There are many advantages to getting rich slowly.
Today’s topic is how to get rich slowly, with a little help from Google Sheets.
Why write this post? In college I was just starting to save money from my part-time jobs, but I had no idea what to do with my savings. My parents had some savings and property assets, but no positions in the stock market or bonds, and nothing approaching an investment portfolio. I had no advice from them, nor did I know which questions to ask.
Rescue: specific, well-defined, limited help
Yesterday I received an angry email from a reader that gave me pause for thought. The reader asked me to do something I wasn’t comfortable doing and I declined. The reader became frustrated and let me know in no uncertain terms. Their argument went something like this: Why was I presenting myself as someone helpful if I wasn’t willing to help them?
It wasn’t a terrible interaction — just a frustrated person venting — but it did get me thinking about what I’m trying to do here. This blog is subtitled “Systems for Living Well” and that’s mostly what it’s about. I share my own experiences, insights, and knowledge, and hope this blog benefits others. In the past I’ve framed that as “helping people.”
But I’m wondering if “helping” people often leads to dysfunction and codependence. How much responsibility should the “helper” take for the circumstances of the “helped”? Is there a danger of the person being helped surrendering their own power and agency to the helper?
“Helping people” has been a core value of mine since grade school. To reevaluate and possibly jettison this guiding principle is a big deal for me. It’s not that I want to become less altruistic or less giving (especially in relation to friends and family), but I think the old language doesn’t work anymore. I need to replace “helping” with more specific verbs, in both my thinking process and in terms of real life actions.
Some thoughts re: the future direction of this blog:
What I Want to Retain or Move Towards
What I Want to Move Away From
I’m thinking out loud here. I don’t want to be less generous just because a few people feel overly entitled. I have no problem setting limits. Still, I may need to be clearer about what I’m offering, and where those limits are.
I hope you found this post educational, inspiring, or at least mildly entertaining!
Back in May Marc Kate (a good friend and host of the Why We Listen podcast) emailed me with some thoughts about current music and his own relationship to music:
Iâm finding that the trap of Retromania, the ubiquity of nostalgia, the lazy, daily choices we increasingly make in our playlists are contributing to musicâs stagnation.
I mostly feel like some of the most exciting music Iâve ever heard is happening right now, but I also canât rightly defend any of it as particularly new. Iâve always prioritized music that is cutting edge, but I canât say Iâve really heard any in decades.
He followed this up with a proposed experiment and invitation:
So, I want to see what happens, what I learn if I eschew music that is even slightly old. Even if it means Iâm actually just listening to wholly historically derivative music that was made last month.
Instantly I was in. Even though I disagreed that music was stagnating in any way, and I’d been finding plenty of new music I loved, I wanted to take the new new music experience to the extreme. For the month of June, Marc and I agreed we would ONLY listen to music released no more than one year ago (and this could not include re-releases or new releases of old music). There would be exceptions only for listening experiences out of our control (like music piped into grocery stores, public spaces, etc.).
Listen to the JD Moyer episode of Why We Listen.
Music Search
The first problem I confronted: how would I find this new music? Some I could find by browsing sales charts on sites like Beatport, which have a high turnover rate and rarely include music more than a few months old. But this would only lead me to new electronic music, and part of the idea of the experiment was to expand my musical taste (or at least exposure) into genres I might not otherwise consider.
I hit upon a solution about a week in. While preparing a giant playlist for my birthday party (with a new music theme), I hit up friends and acquaintances on Twitter for their favorite album of the year. I got a 100% response rate — it turns out people love to recommend music. I love to discover and recommend music as well (it’s one reason I co-founded Loöq Records) … it may be a near-universal desire to want to share music that has touched and inspired us.
There are three main ways you can discover new music in this internet age:
Option 1 is the laziest. Option 2 requires time and dedication, and also listening to lots of bad music in order to find the good stuff (not being in love with this process was one reason I gave up DJing). Option 3 is probably still dominant among the <30 crowd, but in my circles and at my age (forty-six) there are more conversations about kids and schools than there are about new tracks and music videos. But I found it wasn’t hard to steer the conversation back in that direction. With a little prompting I received a flood of recommendations — more than I had time to listen to.
