Good reads from around the Web.
More respectable readers may not know about the “date a stripper” desperation aspiration that permeates the darker corners of the modern male psyche, just as surely as some women still search for their fantastical Mr Darcy.
WHY WAIT? For just $29.99 plus 17 easy installments of $7.19 a month, you can gain access to top tips and videos from an aging Lothario with a badly fitting hairpiece who’ll reveal how to make a professional naked lady your own!
Now I’ve got nothing against strippers. And as a full-blooded – if irredeemably bookish – male, I get the superficial appeal of coming home to one, too.
But I’ve always thought it must be pretty tiresome when your other half pays for her share of the bills in sweaty £10 notes. Not to say competitive, when she’s receiving half a dozen marriage proposals a night.
This week though I discovered an exotic dancer after my own heart – one for whom I might be prepared to overlook the downsides.
Tara Mishra, a 33-year old stripper from the brilliantly named Californian town of “Rancho Cucamonga” has been given $1 million back by police who mistook her stash for drug money.
That’s quite a sum for anyone to have amassed by their early 30s. But I’m not a mere gold digger – it is more how she got her $1 million that impresses me.
Yahoo reports that Tara:
…began putting aside her earnings when she started dancing at age 18… The money was meant to start her business and get out of the stripping business…
I presume the cops who pulled over a car and discovered $1 million bundled together with hair bands could not believe anyone could legitimately amass that sort of money by 33, let alone someone in her line of work.
But I recognise a kindred spirit when I see one.
I just wish Tara was a reader of Monevator. There are better places to invest your life savings than into a new nightclub with friends, and better ways to transfer your money than in the boot of a rented car.
In fact, the use of cash suggests Tara hasn’t even got a back account. Compound interest could have got her to her target years earlier, even if she’d kept her savings in a cash deposit account.
Tara’s plans remind me of those of another profession with a short, lucrative shelf-life – sportsmen and women, who often lose the lot when they leave the field.
Risky business
Perhaps $100,000 would be a good amount for Tara to gamble on her own business. The rest could go into a well-diversified passive portfolio.
I’m sure it wasn’t easy earning $1 million as a stripper. But it’ll be one hundred times harder if she has to start again at 33.
If you do happen to come across this article, Tara, then please do read this one on wealth preservation.
And… um… any plans to visit London? 😉
From the blogs
Making good use of the things that we find…
Passive investing
- Seeing diversification in action – Canadian Couch Potato
- Medieval medicine and active fund management – Rick Ferri
Active investing
- Rising yields could be great for pension deficits – Value Perspective
- Confessions of a bond hater – Investing Caffeine
- Philip Fisher’s 15 things to look for in a stock – Clear Eyes Investing
- Hunting small-cap bargains: Japan versus the US – Oddball Stocks
Other articles
- I’ve said a degree is now optional. Mr Money Mustache agrees – MMM
- … and he was -ed by Yahoo Finance this week. He’s famous! Again.
- Help to Buy: It’s time to get on-board – Simple Living in Suffolk
- The road to asset rich – The Finance Buff
- A strange retirement anomaly from research into annuities – Wade Pfau
Product of the week: Furness Building Society is offering a three-year fixed rate mortgage at 3.45% (and a £995 fee) for those with a 10% deposit. According to This Is Money, 10% is the sweet spot for mortgage deposits.
Mainstream media money
Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view these enable you to click through to read the piece without being a paid subscriber of that site.1
Passive investing
- Buy and hold investing takes a lifetime – Motley Fool
- Finding Wall Street’s pot of gold – MoneyWatch
Active investing
- How to tell when a dividend is under threat – Telegraph
- Swedroe: Are behavioural funds superior? – MoneyWatch
- The unheard defence of big Wall Street banks – Motley Fool
- Emerging markets: The great deceleration – Economist
Other stuff worth reading
- Risks and rewards from peer-to-peer lending [Search result] – FT
- Funding for lending has slashed interest on savings – This is Money
- Baby Boombers have done much better in the recession – Economist
- You have to live to 100 to make 5% on even the best annuity – Telegraph
- …though living too long is a risk for others – MoneyWatch
- Help to Buy: What’s the catch? – The Guardian
- How to make money from your vegetable patch – The Guardian
Book of the week: Politicians who believe they can cherry-pick entrepreneurs to enact the social change they want should read Worthless, Impossible and Stupid
Like these links? Subscribe to get them every week!
