White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Where are you and where are you going?
white belt
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by white belt »

Dave wrote:
Thu Oct 28, 2021 2:51 pm
Seems like active investing/trading could be a good fit with your current work/time situation. It also has the benefit of playing extremely well into RE life in that it could, if successful, either amplify your returns at a given level of risk or reduce your risk at a given level of return.

[...]

And it's very likely you will lose some of it at some point. That's the cost of education. I also see no way around this. If you want to be an active participant in markets, you will lose money sometimes. All the preparation in the world, all the reading, and all the IQ won't prevent that. So it's good to be prepared for that as a possibility.
Yeah I've thought similar things. Right now, I have an itch to "Make hay while the sun is shining" because I have so much free (work) time to devote to the field and also because I feel there are so many opportunities out there. In 2 years, I will transition away from my current active duty military lifestyle, but in the meantime I have a lot of mental energy while still being somewhat limited in possibilities due to the schedule and living in a different area than my planned retirement location. I could feasibly do ~95% of the preparation/research legwork while I'm at my actual job, so that the only thing I'm doing in my time outside of work is executing trades.

I'd like to at least give things a shot; worst case is I lose some money but learn a lot about myself, investing, macroeconomics, etc. Best case is I find it is a useful side gig to make some extra income that I can then continue as a transition into new phases of life. At some point in the future, I will probably shift to a less active and more fail-safe portfolio, but right now I'm interested in devoting some more time to my investments.

In practical terms, my portfolio will remain in an allocation similar to the Dragon Portfolio, but I'll start dedicating a percent or 2 at a time to specific "macro" trades (Cole considers Global Macro Trading a "Hawk" asset just like gold, CTF, Long Vol, etc). I'm not sure yet what form those trades will take, but I'm going to do a lot more reading and research, along with perhaps dropping the $50-100 a month to get access to premium content from macro thinkers/traders I respect and analytical tools that can give me more a more complete picture. The first profitable trade would more than pay for those costs. I plan on just starting small with my macro trading portfolio.

white belt
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by white belt »

Relationship
The long distance dating situation worked well for its first month. I visited DGF for 4 days and she visited me for a weekend. This month I just have one 4 day visit planned and then we should be able to spend a lot of time together around the holidays because of her winter break schedule. We had a great time and she met my friends and family, who she liked and all seemed to like her. We also visited my retirement city which she really liked and could envision herself living in during residency.

I haven't really had the "ERE" talk yet but I think I will have it on my next visit. I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking about how to present things in a way that appeals to her ENFJ temperament and also is understandable from her current WL (which I peg around WL3/4*). I think I will really focus on how my savings give me some flexibility and enables me to work at stuff that provides me with purpose and serves the greater good. She says that my frugality is one thing she finds attractive ("You don't care about stupid stuff like giant mansions and fancy cars") and when I talk about saving money she says things like, "I think you might be low key rich because you spend so little money." I've been dropping crumbs like having her flip through RetroSuburbia, which she thought looked really cool and also jived well with her ideal lifestyle vision of having plants and animals in some kind of farm setting (she also really liked the video of Novella Carpenter's homestead in Oakland).

I think I have to be very careful to not focus so much on freedom from because she is very passionate about being a doctor, which she chose because she had the ENFJ itch to help others. If she wasn't pursuing her MD she would probably be working really hard in some other career field to help people, so she's not going to relate to the traditional FIRE career burnout trope (which is fine since I'm really trying to move from FIRE mindset to ERE mindset). ENFJ's are known for being open-minded and she has held true to that pattern throughout our entire time dating, so that does help to make things a little easier. I'm thinking she might like YMOYL, but I'm also hesitant to recommend too much tracking/digging into numbers because I think she is more interested in big picture stuff than making spreadsheets. She also has much more of an aesthetic sense than me, so I have to be careful to not be too cold/hard/calculating/utilitarian unless it also includes pretty.