Thoughts on Streaming
First digital downloads replaced physical media, and now streaming is replacing a large percentage of downloads. Each wave cut music industry revenues by half or more. Piracy has of course played a role, but the replication/sharing revolution is the main factor.
Nimble players, like my own label, can survive by cutting costs. Vinyl production and shipping were huge expenses, and when we dropped vinyl our profits-per-release shot up. Even though revenue is low, we can keep releasing music we love and make a little money in the process. But I do miss vinyl …
What about the consumer side? Previous to this experiment, my preferred mode of listening to music was still removing a slab of vinyl from its cardboard sleeve, placing it on the Technics 1200, and dropping the needle on the record. Music just sounds best this way. But none of my favorite albums (like Tycho – Awake) had been released in the past year. So I signed up for a 3-month free Spotify trial and jumped into the world of consumer streaming.
It’s amazing what you get for the price of an internet connection and a few cups of coffee. I was able to find 100% of the music recommended to me. It was easy to set up as many playlists as I wanted. Obviously Spotify isn’t the only streaming service but they have a great interface and a huge library. While they may not pay artists as generously as they claim, Spotify is a great deal for the music consumer.
Effects of Only New Music
I listened to so much new music in June that is was overwhelming. I didn’t get to know any of it very well. Of the many recommendations I received, only a few stuck. It’s good that there’s a huge, highly diverse universe of new music, because tastes diverge just as much.
A few albums that will stay in my playlists:
(The last one is a Loöq Records release, but it earned its place on the short list.)
How does this compare to the amount of new music I usually add to my active playlists (not just my library)? At the most I really fall in love with no more than one new album a month, so it was a big increase. I’m still getting to know the albums above, but they’re all keepers.
Since there wasn’t any discomfort involved in listening to only new music, the month went by quickly. Marc had a similar experience. One month might have been too short of a time for this experiment to feel the full effects.
Overall the experiment was a good kick-in-the-pants to expand my listening horizons.
Enter Marc Kate …
As I mentioned above Marc is the host and producer of the Why We Listen podcast. While the typical format is Marc asking the guest to choose three songs â any three songs, for any reason they like â to share and discuss with him, our episode featured a broader discussion about music centering around the June listening experiment. You can listen to our discussion here, or as soon as it posts on iTunes.
Here’s Marc’s take on New Music June:
We live in a world that is changing rapidly, and music isnât keeping up. It seems to be content with aping the Beach Boys or combining Afro-Beat with post-punk, or looping Italo-Disco album cuts, or discovering faux genres (Yacht Rock) or any other strategy that has been mined for decades. If Iâm sounding cynical, itâs because I am. Iâm deeply excited about a lot of music Iâm hearing, but deeply disappointed in how conservative it all sounds. Complaining that all new music sounds the same is a tired position to take, but it it has never been truer in my lifetime as it is now. If you disagree, I challenge you to point me to five minutes of music that wasnât possible or is indistinguishable from music that we could have heard 15 or more years ago.
I was raised believing what Jacques Attali said: that âMusic is prophecy.â Music is the weather vane, the barometer and the compass. Through it we can know where we are and where we are going. However, for the past few decades, it seems that music mostly reminds us of where weâve been.
I started my podcast Why We Listen as an excuse to meet with interesting people to learn about their listening habits and learn how music functions for them relative to how I understand music to function for me.
What I discovered, as I spent so much time immersed in this kind of research, is that music really has stagnated. And Iâve been complicit. My listening habits had stagnated too. Iâd become lazy and undemanding, settling for middlebrow delights and not asking to be challenged. Technology has made it easy for us to be collectively conservative. Weâre surrounded by the music of our grandparents. Public space is more likely to play music that is 30 years old than anything contemporary, and contemporary music is more likely to sound like music that is 30 years old.
This doesnât sound like prophecy. It sounds like a history lesson, like weâre trying to describe this chaotic new world with dead languages.
