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perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.
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Barack Obama
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Consider a more extreme example than the casino experiment. Assume a collection of people play Russian roulette a single time for a million dollars—this is the central story in Fooled by Randomness. About five out of six will make money. If someone used a standard cost-benefit analysis, he would have claimed that one has an 83.33 percent chance of gains, for an “expected” average return per shot of $833,333. But if you keep playing Russian roulette, you will end up in the cemetery. Your expected return is … not computable.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
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When America began, government cost every citizen $20 (in [2003] money) per year. Taxes rose during wars, but for most of the life of America, spending never exceeded a few hundred dollars per person. During World War II, government got much bigger. It was supposed to shrink again after the war but never did. Instead, it just kept growing. Now the federal government costs every man, woman, and child an average of $10,000 per year.
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John Stossel (Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...)
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Investment Owner’s Contract I, _____________ ___________________, hereby state that I am an investor who is seeking to accumulate wealth for many years into the future. I know that there will be many times when I will be tempted to invest in stocks or bonds because they have gone (or “are going”) up in price, and other times when I will be tempted to sell my investments because they have gone (or “are going”) down. I hereby declare my refusal to let a herd of strangers make my financial decisions for me. I further make a solemn commitment never to invest because the stock market has gone up, and never to sell because it has gone down. Instead, I will invest $______.00 per month, every month, through an automatic investment plan or “dollar-cost averaging program,” into the following mutual fund(s) or diversified portfolio(s): _________________________________, _________________________________, _________________________________. I will also invest additional amounts whenever I can afford to spare the cash (and can afford to lose it in the short run). I hereby declare that I will hold each of these investments continually through at least the following date (which must be a minimum of 10 years after the date of this contact): _________________ _____, 20__. The only exceptions allowed under the terms of this contract are a sudden, pressing need for cash, like a health-care emergency or the loss of my job, or a planned expenditure like a housing down payment or a tuition bill. I am, by signing below, stating my intention not only to abide by the terms of this contract, but to re-read this document whenever I am tempted to sell any of my investments. This contract is valid only when signed by at least one witness, and must be kept in a safe place that is easily accessible for future reference.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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By the 1960s, the price had fallen to $8 or so per transistor. By 1972, the year of my birth, the average cost of a transistor had fallen to 15 cents,6 and the semiconductor industry was churning out between 100 billion and 1 trillion transistors a year. By 2014, humanity produced 250 billion billion transistors annually: 25 times the number of stars in the Milky Way. Each second, the world’s ‘fabs’ – the specialised factories that turn out transistors – spewed out 8 trillion transistors.7 The cost of a transistor had dropped to a few billionths of a dollar.
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Azeem Azhar (Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology)
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the audience, unaccustomed to any of this, went wild: America! The high point of this whirring, pale-blue era was 1960. The average American earned more than 5,000 dollars a year; a newly built house cost 12,500 dollars, a car 2,600, a pair of shoes 13, a litre of gasoline 6.7 cents. The tail fins on the new Cadillac Eldorado were the largest and sharpest ever seen. In April, the world’s first weather satellite was launched. In the Philippines, the Japanese government tried in vain to coax the last two Japanese soldiers out of the jungle – they refused to believe the war was over. Xerox put the first commercial photocopier on the market. Chubby Checker started a new dance craze, the twist. Frank Sinatra, cigarette in hand, stood and sang in a short film called Music for
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Geert Mak (In America: Travels with John Steinbeck)
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Convinced that struggle was the crucible of character, Rockefeller faced a delicate task in raising his children. He wanted to accumulate wealth while inculcating in them the values of his threadbare boyhood. The first step in saving them from extravagance was keeping them ignorant of their father’s affluence. Until they were adults, Rockefeller’s children never visited his office or refineries, and even then they were accompanied by company officials, never Father. At home, Rockefeller created a make-believe market economy, calling Cettie the “general manager” and requiring the children to keep careful account books.16They earned pocket money by performing chores and received two cents for killing flies, ten cents for sharpening pencils, five cents per hour for practicing their musical instruments, and a dollar for repairing vases. They were given two cents per day for abstaining from candy and a dime bonus for each consecutive day of abstinence. Each toiled in a separate patch of the vegetable garden, earning a penny for every ten weeds they pulled up. John Jr. got fifteen cents an hour for chopping wood and ten cents per day for superintending paths. Rockefeller took pride in training his children as miniature household workers. Years later, riding on a train with his thirteen-year-old daughter, he told a traveling companion, “This little girl is earning money already. You never could imagine how she does it. I have learned what my gas bills should average when the gas is managed with care, and I have told her that she can have for pin money all that she will save every month on this amount, so she goes around every night and keeps the gas turned down where it is not needed.”17 Rockefeller never tired of preaching economy and whenever a package arrived at home, he made a point of saving the paper and string. Cettie was equally vigilant. When the children clamored for bicycles, John suggested buying one for each child. “No,” said Cettie, “we will buy just one for all of them.” “But, my dear,” John protested, “tricycles do not cost much.” “That is true,” she replied. “It is not the cost. But if they have just one they will learn to give up to one another.”18 So the children shared a single bicycle. Amazingly enough, the four children probably grew up with a level of creature comforts not that far above what Rockefeller had known as a boy.