* = It's actually a bit difficult to tell this because I believe the is a naturally frugal person. After looking through RetroSuburbia, she did say something like, "What do these people do for jobs? Don't you need to have a lot of money to do this?" I explained that they lived simply, grew a lot of their own food, relied on community, etc which doesn't require much money. I think the wheels are turning in her head but it's all just so different than what society has told her so it will take time.

chenda
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by chenda »

She sounds awesome, I'd keep hold of this one :)

I do enjoy your thoughtful posts white belt.

white belt
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by white belt »

October Report

Expense Total: 2078
Housing - 800
Food/Restaurant - 368
Dating – 300
Social/Entertainment/Alcohol/Bars – 248
Car/Transportation/Insurance – 203
Health/Fitness – 76
Other - 39
Cell Phone/Music - 44

This is high spending month compared to last month. I think most of the difference was due to some extra social/entertainment costs for some one-off events and some start-up costs associated with DGF. I won't go category by category, but in the future I think I can get the dating (included cost of flight), restaurant, and entertainment expenses quite a bit lower.


Financial Snapshot
Rolling 3 month expense average: $1895
Net Worth: $421k
Stock: 44%
CTF (currently long): 22%
Cash: 6%
Bonds: 10%
Gold: 9%
Crypto: 9%


The rolling 3 month expense average is below $2k for the first time, so that is some progress. I still think I can get to 2x JAFI even with current inefficiencies associated with job requirements and long distance relationship.

Western Red Cedar
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by Western Red Cedar »

I agree with Chenda. She sounds great! Your post reminded me a little bit of this interview with the mad fientist:

https://www.madfientist.com/sane-fientist-interview/

His wife is an optometrist and struggled with the notion of why one would want to stop working. It is pretty funny and may provide some ideas for approaching upcoming conversations.

white belt
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by white belt »

@Chenda @WRC

Thanks for the kind words. My friends said something similar when they met her last weekend. Although their version was more like, "How did you find this girl?" On Tinder of course; a real millennial love story.

I read through the podcast transcript and a few things stuck out to me. I guess I should preface this by saying that I'm not trying to judge people for how things work in their own relationships and each situation is unique. I'm more just doing this to show how my thought process differs from Mad Fientist and his wife. **Take everything with a grain of salt because I have never been married.**

Jill: So, yeah, it just made sense because we knew at that early stage that I definitely like to spend a lot more money than you did. It just seemed like an easy way to prevent arguments with keeping our money separate. I could do what I want with my money; you could do what you want. Everyone was happy.

[...]

Jill: Yeah, I think our marriage would’ve been doomed if we had everything in a joint account. I think that would’ve caused a lot of arguments.

Mad Fientist: Yeah, that is definitely confirmed I think. That would’ve been a disaster. So you would recommend it to other couples potentially?

Jill: Yeah! I think everybody just has to work out what works for them. Some people feel a lot more comfortable keeping everything joined and feeling like they’re doing everything as a couple. I think that’s fine.

But if you’re really not on the same page when it comes to spending money, then I don’t think there’s any reason not to just keep your finances separate. It just avoids that whole issue.
I've read through every thread on here and several on other forums about marriage finances. I know there are many on here who subscribe to a 50/50 keep finances separate approach, while others insist on joint finances as a key prerequisite for a healthy marriage*. I think the above quote illustrates a very common approach to money (which also applies to many relationship issues) that I disagree with entirely. I have no interest in preventing arguments because avoiding issues tends to amplify them. I'd rather have issues rise to the surface early on so they can be addressed and worked through. If it turns out an issue is so serious that it can't be worked through (or my partner lacks the maturity/capability to work through an issue), I'd rather figure that out in year 2 of a relationship than year 12 or 22.

I'll admit, I feel very fortunate to have the perspective afforded by reading through topics on MBTI, enneagram, Spiral Dynamics, and ERE WLs on these forums. This knowledge helps me to have frameworks to better understand where my partner currently is, my own blind spots, and how I can effectively communicate in a way that she understands.

At this point, I'm firmly in the joint finances camp for me. I have no intention of dating/marrying a girl long term if we aren't both on the same page regarding money/lifestyle/shared goals/vision.* I very much believe a relationship is bigger than its component individual parts.

Jill: It was all basically the conversations that we had that sort of shifted my whole mindset.

It was I think on our honeymoon, we had a conversation where you said to me, “What would be your perfect life? Describe. If you could design your life any way you want, then what would it be like?” So, we had this big conversation.

I found that actually as a hard question. It’s not like the “What would you do if you won the lottery?” It’s more of a realistic version of that where you don’t have just unlimited money to do whatever you want.

So, we talked about that a lot. And we both were in agreement about where our priorities were and what we would like to spend more time doing—spending times with friends and family and traveling, volunteering and all those kinds of things.

