Asymmetric Bets and Infinite Returns

byoscope

It’s been a fantastic past ten days, headlined by my brother’s 30th birthday with our family meeting up in Englewood, Florida. We even took bronze in a pickleball tournament… Something I thought I would never say.

I’ve had some stress with thoughts of getting my fiancé to the US in the absence of having a “real” job, so I’ll probably need to address that soon but things are looking up. I sent one final check to the former owners of the Michigan properties. I will be debt free on all three Michigan properties…

I actually don’t feel all that rushed to get more money to live off of but do feel an urge to get a job to shift cash into Bitcoin. I feel this could be one of the great shifts in history coming. Or at least a great asymmetric bet.

10-day BS Refresh

Analysis Intelligence

The Opening NW in the 11/30/2020 column is the closing NW from the 11/20/2020 column. The green numbers represent estimated changes to my net worth in those categories (green numbers in 11/30 column are the changes that I estimated on 11/20). The white “Gain from” rows show how the actual numbers turned out compared to my original estimates, ten days prior. Stocks were the big driver from ten days prior. I technically recorded this on the 28th when Bitcoin was at 17,816. With Bitcoins recent swings I wouldn’t be surprised if this closing number is off by a couple of thousand by the 30th.

Crystal Ball

Per usual the tenth of the month is characterized by the loan paydown. Unfortunately this time my cash will be going down by more as I have one vacancy, that had been renting for $650/month plus utilities.

Going forward the pattern will be changed because I have finally, after two focused years, paid off my Michigan properties. I feel like doing a DEBT FREE SCREAM on these! So now instead of sending cash each month to pay down the principal I’ll be able use that money to live off of, which is quite handy while I don’t have a traditional job.

Stig Brodersen, of The Investors Podcast, was recently interviewed on The BiggerPockets Podcast show and he went through characteristics of billionaires. One of them was, funny enough, that all wanted to be millionaires, not billionaires. Another was that those very successful people are constantly making asymmetric bets. This in essence means that a possible outcome may be negative but another possible outcome may be very very positive and bordering on outrageously positive.

Think asking a very pretty girl out on a date. The worst case is a brief moment of thinking, “oh schucks”, but the possible future happiness payoff is very high.

I have been thinking about some of those points a lot and have been thinking that my books, blog, and our podcast are all those things. The worst case is still very good! I’ve learned things about publishing and organizing a book. I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with my brother discussing fun and interesting books that will help us, and hopefully others, down the road (unsurprisingly another characteristic of those billionaires was that they’re voracious readers!). I’ve gotten to meet cool people while expanding my network from doing these actuarial discussions and improve my public speaking skills. Monetarily it’s even starting to payoff.

Since 15 Weeks to Pass an Actuarial Exam was released, about two months ago, I’ve made about $200 in royalties, and I think I’m starting to see a compounding effect. I’m getting more messages on LinkedIn and Facebook and after not selling a Make Better Bets book in months I got an ebook sale and have an hunch that it came from someone who bought one of the actuarial goal journals, or heard me speak.

Specifically on the actuarial goal journal I only spent about forty hours on it and paid a cover designer $50 to make the cover. So I’ve already broke even on this venture and whatever comes in the future is pure gravy. Infinite Returns! Well maybe not infinite but very high.

Make Better Bets has been less monetarily successful thus far. That book took me hundreds of hours to create, organize, and edit. It hasn’t brought much in terms of royalties (yet) but the learnings from that book creation are already paying dividends.

Ideas for increasing NW

  • Start analyzing how affiliate programs really work.
  • Learn about Salesforce
  • After my UNC-Charlotte presentation last week I’m now scheduled to give a presentation to the International Association of Black Actuaries (IABA) on Dec 2nd. It will be targeted to students sitting for exams P and FM (Probability and Financial Mathematics) in the upcoming months. I will try to post a link to that presentation.
  • I’ve had a friend ask me multiple times now to write macros for her. I was able to help her again last night and maybe should keep this idea open for as a way to help people and make some good money.
  • I’m now working on a couple more journal ideas to sell. If you haven’t noticed I’m a big fan of journaling.
  • Seriously considering taking out my liquid trading account to put all into Bitcoin. More analysis to come.
  • Instead of relying solely on Amazon to sell my book I’m thinking to sell the books on my website as well.

Notes:

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