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Ron Chernow (Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.)
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Do the math. America allows about one million two hundred thousand abortions per year. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the average cost of an abortion in 2001, the last year for which data was provided by aborters, was $468.00, so by now the average cost exceeds $600. Multiply the number of abortions times the costs of an abortion. That exercise will yield a total of ‘blood money’ every year in America of close to a billion dollars ($1,000,000,000.00).
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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Specifically, they argue that digital technology drives inequality in three different ways. First, by replacing old jobs with ones requiring more skills, technology has rewarded the educated: since the mid-1970s, salaries rose about 25% for those with graduate degrees while the average high school dropout took a 30% pay cut.45 Second, they claim that since the year 2000, an ever-larger share of corporate income has gone to those who own the companies as opposed to those who work there—and that as long as automation continues, we should expect those who own the machines to take a growing fraction of the pie. This edge of capital over labor may be particularly important for the growing digital economy, which tech visionary Nicholas Negroponte defines as moving bits, not atoms. Now that everything from books to movies and tax preparation tools has gone digital, additional copies can be sold worldwide at essentially zero cost, without hiring additional employees. This allows most of the revenue to go to investors rather than workers, and helps explain why, even though the combined revenues of Detroit’s “Big 3” (GM, Ford and Chrysler) in 1990 were almost identical to those of Silicon Valley’s “Big 3” (Google, Apple, Facebook) in 2014, the latter had nine times fewer employees and were worth thirty times more on the stock market.47 Figure 3.5: How the economy has grown average income over the past century, and what fraction of this income has gone to different groups. Before the 1970s, rich and poor are seen to all be getting better off in lockstep, after which most of the gains have gone to the top 1% while the bottom 90% have on average gained close to nothing.46 The amounts have been inflation-corrected to year-2017 dollars. Third, Erik and collaborators argue that the digital economy often benefits superstars over everyone else.
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Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
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When people have lost money in common stocks or mutual funds, they often face a dilemma. Should they stick with their losing investments, increase their stake (perhaps through dollar cost averaging), or move their holdings to an entirely different investment vehicle? Virtually the same dilemma confronts people who are dissatisfied with their current jobs, careers, or marriages. They must decide whether it is wise to continue in these situations or start anew with different firms, occupations, or partners.
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Barry M. Staw
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The average adult slave cost about 1,200 dollars in 1860, the equivalent to about 24,000 dollars today, so the 5,500 enslaved people of Augusta were worth over 6 million dollars to their owners, equal to 120 million dollars today.
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Edward L. Ayers (The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America)
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Dollar cost averaging naturally provides steady employment for fund managers and most everyone else associated with the stock market. Regular contributions are therefore sold to the public as something that is beneficial. In reality, dollar cost averaging is a double-edged sword. Proponents usually imagine a scenario of an initial market decline that recovers. In this case, even though the starting and ending price are the same, the average cost is lower, thus resulting in an overall investment gain. Now consider the scenario of a rising market that subsequently declines. In this case, the average cost is higher than the start and ending price, and the investor will have lost money. In fact, given that markets rise much more slowly than they drop, a dollar cost averaging investor is more likely to make an entry and invest larger amounts while the market is rising than during its decline. At its best, dollar cost averaging provides no benefit, but regardless, dollar cost averaging is an excellent way of providing steady work for Wall Street, which collects fees and commissions to invest the steady stream of money from workers.
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Jacob Lund Fisker (Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence)
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The third is the device of “dollar-cost averaging,” which means simply that the practitioner invests in common stocks the same number
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Best Budget Travel Destinations Ever
Are you looking for a cheap flight this year? Travel + Leisure received a list of the most affordable locations this year from one of the top travel search engines in the world, Kayak.
Kayak then considered the top 100 locations with the most affordable average flight prices, excluding outliers due to things like travel restrictions and security issues.
To save a lot of money, go against the grain.
Mexico
Unsurprisingly, Mexico is at the top of the list of the cheapest places to travel in 2022. The United States has long been seen as an accessible and affordable vacation destination; low-cost direct flights are common.
San José del Cabo (in Baja California Sur), Puerto Vallarta, and Cancun are the three destinations within Mexico with the least expensive flights, with January being the most economical month to visit each. Fortunately, January is a glorious month in each of these beachside locales, with warm, balmy weather and an abundance of vibrant hues, textures, and flavors to chase away the winter blues.
Looking for a city vacation rather than a beach vacation? Mexico City, which boasts a diverse collection of museums and a rich Aztec heritage, is another accessible option in the country. May is the cheapest month to travel there.
Chicago, Illinois
Who wants to go to Chicago in the winter? Once you learn about all the things to do in this Midwest winter wonderland and the savings you can get in January, you'll be convinced. At Maggie Daley Park, spend the afternoon ice skating before warming up with some deep-dish pizza.
Colombia
Colombia's fascinating history, vibrant culture, and mouthwatering cuisine make it a popular travel destination. It is also inexpensive compared to what many Americans are used to paying for items like a fresh arepa and a cup of Colombian coffee.
The cheapest month of the year to fly to Bogotá, the capital city, is February. The Bogota Botanical Garden, founded in 1955 and home to almost 20,000 plants, is meticulously maintained, and despite the region's chilly climate, strolling through it is not difficult. The entrance fee is just over $1 USD.
