad consumption habit to slay is everything else you don’t need i.e. wants. From buying $3,000 Louis Vuitton handbags to spending $9,000 on a Panerai watch, there are a lot of wants that will prevent us from achieving financial freedom sooner, rather than later.

Therefore, to solve this problem of mindless consumption, I’ve come up with The 10X Investment Consumption Rule.