- Reader Ken notes that: “FT articles can only be accessed through the search results if you’re using PC/desktop view (from mobile/tablet view they bring up the firewall/subscription page). To circumvent, switch your mobile browser to use the desktop view. On Chrome for Android: press the menu button followed by “Request Desktop Site”.” [↩]
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In “A strange retirement anomaly from research into annuities” the commenters were quick to pick up that the author discussed only the probability of failure, not the size of the failure. Myself, I’m at a loss to see why buying a series of inflation-linked annuities is an intrinsically good idea. I mean, I see that you’d expect better annuity rates as you age, but what are you going to live on in the meantime – running down your capital? Or dividend flows from your investments? Both? Or would you combine with the purchase of a fixed rate annuity to boost your income at first?
I also infer that TIPS pay a better real income than Index-Linked Gilts.
dearieme,
TIPS yields can be found here.
Thanks, Mike. They do look a bit better than ILGs, but there may be wrinkles that make my comparison naive.
I’ve had another look at that paper and am more impressed the second time. I had brought to it the unsuitable British assumption that annuities are almost always bought from a pension fund, often by people who don’t have much else in the way of investments. Instead the author is looking at someone with a heap of capital (whether in a pension fund or not, presumably) who wants to manage it so that he gets a decent income until death but also has some left over to bequeath.
Hm, I suppose I’m doing something like that myself; I have deferred my State Pension so that I, and more importantly my widow, will get a bigger pension eventually. That’s equivalent to turning some capital into an index-linked annuity (with a cracking good annuity rate, I must say). Hurray for me!
I’m keen to make provision for my widow that will not require her to become an investment ace in old age. Extra State Pension fits the bill.
Forgive me for thinking out loud, but I’ve now looked at Pfau’s co-author’s blog. It’s getting clearer – the crucial point is, he suggests, not buying index-linked annuities, though that may be a good strategy, the crucial thing is to let the equities proportion of your portfolio increase over time after retirement. But that follows, I dare say, from the model they happened to adopt, the parameter values they bunged into it, and the measure of merit that they adopted. They have already admitted to the shortcomings of the latter.
Do their results constitute a good set of predictions of future realities? Lord knows. Still, it’s food for thought.
Good article by Ferri – but he needn’t confine himself to “medieval” medicine. The point is valid for today’s so-called alternative medicine, too…
I’m surprised you didn’t flag Adam Posen’s excellent article in today’s FT, “The cult of home ownership is dangerous and damaging.” Too busy at the “gentleman’s”, ahem, club?
Colo(u)r me incredulous, but amassing $1m in 15 years is a savings rate of near 70k a year. Stripping must pay well in the US.
Still, I’m sure you’ll be able to , er, sort Tara out 😉 Getting her finances straight and risk-diverisifed, I mean…
@ermine — Yes, I wondered that too when I wrote the line about the compound interest if she’d had a bank account (or more likely CDs is the US) — I guess she probably did have some sort of savings vehicle. A little over $40,000 a year would have got her there with 6% interest, though that wouldn’t have been possible for the past few years. But then she probably could have got more 10-15 years ago, too?
I dunno, I like the story. I hope it’s more true than not.
“WHY WAIT? For just $29.99 plus 17 easy installments of $7.19 a month, you can gain access to top tips and videos from an aging Lothario with a badly fitting hairpiece who’ll reveal how to make a professional naked lady your own!”
Nevermind all the link to TIPS yields. Where is the stripper pulling link?
As I’m married to an (ex) stripper, I can attest to the joys of cash. Except there isn’t any, she spent it all long before I came on the scene. Ho hum.
I think it’s fair to say in this case, that whilst cash doesn’t have a great rate of return, it’s better than the negative rate of 30% or more you would have paid had you put in into the bank (and onwards to another investment) and then had to pay income tax on it…