In January, travel to the port city of Cartagena on the country's Caribbean coast. The majority of visitors discover that exploring the charming streets on foot is sufficient to make their stay enjoyable.
Tennessee's Music City
There's a reason why bachelorette parties and reunions of all kinds are so popular in Music City: it's easy to have fun without spending a fortune. There is no fee to visit a mural, hot chicken costs only a few dollars, and Honky Tonk Highway is lined with free live music venues. The cheapest month to book is January.
New York City, New York
Even though New York City isn't known for being a cheap vacation destination, you'll find the best deals if you go in January. Even though the city never sleeps, the cold winter months are the best time for you to visit and take advantage of the lower demand for flights and hotel rooms. In addition, New York City offers a wide variety of free activities.
Canada
Not only does our neighbor Mexico provide excellent deals, but the majority of Americans can easily fly to Canada for an affordable getaway.
In Montréal, Quebec, you must try the steamé, which is the city's interpretation of a hot dog and is served steamed in a side-loading bun (which is also steamed). It's the perfect meal to eat in the middle of February when travel costs are at their lowest. Best of all, hot dogs are inexpensive and delicious as well as filling.
The most affordable month to visit Toronto, Ontario is February. Even though the weather may make you wary, the annual Toronto Light Festival, which is completely free, is held in February in the charming and historic Distillery District. Another excellent choice at this time is the $5 Bentway Skate Trail under the Gardiner Expressway overpass.
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Ovva
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Historian Francis Russell noted that inadequate working conditions and rising prices both frightened and galvanized workers. “Wherever one turned, in industry or transportation or public service, there seemed to be a strike or threatened strike,” he said. “To add to the malaise, prices, instead of falling, continued to rise. The value of the 1914 dollar had dropped to only forty-five cents. Food costs had gone up 84 percent, clothes, 114 percent. For the average American family, the cost of living was double what it had been five years earlier, and income had lagged behind. Professional classes, from clergymen and professors to clerks, state and city employees, firemen and police, found themselves worse off than at any time since the Civil War.
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Stephen Puleo (Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919)
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Watson knew that the lien system merely provided the shackles of the farmer’s economic slavery. It was only the machinery of exploitation. How was it that cotton had fallen from a dollar a pound at the close of the War to an average of twenty cents in the ‘seventies, nine cents in the ‘eighties, and seven cents in the ‘nineties—a level below the cost of production—and had stayed there?
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C. Vann Woodward (Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel)
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The seminal paper in the field was published in 1991 by William Sharpe, whose theories underpinned the original creation of the index fund, and was bluntly titled “The Arithmetic of Active Management.”16 This expanded on Sharpe’s earlier work, and addressed the suggestion that the index investing trend that was starting to gain ground at the time was a mere “fad.” The paper articulated what Sharpe saw as two iron rules that must hold true over time: The return on the average actively managed dollar will equal that of a dollar managed passively before costs, and after costs the return on that actively managed dollar will be less than that of a passively managed dollar. In other words, mathematically the market represents the average returns, and for every investor who outperforms the market someone must do worse. Given that index funds charge far less than traditional funds, over time the average passive investor must do better than the average active one. Other academics have later quibbled with aspects of Sharpe’s 1991 paper, with Lasse Heje Pedersen’s “Sharpening the Arithmetic of Active Management” the most prominent example. In this 2016 paper, Pedersen points out that Sharpe’s assertions rest on some crucial assumptions, such as that the “market portfolio” never actually changes. But in reality, what constitutes “the market” is in constant flux. This means that active managers can at least theoretically on average outperform it, and they perform a valuable service to the health of a markets-based economy by doing so. Nonetheless, Pedersen stresses that this should not necessarily be construed as a full-throated defense of active management. “I think that low-cost index funds is one of the most investor-friendly inventions in finance and this paper should not be used as an excuse by active managers who charge high fees while adding little or no value,” he wrote.17 “My arithmetic shows that active management can add value in aggregate, but whether it actually does, and how much, are empirical questions.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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we examined return on investment for communication expenditures for “most-excellent” and “least-excellent” programs. 6 In the survey, CEOs were asked to estimate benefits that their organizations received from the dollars or pounds invested in communication. If the CEO said the organization received one dollar back for each dollar spent on communication, then communication benefits were even with costs. If two dollars in benefits were received for each communication dollar spent, then communication provided the organization with a positive return on investment. The CEO's evaluation of return on investment is, admittedly, subjective. But consider this: The CEO's judgments about costs and benefits are the very judgments that will determine if your budget and staff increase or decrease next year! Further, no other manager in the organization has the same vantage point as the CEO. The average return on investment from the CEOs in organizations with most-excellent communication programs was $2.66 for every dollar invested in communication. In contrast, CEOs of organizations with least-excellent communication programs reported only a $1.46 average return on investment for each dollar spent on communication. CEOs with most-excellent communication programs—as defined by the Excellence Study and as isolated in the Excellence Factor—see greater return on investment for communication expenditures than do CEOs with least-excellent programs.
