Instead of sharing the usual things I'm thankful for (health, family, being Asian, etc.), I thought I'd share some unusual things I'm thankful for this year!
2023 was supposed to be a return to easy living. Alas, I don't feel very relaxed. The combination of keeping Financial Samurai going and being a dad is grinding me down.
By going through a list of usual things to be thankful for, even if many of them are bad, I hope to feel more appreciative of everything. That's what this time of the year is for!
I hope you will perform this personal exercise as well.
Five Unusual Things I'm Thankful For
No matter how disappointing some things are, I always like to look on the bright side of things. So here goes nothing.
1) Thankful for local government corruption
When you have a $14+ billion annual San Francisco budget, it's hard not to have some corrupt officials. Money and power can bring out the worst in people.
But let's look at the bright side of city officials taking bribes. It means it's hard to get things done due to high standards and tons of competition. If getting things done in the city were easy, we might be jeopardizing the health and safety of our denizens.
See: Former SF Public Works Director Gets Sentenced To 7 Years In Prison
Difficult to remodel or build new property
One example of legal bribery is paying a “permit expediter” to get your housing permit approved or approved faster. If you don't pay for one, your permit could be held hostage for months or even years.
In 2005, when I was 28, I constructed a new full bathroom out of a closet. My general contractor advised me to pay $1,200 for a permit expeditor so I did. He told me, “That's just how things work in the city.”
It sounded fishy at the time but as this was my first time remodeling, I didn't know better. The permit expeditor I paid was charged with bribery a year later.
By making it difficult to remodel and build new homes, the city helps support existing home prices by artificially restricting supply. As a result, existing San Francisco homeowners have experienced greater home price appreciation than cities with less corrupt buildings and planning departments.
Further, if you can complete a gut remodel, your home should be much more valuable since it's so hard to get permits and pass the rigorous inspection process.
Let’s go government inefficiency and corruption!
See: Ex-SF Building Inspectors Took Bribes
2) Thankful to the Fed for creating boom-bust cycles
Instead of raising and cutting interest rates gradually, the Fed takes an aggressive approach, which creates boom-bust cycles.
During rate cuts in 2020 to counteract the pandemic, we made a lot of money in 2020 and 2021 with stocks and real estate. Once the Fed started hiking rates aggressively in 2022, we bought stocks at a discount. Now the S&P 500 is up ~20% and the NASDAQ is up ~45% YTD in 2023. What a blessing!
Thanks to aggressive rate hikes, I was also able to buy a wonderful property at a lower price 17 months after I first saw it in May 2022. The Fed's rate hikes bought me 17 months of time to save, invest, and recover from my stock market losses.
Without an aggressive Fed, the house would have gotten bid up beyond my family's reach.
Thank you Fed for giving me the opportunity to better take care of my family! As a father, one of the top priorities is to provide a family a comfortable home on a safe neighborhood.
Finally, thanks to the Fed, we can now all earn ~4.84% risk-free income for up to 20 years in Treasury bonds if we want. Earning such a high risk-free interest rate with inflation heading back to 2.5% or lower is a generational win. Millions more savers will experience greater financial security as a result.
3) The bright side of OpenAI changing to a for-profit company
OpenAI, the AI company which created ChatGPT began as a non-profit company to help all of humanity. But the leaders soon realized the money-making potential in ChatGPT, so they switched to a for-profit structure. After raising a tremendous amount of funding, hiring top talent, and innovating, the company is now worth ~$86 billion.
When a company is worth $86 billion, it gets to hire even more people, which is great for cities where OpenAI has offices (San Francisco, Seattle, etc.). In addition, the rapid creation of an $86 billion company increases the desire to create new competitors. Venture capitalists are funding AI companies left and right!
Anthropic, a close OpenAI competitor, for example, came out of nowhere and is now worth ~$30 billion. Not bad for an AI company which is also supposedly not profit driven.
Within several years, all this sudden wealth creation has created thousands of new millionaires and dozens of billionaires in the San Francisco Bay Area. Meanwhile, thousands of new jobs will be created.
