If only…I could have been on my yacht today fishing in the Bahamas
‘DidoSphere’s Simplest Path Wealth’ – Time Yield – At age 30, most of us know very little about money. Even those who graduated with a finance or accounting degree will encounter difficulties in putting the theories they learned in college into practice when they get to the real world. If I knew then what I know now, I could have retired at 55 and could have been spending my days on my yacht fishing in the Bahamas and drinking fine wine in the evenings. The problem when we are young is that we are too skeptical to listen to good advice due to many years of indoctrination. We have been listening too long to quips such as, “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.
The decade of the eighties was a period when I tuned out to music-radio and tuned in to talk-radio. I took in a lot of talk radio, close to 12 hours a day. I know very little about 80s music but I learned a lot about politics, sports, sex and money from radio personalities who flaunted their knowledge in their respective areas of expertise. I kept a small radio next to my early version PC (personal computer) and listened all day long, non-stop to various talk show programs, switching back and forth to NYC stations, WABC, WNBC, WOR and WMCA while laboriously tinkering with budgets, forecasts and analyses on Lotus 123. I slept with the radio on much to my wife’s chagrin, albeit I was using headphones. I listened to political discussions, travel, sex, sports, real estate and finance. Most of the programs were “call in” shows meaning listeners called in to voice their opinions, challenge the host or ask for advice. Although I was amused with Dr. Joy Browne’s sex advice and Bob Grant’s ultra-conservative antics, the ones I enjoyed the most and found most useful were the financial advice shows of Bruce Williams, Bob Brinker and Bernard Meltzer. Come to think of it, I never called into any of those shows, but many of the callers’ problems mirrored my own, so I implemented many of the solutions the hosts propounded. I learned a lot from those shows but one of my biggest regrets in life is not listening to Bruce Williams’ advice.
Bruce Williams’ Advice
On one of his shows in the early eighties, right after his usual, “Welcome my friends, welcome to my world” intro, Bruce Williams went right into the news of the day. I can remember as if it were yesterday, he said, “In today’s financial news, you can now buy a non-callable 30 year T-bond (30 year treasury bond) with a guaranteed interest rate of 14.5%. Imagine my friends, if you invest your $50,000 today you will have $2.5 million in 30 years. You don’t have to invest in anything else. You don’t have to buy gold, real estate or do anything fancy.” I did not follow the advice, not because I did not have the cash (in fact my wife and I had close to $100,000 in the bank by then) but because, 1) 30 years is such a long time and retirement at that age was the furthest thing from my mind, 2) the advice simply sounded too good to be true. It sounded so incredible in its simplicity, it cannot possibly work, so I thought. There must be a catch somewhere. So I cast it off as satire or hyperbole from a talk show host always on the look-out for ratings. How wrong I was!!! Imagine my friends, had I followed this sound advice from a talk show host, with little risk, my $100,000 would have grown to $5 million in 30 years. I could have retired in my fifties, in pursuit of Marlin on my own 40-foot fishing boat off Cabo San Lucas. Instead, I squandered a big chunk of my money pursuing riskier, more exotic investments (See Chapter, “Isn’t There a Better Investment Strategy?). Today you will find me still tinkering with budgets, forecasts and analyses, albeit on excel which is faster than Lotus 123, so I have a little extra time to write books that I hope will someday become best sellers. Read more: DidoSphere’s THE SIMPLEST PATH TO WEALTH, an Amazon Kindle Book. https://www.amazon.com/Simplest-Path-Wealth-Turn-Million-ebook/dp/B01KPQB0OS/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1509563427&sr=1-6&keywords=didosphere