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David M. Dozier (Manager's Guide to Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management (Routledge Communication Series))
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Tough times brought on by the Gulf War were testing such assumptions, forcing us to consider our response. We needed to come up with new ideas, do more with less, make short-term gains through greater efficiency, and prepare for long-term gains. That meant cutting every dollar possible in overhead and procedures while maintaining or boosting spending in three vital competitive areas. Number one was product quality. World leadership demanded that we maintain world-class quality, and recession is generally a period when material and labor prices are lowest and room occupancies are down. So we renovated and refurbished at such normally busy properties as the Inn on the Park in London and The Pierre in New York at a time when revenue would be little affected and customers least inconvenienced. That meant we were spending when others were retrenching. We had followed that strategy in 1981-82, and the rebound from that recession had given us nine years of steady growth. I thought the odds were in our favor to score the same way again. The second area was marketing. It’s tempting during recession to cut back on consumer advertising. At the start of each of the last three recessions, the growth of spending on such advertising had slowed by an average of 27 percent. But consumer studies of those recessions had showed that companies that didn’t cut their ads had, in the recovery, captured the most market share. So we didn’t cut our ad budget. In fact, we raised it modestly to gain brand recognition, which continued advertising sustains. As studies show, it’s much easier to sustain momentum than restart it. Third, we eased the workload and reduced costs by simplifying reporting methods. We set up a new system that allowed each hotel to recalculate its forecast, with minimal input, to year’s end, then send it in electronically along with a brief monthly commentary.
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Isadore Sharp (Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy)
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You can reduce risk by building up your investments slowly with regular, periodic investments over time. Investing regular amounts monthly or quarterly will ensure that you put some of your money to work during favorable periods, when prices are relatively low. Investment advisers call this technique “dollar-cost averaging.” With equal dollar investments over time, the investor buys fewer shares when prices are high and more shares when prices are low. It won’t eliminate risk but it will ensure that you don’t buy your entire portfolio at temporarily inflated prices. The
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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And you must have both the cash and the confidence to continue making the periodic investments even when the sky is the darkest. No matter how scary the financial news, no matter how difficult it is to see any signs of optimism, you must not interrupt the automatic-pilot nature of the program. Because if you do, you will lose the benefit of buying at least some of your shares after a sharp market decline when they are for sale at low-end prices. Dollar-cost averaging will give you this bargain: Your average price per share will be lower than the average price at which you bought shares. Why? Because you’ll buy more shares at low prices and fewer at high prices.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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The average doctor in a high-risk practice like surgery or obstetrics is sued about once every six years. Seventy percent of the time, the suit is either dropped by the plaintiff or won by the doctor in court. But the cost of defense is high, and when doctors lose, the average jury verdict is half a million dollars. General
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Atul Gawande (Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance)
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Thus far Lucas had spent $473,000 of his own money on The Star Wars. He knew this dessert would take far more ingredients than could be bought for $8.3 million. That was a fairly low figure; the average studio comedy at the time, with no special effects, cost around $20 million. How on Earth could Lucas realize his vision on that budget?
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Chris Taylor (How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise)
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As Cochran recalls in a blog post he wrote about his experiment for the Harvard Business Review, these simple statistics got him thinking about the rest of his company. Just how much time were employees of Atlantic Media spending moving around information instead of focusing on the specialized tasks they were hired to perform? Determined to answer this question, Cochran gathered company-wide statistics on e-mails sent per day and the average number of words per e-mail. He then combined these numbers with the employees’ average typing speed, reading speed, and salary. The result: He discovered that Atlantic Media was spending well over a million dollars a year to pay people to process e-mails, with every message sent or received tapping the company for around ninety-five cents of labor costs. “A ‘free and frictionless’ method of communication,” Cochran summarized, “had soft costs equivalent to procuring a small company Learjet.” Tom Cochran’s experiment yielded an interesting result about the literal cost of a seemingly harmless behavior. But the real importance of this story is the experiment itself, and in particular, its complexity.
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Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
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PROFESSOR’S TEASER Here is an interesting teaser from Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw, in a blog post entitled ‘A quick note on a universal basic income’.25 Consider an economy in which average income is $50,000 but with much income inequality. To provide a social safety net, two possible policies are proposed. Which would you prefer? — A universal transfer of $10,000 to every person, financed by a 20-percent flat tax on income. — A means-tested transfer of $10,000. The full amount goes to someone without any income. The transfer is then phased out: You lose 20 cents of it for every dollar of income you earn. These transfers are financed by a tax of 20 percent on income above $50,000. I have seen smart people argue as follows: Policy A is crazy. Why should Bill Gates get a government transfer? He doesn’t need it, and we would need to raise more taxes to pay for it. Policy B is more progressive. It targets the transfer to those who really need it, and the transfer is financed by a smaller tax increase levied only on those with above-average incomes. But here is the rub. The two policies are equivalent. If you look at the net payment (taxes less transfers), everyone is exactly the same under the two plans. The difference is only a matter of framing. The professor’s argument is logically sound, although in practice the two policies are not equivalent. Means testing necessarily involves administrative costs for the state, and personal costs for the claimants, that reduce the value of any payment below its nominal value. Means-tested benefits are also uncertain and unstable, because the earned income on which they are based is uncertain and unstable. So, while the exchequer cost of the two policies may be equivalent, the value to recipients is not. All the more reason to go for the non-means-tested universal payment and claw it back from higher earners through the tax system.
