Unshakeable: Your Guide to Financial Freedom
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Read between June 27 - July 2, 2017
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To be the chess player, not the chess piece. To be one of the few who do, not one of the many who merely talk!
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Decisions equal destiny.
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People love to say that knowledge is power. But the truth is that knowledge is only potential power. You and I both know that it’s useless if you don’t act on it.
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we also learned a vitally important lesson: we’re not rewarded when we do the right thing at the wrong time. If you plant in winter, you’ll get nothing but pain, no matter how hard you work. To survive and thrive, you and I have to do the right thing at the right time.
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Some winters arrive sooner, some later; some are severe, some mild.
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History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
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You know the old saying “Ignorance is bliss”? Well, let me tell you: when it comes to your finances, ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is pain and poverty. Ignorance is disaster for you and your family—and bliss for the financial firms that are exploiting your inattention!
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Let’s assume the stock market gives a 7% return over 50 years,” he began. At that rate, because of the power of compounding, “each dollar goes up to 30 dollars.” But the average fund charges you about 2% per year in costs, which drops your average annual return to 5%. At that rate, “you get 10 dollars. So 10 dollars versus 30 dollars.
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Warren Buffett jokes that you never want to ask a barber whether you need a haircut. Well, brokers are the barbers of the financial world.
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Competence is such a rare bird in these woods that I appreciate it whenever I see it. —FRANK UNDERWOOD, House of Cards
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SEVEN KEY QUESTIONS TO ASK ANY ADVISOR
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I have enough money to retire and live comfortably for the rest of my life. The problem is, I have to die next week. —ANONYMOUS
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They know that it’s not what they earn that counts. It’s what they keep. That’s real money, which they can spend, reinvest, or give away to improve the lives of others.
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When I met David Swensen, he pointed out that one of his biggest advantages in investing money for Yale is that it’s a nonprofit institution and thus exempt from taxes. But what should the rest of us do? First, steer clear of actively managed funds, especially those that trade a lot. As David told me, one benefit of index funds is that they keep trading to a minimum, which means “your tax bill is going to be lower. This is huge. One of the most serious problems in the mutual fund industry, which is full of serious problems, is that almost all mutual fund managers behave as if taxes don’t ...more
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I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. —NELSON MANDELA
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to find certainty in an uncertain world.
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but this is a gift that only you can give yourself.
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Shakespeare wrote four centuries ago, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”
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A simple rule dictates my buying: be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread. —WARREN BUFFETT IN OCTOBER 2008, explaining why he was buying stocks as the market crashed
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bad news is an investor’s best friend.
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Bonds When you buy a bond, you’re making a loan to a government, a company, or some other entity. The financial services industry loves to make this stuff seem complex, but it’s pretty simple. Bonds are loans. When you lend money to the federal government, it’s called a Treasury bond. When you lend money to a city, state, or county, it’s a municipal bond. When you lend money to a company such as Microsoft, it’s a corporate bond. And when you lend money to a less dependable company, it’s called a high-yield bond or a junk bond. Voilà! You’ve now completed Bonds 101.
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Real Estate Investment Trusts. I’m sure you know people who’ve done well by investing directly in residential property. But most of us can’t afford to diversify by owning a slew of houses or apartments. That’s one reason why I like to invest in publicly traded real estate investment trusts (REITs). They provide a no-hassle, low-cost way to diversify broadly, both geographically and across different types of property. For example, you can own a small slice of a REIT that invests in assets such as apartment buildings, office towers, senior housing facilities, medical offices, or shopping malls. ...more
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what counts is not reality, but rather our beliefs about it.
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it’s not enough to know what to do. You also need to do what you know.
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when we’re winning, our bodies release chemicals called endorphins, so we feel euphoric and don’t want to stop; when we’re losing, we don’t want to stop either, since we crave those endorphins and also want to avoid the emotional pain of losses.
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as Warren Buffett says, “The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.”
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By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
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having financial wealth doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be wealthy as a human being.
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When people dream of becoming rich, they’re not fantasizing about owning millions of pieces of paper with pictures of dead people on them! What we really want are the emotions we associate with money: for example, the sense of freedom, security, or comfort we believe money will give us, or the joy that comes from sharing our wealth. In other words, it’s the feelings we’re after, not the money itself.
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wherever your focus goes, your energy flows.
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money doesn’t change people. It just magnifies who they already are: if you have a lot of money and you’re mean, then you have more to be mean with; if you have a lot of money and you’re generous, you’ll naturally give more.
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Was Robin Williams a master achiever? Absolutely. He started out with nothing. But then he decides that he wants to star in his own TV show, and he does it. Then he decides that he wants a beautiful family, and he creates it. Then he decides that he wants more money than he can spend in a lifetime, and he makes it happen. Then he decides to become a movie star, and he does it. Then he decides that he wants to win an Oscar—but not for being funny—and he does that, too! Here was a man who had it all, who achieved everything he’d ever dreamed of achieving. And then he hanged himself. He hanged ...more
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We can’t control all the events in our lives, but we can control what those events mean to us—and thus what we feel and experience every day of our lives!
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This two-million-year-old organ is always looking for what’s wrong, for whatever can hurt us, so that we can either fight it or take flight from it.
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A Beautiful State. When you feel love, joy, gratitude, awe, playfulness, ease, creativity, drive, caring, growth, curiosity, or appreciation, you’re in a beautiful state. In this state, you know exactly what to do, and you do the right thing. In this state, your spirit and your heart are alive, and the best of you comes out. Nothing feels like a problem, and everything flows. You feel no fear or frustration. You’re in harmony with your true essence.
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Everyone has his or her own flavor of suffering. So here’s my question for you: What’s your favorite flavor of suffering? Which energy-sapping emotion do you indulge in most? Is it sadness? Frustration? Anger? Despair? Self-pity? Jealousy? Worry? The specific details don’t really matter because they’re all states of suffering.
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Consciously or unconsciously, you’re focused on at least one of three triggers for suffering: 1. Suffering trigger is “Loss.” When you focus on loss, you become convinced that a particular problem has caused or will cause you to lose something you value. For example, you have a conflict with your spouse, and it leaves you feeling that you’ve lost love or respect. But it doesn’t have to be something someone else did—or failed to do—that caused you to perceive the sense of loss. This sense of loss can also be triggered by something you did or failed to do. For example, you procrastinated, and ...more
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What I’ve come to realize is that the single most important decision in life is this: Are you committed to being happy, no matter what happens to you?
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will you commit to enjoying life not only when everything goes your way but also when everything goes against you, when injustice happens, when someone screws you over, when you lose something or someone you love, or when nobody seems to understand or appreciate you?
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Yesterday is but a dream, And tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, And every tomorrow a vision of hope. —KĀLIDĀSA, Sanskrit dramatist and poet, ca. fifth century CE