I’ve been listening to the audio book Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Entrepreneurship by MJ DeMarco recently. If you haven’t read or listened, I highly recommend heading to the library or over to Audible.com to get reading or listening.
This book flies in the face of everything we’ve been told about investing and how we should be living our lives. Like most people that are interested in having an alternative or supplement for Social (In)Security in my retirement years.
MJ has taken almost everything that I’ve learned over the years and essentially taken a massive runny shit on it. This book cuts right through all of the bullshit that has been shoved down our throats by the Wall street banksters and financial gurus.
The concept of saving 10% of each paycheck is completely laughable when you actually sit down and do the math. Let’s just say that you make $1000 per paycheck. 10% is going to be $100 or $200 a month and $2400 a year. This is only if you have the discipline to actually do it and nothing detrimental slaps you in the face that causes you to have to dip into these funds. Let’s then say that you invest that into a fund that pays you 5%. You’re now making a whopping $120 per year and if you compound this for 10 years you now are looking at $35,605.64. In 30, you’ll have $177,798.56. 40 years: $321,311.40.
While these numbers are getting pretty impressive, this doesn’t account for stock market crashes, recessions, or compounding inflation due to our shepherds at the Federal Reserve printing as much money as they want to artificially stimulate the economy devaluing the dollar even more, which actually puts you right back to the $2,400 dollars a year or less that you were saving.
If you were to instead, start a business that doesn’t require you to trade hours for dollars, invent something, solve a problem, write a song, or book providing real value to others, perhaps you can set yourself free while you are young enough to be able to enjoy it instead of waiting until you are almost dead (if you don’t die before you get there in the first place) as long as you then, take advantage of investing your money rather than falling into the consumer trap of buying more and more expensive shit looking for status.