If OpenAI had decided to remain a non-profit and loyal to its mission to help humanity, all this wealth creation likely would have never occurred. Hooray for greed!
AI Is A Vacuum Cleaner Of Capital
Now there is another strong local economic catalyst for the San Francisco real estate market and economy. I expect there to be even more AI companies created thanks to thousands of new financially independent employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, etc branching off. This happened several years after companies like Google and Facebook went public. Once the shares fully vest, employees like to do their own thing.
With a virtuous wealth cycle concentrated in the Bay Area, it's now harder to leave San Francisco because more great fortunes will be made. The AI revolution is just getting started.
It's much better to live at AI headquarters than be outside the walls where AI will be systematically eliminating millions of jobs over time. I hope this doesn't happen, but it's an inevitability when a company is trying to maximize profits.
If you'd like to invest in AI, check out the Innovation Fund. Roughly 35% of the fund is invested in private growth companies in the AI space.
You can see what the Innovation Fund is holding before deciding to invest and how much. The minimum is $10. Traditional venture capital funds require capital commitment first and then hope the general partners will find great investments.
4) Thankful for perpetual rejection
When I didn't get promoted to Managing Director in 2011, after 10 years of loyal service to Credit Suisse, I decided to devise a plan to get laid off. The idea to negotiate a severance package with all my deferred cash and stock came to me while sitting at a bar in sunny Santorini, Greece. Then I made it happen six months later.
Being able to walk away from banking with money in my pocket was a dream come true. Banking was making me ill. Within a year after I left, all my chronic back pain, sciatica, and TMJ went away. The health benefits of early retirement are priceless.
Back then, I would have paid anything to feel healthy again. Little did I know that all it took for a healthy body was not working 60 hours a week for years under a lot of stress. Hooray for hitting the “bamboo ceiling”!
Turning job rejections into profits
After getting rejected by dozens of tech companies in 2012, I ended up buying a lot of tech stocks. I figured, if I couldn't work for them, they would work for me! The returns from these tech investments have made it possible for my family to eat at McDonald's every day for the rest of our lives.
Once my wife negotiated a severance in 2015 as a high performer, we no longer had subsidized healthcare. After getting one of our health insurance claims denied by UnitedHealthCare, I realized what a powerful business it was. So I bought some UNH stock and it has blown away the S&P 500!
Getting rejected as a writer
When no literary agent responded to me about my book idea on how to negotiate a severance, I decided to self-publish. The book has now sold thousands of copies and has made over $550,000 in net profits.
I consistently get comments and emails of thanks saying how How To Engineer Your Layoff gave them the courage to leave a bad work situation behind. It feels amazing to change people's lives for the better.
Getting rejected as an athlete
One of the saddest things about being an athlete is getting old. At some point, you realize your body will no longer cooperate even if your mind is still strong.
In Spring 2023, I was rejected by the captain of a public park 4.5-level tennis team to join his team. It was a sad fall from grace given I had played at the 5.0 level for four years on other teams before the pandemic. But without this rejection, I wouldn't have experienced one of the most satisfying wins of my life.
On July 6, 2023, my partner and I beat the captain who had rejected me and his partner 4-6, 6-3, 10-7 in a critical playoff match. Ah, the win was so satisfying, so was seeing the melancholy on his face after he lost. Thanks Jeff for the priceless memory! Public park teams are supposed to be inclusive.
Related: Perpetual failure: the reason why I save so much
5) Lower-than-average desire to be successful
One of the greatest destroyers of happiness is never being satisfied with what you have. Because a friend of mine lost his life at age 15, since 13, I've felt more thankful to be alive. Every new year feels like a bonus.
At 34, I decided I had had enough and left banking. It was hard to walk away from a healthy paycheck. I knew if I worked for just five more years, I would be able to accumulate at least another $1 million in net worth. But I didn't care anymore.
My passive investment income at the time wasn't enough to live a rich lifestyle in San Francisco or Honolulu. But it was enough to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle as an individual or couple.
