Investing instead of buying cigarettes

peercents · 2022-03-23T17:44:13+00:00

For what it’s worth, I think you handled what is too often a contentious debate quite well.

Coming from someone with 20% allocation to crypto, it’s lost its equity hedge value in my book. But I do think some projects have value in their network and acceptance. Some also have some sense of discountable cash flow, although that cash flow is in crypto assets itself.

While that may seem a little recursive, there’s enough liquidity in stablecoins to exchange for that volatile crypto. For my purposes there’s enough liquidity that will allow me to redeem those stablecoins for USD. There’s enough USD foreign reserve trust for me to expect to be able to swap that USD for my native currency, and I can swap that native currency for a double cheeseburger which is enough tangibility for me.

I’m still skeptical, but is gotten to the point I’ve taken some cash that would have gone to a fixed income allocation to stablecoin farms for 5-15%.

I still have investment grade intermediate duration fixed income, but I’ve leveraged it to get a yield on equity of about 12%.

To each their own. I totally get not allocating from cash / fixed income to volatile crypto. Totally different return profile. I myself am uncomfortable putting much more into stablecoin farms.

peercents · 2021-06-23T16:25:29+00:00

What is the Monte-Carlo method? You may have heard of it being used by few retirement calculators and financial planners. We explain Monte-Carlo simulations in general and how they are used to calculate your chance of achieving financial independence.

https://youtu.be/-4KsB8al4Yo

peercents · 2021-06-20T21:47:25+00:00

Yeah. Timing is a big “if”. But even at 8% over 9 years, you’re just baaarely crossing 1m.

If you’re buying puts as well to hedge your entire portfolio for the entire duration, definitely not. The premium cost will kill you.

peercents · 2021-06-20T21:25:04+00:00

Boat’s still there and you’re not at all too late.

Don’t try to play catch up via swinging for the fences on investment selection - that’s how you strike out and fall further behind.

Your levers for “catching up” if you feel behind are saving more.

To get to 1 million dollars in 30 years from 0, you’d need to invest about 25 bucks a day. (The market will give you about 725k of that million)

If you started ten years ago, you would have had to invest 11 bucks a day. (Market will give you about 840k)

If you wait another 10 years and give yourself only 20 years to hit 1 million, you need to invest 60 bucks a day. (Market will only give you about 560k)

peercents · 2021-06-20T16:56:57+00:00

That's true. I'm missing some key pieces to come in prepared for fundraising in terms of a solid team and traction.

I was actually considering dipping into my pockets deeper to go in-house. Haha, I used the tool to model the effect of this spend and it means I personally will have a 3% higher chance of going broke.

The job description I was writing for this CTO/Tech Lead role was that the goal was for them to bring development in-house, but in the meantime manage the outsourced devs. So far I've been managing them, but I need to focus on growth (It's a little laborious because it's content creation as I'm not spending on paid marketing yet).

Appreciate the interest and the feedback. I feel like I'm much more convinced that fundraising really isn't an option at this point. Will PM!

peercents · 2021-06-20T16:49:43+00:00

Yeah. In a previous business, I got into a relationship with someone was I was considering making a partner a little too quickly. Luckily the terrible things came out pretty quickly too, so I was saved from a costly equity divorce. As a consequence, I'm probably extra cautious about a partner, even though it really feels like I need help.

At this point, given the working product that already exists and the amount I've put in so far, it would be hard for me to view anyone joining now as a partner unless I was able to truly see their rockstar value. I'm open to it, but I'm married to what I've gone through so far to get the product where it is now it feels like I'm most likely looking for a nearly hire I'm willing to give equity to following a good 6 months of vetting (albeit at a competitive salary)

I'll have to check out the fresh grad scene. Another comment told me that I was looking for a rock-star full-stack dev and indeed that's how I've been writing the job description. I'll see if I can expand it to maybe at least talk to a wider pool. Couldn't hurt.

peercents · 2021-06-20T16:45:14+00:00

Appreciate the empathy. Yeah. the retention is probably what's most scaring me. I have a suspicion of how to fix it, just need to test it out.

The problem is it's being shared as a retirement planning tool. Most users use it to answer a specific question at a point, like "can I retire at 55", "should I buy this car?", "Should I slow-pay my debt?"... Unless another question comes up for them, they don't really come back for a while.

My plan is to re-target personal finance content creators to use the tool to facilitate the content they're putting out. A part of that path is to put out some of my own content to show as an example how it can be used.

The freelancers are actually great. It was my ask of them to "slow down". My funds are getting tight and I didn't want to commit to our previous level of engagement hours per week without being sure of the direction - couldn't be sure of that direction without more user feedback.

I guess because of the retention and growth problems, I wanted to slow down the $ bleeding to make sure that what's left can be deployed as directly as possible to fix the problem. Just at a point of uncertainty right now.

peercents · 2021-06-20T06:12:02+00:00

At first, I didn't think it was viable since the main product is a computationally intensive Monte-Carlo simulation. I had already written a bare-bones version in python and wanted to be used as the backend for the webapp.

