For most of my adult life I lived paycheck to paycheck, which never bothered me because I was always either content or hopeful that I was somehow going to be financially stable in the future. I wasn’t truly impoverished, I never starved, but there were long periods of time when I didn’t have a proper home and thus slept in my car or on the beach, would shower at my friends’ apartments, and shaved in the college restrooms before anyone arrived on campus. I have clear memories of going grocery shopping knowing exactly how much money I had available to spend. I would do the math in my head as I weighed vegetables on scales and added up the canned food in the shopping basket. I remember that I couldn’t afford to buy organic ground beef. Yet I wasn't bothered by having little money because at the time I was enjoying my life. My lack of savings never prevented me from reading, writing, being outdoors, having friends, and occasionally backpacking. And because I was always actively learning, stimulated, and engaged in the world, I never lost confidence in myself nor faith that my paycheck to paycheck lifestyle was temporary. I had potential, Goddamnit. An added advantage was that I’ve always been good about looking at the bigger picture, and when I would compare my situation to those in severe poverty across the nation, world, and throughout history, I recognized that I had no grounds to complain since my "poverty" was merely superficial and largely by choice, not entrenched and generational. But like many others, I racked up credit card debt which I struggled to pay off, and then repeated this cycle every few years.
As I grew older I realized that my quixotic ambitions of being an activist, writer, and artist were not manifesting due to my lack of discipline. I moved from San Francisco to west Sonoma County – a most excellent decision which allowed me to improve my relationship with the natural world. (I severed this connection twice by moving away from Sebastopol, but returned on both occasions.) I fell into a pattern of working day jobs, being outdoors, reading, writing, completing various art projects, traveling, and having a strong social and family life. For a period of time I was almost flourishing, but still living paycheck to paycheck. I later got a better job, but struggled to save money. I came to the conclusion that I needed to put my dream of being a paid writer and artist aside, and work more hours. So for three years I worked two full-time jobs. During this time I gave more consideration toward income because for the first time in my life, I began to accumulate savings. I began to learn about investing. I realized that one of the only practical ways for me to extricate myself from the paycheck to paycheck lifestyle and achieve financial freedom was through investing. The only way someone like me was going to achieve any semblance of the “American Dream” was if they hustled.
My lifestyle of non-stop work in order to save and invest was a double-edge sword. The upside was that I was working toward financial freedom so that I would eventually have the time to get back to my writing. Or so I told myself, for once you drop artistic projects for three-years, picking them again is easier said than done (I have developed an exacerbated form of writer’s block, something that I call writers Prefecture.) The downside was that I was drowning in work (I fell asleep standing up more than once) at two jobs that I didn’t care for. Even after I reduced my work hours after two-years, there was never one day I woke up and was excited to go to work. I understand that no one has that luxury, but still my dedication to my jobs was destroying my inner-being. I remember early one morning I was the only person in the neighborhood walking to my car to go to work. Coffee in hand, I thought, “Look at me, I’m one of the responsible people.” Then I corrected myself, “No. I’m a schmuck, and I’ve been suckered.” Every day I would go to work for eight hours, which would translate to $200 in my paycheck. I would regularly think to myself that there’s got to be something else I could do for eight hours that I actually enjoyed that could generate income. (It didn’t have to be $200 a day. I'd happily clean up trash on the coast for $100 a day). One of my shifts was 7am to 3:30pm five days a week, assisting surgeons inside of a windowless, fluorescent operating room. I would walk into work well-rested, in prime mental shape, with a "full tank," and from me my employer would extract my energy and attention reserves for the day. While at work the only place I wanted to be was home, doing my personal work. And when I arrived back home I was too drained to devote any significant vigor to my projects. (My wife would joke: “When you’re at work you want to be home, and when you’re at home you want to go back to work.” No.) I'd often come back home, take a nap, then go on a run, eat dinner, take a shower, do something minimally productive or counterproductive, and then go to sleep in order to go back to work the next day. It was as if I were working to make money in order to pay bills in order to keep on working to pay bills. In my role as a medical technician at both my jobs I was completely expendable. Furthermore, the depressing amount of medical waste produced from surgical cases wasn’t inspiring me to be a part of that system.