If my intent was to make millions and get promoted to Managing Director, I would have been miserable for the next 5-10 years working long hours. My health would have suffered and maybe I would have cut a couple of years off my life expectancy.
Good enough is good enough!
Fame is not worth it
I've found mostly intrinsic motivation to do what I want to do. Although fame can be alluring, fame doesn't sustain my interest. Attention is like an addiction that can ruin a person’s mental health.
I tasted some public exposure for a couple of months during my Buy This Not That book marketing tour in 2022. It was fun to show my parents the TV spots, but fame is not something I would want to be ongoing.
When you're with your kids at the playground, do you really want strangers coming up to you and interrupting your one-on-one time with your little ones? I don't think so.
All I want is enough money to take care of my family, do meaningful work, and have the freedom of being a nobody. A simple life is a good life.
So Many More Unusual Things I'm Thankful For
I could go on about more unusual things I'm thankful for. But I won't bore you.
There are two main points to this post:
1) Try to look on the bright side of things. Bad things happen all the time. Train your mind to become more optimistic by looking for the potential positives. If you do, you'll find more opportunities and feel happier as a result.
2) Don't stop trying. You will never lose if you never give up. Don't underestimate the power of grit. It doesn't matter if you fail. What matters is that you tried and will keep on trying.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
I'm curious what are some unusual things you're thankful for? What are some lucky breaks you've had?
Note: I'm not really thankful for corruption, boom-bust cycles, government red tape, and greed taking over AI. Rejections always stink as well. I'm just trying to look at the positives of suboptimal situations.
Related posts about being thankful:
Solving The Happiness Conundrum In Five Moves Or Less
The Importance Of Forecasting Your Misery To Live A More Fulfilling Life
Thankful For Luck: A Phone Call That Changed My Life for The Better
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Hi Sam,
Thankful to you and your family for supporting your work.
Thankful for having Thanksgiving with 26 family members out of state.
Thankful for my very serious heart disease to keep me focused on health and figuring out what my real priorities are.
All the best.
What a blessing to spend time with so many family members.
Best of health to you!
A pearl is the result of a chronic irritation on an oyster.
:)
First of all, thank you very much for your newsletters Sam! I appreciate learning so much about money and finances from you. In particular I enjoyed this article as well because gratitude (giving thanks, being thankful, being appreciative, counting your blessings – whatever you call it) is a game changer. I’ve used it daily since 2012 to turn my life around. And there are many millionaires who used it to become rich, wealthy and wealthier! Think Oprah Winfrey ($2.8 billion) and Tony Robbins – who use a daily gratitude practise.
Even though you kind of negated your gratitude in your ‘note’ – truth is, you are right on track. By seeing the silver lining in every situation, especially the crap ones you are changing your magnetism (on a quantum physics level you change the vibration of the sub atomic particles in your cells, and in the energy field surrounding you) to a more positive present and future. I’ve been studying this field and doing it daily since 2012 as I mentioned and if you’d like any tips about how to incorporate it into your daily life just ask me. I don’t do the standard ‘5 things you are grateful for’ questions.
blessings, Annette
I always enjoy the FS perspectives, happy Thanksgiving to all of you!
Here’s an AI question; my company is implementing a new system. We’ve been at it for 5 years. The homegrown system we have is able to print and route 1,200-2,000 invoices every business day without a human having to touch it. The logic is complicated; sold to = bill to, sold to does not equal bill to /invoice to bill to, sold to does not equal bill to / invoice to sold to. Then you have delivery preference; email, fax, mail, and EDI. Some customers have “Do Not Print” logic; some want their invoices batched and some don’t. Then you have different report styles; normal, special, projects, and credit memos. Some customers may have different report styles in the same print routing. Like I said, lots of complexity that the “inferior”, “outdated” homegrown system can handle but the fancy new one can’t. How does AI solve these real world problems and not just write book reports?
