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@alastairparagas
Last active May 8, 2022 20:03
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Resources for Personal Finance

Alastair's Personal Finance Resources

Personal Plugs and Writings

General resources

  • Bogleheads: https://www.bogleheads.org - full of adherents of John Bogle, founder of Vanguard (now one of the largest mutual fund companies in America, with $7.2 trillion assets under management).
    • The main tenets of Bogleheads are:
      • Focus on costs (expense ratios) when investing on mutual funds. Index investing.
      • Long-term investing alongside not trying to time the market. Stay the course.
      • Live below your means. Save the rest.
      • Diversify investments but make it simple.
    • Forums are filled with people who by the steady course of disciplined compounding over time, have accumulated wealth.

Podcasts

  • Real Personal Finance: https://www.realpersonalfinance.co/listen - hosted by James Conole and Scott Frank, 2 Certified Financial Planners, on various aspects of personal finance - and how not only to save money, but mold a plan around your life (and not just be consumed with saving)
  • BiggerPockets Money: https://www.biggerpockets.com/moneyshow - hosted by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench. With episodes varying from stories of people's path to wealth and early retirement, budgeting to how to manage investments in various assets like index funds and real estate.
  • Millionaires Unveiled: https://millionairesunveiled.com - stories of everyday people who have become millionaires vastly through working over the years, humbly spending/budgeting below their means and mobilizing investments/businesses. Varies from people with $5 million to $320~ million in net worth.
  • Financial Samurai: https://www.financialsamurai.com/financial-samurai-podcasts/ - hosted by Sam Dogen, who worked for 10 years at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker and retired early at age 34.

Courses

  • Financial Markets (Open Yale): https://oyc.yale.edu/economics/econ-252 - Nobel Prize winning Robert Shiller's course at Yale, with the basics of the financial markets, its history with VOC (Dutch East India company in the 1600s) and to modernity.

Books

  • Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham) - Warren Buffet's claimed favorite book. Less about the quantitative nature of investments, and more about the psychological and irrational nature of markets.
  • Taxes in America: What everyone needs to know (Leonard Burman) - an explanation for the how and why behind tax laws in the United States in a fact-filled and fun presentation
  • Stocks for the Long Run (Jeremy Siegel) - Long-term statistics of stocks and other financial assets, historical events including 9/11 and World Wars. Future is always bright.
  • The Future for Investors (Jeremy Siegel) - Key takeaways here: fallacy of composition in investing and in a time where markets were most excited about the tech boom (1990s/early 2000s), sectors like consumer staples and healthcare dominated.
    • Investors often overvalue up-and-coming trends
    • Fallacy of composition and excessive optimism in investments
      • Warren Buffett's encounter buying a then failing textile company named Berkshire Hathaway, then frought with overseas textile competition and buying back shares
      • Telcom companies/Telecommunications Act of 1996
      • Knowing when a business' capital reinvestments will bring advantages to its competitive advantage vs blindly making the same reinvestment maneuvers as the competition, wasting invested capital. Businesses overvalue their capital investments without taking into consideration how its competitors making the same capital investments drives down expected future profits.

Videos

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