So, when we talked about that, and then we talked about would it be possible to do more of that stuff if it we weren’t having to work full-time, it just really kind of opened my eyes to the benefits of financial independence.

I think when you started me on this journey, I didn’t have the same motivation that you did for achieving financial independence. It didn’t really appeal to me. But when we talked about what our life could look like if we weren’t having to work full-time, then that was really appealing to me.

So, as soon as I had that big goal, a side effect of that was that I didn’t want to really buy things anymore. I suddenly realized how silly it is just to be buying stuff for the sake of wasting money on things when you could be putting your money to a lot more use.

And so, it was just a really easy and a kind of “overnight” transition I guess.
I can't believe that someone as analytical and deliberate as the MadFientist waited until his honeymoon to have that conversation! I'm glad it worked out for them, but in my mind that is a conversation that needs to happen relatively early on in a relationship. I plan the "lay all the cards on the table" conversation for my next visit with DGF (this past weekend she passed the friends/family test), but so far she has reacted very well to some of the hints I've dropped. Of course, I plan on tailoring it more towards improving our ability to have a positive impact than just giving us freedom to travel the world (because DGF is ENFJ). We've also had a lot of conversations about shared vision already.


* = @Ego has advocated the all or nothing approach to marriage. @7WB5 has advocated that an even-stevens split to finances screws over the woman in a marriage because of her higher mate value on the open market compared to a man.

** = I also understand that humans are complex and dynamic, so it is quite possible that being on the same page today does not equate to being on the same page in the future. Divorce is always a risk and quite messy, but is so commonplace in our society that I hardly consider it the end of the world (especially if there aren't children involved).

Edit: To clarify, DGF and I are not planning on combining finances or getting married anytime soon, so I'm more speaking to what I see the situation would be if/when we are living together in the future.
Last edited by white belt on Thu Nov 04, 2021 8:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by mountainFrugal »

Regardless of your situation, frequent (monthly for us) check-ins and being flexible make it not a big deal at all to switch things up when situations change (assuming your base spending is low). We have a joint checking account where all of our monthly shared costs come out of (split evenly currently). We pay more to the shared account then is spent and save/invest the difference. When I made more money and she was still in school (small stipend), I paid a larger portion of the shared expenses. When my partner was looking for a new job, I paid for all of the shared expenses. I do not have any debt, she has some remaining student loan debt, so not combining all finances works well for us. I am guessing that your DGF will have some loans to pay off after her medical training, so this might be a wise split.

Scott 2
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by Scott 2 »

This seems serious. If you haven't read these, I highly recommend them. The two modern schools of thought, on sustaining a healthy marriage:

https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Principles ... 083JKQPVQ/
https://www.amazon.com/Hold-Me-Tight-Co ... 084G9QFZY/

We just celebrated 15 years. IMO it's more about a shared commitment to the journey, than confirming your perfect match via checklist. Life happens. Plans derail. There will always be some percentage of disagreements you choose to live with. That is part of the deal.

We were firmly in the separate finances camp, until circumstances made it untenable. At 40, we have the tools to navigate our transition to shared finances. At 25? We were not mature enough to survive the same conversations. Leaving them unresolved worked for us.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by mountainFrugal »

white belt wrote:
Thu Nov 04, 2021 8:13 pm
Edit: To clarify, DGF and I are not planning on combining finances or getting married anytime soon, so I'm more speaking to what I see the situation would be if/when we are living together in the future.
We are just as excited for you as your meatspace friends...so spraying potentially unwanted/premature advice comes from a place of excitement. :).

+1 on the 7 Principles book.

Scott 2
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by Scott 2 »

Haha, nice edit. I stand by the suggestions. I read 7 principles early. Wish I'd read Hold Me Tight then as well. I would have saved a lot of trouble.

white belt
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by white belt »

Thanks for the book suggestions.
mountainFrugal wrote:
Thu Nov 04, 2021 8:35 pm
We pay more to the shared account then is spent and save/invest the difference. When I made more money and she was still in school (small stipend), I paid a larger portion of the shared expenses. When my partner was looking for a new job, I paid for all of the shared expenses. I do not have any debt, she has some remaining student loan debt, so not combining all finances works well for us. I am guessing that your DGF will have some loans to pay off after her medical training, so this might be a wise split.
My understanding is that in the US if you are married, all finances are considered joint regardless if they are in joint or separate accounts. In the event of a divorce, you and your partner are entitled to half of every dollar earned during the marriage, regardless of how finances are tracked. If you aren't married, then separate finances makes sense since you don't have the legal protections associated with marriage. Please someone correct me if that's not the case.