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Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
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To conclude this section, let us mention briefly three supplementary concepts or practices for the defensive investor. The first is the purchase of the shares of well-established investment funds as an alternative to creating his own common-stock portfolio. He might also utilize one of the “common trust funds,” or “commingled funds,” operated by trust companies and banks in many states; or, if his funds are substantial, use the services of a recognized investment-counsel firm. This will give him professional administration of his investment program along standard lines. The third is the device of “dollar-cost averaging,” which means simply that the practitioner invests in common stocks the same number of dollars each month or each quarter. In this way he buys more shares when the market is low than when it is high, and he is likely to end up with a satisfactory overall price for all his holdings. Strictly speaking, this method is an application of a broader approach known as “formula investing.” The latter was already alluded to in our suggestion that the investor may vary his holdings of common stocks between the 25% minimum and the 75% maximum, in inverse relationship to the action of the market. These ideas have merit for the defensive investor, and they will be discussed more amply in later chapters.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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This record may be regarded as a persuasive argument for the principle of regular monthly purchases of strong common stocks through thick and thin—a program known as “dollar-cost averaging.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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If you’re not confident that the market is low or fairly low, you’ll be wise to use dollar-cost averaging by investing a fixed dollar amount at regular intervals to get gradually invested over time.
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Charles D. Ellis (Winning the Loser's Game: Timeless Strategies for Successful Investing, Eighth Edition)
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Beauty is what lies beyond usefulness. Beauty inspires loyalty and gives meaning to mere usefulness. We need useful things, but we love beautiful things. A building which is merely functional will not last, for people will not love it. They will get bored with it. The average football stadium now costs a billion dollars to build and lasts just thirty years, after which it appears dated, silly, and unfashionable. The Chartres Cathedral, on the other hand, is more beautiful than any sports complex on earth and it has been functional for more than 800 years. Beautiful things last because when they begin to fall apart, we tend to them, revive and restore them; however, when purely functional things fall apart, we tire of them and replace them.
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Joshua Gibbs (Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity)
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How Should I Structure My Pricing? Pricing is the biggest lever in SaaS, and almost no one gets it right out of the gate. Fortunately, you don’t need a PhD to structure your pricing well. Like most things in SaaS, finding the right pricing structure is one part theory, one part experimentation, and one part founder intuition. I wish I could tell you a single “correct” structure, but it varies based on your customer base, the value provided, and the competitive landscape. Most founders price their product too low or create confusing tiers that don’t align with the value a customer receives from the product. On the low end, if you have a product aimed at consumers, you can get away with charging $10 to $15 a month. The problem is at that price point, you’re going to be dealing with high churn, and you won’t have much budget to acquire customers. That can be brutal, but if you have a no-touch sign-up process with a product that sells itself, you can get away with it. Castos’s podcasting software and Snappa’s quick graphic design software are good examples of products that do well with a low average revenue per account (ARPA). You’ll have more breathing room (and less churn) if you aim for an ARPA of $50 a month or more. In niche markets—or where a demo is required or sales cycles are longer—aim higher (e.g., $250 a month and up). If you have a high-touch sales process that involves multiple calls, you need to charge enough to justify the cost of selling it. For example, $1,000 a month and up is a reasonable place to start. If you’re making true enterprise sales that require multiple demos and a procurement process, aim for $30,000 a year and up (into six figures). One of the best signals to guide your pricing is other SaaS tools, and I don’t just mean competition. Any SaaS tool a company in your space might replace you with, a complementary tool or a tool similar to yours in a different vertical can offer guidance, but make sure you don’t just compare features; compare how it’s sold. As mentioned above, the sales process has tremendous influence over how a product should be priced. There are so many SaaS tools out now that a survey of competitive and adjacent tools can give you a mental map of the range of prices you can charge. No matter where your business sits, one thing is true: “If no one’s complaining about your price, you’re probably priced too low.
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Rob Walling (The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital)
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The ideal way to dollar-cost average is into a portfolio of index funds, which own every stock or bond worth having. That way, you renounce not only the guessing game of where the market is going but which sectors of the market—and which particular stocks or bonds within them—will do the best.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Let’s say you can spare $500 a month. By owning and dollar-cost averaging into just three index funds—$300 into one that holds the total U.S. stock market, $100 into one that holds foreign stocks, and $100 into one that holds U.S. bonds—you can ensure that you own almost every investment on the planet that’s worth owning.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Just like dollar-cost averaging, the discipline once again makes you invest in underperforming assets when their prices are low, so that you own lots of them when their prices go up.
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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You don’t want to hesitate to get in the market trying to have perfect timing; instead, use dollar-cost averaging and know that volatility can be your friend,
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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The third is the device of “dollar-cost averaging,” which means simply that the practitioner invests in common stocks the same number of dollars each month or each quarter. In this way he buys more shares
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The prize itself—an elite college admission—comes at a steep price. The cost of a four-year college degree from any of the top-twenty private colleges in the United States now exceeds a quarter of a million dollars, including room, board, books, and fees. The top-twenty public universities cost less, but even they average between $100,000 and $200,000 for a four-year degree, including room, board, books, and fees, depending on one’s state resident status. Society’s desire for early-blooming validation has led to—let’s be honest—price gouging by those official scorekeepers of early achievement, colleges and universities. The rest of us are stuck with big bills and massive debt. Since 1970, college tuition costs have risen three times faster than the rate of inflation. College debt in the United States is now $1.3 trillion, with an 11.5 percent default rate. By all measures, the rush to bloom early has helped create a potential bust bigger than the 2008 housing bubble.
