Over the years I've shared investment advice now and then with a few JC colleagues, and I thought it would be good to distill my financial planning system into its most basic strategy. The one key thing you should know about financial planning is that it should always be informed first and foremost by the looming spectre of death. Your death will soon be at hand. It's coming. "We all have it coming, kid." The more you keep that in mind, the better things will turn out for you financially, in the end. LSD investing has a few key principles. 1. If you have or plan to have heirs, and want them to remember you fondly, then your financial planning may want to revolve around maximizing the assets that you can't take with you. In this case, you should try to picture your own funeral taking place at the side of an empty grave filled with a pile of cash, stocks, bonds, real estate, and so on. Your casket rests on top of that pile. At your funeral, your heirs will reach into that pile, removing assets. As the pile gets lower, your casket sinks slowly into the grave. Finally, all the assets have been distributed, and you will be neatly buried and forgotten. 2. If you have no heirs or don't care if they remember you fondly, then your financial planning should revolve strictly around timing your death with the exact moment you go broke. This is a difficult investment style, not for the faint of heart. To get in the right frame of mind, you should think of the remaining years of your life as a car chase. You're in the front car being chased by another car, which is being driven by the looming spectre of death. The back seat is filled with all your assets, and your job is to toss all your assets out the window in a measured, carefully timed way to try to slow down and confound your pursuer. In the end, you'll be caught --we all are-- but you can say you did everything possible to escape.
My favorite bit of financial planning I got when I was just graduating college: "Your monthly rent should not be more than 25% of your month's paychecks." I live in NYC. Good luck with that.
New York City is great for any investment style, because there's no upward limit to how much money you can make there, and also no upward limit to how much you can spend to live there.
Spend money you don't have on a lavish wedding and trips to disneyland. Then post on the JCC about how you don't have money
The book I'm currently reading has a lot of information about bequeathing properly. It's got some tragicomic stories in it, like the widow who finds out her husband's meticulously cared for coin collection was worthless. Also there's the brother and sister who each get an expensive work of art from the parents' collection but due to changing fashions the brother made a million dollars selling his while the sister got a paltry two hundred thousand. Ah inheritance whackiness
I would be remiss if I didn't promote the value of being well insured and then dying a horrible accidental death or succumbing to a terminal illness. Also, if you dislike your children, you need to arrange for your surviving spouse to quickly remarry upon your death, preferably a much younger partner who will help immensely in squandering the estate before the kids can inherit anything.
Expensive liquors to fill the empty void in your existence can really pile on the expenses. Consider switching to cheaper grain alcohols, or mouthwash.
Let's not forget that you can 'gift' $14,000 (I think), $28,000 per couple, to any number of individuals. So you can spread out a lot your kids' inheritance in a short amount of time without even making them pay taxes. This is a two'fer on depriving your rightful heirs because all these people they know will be talking about how generous you were for years.
When I'm a little older, I'm going to tell all of my friends and living relatives how I don't have kids to leave my money and assets to, and I don't know what I'm going to do with it. They will suck up to me and do whatever I want them to do in hopes of being the lucky inheritor. Meanwhile, I will laugh behind their backs knowing that one of two scenarios will actually happen. Either I will not have money or assets in the first place, or I will have lots and blow it all travelling the world and partying until I die of an overdose or some crazy adventure in some foreign country.