I understand that marriage is not necessary to have a long and successful relationship, however I will identify the following reasons why I would consider marriage over just a long term partnership:

-recognition by the government (important for things like medical directives, benefits, legal documents, legal rights, etc)

-recognition by society/friends/family (less important in less-conservative communities, but still a thing)

-financial penalties associated with separate finances* (least important of all, but a practical consideration)

* = This is less of a concern if both partners are making similar income, but if one is a student and the other is a high income earner, or maybe one is retired and the other is working, then MFJ taxes are a significant advantage. I also work in a career field that will pay me ~$6k a year tax free to be married (and will provide free comprehensive zero-deductible healthcare to my partner).


But yes, DGF does have some student debt associated with medical school (I think she estimates she is on track for $120k total when she graduates) and also a mortgage on her house which will likely be net positive due to inflation, property appreciation, and the fact that she is going to start generating cashflow by renting out a spare room. If we stay together, she will end up making ~$80k in residency right at the point when I retire and my income drops significantly.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by mountainFrugal »

I think that you are correct. The only wrinkle would be if you signed a pre-nup prior to getting married which is generally recommended if there is a large disparity in wealth, consumer debt, business equity etc. going into a marriage. My late wife had a lot of student debt that creditors tried to get from me personally through harassment calls and mail, but student debt does not translate like that unless you are co-signer. Having gone through the ultimate downside of shared finances when someone passes away, I can tell you that it makes it 1000x easier to be married (even with different last names) because of your point number 1 above.

My current partner and I are not married so we keep things separate.

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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by theanimal »

white belt wrote:
Sat Nov 06, 2021 11:06 am
My understanding is that in the US if you are married, all finances are considered joint...
This is explicitly true in community property states, of which there are 12. Non community property states are often similar but can have differences in terms of retirement and education savings. I had a friend get married recently and we were looking at it. It's worth looking up for your individual state, there may be differences if it is not a community property state.

white belt
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by white belt »

Thanks for the responses everyone.

After doing more reading, I've figured out the source of my confusion. I was incorrectly assuming that all individual debts and individual assets become joint as soon as one marries, but that is not the case. Individual debts carried prior to marriage do not transfer to the other person unless they are co-signers on the loans. I don't live in a community property state, so during marriage individual debts accumulated would only belong to the spouse who incurs them, but in the event of a divorce I might still be found responsible for a share of them. Another fact that I overlooked is that one can pay taxes MFJ even if finances are separated, but there are many factors to consider. Each state is different which adds another layer of complexity.

Therefore, I will rescind some of my previous comments about joint finances being a straightforward choice.

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GandK
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by GandK »

Hey there from an AF veteran (93-97)! Just getting 'round to your journal.

Marital assets are completely state-dependent. However. If you plan to change your legal state of residence along the way, you'll also be changing what the definition of "marital assets" would be. If you divorce, for example, you don't divorce in the state where you lived four posts ago and got married; you divorce in your current jurisdiction, and according to their rules.

It pays to make your decisions accordingly.

white belt
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by white belt »

GandK wrote:
Sat Nov 06, 2021 4:17 pm
Marital assets are completely state-dependent. However. If you plan to change your legal state of residence along the way, you'll also be changing what the definition of "marital assets" would be. If you divorce, for example, you don't divorce in the state where you lived four posts ago and got married; you divorce in your current jurisdiction, and according to their rules.

It pays to make your decisions accordingly.
Good point! I think it makes most sense to assume that I will have to abide by laws that are the least financially favorable when making such risk considerations, since I don't know for certain which state I will be in at the time of a divorce. For example, if I am the higher income or net worth partner, then I should account for the risk of a divorce in a community property state. If I am the lower income or net worth partner, then I should account for the risk of a divorce in a non-community property state.

I plan on getting out of the active duty military life at the end of my current commitment (2.5 more years). I'm tired of not having control over where I live and what job I work. If DGF is still in the picture at that time, her residency and medical career will require location flexibility as well.

white belt
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by white belt »

I need to figure out how to spend the free time I have. This schedule makes it tricky to get in a rhythm doing things because of the long stretches of work followed by long stretches off. My analytical brain is looking for problems to nug on and there just isn't much to do at work.