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Rich Karlgaard (Late Bloomers: The Hidden Strengths of Learning and Succeeding at Your Own Pace)
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And then the great excitement of the solar breakthrough dimmed. As Pearson would later recall, the installation was “a huge technical success, but a financial failure.” The solar battery could power the remote telephone equipment with ease. But for the power they generated, the solar cells, at several hundred dollars per watt, simply cost too much.19 In 1956, Daryl Chapin figured that it would cost the average homeowner nearly $1.5 million to buy enough Bell solar cells to power his house.20 By one of Kelly’s fundamental dictums of innovation—something that could do a job “better, or cheaper, or both”—the cost of the cells and the results in Georgia suggested solar power was not going to be a marketable innovation anytime soon. Sometimes, in describing a new invention that seemed technically brilliant but impractical, industrial scientists would quip that they had found “a solution looking for a problem.” The silicon solar cell needed a problem, as yet unimagined, to appear.
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Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
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_____________ ___________________, hereby state that I am an investor who is seeking to accumulate wealth for many years into the future. I know that there will be many times when I will be tempted to invest in stocks or bonds because they have gone (or “are going”) up in price, and other times when I will be tempted to sell my investments because they have gone (or “are going”) down. I hereby declare my refusal to let a herd of strangers make my financial decisions for me. I further make a solemn commitment never to invest because the stock market has gone up, and never to sell because it has gone down. Instead, I will invest $______.00 per month, every month, through an automatic investment plan or “dollar-cost averaging program,” into the following mutual fund(s) or diversified portfolio(s): _________________________________, _________________________________, _________________________________. I will also invest additional amounts whenever I can afford to spare the cash (and can afford to lose it in the short run). I hereby declare that I will hold each of these investments continually through at least the following date (which must be a minimum of 10 years after the date of this contact): _________________ _____, 20__. The only exceptions allowed under the terms of this contract are a sudden, pressing need for cash, like a health-care emergency or the loss of my job, or a planned expenditure like a housing down payment or a tuition bill. I am, by signing below, stating my intention not only to abide by the terms of this contract, but to re-read this document whenever I am tempted to sell any of my investments. This contract is valid only when signed by at least one witness, and must be kept in a safe place that is easily accessible for future reference.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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In my view, investors should usually refrain from purchasing a “full position” (the maximum dollar commitment they intend to make) in a given security all at once. Those who fail to heed this advice may be compelled to watch a subsequent price decline helplessly, with no buying power in reserve. Buying a partial position leaves reserves that permit investors to “average down,” lowering their average cost per share, if prices decline.
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Seth A. Klarman (Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor)
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fight in America would cost him an average of one million dollars a day, at least, plus significant operating expenses from al-Matari’s cell, but if the end result meant America came to Iraq with boots on the ground, pushed back the Iranian hordes encroaching toward the south, ended pro-Iranian Alawite rule in Syria, and brought the price of oil back up to a level that would protect Saudi Arabian leadership’s domestic security . . . well, then, Sami bin Rashid would have done his job, and the King would reward him for life. A moment later INFORMER confirmed he received the money, and he told his customer to watch his mailbox in the dark web portal on his computer, and to wait for the files to come through. True to his word, INFORMER’s files began popping up, one by one. While bin Rashid clicked on the attachments, a smile grew inside his trim gray beard. First, the name, the address, and a photograph of a woman. A map of the area around where the woman lived. A CV of her work with the Defense Intelligence Agency, including foreign and domestic postings that would have her involved in the American campaign in the Middle East. Real-time intel about her daily commute, including the house where she would be watering the plants and checking the mail all week for a friend. Incredible, bin Rashid thought to himself. Where the hell is this coming from? The next file was all necessary targeting info on a recently retired senior CIA operations officer, who continued to work on a contract basis in the intelligence field. He spoke Arabic, trained others in tradecraft, counterintelligence,
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Mark Greaney (True Faith and Allegiance (Jack Ryan Universe, #22))
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There are some downsides to ETFs. First, you have to use a broker each time you buy and sell, and that usually means you’ll be charged a commission for each transaction. Needless to say, the shorter the holding period, the more these added commission costs could negate any benefits of the ETF’s lower expenses. As a result, ETFs are not suited for investors who make a number of smaller purchases, such as with dollar-cost averaging, since they’d have to pay a commission on each purchase. Rather, these investors should stick with low-cost, open-end index mutual funds.
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Taylor Larimore (The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing)
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The ideal way to dollar-cost average is into a portfolio of index funds, which own every stock or bond worth having. That way, you renounce not only the guessing game of where the market is going but which sectors of the market—and which particular stocks or bonds within them—will do the best. Let’s say you can spare $500 a month. By owning and dollar-cost averaging into just three index funds—$300 into one that holds the total U.S. stock market, $100 into one that holds foreign stocks, and $100 into one that holds U.S. bonds—you can ensure that you own almost every investment on the planet that’s worth owning.7 Every month, like clockwork, you buy more. If the market has dropped, your preset amount goes further, buying you more shares than the month before. If the market has gone up, then your money buys you fewer shares. By putting your portfolio on permanent autopilot this way, you prevent yourself from either flinging money at the market just when it is seems most alluring (and is actually most dangerous) or refusing to buy more after a market crash has made investments truly cheaper (but seemingly more “risky”).