Yeah, this illustrates what I view as the silliness in so much of the AGI talk. To me, it’s quite clear that the human mind is non algorithmic. It’s why it’s so good at solving clunky problems like the invoicing thing. Enormous complexity can come out of a relatively simple set of procedures at scale. People are great at dealing with that, algorithms… not so much.
Right, I’m just a lowly accountant, so what do I know – ha. I am convinced, though, that the vast majority of the execs and pundits breathlessly hyping AI couldn’t articulate a single business process at their own company in any level of detail. Nearly everything lives on a data base table and I’m not sure AI is even able to read data base tables at this point, much less use them to automate business processes. Book reports on War & Peace, great. Business process automation, not so much.
Happy Thanksgiving Sam,
I am Thankful for a loving family and for my health this year. Growing up I was in and out of the hospital for various things and I never take simple things for granted anymore. I have spent time in a wheelchair and I know what life is like with those kinds of limitations. I understand the importance of having access to quality affordable health care and I grateful that this nation has chosen to expand health care to everyone. It wasn’t like that when I was younger.
My motivation to leave work and become an investor full time was in part due to my struggles with my health when I was younger. I realize more than most that a health crisis can strike without warning any place and at any time and it is important to spend time doing what you are good at and what you love.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone here and to making every day of our lives the best it can be.
Happy Thanksgiving to you too Will. Difficult times make us appreciate normal times better.
Let’s cherish our health and the time we have now!
I’m not sure about the famous / not famous part. (Also, being “approached at the park by a random” famous is different than, “well known within your field” famous)
Someone once said to me, “Rich, Famous, Happy — you can only choose two out of three”.
But I dunno. Warren Buffett seems pretty happy. I wonder what he would say on the topic.
One way to answer your question is to ask how you dealt with strangers coming up to you when you were with your kids or doing your own thing. How did you feel and what did you do? Is there a limit to the number of times you will feel it OK happening to you when you are out and about?
If you’re OK with the interruptions, then you are OK with fame.
I’d love to know your experience with fame and how you handled it as everybody is different.
What is it that you do that results in some people recognizing you
Thanks!
Happy Thanksgiving!
The permits and inspection process in SF is crazy. But that’s a great positive angle on the price appreciation and increased value of remodeled homes.
And yes, I have been loving the high treasury bond yields this year. I forgot how much I missed being able to earn over 4-5% interest income.
One unusual thing I’m thankful for is for losing my passport this year. I went through one hell of a stressful experience that could have been so easily avoided, and felt like a complete idiot for months, but it is an experience I will never forget. And I’m so glad to say that’s over and behind me now.
I got the full benefit of not letting the experience stop me from my end goal and also had fun writing about it and talking about it with Sam on a few podcast episodes. And today the great satisfaction I feel of having overcome that debacle is something I wouldn’t have at all if I never lost it in the first place.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Sam, your posts are always surprising and thought provoking. They make me laugh and also make me wish I invested more during the bust part of the cycle. Have a fantastic thanksgiving with your family!
Sam, sometimes I think you are trolling us!
Baloney for Thanksgiving.
lol, that’s his style :)
I’m thankful for all the work you have put into FS over the years. It has been a blessing to me and my family.
I’m thankful for folks like you with the courage to share their successes and failures online for others to learn from.
You’ve got lots of money , braines, talent, and wonderful family.
Go help the world it will be fulfilling.
Happy holidays
You might be overestimating what I’ve got.
But I do get emails or comments on one of my 2,300+ posts with nice messages of thanks for helping answer a question, solve a problem, or give the reader courage to change.
This type of feedback is the greatest reward.
Sam – You ARE helping the world with the free, EXPERIENCE BASED financial education you have been providing over the past decade+. I know it must be fulfilling or you wouldn’t keep doing it three days a week with two young kids. Not to mention your newsletters and podcasts too. Thank you (and your crew) for all your hard work and dedication!
Oh, and your TWO (soon to be three?) books also.
Sam
Thank you for your inspiring messages, candid information and positive viewpoints.
You make a difference