I've turned to reading and thinking more about my investments, which has resulted in making some minor tweaks. I have a new spiffy spreadsheet template I've been using that makes it much easier to track minute details of my investments (the old one was fine for rebalancing, but wasn't very user friendly for tracking performance). I've already made some tweaks to the template and I might add a feature to track long-term vs short-term gains so I don't have to go back to my brokerage accounts to figure out tax optimization strategies. Here is my current asset allocation:

Image

The big change is I've added a category called "Global Macro" which is my more actively managed trade portfolio. Right now it is composed of my URNM trade and crypto. I still need to do the work to figure out my exit prices/strategies. I decided to categorize crypto in this category because I think that more accurately reflects it's risk/return profile for me. I have no intentions of holding my current crypto allocations through the next bear market and I'm really treating it as a trade rather than a buy and hold. I'm shooting for multi-bagger returns in my macro trades to justify the extra labor required to research and manage them.

I've also been reducing my exposure to bonds because in the current environment they aren't even maintaining my purchasing power. I'm considering shifting into TIPS and I bonds instead of the current bond fund offered as part of my TSP, because at least they somewhat keep pace with inflation. I'll need to do more reading on bond alternatives, but in the current low interest rate environment most bonds just seem like interest-free risk. I can't bank on bonds appreciating because there just isn't much room left for the US to lower rates. Additionally, towards the zero bound of interest rates, bonds and stocks are highly correlated. There are some practical difficulties with implementing this because I can only hold stocks or bonds in my TSP, so any reduction in bond allocation means increasing my equity exposure. I don't really have a way around this unless I want to liquidate some VTSAX that will generate a long term capital gains bill, which doesn't seem worth paying just to tweak my asset allocation. I still have money coming in every month from my paycheck, so I may just have to leg out of my bond positions slowly.

I'm aiming to have roughly a 50/50 balance between hawk and serpent assets, although at the moment my stock/bond allocation is over 50% of my total portfolio. For my sanity, I probably should stick with only checking my portfolio once a week and then re-balancing at the end of each month. I'm not sure that it is productive to be checking things multiple times a day, especially when my shortest trades are all months long. I'm still getting a feel for my risk appetite, but at at the moment I feel like taking on a bit more risk now since I have several years until I'll even have to consider drawing down from my portfolio. Maybe this is just irrational exuberance from the recent bull markets.


Things with DGF are going well. We had a skype date in which we worked through the NYT's 36 Questions that we both enjoyed. This week we'll do either a skype cooking date or play some kind of board/online game, then I'll be visiting her for 4 days next week. I will help her re-arrange some furniture in her house to make room for a new roommate. We talked it over and decided that it would be best if she rents out the 2nd bedroom in her house because the $6k in income she'd pocket would help her reduce the student loans she needs to take out for next year. I also think it will be good for us to learn how to function as a couple with roommates around because we might end up doing some form of househacking/community living in the future.

We also read Permission to Feel and discussed it a bit. I'm actively trying to work on nurturing my emotional side, however I found the book pretty short on actionable advice. Other than the RULER system which took up maybe 10 pages, the rest of the book was largely fluff filled with correlative data presented as causative and a thinly veiled advertisement for the author's emotional intelligence programs for schools and businesses. DGF gave it a 2/10. It could have easily been an article instead of an entire book (I guess that's probably true of most non-fiction reads these days). Up next I think we'll to work through Games People Play by Berne and then maybe the titles linked above in this thread.

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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by Scott 2 »

Games People Play - The core content was written in the mid-60's, lightly revised in the mid-90's. It's an interesting read, but as much for recognizing social progress since then, as understanding the author's transactional analysis framework.

white belt
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by white belt »

I've been thinking more about investing and trading. I'm quite concerned that I'm currently on top of Mt Stupid so I probably should just stop talking about investing related things and instead focus on just learning more. Since this is my journal and I'm trying to document my journey, I'll still post my thoughts here. I'm still working through Reilly and Brown's book and then I will read Bodie.

Over the past year and half I've listened to a lot of macroeconomics related content which has given me exposure to a variety of perspectives. Every trader has an edge; some really on specific quantitative models, some rely on intuition and sharp thinking based on years of observation, some trade momentum, some use elaborate rules based systems such as trend following, some focus on a specific niche of the market and become SMEs, and so on. There are as many trading methodologies as there are traders.