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Let’s discuss our Swoosh-less Nike sneaker for a moment. My guess is that if you removed the branding from a pair of Nike Dunk sneakers, they would be worth no more than twenty-five percent of their retail price. That means that at least seventy-five percent of the value of a Nike sneaker is tied up in the emotional elements you can’t see or touch, the intangibles. But just because you can’t see them or touch them doesn’t mean they aren’t real.
For a parallel example, let’s look at Kanye West’s relationship with Adidas. Kanye has little or no athletic prowess—he’s a musi- cian, a tastemaker, a hype man. Whatever you may think of Kanye, he gets people talking and has been able to use his brand to create value for his partners. And that’s exactly what he did when he designed a line of sneakers for Adidas, the Yeezy Boost.
In February 2015, a limited run of his shoes sold out within ten minutes at a retail price of two hundred dollars. The shoes were then released to a wider audience a month later and once again sold out in record time. This is where things start to get interesting. According to Complex magazine, in the following quarter the Yeezy Boost accounted for $2.3 million in sales on eBay, three times the gross sales of its closest competitor, for an average price of $751 per pair. Let’s generously assume it cost Adidas fifty dollars per pair to produce and market a pair of Yeezy Boost. If that’s the case, Kanye West’s creativity is worth $701 per pair, and that doesn’t include the halo value to the overall Adidas brand.
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Alan Philips (The Age of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential)
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Let’s say you can spare $500 a month. By owning and dollar-cost averaging into just three index funds—$300 into one that holds the total U.S. stock market, $100 into one that holds foreign stocks, and $100 into one that holds U.S. bonds—you can ensure that you own almost every investment on the planet that’s worth owning.7 Every month, like clockwork, you buy more. If the market has dropped, your preset amount goes further, buying you more shares than the month before. If the market has gone up, then your money buys you fewer shares. By putting your portfolio on permanent autopilot this way, you prevent yourself from either flinging money at the market just when it is seems most alluring (and is actually most dangerous) or refusing to buy more after a market crash has made investments truly cheaper (but seemingly more “risky”).
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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diversify across time. And that’s what dollar-cost averaging does for you.
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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What dollar-cost averaging really means is systematically putting the same amount of money across your full portfolio—not just the stock portion.
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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Remember, volatility can be your friend with dollar-cost averaging, and it can also allow for another technique that will keep you on track, “rebalancing,
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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dollar-cost averaging,” which means simply that the practitioner invests in common stocks the same number of dollars each month or each quarter.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Online Customer Service Jobs Can Be the Best Work from Home Opportunities
Provided that this is true, at that point a pursuit into online client benefit employments would be ideal for you. There are some of these employments that are holding up to filled at this moment. Having a full time assistant or secretary can cost an organization several dollars every week. For a considerable measure of independent ventures, this is a cost that they cannot manage. Therefore, numerous private ventures are beginning to outsource these obligations to people who can telecommute. The procedure is in reality exceptionally basic. Every single approaching call would get steered to your home number, and you would answer the require the organization, similarly as though you were sitting in your office at a work area. You take and forward messages and answer general inquiries.
The following are a couple of the most prominent online client benefit employments being offered today. An online client benefit proficient can make a better than average salary, particularly on the off chance that you handle requires various diverse customers.
Astounding Jobs as a Work At Home Call Center
Indeed, you can set your home office up to be a completely working work at home call focus. Home call focuses is a locally situated business opportunity that is extremely lucrative, in light of the fact that you handle a huge volume of approaching calls. Furthermore, it’s anything but difficult to begin.
online customer service
Simple Work from Home Telemarketing Jobs
Provided Roku phone number this is true, at that point a Work from Home Telemarketing Jobs is the open door for you. Numerous organizations from everywhere throughout the world will pay somebody to give telemarketing administrations to them. These are online client benefit occupations that expect you to make outbound telephone calls in regards to everything from general item studies to family unit investigation. In the event that you can have a second telephone line in your home, at that point this open door is for you.
Honest to goodness Clerical Work at Home Jobs
you like writing, documenting, faxing, and making spreadsheets. Assuming this is the case, there are Legitimate Clerical Work at Home Jobs that you would be ideal for. Organizations outsource genuine administrative occupations each and every day. Get paid continuously, or by the task, which ever you favor.
Basic Work at Home Phone Jobs
There are various online client benefit occupations and telephone employments that all should be possible from the solace of your own home. About a telephone work as a work from home arrangement setter for a protection specialist. There are more than 400,000 protection specialists in the only us who procure low maintenance telecommute name setters. You can get paid per arrangement, and get paid a commission of the real deal. Would you be able to state lingering salary! If you get a kick out of the chance to set arrangements, at that point this online client benefits employments if appropriate for you.