So, inspired by JD Moyerâs âlifestyle experimentsâ as I think of them, I thought to detoxify for a month. I wanted to do my best to purge vintage sounds from my personal soundtrack and see what that would do to my attitude.
What I discovered is what I already knew:
That there is a lot of really fun new music being made with very traditional goals.
That there are some people out there pushing at the edges of whatâs possible. Just little nudges. Nothing revolutionary, but promising gestures of discovery.
That there doesnât seem to be much evidence that some sort of sonic revolt is waiting around the corner.But Iâm patient. And Iâm listening.
â
I’m more optimistic about the current state of music production than Marc, and we have some good back-and-forth in the podcast (as of writing this I haven’t yet heard it, but Marc promised he’d edit out the bits where I sounded like a complete idiot). If they made the cut, I also shared some of my own experiences and frustrations writing and releasing music that inspires me, but isn’t necessarily targeted at any particular audience or market segment. How does your music find its people? And what if those people don’t exist? Should you change your style, chasing what’s popular? Or just do your own weird thing and hope a few other people will like it? Twenty years writing music music and running a record label and I still can’t give you a good answer to this question. I guess it depends on what your goals are, as an artist.
Marc Kate’s most recent album, mentioned on the podcoast, is File: #08, now available from Computer Tapes. His forthcoming album Failing Forms will be released in November.
Approximately two weeks ago I deleted my Facebook account. It wasn’t something I thought about a great deal. I suddenly realized “I’m done with Facebook,” and a day later I deleted my account.
There have been red flags regarding Facebook’s data-mining and privacy policies. But this isn’t why I deleted my account. I don’t know if I even fully understand why I wanted to stop using Facebook, but here are some of the reasons I’ve considered:
Facebook was starting to feel like a low-quality tabloid newspaper instead of a way to connect with family and friends.
One reason I stayed on Facebook for so long was that I felt it helped me keep up with acquaintances. I recently had an experience that made me rethink this supposition. I ran into someone from the dance music scene that I hadn’t seen in years. I’d seen that person’s posts on Facebook so I had a vague idea that I knew what was going on with him. But after a brief conversation on BART (our local transit system) I realized that I’d had no idea what was really going on in his life. I had been reading his posts without context, and didn’t understand that his life had been turned upside-down by a series of events, and that he was having to rebuild his life essentially from scratch. I learned more in a five minute conversation than I would have from reading a thousand of his Facebook posts.
Events and Invitations
A few friends would use Facebook to invite me to events. It was often difficult to find these real invites among the dozens of spam-invites to paid events that would also show up in my Facebook events list. I suppose some friends will have to switch to email (or snail mail) to invite me to things, but I actually check those formats on a regular basis. It’s nice to have one fewer inbox.
Focus, Active Curation
Since quitting both Facebook and Reddit, it’s much harder to waste time on my computer. I check my email, the New York Times headlines, and that’s about it. Sometimes I’ll look at my Twitter feed and click on a few interesting links. But I no longer fall into a black hole of distraction where I lose an hour or more of my day. I feel more focused.
In the evening, if I’m actively looking for entertainment, I now have to be more active in my search (instead of passively browsing an algorithm-generated feed, or pages of “top voted” content). This is a good thing. I’m reading more fiction (in book format, not on my computer), and finding very narrow content related to my hobbies (like the TerranScapes youtube channel). This is a return to how I sought entertainment during the first thirty-five years of my life, and it’s a more gratifying system. I’m engaging with material that actively interests me in very specific ways, instead of finding the occasional gem amidst a sea of broad content.
Out of the Loop?
I did have some mild anxiety about becoming more socially isolated or being “out of the loop” if I quit Facebook. I quickly identified this as a false fear. My real friends weren’t going to forget about me, and though I might learn things about people’s lives (who got married, who had a kid, etc.) later than most, I might enjoy the information more receiving it in person.
