Nearly 75% of Parents Help Their Children Financially
From creditcards.com, December 11, 2017, comes the study that nearly three in four parents with adult children say they help their grown offspring with finances. Most of the parents (84%) help with living expenses. Are we setting up future generations for problems? Probably so. Analyst Matt Schulz of creditcards.com says, “It’s natural for parents to want to help their kids, but one of the greatest gifts a parent can give to their children is teaching them how to manage finances and to live within their means.”
Now You See It, Now You Don’t
Bloomberg, March 7, 2018, reports the story of Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber who lastn year sold $1.4 billion of stock and now has started an investment fund. Must be nice to value something that large that loses money. Last year Uber, according to Forbes, lost $3.2 billion. This is a company that loses more money each year it is in business. Shades of Bernie Ebbers. And does anyone remember MCI WorldCom?
This Week Magazine, December 29, 2017: Life Beyond Technology
“Getting my attention back” is the story Craig Mod writes about technology sapping everyone’s attention. There are a thousand ways to start your day that don’t begin with looking at your phone, and yet so few of us choose to do so. Mod spent 28 days with no cell phone or Internet at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Lynchburg. It’s a great story about who we are and what we’re really doing in life. People live on the Internet and fail to do their own thinking about the world. For the full article, go to backchannel.com.
Lateness at Meetings
Pilita Clark from the Financial Times discusses lateness as annoying, rude and a sign of the quality of the person. There are an estimated 37 million business meetings each day in the U.S., and some 45% of them probably start late, says Steven Rogelberg, a U.S. professor who has studied meeting lateness. When Larry Page became CEO at Google in 2011, he cut all meeting times by 20%. On a personal note, I would get rid of pointless meetings. Apple’s Steve Jobs was tough on this issue and made sure that if you were there in a meeting, you needed to be there and not involved in some networking, talk-around time.
Who’s Going to Buy Our U.S. Bonds?
For starters, maybe everyone else in the world is going to buy them. Some facts from Oxbow: Interest rates on the German 10-year bond is 0.62%, the Italian 10-year bond is 1.97%, the Portuguese 10-year bond is 1.85%, the Japanese 10-year bond is 0.04% and the U.S. 10-year bond is 2.87%. I ask: Which one would you buy?
Best Bet/Worst Bet
The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2018, issue discusses with Sallie Krawcheck (former high-profile leader with Citigroup and Merrill Lynch) her best money moves and worst. She cashed out $9.5 million in Citigroup stock at the high in 2004 at around $40 per share, a decision frowned upon by other management at that time. She bought a vacation home in the Hamptons that has done well. Stock is the equivalent of $7.50 today. Then she was asked about her worst. She referred to her $1 million investment in Bank of America. That ended up being greater than a -50% loss. The takeaway … It pays to diversify.
Life Expectancy Down for Second Year in Row
The January 6 Economist magazine reports that U.S. life expectancy fell for the second year in a row, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Before 2016, the last time it fell was 1962–63. Statistics suggest that this alarming trend is caused largely by the epidemic of opioid addiction. The steepest rise in mortality was among 25- to 34-year-olds. Deaths from drug overdoses per 100,000 in that group shot up by 50% from 2014 to 2016. Hopefully, we can all help to overcome this moving forward.
A Good Read
Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More by Morten Hansen. This is a great book on priorities in business or other organizations. In other words, it describes how to accomplish more in less time. The common practice among top performers is selectivity. They select the most important items and totally obsess over them. It’s a good read.
All the best,
Ted Oakley
Link: Download T.O. Insights Here
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