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sam thoms
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Nuclear power is probably the clearest case where regulation clobbered the learning curve. Innovation is strongly suppressed when you’re betting a few billion dollars on your ability to get a license to operate the plant. Besides the obvious cost increases due to direct imposition of rules, there was a major side effect of forcing the size of plants up (fewer licenses); fewer plants were built and fewer ideas tried. That also meant a greater cost for transmission (about half the total, according to my itemized bill), since plants are further from the average customer.
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J. Storrs Hall (Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past)
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Some investment advisors have turned against dollar-cost averaging because, as even Burt Malkiel admits, it’s not the most productive strategy for investing in the stock market when it keeps going straight up—like it’s been doing in the years following the recent Great Recession.
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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That’s obvious, right? And there have been recent studies, including one by Vanguard in 2012, showing that in rolling ten-year periods over the past 80 years in the US, UK, and Australian stock markets, lump-sum investing has outperformed dollar-cost averaging more than two-thirds of the time.
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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A great analogy for timing your calls is investing. The investor who attempts to time the market has historically failed to beat the investor who uses a dollar-cost-averaging strategy—making incremental investments on a regular schedule over time. If you think about prospecting in the same vein, salespeople who prospect daily on a regular schedule are always more successful over time than those who make the attempt to time their prospecting. Like investing, statistics are always in the favor of the salesperson who does a little bit of prospecting every day.
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Jeb Blount (Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling (Jeb Blount))
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If you like spending 6–8 hours per week on investments, do it. If you don’t, then dollar-cost average into index funds. This accomplishes diversification across assets and time, two very important things.
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Robert L. Bloch (My Warren Buffett Bible: A Short and Simple Guide to Rational Investing: 284 Quotes from the World's Most Successful Investor)
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Another example, one that touches more people, is the nursing home industry. Numerous studies have shown that living at home, in a house or an apartment, is better psychologically, more fulfilling, and cheaper than living in nursing homes.14 Yet these institutions prosper when federal programs that foster living in the community are cut. There are also funding disincentives that the U.S. Congress, through Medicare and Medicaid, has created to ensure the profit bonanza of nursing homes. According to the activist disability journal Mouth (1995), there are 1.9 million people with disabilities living in nursing homes at an annual cost of $40,784, although it would cost only $9,692 a year to provide personal assistance services so the same people could live at home. Sixty-three percent of this cost is taxpayer funded. In 1992, 77,618 people with developmental disabilities (DD) lived in state-owned facilities at an average annual cost of $82,228, even though it would cost $27,649 for the most expensive support services to live at home. There are 150,257 people with mental illness living in tax-funded asylums at an average annual cost of $58,569. Another 19,553 disabled veterans also live in institutions, costing the Veterans Administration a whopping $75,641 per person.15 It is illogical that a government would want to pay more for less. It is illogical until one studies the amount of money spent by the nursing home lobby. Nursing homes are a growth industry that many wealthy people, including politicians, have wisely invested in. The scam is simple: get taxpayers to fund billions of dollars to these institutions which a few investors divide up. The idea that nursing homes are compassionate institutions or necessary resting places has lost much of its appeal recently, but the barrier to defunding them is built on a paternalism that eschews human dignity. As we have seen with public housing programs in the United States, the tendency is to warehouse (surplus) people in concentrated sites. This too has been the history with elderly people and people with disabilities in nursing homes. These institutions then can serve as a mechanism of social control and, at the same time, make some people wealthy.
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James I. Charlton (Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment)
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In the current economy, for most students, colleges couldn’t possibly deliver on providing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of anything. Wages aren’t budging, even though corporate profits have soared. The average CEO now makes 271 times the salary of the average American worker, whereas in 1965, the ratio was twenty-to-one. Healthcare costs are staggering—per capita health spending has increased twenty-nine times over the past four decades—and childcare costs are rising like college tuition, even as the frontline workers in both healthcare and childcare often receive poverty wages. A college degree is no guarantee of financial stability.
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Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror)
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Over a 10- or 20- or 30- year investment horizon, Mr. Market’s daily dipsy-doodles simply do not matter. In any case, for anyone who will be investing for years to come, falling stock prices are good news, not bad, since they enable you to buy more for less money. The longer and further stocks fall, and the more steadily you keep buying as they drop, the more money you will make in the end—if you remain steadfast until the end. Instead of fearing a bear market, you should embrace it. The intelligent investor should be perfectly comfortable owning a stock or mutual fund even if the stock market stopped supplying daily prices for the next 10 years.11 Paradoxically, “you will be much more in control,” explains neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, “if you realize how much you are not in control.” By acknowledging your biological tendency to buy high and sell low, you can admit the need to dollar-cost average, rebalance, and sign an investment contract. By putting much of your portfolio on permanent autopilot, you can fight the prediction addiction, focus on your long-term financial goals, and tune out Mr. Market’s mood s
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Jumping from Opportunity to Opportunity is going to be a wild ride - There is nothing as volatile as the Crypto market. As a new investor, you need strategies NOT get-rich-quick schemes. Aside from watching out for RUG PULLS, you should Dollar Cost Average and buy Bitcoin — this means resisting any temptation to get into short-term hype and lose your hard earned money. In Bitcoin, a passive long play investment has a better chance of succeeding than an active trading company.
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Najah Roberts