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Dec 2019Merry Christmas Featuring E.T.
“May you never be too grown up to search the skies on Christmas Eve.” – Anonymous For over 10 years the British retailer, John Lewis, has aired what has become an iconic holiday season commercial. Although this year’s version was well done I thought the parody featuring Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg was even better. However, my favorite 2019 holiday commercial was from Xfinity. I thought it perfectly captured the…
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Nov 2019Steve Jobs Was Wrong
“People who tell you to follow your passion are already rich.” – Scott Galloway I know I’m getting older when young adults increasingly ask me for career advice. Most of them are surprised when I suggest that “follow your passion” is dangerous career advice. This contradicts most of what is passed off as vocational wisdom, perhaps never more famously than in the iconic convocation address Steve…
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Oct 2019Controlling the ”Controllables”
“Knowing what you don’t know is much more useful in life and business than being brilliant” Charlie Munger Having become an avid follower of Stoic philosophy over the last few years I have come to understand that one of its intellectual pillars is classifying all of life’s experiences into one of two buckets. The first bucket I would call “things that you can control”, with the second one…
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Sep 2019Are you a Real Investor or a Make-Believe One?
“’If you wish to improve’, Epictetus once said, ‘be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.’ One of the most powerful things we can do as a human being in our hyper connected, 24/7 media world is say: ‘I don’t know.’ Or more provocatively, ‘I don’t care.’ Not about everything, of course – just most things. Because most things don’t matter, and most…
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Aug 2019Advice for my daughter
“It takes tremendous strength and resolve to allow your kids to suffer the consequences of their decisions.” – Anonymous My little girl is going into grade nine! If you have children you know the very act of writing this fills me with mixed emotions. One of the many challenges of parenting is trying to teach our children financial lessons without being boring, condescending, repetitive, etc. One…
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Jul 2019How Much Is Too Much
“Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.” – Will Rogers Reflecting on my past two blogs Money Can Buy You Happiness and The Three Levels of Wealth, I seem to have inadvertently written about and/or stumbled upon the personal utility of money. I promise this will be my last missive on the theme … at least…
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Jun 2019Money Can Buy You Happiness!
In last month’s Wealth with Wisdom I discussed “The Three Levels of Wealth” . On a related topic, and contrary to popular opinion, I would suggest that money can indeed buy happiness. This perspective would appear to contradict the massive body of research reflecting (like the chart below) that at about $80,000 of income further emotional “happiness gains” are hard to come by. But here’s the thing … if you think…
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May 2019The 3 Levels of Wealth
“Wealth: Any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.” — H. L. Mencken What is your definition of wealth? I’m certain I would hear 100 different answers if I asked 100 people. I read an article about the Canadian entrepreneur, Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder of Flickr (acquired by Yahoo in 2005) and Slack. The…
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Apr 2019Time in the Market
“Our capital markets are simply a relocation center; they relocate the wealth from the impatient to the patient.” Warren Buffet I had a conversation with a client who shared with me that a close friend of hers bailed out of the stock market. Why? Because he simply could not stomach what turned out to be the very short term decline of the market during the last…
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Feb 2019Time to Pluck the Goose
“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing.” Jean-Baptiste Colbert Please find below two Stonegate tax resources which may assist you in dealing with your 2018 and 2019 tax reporting.Personal income tax organizerPersonal tax calendar As we prepare for this year’s “plucking” perhaps the article below will help minimize the…