So it was during this period of incessant work that I started investing. Sometimes when I walked around the hospital I would see elderly employees trapped in a job they disliked. I would have a knee jerk reaction of throwing another $100 into my investment account. (I was always dumbfounded by the senior citizens who returned back to work after retirement. I wondered: did they run out of money, did they really like their former jobs that much, or did they fail to nourish a hobby or passion in their adult life which they would prefer to pursue in their retirement?) In the decontamination unit or on my breaks I would watch investment videos. I tried to not let this detract from my interest in current affairs, history, and the natural world. I felt that individuals must be firing on multiple fronts if they were to stand any chance of resisting impending authoritarian threats and making it out of the rat race. I had to stay informed, get my monetary house in order, stay healthy, enjoy the outdoors, read, write, and minimize my bad habits. I was always skeptical of government and corporate policies, so my conspiratorial mindset required that I learn both the mainstream narratives and also keep in touch with the counter-perspectives that were being increasingly censored. It has yet to be seen if my sacrifice has paid off. I've neglected and put personal projects on the back burner in exchange for making money. (Fortunately, I don’t feel like I’ve abandoned every project. And because I’ve always been disciplined about keeping notes whether it’s in my notepad or in my phone, I’ve always been able to jot down ideas and develop my stories here and there, never allowing them to vanish from my vision board). It’s going to take some time to catch up with everything on the back burner and adhere to a schedule in which I am habitually constructive, but I’m going try to start off small and take things a step at a time. (Indeed, even this blog entry is an attempt at tackling the litany of things on my project list and in my mind, and is in itself an exercise in journaling and doing what I am somewhat good at: listening to a presentation and transcribing the important parts). But working incessantly and investing did allow me attain financial freedom, at least temporarily, which affords me one of the most valuable abstract commodities in the world: time.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels
In my youth, as a form of rebellion, I never looked up to the wealthy. When I decided that I wanted to extricate myself from my paycheck to paycheck lifestyle, I began to listen to what they had to stay. If I wanted to become a successful investor, I need to at least listen to what the people who have been doing that for a living have to say. As with anyone I listen to, I might not agree with all their perspectives, but that doesn’t negate the legitimacy of their message nor preclude my option to learn selectively from their strategies. Below I have included three videos that I enjoyed watching a some point over the last year and have transcribed a portion that I thought valuable.
This first video is from Jake Ducey’s I Love Prosperity program. He interviewed Rick Rule and asked him what one needs to do nowadays in order to hustle your way out of the rat race.
Rick Rule:
Four things, Jake. No, five things.
1. Invest in yourself. Organize yourself around a product or service that delivers real utility to somebody else. You don’t have own your own business, you can be an employee in somebody else’s business, but you need to invest in yourself to the point where you’re absolutely indispensable to your customer. That’s the first thing. When people who work at McDonald’s say they’re not getting a living wage – it’s true, it’s not a living wage. And so you need to develop a skillset that allows you to deliver utility to the market so that you can earn a living wage. So the first thing that you have to do is put yourself in the mindset that says you make money by delivering utility to other people. That’s the very first thing to do. In order to get value you give value. And if you’re in a circumstance right now where you can’t do that you have to change your circumstance because the circumstance ain’t gonna change for you. You get value by giving value. That’s the most important thing.
2. You have to save. And this is a contradiction of what I said earlier. The idea that you save and you get paid 125 basis points on your savings, while you’re purchasing power goes down by 550 basis points a year is counterintuitive. Except that if you have cash or if you have liquid assets – if you have a liquidity squeeze, if the broad equity markets fall by 50 or 60%, if we have the same lack of trust in financial institutions that we experienced in 2008 – the liquid assets that you have when nobody else has liquid assets will give you both the tools and hopefully the courage to take advantage of the situation rather than being taken advantage of. Understand the negative real yield you got with your savings is an options premium. It gives you the ability to act when other people can’t act.
3. Have part of your savings in liquid assets that don’t depreciate alongside fiat assets. That’s a fancy way of saying own some physical gold and silver. What’s nice about physical gold and silver is it you don’t have to own too much. If you have a circumstance where the fear goes to hell in a hand basket, the upside is that your physical gold and silver means that a small insurance premium – which is to say a small holding in the physical gold and silver – offsets a very large deterioration in the purchasing power of your fiat currency. So absolutely save part of your wealth in gold and silver
4. If you can afford it, with a small amount of your money, speculate. Give yourself the ability, if you can afford to lose it, to participate in asset classes that are so deeply out of favor that when they return to favor you can enjoy tenfold or fifteen fold internal rates of return. Don’t employ this strategy with money that you can’t afford to lose half of, but by all means if you can afford to speculate – don’t speculate in the flavor of the month, if pot stocks are hot stay as far away from them as you possibly can. Speculate on out of favor, disaggregated circumstances that have legitimate 10, 15, 20x potentials, with a small amount of your net worth. I’ve had circumstances in my life where a 5% investment in an asset class doubled my net worth.