In order to make money trading, I need alpha. What could that alpha be for me? I have the following ideas floating around:

1. Climate Change/Collapse Investing

I've noticed something interesting since I spend a lot of time straddling the world of eco-thinkers* (environmentalists, permaculture, climate change) and the world of internet high finance (Fin Twit, macro thinkers, traders). The fact is, other than on these forums, I see almost no overlap of people in the venn diagram between these two worlds.

The typical eco-thinker ranges from uncomfortable with to outright hostile towards economics, financial markets, profit, money, and the like. However, many of these thinkers have spent a lot of time planning for climate change and collapse, to include valuable hands-on time doing the hard work like growing food, reducing consumption, living without fossil fuels, and so on. They understand very well the limits of the natural world and how difficult subsistence is when you can't just wave the voodoo wand of fossil fuels to pull forward resource consumption from the future. They understand the absurdity of societies structured for exponential economic growth. I suspect many opt out of the financial markets because they don't want to feel like they are making the situation worse.

On the flip side you have the high finance types. They understand that climate change is important because of trends like ESG, but beyond that they are mostly paying lip service so they can maximize profit. The techno-optimists also fall under this camp; pumping assets that they think will solve the climate change problems. They understand very well the realities of markets and money, but they can't accept that the entire models that macroeconomics and capitalism are built on cannot persevere into the future. To steal the Upton Sinclair quote, the systems which push overshoot and worsen climate change are what pays their bills. I don't see scenario where a rich fund manager is going to all of a sudden decide that the system needs to be dismantled entirely, at least not unless it's to create another system that they are also at the top of. At best, we see the wealthy and powerful dumping money into techno-optimist solutions.

Perhaps due to this dichotomy, I don't think the short or long term realities of climate change are priced in. There seems to be significant lag time because everyone is living in their own silo, which means there might be opportunity for arbitrage. We're guaranteed 1.5C and highly likely to reach 2C, so the window closes a little more everyday on the time you have to react before the masses. I don't believe the realities of this disruption are at all priced in yet.

Therefore, perhaps there is a way to play this theme. Commodities are an obvious one, but there are other possibilities like real estate, insurance, financials, tech. The ramifications of climate change will rattle through the world, but there is going to be a lot of analysis needed to predict 2nd and 3rd order effects. Of course, to be successful I need to get the timing right as well, since being right but too early doesn't help.

My ongoing uranium trade was a play on this theme in a way. I heard about it on Macrovoices and it sounded like a good opportunity just based on the demand of the current load of reactors. Additionally, I knew from my knowledge in CC spaces that nuclear provides consistent base load power to supplement alternative energy sources like wind and solar. I also knew that de-carbonization is going to require a shit ton of electricity because our economy is still structured on using a ton of energy, which the grid is not at all prepared to provide in most places. Since then, the USA has established a strategic uranium reserve, numerous reactors across the globe have had lifespans extended, and China has pledged to build 150 new reactors in the next 15 years. But maybe this is all me just patting myself on the back in hindsight and not repeatable. I certainly didn't have a solid trading strategy or philosophy outlined at the time I entered the trade.


* = I'm only referring to eco-thinkers that "get it", not the vast majority of society who thinks they can save the planet by recycling cans and driving a new Tesla.


2. Military/Warfare Tech

I still work in the military and have spent many years both as the warfighter on the ground and the one providing support to such a person, so I have a lot of domain knowledge about how technology is used to conduct warfare. However, I am not so sure I still have an edge in this unless I switch to a different position at work. I've been away from that world for too long to feel like I can make accurate predictions on the direction things are headed.

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GandK
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Re: White Belt's Military Journey to FI

Post by GandK »

This issue is tough, and advice can be dangerous. Education has got to be the beginning.

My husband and I have been FI for almost 3 years now, and traveling full time for 2. There are investment decisions we make that would be remarkably bad for a lot of other people.

Example 1: We have pensions, and have made riskier investments with our remaining retirement money than 50-ish year old people should make if they don't have something stable like fully funded pensions. Our brokerage account looks more like a mix that 25yo people might have, risk-wise.

Example 2: I have a small Roth that I trade pink sheets in, and periodically chuck half the returns I get from the pink sheet trades into TQQQ. And that account has been our highest percentage return account over these last 3 years. But I'm fully cognizant that I could lose every penny in that account, and that "trading pink sheets" is not an investment strategy. We're not living off that account, so neither of us mind.

I would never advise Joe Random who is 50 to do what we do.

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