OnceUSave

Life is fragile; we all know that. But we get so entangled into our day to day living that we procrastinate and forget to do the most fundamental thing we should do to protect our families. And that is to insure our lives. It’ll cost some money, but it is the best money you’ll everContinue reading “The Right Way To Insure Your Life”

Stock market composition changes by the country. United States is tech heavy. Canada is banks heavy. Australia is commodities heavy. Emerging markets were commodities heavy. They turned tech heavy this past decade with the rise of the likes of Alibaba and Tencent. That can change. It will change. That is the nature of business. ThatContinue reading “Currency Movements Don’t Matter”

As the rest of the world lay in ruins, the United States was pretty much the only country left with production capacity intact post World War 2. And with a lot of rebuilding that was to follow meant that the factories there had to run overtime to meet the inexhaustible demand. Plus, with exploding domesticContinue reading “Don’t Fall For The Growth Trap”

Gary Smith in his book, Standard Deviations talks about the evolution of peppered moths, usually found in nature as light-colored creatures these days. But that was not always the case. A trickle of dark-colored moths started appearing in 1848 England but by 1895, ninety-eight percent of the peppered moths found there were dark-colored. But by the 1950s, theContinue reading “Hardwired To Be Screwed”

Stocks are volatile. And a big reason they’ll remain volatile is because of where a stock’s value comes from. The value of a stock today is the sum of all the cash flows (dividends) a business (stock) will deliver to its shareholders in perpetuity, discounted to the present at an appropriate discount rate. Not toContinue reading “Capital Preservation And Growth Doesn’t Exist”

Recessions are necessary to clear out excesses. They are part of the growth cycle. They make sure that our savings get channeled into the right investments. They cause pain. They are supposed to cause pain. But that is a transitory pain. The world has endured recessions and depressions. A decent number of them will occurContinue reading “The Cardinal Investing Sin”

What if there was an account to which you can contribute money to before tax, invest and let the money grow tax-free and then spend that money tax-free? This looks like a fantasy setup but it is not, and you should know about it. Consumer-Directed Health Plans (CDHP) combine a High-Deductible Health Plan (HDHP) withContinue reading “Truly Tax Free”

You want to feel inflation? Try visiting a country like India every other year. I mean you are gone a while, but you only remember the prices of the past. Then you go there again and get price shocked everywhere you turn. Inflation, an ever-present tax, is structural in most emerging economies. They import moreContinue reading “Stocks, Bonds, Bills & Inflation”

My daughters each have their own investment accounts, fed with a little bit of money they receive from allowances and gifts here and there. And that tendency I have regardless of how disinterested they appear or seem to appear, I talk about the world and the goings in the markets at every chance I get.Continue reading “Nobody Wants To Get Rich Slow”

Up until the late 1800s, horses and buggies ruled the land as the primary mode of short-distance travel. There were innovations and incremental tweaks within that ecosystem with time but nothing transformative. Until Henry Ford came along with the Model-T and disrupted the buggies out of existence. Similarly, Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the 1450s droveContinue reading “Creative Destruction”