5. Stay positive. Too many people look at the circumstance and say there’s no way out. I can’t get ahead because of Biden. I can’t get ahead because of the World Economic Forum. I can’t get ahead because of the Socialists. That’s all bullshit. In any set of circumstances somebody who pays attention to rule number one, which is deliver value for other people will come out ahead. We will come through this circumstance 10 years from now, 15 years from now, or some point in time, stronger then we are now. Don’t use the malaise in front of us as an excuse for doing nothing. Do something. Prepare Positively. I believe, as an example, that the broader equity index’s in the United States, the S&P 500… At four different times in my career the S&P has fallen by 40 or 50 percent. It was extremely unpleasant to go through that period of time, but when you look at a chart of the S&P 500 going back sixty years you almost can’t see those 50% declines. So, I believe as a society that the ultimate direction that we face is higher, much higher. I just believe that we’re gonna have a real test like we had in the 1970s getting from here to there.
So let’s do them again.
Generate utility, that’s number one. Focus on making yourself more valuable to your customer, irrespective of your circumstance. Save despite the fact that the current return on liquid assets is zero, consider it either as insurance or an option premium. Save part of your liquid assets in gold and silver – and pray to God they don’t go up – understanding that the set of circumstances that you were afraid of will likely make them go much, much higher than other people think. Think of it as an insurance class. If you can afford to, speculate. And if you speculate don’t just speculate with your money, speculate with your time, choose your speculations very well. And finally, be positive, don’t be paralyzed. Be positive, be proactive, don’t be a victim.
This next video and transcription is from Stanberry Research. Host Daniela Cambone interviews Jim Rogers (who has the dubious distinction of co-founding an investment fund with the diabolical George Soros), who explains the value of keeping your eyes open.
Daniella Cambone:
I want to end, and I wanted to share something with you that I’ve never shared with you before. We were at a show together in Las Vegas a few years ago – I want to say about five or six years ago. You were a keynote speaker there. And I remember I was walking back to the hotel, I was behind you and I didn’t want to bother you because you were so taking in that moment. And here is Jim Rogers walking the strip in his suit, and his signature bowtie, you had your hands behind your back, and you were looking at the lights, looking at the people around you. And that image has remained in my mind. I just always wanted to know in that moment, what is Jim Rogers thinking?
Jim Rogers:
Well at that time and always I have learned, for whatever reason, try to look and watch and see. Most people go to Las Vegas and say, “Oh my gosh, look at that,” but I have learned no matter where I am – whether it’s Paris, Brooklyn, anywhere – to try to just look and observe. You may not see anything, but if you see something and if you are being attentive – you have your antennas open so that you can see – who knows what you’re going to see. You might see something that is significant, or you might see some change. The most important thing that I look for is change. You don’t see it very often, but when you do, Daniela, you should think about it and go back and do research. So I know that when I go to a place like Las Vegas, especially to a show, I’m trying to look and observe and see what’s going on. Most of the time I see nothing, but occasionally… then I go home and have to do some work.
I’m I. the process of transcribing some things I’ve had on the back burner for the past year.
— Aaron Dames (@DividedCore) October 13, 2021
Here’s one such gem:@DanielaCambone of @Stansberry beautifully lays out a fantastic question to @JimRogerBlogs, who provides an equally wonderful answer.https://t.co/k5dvrI8mD2 pic.twitter.com/DbnNM0Y0Q3
This last clip is from an episode of Nomad Capitalist. Host and founder Andrew Henderson interviews Doug Casey. The interview was less insightful than I recalled, but I still transcribed the memorable part about the Augean stables.
The world is much more strictly regulated and all passports today are government property that are all hooked up by computer systems so they know where you are and what you’re doing everywhere. Personal freedom is increasingly being flushed down the toilet and people asked me, well why is that? It’s because everyone believes in democracy. And all these legislators that meet, what do they do? They pass laws. And what do laws do? They tell you what you must do, and must not do. So every day that passes there are more of these laws that accumulate like the bottom of the Augean stables. And every law they pass has to be funded – so taxes go higher, or money printing goes higher, and a new agency has to be set up to enforce it. So this is what’s happening to the world at this point. And this is one of the reasons why I’m saying that we’re going into the Great Depression.