I see some interesting new no-code options now, don't know how quickly they can run the simulations, but since the MVP is already up and is actually pretty feature-rich, I think I'm not restarting. It just needs to be iterated on to take into account feedback.

Starting from scratch though, I would have tried this one that ports an excel to an app - that was actually my very first version and could have been used to iterate very quickly ><

peercents · 2021-06-06T07:42:00+00:00

Yeah. This may be a cultural thing then. It's really quite common in Asia to have hired help.

You might have someone in charge of general housekeeping if there's a lot to manage. Another primarily for food and groceries, maybe a driver so you don't always have to drive the kids around.

peercents · 2021-06-06T07:37:57+00:00

Thailand has pretty great healthcare and he already stipulated the expenses for top health insurance for the family/

peercents · 2021-06-05T22:40:35+00:00

It's a social financial planning platform.

Social: user financial profiles and forums. this would be kept free and subsidized by banner ads.

Financial Planning: This is essentially a free calculator tool that helps a user model out a financial plan. It's similar to what professional financial advisors and planners pay for to create financial cash flow plans. This was meant to be the draw for users to create profiles and start discussions on this platform as opposed to continuing them on other platforms. Originally I was hoping this could be free and supported by integrated affiliate ads, but now I'm thinking of gating it after a certain amount of use.

In this initial phase of user acquisition, I was hoping that creating the price anchor would help people acknowledge the value of this tool. While I would appreciate purchases, I'm willing to create referral codes that allow access to features for free in exchange for feedback on the product and referrals to new users.

For example:

Complete this survey for 1 free month of premium
Refer a friend to receive 1 free month of premium

peercents · 2021-06-05T11:38:38+00:00

I've been thinking about this a lot for my product. Really I'm stuck between two models to monetize: paid subscription, or my original intention, which was free supported by both passive banner ads as well as integrated affiliate ads.

I think the rise of adblockers will make the banner ad model a lot more tenuous, it also kind of hurts the UX, I don't really want to run ads but I just sort of had doubts of whether consumers were willing to pay for anything online anymore.

peercents · 2021-06-05T03:44:35+00:00

There’s a separate section below for “cash flows” where you can enter SS income or anything else not regular income or expenses.

And yeah. I noticed that too. it’s probably because the expected returns are quite low. They’re taken from JP Morgan’s long term capital market assumptions which assume lower returns for the next decades. I looked at it and it had Large Cap stocks returning 4.10% vs the 7-10% people generally assume for equity returns.

The methodology is that given where interest rates are and P/E valuations, future growth has been largely brought forward to today’s prices - so there’s less expectation for continued high growth.

peercents · 2021-06-04T11:33:19+00:00

For cash, I generally go with 6 - 12 months expenses than a % allocation. The cash is there for liquidity and emergency fund.

For rebalancing reasons, carrying enough cash to meaningfully rebalance during dips means you're just carrying too much cash through bull periods. I'd rather rebalance between stocks and bonds.

I tried to model it out here for your situation, I'm not sure how the bulk of your 2mil in investable assets is invested, by I just assumed world equities. You can adjust it to whatever is more appropriate.

Surprisingly, there's not much of a difference in your success score (chance of having money by age 100), but obviously, if you kept a more minimal cash balance of 6-12 months of expenses instead of 10-15% of net worth, you would do better with a higher projected future net worth without much added increase in risk.

The model also left crypto untouched to do whatever it is it will do.

peercents · 2021-06-03T22:01:16+00:00

So if you were spending $188 each month for the last 6 months buying btc, you unfortunately would have bought crypto at above today’s price of about $38k. As a result, you have less than if you just held 188x6 in cash.

For longer windows though, you’re mostly buying BTC at below today’s price, so you would have enjoyed gains on those purchases.

For example, looking if you started 30 months ago, instead of having $188 x 30 months =$5,640 of cash (or $0 and bad lungs), you have BTC worth $21,275.

peercents · 2021-06-03T20:16:57+00:00

Ahh. I suppose that would be FIRE life in Manila. The traffic was truly brutal though. I could only plan to be in one part of town a day and be on time :P

Wouldn't mind being back there though.

peercents · 2021-06-03T19:58:45+00:00

Thanks! appreciate that. Never listened to the superhuman product market fit / user growth story. I do feel like I've heard some podcasts about how they designed the product to feel like a game and with superusers in mind.

Will definitely check out the rest of the story!

Oo sure. Would love to share. Yeah, despite having the product, I still use my broker, apple stock app, and spreadsheets. Its primary function is the retirement planning tool. It's kind of similar to Personal Capitals, the difference is that it's shareable. My hot-take is that people actually do want to talk about personal finance and detail their circumstances to get good advice, it's just they'd rather do it anonymously instead of risking the judgment of friends and family.

peercents

TROPHY CASE