We bring you another edition of the Sunday TBB Best of Web links: Give financial advice to young software developers, try to answer if extreme athleticism is the new midlife crisis, wonder if we have a second farm crisis, who killed Lorenzen Wright and end with two awesome videos, one inspiring and the other entertaining!
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Every Sunday I pick the best reads that blew my mind in the previous week. It can be…anything! I like to be eclectic and despise salesy/clickbait/sameold content you read…everywhere else!
As always, click on the headline to be taken to the original source. Sometimes I insert my incendiary comments on article excerpts between [brackets].
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Financial Advice to a Young Software Developer
This is great advice tailored to my son and his classmates with offers on hand to work in this field when they graduate from college next year! I will just paste here the short version but please forward to anyone who is starting out in this field!
- Keep fixed expenses low by continuing to live the “college lifestyle” for a while. Find roommates to keep housing expenses down, live as close to work as possible, and drive a basic older car. After some time has passed, it’s okay to start upgrading these parts of your life, but avoid going crazy as soon as that first paycheck arrives. The longer you can hold out on inflating your lifestyle, the better off you will end up in the long run.
- Start investing now! Contribute at least enough to your employer’s 401k to get any matching contributions (it’s free money!), but work towards completely maxing it out ($18,500) over the next few years. Aggressively pay down debt starting with the highest interest rate and redirect that extra cash flow into investments once the debt is paid off. More details below on Roth vs. Traditional and what specific investments to look for.
- Remain flexible, both in your career and geographic location. You may start out with the absolute perfect position at the perfect company, but things move fast and change frequently in the tech world. Being open to switching roles and/or companies, especially in the first 3-5 years, has the potential to accelerate both your career and income growth significantly.
- Save raises and bonuses while investing on autopilot. To echo #2, start investing in your company’s 401k ASAP and work towards growing your contribution % up to the max. Any bonus or raise is a great time to bump that contribution percentage up, and don’t stop once you max it out. Redirect additional funds into an IRA or regular brokerage account. Automate as much of these savings as possible.
- Financial independence is the goal, you can figure out what you want to do with that power later. Investing early on will open up a world of possibilities a decade or two down the road. Whether you want to retire early, take significant time off to raise kids, backpack across Europe or Southeast Asia, become a leading donor at your favorite charity, or a little of each, it will be the investments you make in the early years of your career that will make it possible.
Two things I should add. One is, it is good to do the 401k contribution high enough to get the full matching but it is GREAT if you go all the way to maximize it! And then somehow manage to live on the net paycheck…amazing how people can adapt to that! The other issue is of course….payments on student loans. It may be too late for that in most cases I understand. But if things were done right there should not be ANY loans in the first place!
I am having a front seat in this thing. I am blown away that companies can throw so much money to these youngsters. I keep telling my son to stay humble, keep learning and start putting money away. You never know for how long these kids about to enter the real world would be treated in this fashion…enjoy it while it lasts!
Extreme Athleticism Is the New Midlife Crisis
Well, this article spoke to me now that I have developed a strong attraction to running! I guess I am not the only one…
…“Death and the Mid-life Crisis” was published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Jacques’ theory was that as we approach middle age we begin to realize our own mortality, and then, consequently, we begin to freak out.
For decades, the midlife crisis has been expressed in tired pop-culture tropes in which (usually) white men buy sports cars and carry on affairs with younger women in a doomed and desperate bid to feel young again. But increasingly, people are responding to the anxieties of middle age not by clinging to the last vestiges of expiring youth but to taking on challenges that seem to belong to the young alone: by pushing the limits of what they’re physically capable of through endurance athletics and extreme fitness. The focus is less on what happened before the crisis and more on what happens after. Call it the midlife correction. [I was too busy at 40…at 45 I started this blog…at 50 something I started running…I am still blogging and running…enjoy the process!]
… extreme fitness is less about being young again and more about building yourself up for the years ahead. In other words, getting better at getting older. [BINGO!]
A midlife crisis is a response to a dark place of a different kind. It could be the fear of mortality, or aimlessness, or futility, or obsolescence, or loss of self. You could view these things as threats, or you could accept them as part of your existence, and move forward.
Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?
This was very educational. And very alarming…
Grain and dairy farmers were beginning to see a repeat of the ‘80s as their prices dropped this spring—and then President Trump started a trade war. Retaliatory agricultural tariffs have kicked this new farm crisis into high gear. The president is offering $12 billion in farm aid to ease the pain, but neither those payments nor the farm bill being hammered out in Congress will substantially change the outlook for farm country. Ever since federal farm policy told farmers to “get big or get out” in the ‘70s, the push toward consolidation has created decades of slow-burning crisis for many farmers. The problem has some rural residents re-envisioning rural policy from the ground up.
Seventy percent of farmers make less than a quarter of their income from farming and only 46 percent have positive net income from their operations.
In 1920, there were 925,000 Black farm operators; the 2012 agricultural census counts fewer than 45,000, operating just .4 percent of all farmland. Eighty-six percent had fewer than 180 acres, and 79 percent had sales of under $10,000. Millions of farmers of all races have been pushed off their land in the last century, but while white-owned farms have declined by about half, Black-owned operations stand at 6 percent of their peak.
I like to shop at local farmer markets. This is one of these trends that will be difficult to reverse…
He was a first-round draft pick in the NBA. 14 years later, he was found dead. Who killed Lorenzen Wright?
Great investigative journalism. Gripping story. Looks like it was his wife who sure sounds a little off to me…How tragic!
Money changes people…
Two Videos
This one of this little girl singing the national anthem before an MLS soccer game will make you smile, wow!
and of course this one that will go down as one of the most brilliant videos about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings (warning: It is not, how shall I put this, pro Brett okay?).
And I leave you with this…
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I’ve read a bunch of “Financial Advice to a Young Software Developer” type articles in the FIRE domain. The lists should all start with DON’T HAVE KIDS!!!!!! THEY ARE FREAKING EXPENSIVE!
Buy used or new car? Saving doesn’t compare to the $100k+ daycare bill. Or lost income from a parent staying home.
And then you may pay 6 figures to put the kid through private school and university.
And then they kid needs somewhere to sleep and eat. Now multiply this by 2x, 3x, 4x or more and the list above isn’t worth much.
No wonder we have fewer and fewer kids, later and later in life. You may ask who will pay my SS? Don’t you worry, the republicans are in the process of blowing the budget in the next 10 years. While Kavanaugh had a tantrum, GOP passed a bill adding $3T to the budget deficit.
People who solely use finances to decide whether or not to have kids should remain childless. Thank you.
I agree with what ABC said.
It was not a “do not have kids” statement. It was simply saying “kids are freaking expensive!’.
I have one more tuition bill to pay for son. And daughter has $120k pretty much secured for her college too. I could have been retired like Rene says he is lol if I had invested it all lol.
I am not a fan of the FIRE bloggers. The VAST majority of them are not really retired…they just retired to an online business and working MORE to build it up to get to that…passive income 🙂
Good morning!
I usually go on my long run Sunday morning but it was way too freaking cold and rainy man!
So I went to the gym and ran for 6 miles and I almost started stabbing myself…running laps around the track over and over is just beyond depressing. So…I left and went to run outside another 4 miles when it got warmer. My 6 miler was another PR by 2.35 mins #winning
Family dinner at 6 pm. Prediction: I am going to eat a lot lol.
I like beer too.
Who was the other one? Ding Dong Wang?
The more I learn about this Brett guy…the more I dislike him WOW #notevenclose
Matt Damon nailed it!
The other one was Long Dong Silver, an actor known to really stretch into his characters. I’d provide a link but it’s Sunday and I am in Utah so my IPad might explode.
Proves the old saying: The Supreme Court knows obscenity when they see it.
Another reason why Brett shouldn’t serve on the supr3me court. He doesn’t know what obscenity is. Apparently the Devil’s Triangle is a drinking game, not a 3some.
Isn’t this a travel blog? Drop the surface-level political nonsense. You might have deep, nuanced thoughts on things, but it isn’t coming out in here.
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