Liberty

Great post, cwericb. This line is so true: "I felt that if I continued to urge him to sell and then the price recovered I would never been forgiven." That's why I don't want to give specific money advice to friends and family. I'm more than happy to share everything that I know about value investing and asset allocation, portfolio construction, how to read a 10K, what books to read, how to think about risk and value creation and such, but I'm always afraid to recommend company A or B or to recommend buying or selling at a specific time, because I know I'll always be tracking that stock to see how it does and thinking about how that person might be happy/mad about it. Even if things go well, I don't want the mental clutter, and if things go badly and significant money is lost - even if the person claims to understand that it's not my fault and that they made the decision themselves - I know that there'll be bad vibes, even if they're not on the surface or unconscious. The only person I manage money for is my wife, and it's all in Berkshire and short-duration bond index ETFs...

I think these should be included. Mortgage falls into housing IMO. And student loans, credit cards, etc.. I don't see why that should be excluded, unless it's a loan to invest, or something that is clearly not a "living expense" (education falls in that broad category, I'd say).

Unfortunately I can't remove just one vote. I see an option to reset everything to zero and nothing else. Maybe mods can edit single votes...

Discussion in a different thread has made me curious about the average yearly living expenses of the members here. I'm sure there's a pretty wide range of lifestyles, and I'm curious to quantify that a little bit (I tried to give a broad range of poll answers yet keep some granularity so not everybody ends up between 50k-100k or whatever). Please don't include taxes, money invested, business-related expenses, etc. Only housing (including mortgage), food, clothes, entertainment, transportation, non-business travel, credit card bills, etc. If you want to give more context, please post about the number of people in your household and what your biggest expenses are. If you are way above or below the average (and thus more interesting! ;) ), consider telling us your secret (how/why do you spend so much/so little?). Thank you.

I get from mrholty's post that he was planning/hoping to retire at age 40 with $4M. If you are planing to live off of your investments for 30-50+ years, you need to think about inflation. Of course. I was referring to this line: "I don't know what 40 yr old or 50 yr old wife'd and kids'd up me will spend since that's 15 or 25 yrs from now, but it's probably a lot more than $160K." 4 million in 15-25 years is different from 4 million today, is what I meant.

True. But the Mr. Money Mustache lifestyle is probably more like retiring on 600k, so 4 million is more like Mr. Money Monocle :) assuming a 4% withdrawal rate, $4mm = $160K isn't exactly champagne and caviar. that's just getting by (albeit nicely) in some parts of the country when you factor in housing/kids/private education a decent vacation here and there etc. I don't know what 40 yr old or 50 yr old wife'd and kids'd up me will spend since that's 15 or 25 yrs from now, but it's probably a lot more than $160K. The median household income, 2009-2013, in the US was $53,046. That's usually two people working. It can definitely be done on less than a million. It doesn't mean that you can do it, or that you would want to do it, but you certainly don't need 160k/year to live well (or 200k at a 5% withdrawal rate with 4 million). And if you go into the frugal lifestyle of Mr. Mustache and co. (at least partly) and get a lot more money-efficient than the average US household which spends on tons of crap they don't need (and which would probably also include moving out of very high-priced cities like NYC...), you don't need much. It depends what it is that makes you truly happy; for me, it's being in control of my time, spending time with my family, good books, music, and TV series/films, internet access. Nothing very expensive. I won't work 10 extra years to have a nicer house and car if I know these things won't make me happier. But maybe people who grew accustomed to a very spendy lifestyle feel they need the finer things in life to be happy - I know that my wife and I have trouble thinking up gift ideas for each other because we have everything we need - to each their own. Also, I was talking about retiring soon, which is what mrholty was close to doing, so inflation wasn't something I thought about in my previous post.

Some people are already trying: http://www.seasteading.org/

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/80104000/gif/_80104798_cscl_globe_cargo_ship_624in.gif http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30696685 Thought this was an interesting piece. Found via @asymco on twitter. http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/80091000/jpg/_80091792_global1_get.jpg

True. But the Mr. Money Mustache lifestyle is probably more like retiring on 600k, so 4 million is more like Mr. Money Monocle :)

Thanks for sharing your story and welcome to the forum. I'm sure that what happened to you happens to a lot of people, and I've certainly had my ups and down myself and learned a lot from those experiences. Ideally, we always want to learn from other people's mistakes. That's the rational thing. But sometimes nothing truly teaches the lesson that personal experience and losing significant money does. I hope you will keep posting, I'm sure we all have a lot to learn from you. Cheers!

