Fill your brain with some goodness and read some of these recommended articles on debt, investing, health, time management, and other interesting tidbits to give you a leg up in life.
Simplify your life. Find your truth. Work towards your goals.
Financial Planning
- Savings rates plunge to new 10 year lows as American’s spend almost everything they’ve got while filling the deficits with credit card balances – http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-22/us-consumers-tap-out-personal-savings-rate-plunges-10-year-low-while-americans-splur
Debt
- Imagine that, auto buyers that had horrible credit and were buying with sub-prime loans are defaulting on their loans at an escalating pace. This is forcing the lenders to write-off more bad loans turning their lending businesses into money-losing operations with loans that are in the billions of dollars – https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/subprime-auto-defaults-are-soaring-and-pe-firms-have-no-way-out
Investments/Valuations
- A great example of how “trusting” you should be with Wall Street firms that don’t hold themselves to a fiduciary standard. Firms and advisors that are not fiduciaries have no mandate to work in YOUR own interest. Rather, they are run to operate for what is in the firm or advisors own self interest. What that means is that if there is a way to make money off of you as an investor, even if it harms you to pad their profits, they can and will do it. But of course the government is fine by keeping things the way they have always been which is protecting Wall Street firms like the pieces of shit at UBS that ripped of thousands of investors – https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/18/broken-bonds-wall-streets-role-in-wiping-out-puerto-ricans-savings.html
- Hussman with insight into the current delusions of investors in todays equity markets – https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mmc171218/Lance Roberts with another excellent article. He’s one of the few financial journalists that call it like it is backing up his thoughts with the data to support a historical perspective and a focus on risk management. He’s a gem in the financial services industry – https://realinvestmentadvice.com/technically-speaking-is-it-1999-2007-or-both/
Macro
- A great historical comparison that shows how the U.S. is following in the economic footsteps of Japan. We are just about 30 years behind them but all the core essentials are present; a big equity bubble, growing debt, a reliance on stimulus, aging demographics, low productivity, and a government that doesn’t have the political will to let a lot of failing companies finally kick the bucket allowing the economy as a whole to move forward with organic growth. With low interest rates, everybody is being kept alive on life support. Rates can’t go up or too many economic patients will die – https://realinvestmentadvice.com/tax-reform-the-japanification-of-america/
Health
- A good reason why our healthcare costs are soaring out of control is that American doctors keep doing expensive procedures that don’t work wasting hundreds of billions of dollars and harming patients with risky medical practices – https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/28/why-american-doctors-keep-doing-expensive-procedures-that-dont-work.html
- An inside look at the growing epidemic of obesity in the United States – https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320460.php
Other Tidbits
- 8 Myths that should die in 2018 (and a good inside look at flawed human behavior and how it works in society) – https://www.vox.com/2017-in-review/2017/12/28/16802312/science-myths-dead-2018