Quitting Facebook did inspire me to be more active in regards to social planning. Life is finite and you don’t have time to do everything with everyone. I’ll save the details for a later post, but I’ve made a few changes to my system for tracking what I/we want to do with our friends and family, and taking the necessary steps to schedule and plan those social engagements.
I actually feel more socially connected since I quit Facebook. I’m no longer looking at events I wasn’t invited to, parties I didn’t attend, and trips I didn’t take. Instead I’m looking at my own calendar to see what I have planned for the week, and with whom. If the calendar is looking empty then I take steps to fill it up.
In terms of your investing personality, are you most like a shark, monkey, or ostrich?
Over the past year I’ve been attempting to get my own financial house in order, and writing about it. In the next few money/investment posts I’ll be referring to sharks, monkeys, and ostriches. Might as well explain what I mean.
Shark
You are a heartless sociopath, or close to it. This makes you potentially the best kind of investor, but also the most dangerous (to both yourself and others). You view money as primarily an abstraction, and are able to make cold rational calculations and decisions without getting emotionally involved. You are prone to both gaining and losing large fortunes quickly. With training, you are able to clearly evaluate risk and make good financial decisions (low risk, high potential gain). However you do like making big bets and nobody wins all the time.
Monkey
You are clever, but not as clever as you think you are. You are good at creating investment systems and strategies but bad at consistently following through on them. Investing is so much fun for you (at least when you are winning) that it’s hard not to meddle and “improve” your system. You are prone to both excessive enthusiasm and wild panic, and thus often find yourself buying high and selling low. You vacillate between “money as a game” and “money is real” and thus underestimate your tolerance for risk and market fluctuations. The investment history of a typical monkey might look something like this.
Ostrich
You would prefer to not think about money, investments, or how you will fund your later years. You feel ambivalent about accumulating money, and conversations about investing stress you out. Can someone else just deal with it? You may sensibly pick a wise fiduciary to manage your investments and do very well. On the other hand you might get snookered by a Bernie Madoff type. Ultimately you have good instincts about investing, and also have the capacity to follow an investment strategy with discipline. The hard part is thinking about it long enough to get started.
The Basics
Investment personality aside, I think the same basic strategy works for most people who aren’t born rich (and yes I realize that term is relative — I’m referring to the poor, working, and middle classes in the U.S.). The basic plan:
The last bullet point is incredibly dense and probably makes no sense unless you already understand it. I unpack it here in this post (and I highly recommend the Robbins book mentioned in same post, for both novice and seasoned investors).
How to Deal with Your Weaknesses
As a monkey, I’ve been a happier investor since I realized I don’t have much tolerance for giant fluctuations in my net worth. Since this realization I’ve invested more conservatively, and it better fits my personality.
I’m lucky to have an ostrich as a partner. If we discuss major financial decisions we’re much better off than my typical “leaping without looking very carefully” approach. The hurdle for Kia was getting clear about why she should invest in the first place. Like many people (including myself) she can’t really visualize retiring, and thus had a hard time thinking about “saving for retirement.” The cold fact of the matter is that even if you don’t want to retire, you might be forced to, or people may no longer want to pay money for what you have to offer at age 65. Yet you could easily live for another 30 years. Longevity variability aside, having a portfolio that pays you passive income allows you to do the work you want to do, regardless of if anyone is willing to pay you for that work.
But what should the shark do? The main shark pitfall is losing everything on “all in” bets. So don’t go all in. Follow a diversified portfolio strategy with most of your savings, and limit your high-risk bets to a limited %. This is a good strategy for monkeys too.
Next Up …
I’ll write at least two more posts on this topic in the coming months, including:
How To Create an Automated Trading Prompt System with Google Sheets
I’ll create and share a public Google Sheet that calls current market data from both Google Finance and Yahoo Finance, and discuss some of the simple valuation formulas I’m using. [Link]
How To Invest a Lump Sum
If you have cash but don’t yet have a diversified portfolio, should you buy in all at once at your % allocations, or “limp in” buying cheaper categories first? How do you know if a general category (stocks, bonds, gold, etc.) is cheap? Â [Link]
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