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/01/07/bill-ackmans-short-list-of-ceos/ Piece about the names on Ackman's desk, which included Sokol. Probably nothing much to it - he wouldn't leave a secret there when journalists are over - but still fun trivia. Here's the hi-res photo: http://www.bloomberg.com/image/i.kKeN7x4TqQ.jpg

^This If you don't want to put in the work to find and follow stocks, focus on asset allocation, dollar cost averaging and rebalancing. Find a plan you and your family is comfortable with and stick to it. ETFs and index funds make this easier and cheaper than ever. Your returns will be acceptable but not outstanding. This is wise advice.

Thanks for the recommendations, Scott and dcollon. I'm adding those to the list :) Update: Just ordered the Beal book. Lots of very cheap used copies on amazon.

I know. I was directly quoting the article linked in the original post:

yadayada, you might be interested in this: http://www.raptitude.com/2015/01/how-to-disappear-completely/ Have you tried it? $45-60 for 90 minutes. That was an interesting read. Thank you. Now I want to try it for myself... Here's the Robert Wright piece : http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/self-meditating/

Maybe. But we always have to be careful when assuming that markets are acting rationally, especially in the very short term. The speed of the oil decline can easily have caused some panic among market participants (many of whom care tremendously about momentum, TA, sentiment, etc). Couple that with margin calls for those invested heavily in the sector (who then sell indiscriminately and affect people who aren't invested in the sector...), and you get a lot of babies being thrown out with the bathwater, including companies that will benefit from lower oil prices. To me the macro is entirely confusing, as it usually is. Some places look weak, some places look strong.. Then you have everybody looking at this landscape and reacting accordingly, so the outcome will vary depending on perception (reflexivity)... Who can know? So I buy good businesses that should do well and deploy capital well regardless.

Probably the same people who just figured out that Berkshire is "more than just a portfolio of stocks". I mean, it's good to not follow the market minute-to-minute, but let's at least all be on the same decade... ;)

Murray Stahl has covered this topic a lot, with great insight. I think you'd find his essays and transcripts interesting.

Good post, txlaw, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

http://www.valuepodcast.com/417 (will also post in Liberty Media thread, but based on a previous experience just posting there, I'm posting in general too because I know some people who are interested might not see it otherwise)

I liked this piece: https://fundooprofessor.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/who-will-bail-shale/

Very nice, Gio. How did your investment portfolio do? 20% Liberty... Not as good as you, but not bad either... As you know I hold a large percentage in cash! Cheers, Gio Very good, thanks. And don't feel you need to explain yourself compared to others, especially at 20% which is excellent by any standard. It's not a competition, we're all working together to get better art this and learning from each other. One year is too short to judge anything much anyway, some years I had bad results while you probably had very good ones (but I feel I learned a tremendous amount from my mistakes so they were still worth a lot)...

Very nice, Gio. How did your investment portfolio do?

I would agree with that. I think arguing about concentration vs diversification in the abstract is a bit like asking "winter coat or hawaiian shirt?". What's best for you depends on other factors.

Oh boy. This is kind of what I meant about text easily leading to miscommunication. If we were all sitting with a beer, my meaning would not doubt come across better. Disclaimer first: I'm not attacking Kraven or saying anything bad about him. He's a great investor and a great guy and I've learned a lot from him. Nothing that I wrote is personal or intended to have an ounce of malice. My default mode as a person is always to discuss ideas as being separate from people, so if I do something stupid, it doesn't mean that I am stupid, and if someone does something that I disagree with, it doesn't mean that I disagree with that person as a whole, all the time or won't find their next idea utterly brilliant... Here's more context: I've been on this board for a few years. The first time Kraven posted about not liking smileys and wanting people to stop using them, I thought it was tongue in cheek and light humor. The 15th time, I was genuinely curious to hear his thinking and figured I'd ask him, and also explain why I thought they were useful because maybe he would agree with my arguments, or maybe I would end up agreeing with his arguments. Why ask? Because as someone who uses emoticons and other markers of context/tone, I was starting to feel a disapproving gaze at the back of my head every time I used one, and that wasn't a nice feeling. These things have been around for decades and they only seem to improve communication, unlike, say, texting/leetspeek (I C U have lotsa fun brah, Y U so... whatever, I can't even really write like that, but that does degrade clarity and I can understand the argument for not using that kind of writing on a forum). So I wrote what I thought was a light-hearted message last night asking my question and explaining why I thought smileys were useful. It was obvious to me that I didn't mean the "you suck" part - I was just looking for something that could mean extremely different things depending on the tone - and I'm sorry if anyone thought I actually meant it. See, text being ambiguous again. Around a beer, it would've been a lot clearer. So West, I don't mean this to be a flamewar or anything, and frankly, it doesn't have anything at all to do with Kraven being a good investor and a good contributor here. I just wanted to ask him why he hated emoticons so much, which doesn't seem like such a taboo question to me. See, no emoticons in this post so far. They were not needed this time :)