How to Own the World – Thought Canvas

Three Steps to Take Before Starting Investing

As most people know, investing is a smart thing to do. While you go out to work for the day, you’re happy knowing that over time, your money is working for you too.

Especially with uncertainty over the future of state pensions, investing is a subject that is becoming more important for financial security and freedom going into retirement ages. According to Andrew Craig in his book How to Own the World, anyone under the age of 50 should assume that the government will be in so much debt by the time you retire, that they will no longer be able to offer you a state pension.

But before you jump in with two feet, what are a few things you should make sure of before you start your investment journey?

Pay Off Any Non-Student/Mortgage Loan Debt

There’s no point investing until you have paid off any debt that isn’t from your student loan or mortgage. The reason being is that some types of debt such as credit card debt have high rates of interest. This means that even if you are making a solid 10% return on your investments, you will be paying 20%+ interest rates on your debt – basically placing yourself on the wrong side of compound interest.

Build An Emergency Fund

The last thing you want to do is have to sell your investments because you lost your job or an unexpected expense came up, so before you start investing make sure you have a comfortable amount of cash in a savings account as a security blanket. Selling off your investments can increase your investment fees, but it also encourages you create a habit of doing it in the future too, which can lower your investment returns for years to come. Six months to a year’s worth of expenses should be ample in an emergency fund.

Create An Investment Plan

It’s not wise to just wing it when it comes to investing. Figure out which investment vehicles you want to put your hard-earned money into, and decide what your psychological risk tolerance is. The key is to create a plan and have the discipline to stick to it. Decide the frequency and the amount you will be investing, and how diversified you want to be – whether to buy stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate, precious metals or even cryptocurrency. A lot of new investors will dabble in certain investments, and withdraw their money as soon as any losses appear. The investor that has a solid plan will be able to ride out any market uncertainties because they have already rehearsed beforehand what they would do in that situation.

The Permanent Portfolio: How to Invest Without Losing

The biggest fear people have when thinking about investing is that they don’t want to lose any money. If you were to do some number-crunching: if you lose 30% of your investment, you need a subsequent 42% gain to recoup your losses. If you were invested into the S&P 500 in 2008 when it lost 50% of its value, you would need a 100% increase to get back to where you were. Seems a little unfair right? But that’s why it’s called the break-even fallacy. This phenomenon is probably why Warren Buffett’s number one rule of investing is simply: “Don’t lose.”

Now that we know how important it is not to lose while investing long-term, how do we go about it?

In How to Own the World, author Andrew Craig outlines a simple portfolio that has only five losing years in the last 37, the worst being only 5.3%. The portfolio even had a positive year in 2008, the same year where the whole world was in financial crisis. The portfolio had an average 7.5% annual gain over the last 37 years.

It might not seem a lot to average 7.5% per year, but putting $100/month in this kind of investment would bring you $17,957.60 after 10 years, $55,500.52 after 20 years, $134,428.85 after 30 years, and $300,363.77 after 40 years. If you just kept the cash you would have amounted to $48,000 in that time. Even worse, if you spent that extra $100/month you’d have $0 after 40 years.

This asset allocation was created by Harry Browne – his idea being that if you owned a diverse range of assets, you should always have something that performs well.

The allocation is:

25% stocks
25% long-term US bonds
25% gold
25% cash

The reason why this combination works so well in managing risk is that these asset classes thrive in different market conditions. Gold is a good bet in times of inflation, while stocks grow in line with economic growth. Bonds are useful to own in times of lower than expected inflation or lower than expected economic growth. Cash gives you liquidity, no fees, an albeit small interest rate, and stability when the others lose value.

The advantage of this type of portfolio is the simplicity – you will only need to buy into two or three different funds and rebalance periodically. Even better, you won’t have to manage your emotions as much because there will be much fewer losing years than with most other types of investment portfolio.

The Government is Doctoring Inflation Rates To Secretly Confiscate Your Wealth

Inflation is defined as the rate of which the price of goods and services increase.

If you were to imagine the cost for a can of drink at the vending machine, petrol at the pump, housing or bread, the prices would have been much lower when you were growing up than they are now. That’s inflation in action.

If our wages don’t keep up with inflation, then our money doesn’t go as far and the standard of living falls.

So what is the current inflation rate? As of January 2021, the government quotes it at 0.7%. Compared to the 1970s where there was rampant inflation, this figure is historically low. Losing 0.7% of the value of your cash savings each year is a minor nuisance at best, and if your interest rate in your savings account matches that, then you wouldn’t be losing any value in your money in real terms at all. But there’s a twist in the tale.

What if the government’s figure of 0.7% didn’t actually match up to what’s really going on with prices in the country? What if real inflation was closer to 10%? After all, the US and UK governments have been inventing trillions of dollars of money in recent times in a process called quantitative easing, which is known to cause inflation.

In 1996, governments in the USA and UK decided to change the way that inflation rates would be calculated. They now use certain tricks such as substitution (using the price of the cheapest available type of product in the category they are calculating), geometric weighting (if they find something that has gone up a lot in price such as healthcare or property, they will assign an inappropriately low percentage of the calculation), and hedonic adjustment (reducing the price of an item like televisions because the item is higher quality than it was the year before). Hidden inflation is becoming more common too, such as when companies give you less of a product like Dairy Milk or Walker’s crisps for the same price, hoping that you won’t notice.

Even if you don’t understand this last paragraph fully, it basically means that the government is tweaking around figures in a formula to get a desired result, instead of doing it fairly. But why would they want inflation rates to seem lower than they actually are?

Firstly, because GDP numbers are inflation-adjusted. If governments are adjusting for inflation by their own fake figures instead of the real ones, it makes it look like the economy is growing even if the economies are actually going backwards. Put another way, because real inflation is at least 7% higher than quoted, it means that if the stock market isn’t growing at least 7% per year, people who invest into it aren’t actually profiting at all in real terms.

Additionally, governments want to quote low inflation rates so they can get away with meagre pay rises like the 1% it is giving NHS workers across the country. The news was not taken lightly after over a year of NHS workers being stretched to the limits during the COVID-19 pandemic. But, imagine if the government had given the 1% pay rise and then broke the news, “Oh, by the way, inflation is actually at 8%, not 0.7%.” The government would have basically rewarded the NHS workers by reducing their spending power by over 7%. The funny thing is that this is the reality.

It’s in the government’s best interests to keep the inflation rates lower than they really are – it makes them look better, and keeps the public from realizing that their standard of living may be dropping.

So, what if you’re reading this and you have excess cash that is sitting in a checking or savings account? You obviously won’t want the value of it to go down by 10% each year. Andrew Craig, the author of How to Own the World suggests to find a way to ‘own’ inflation. This means to buy things that we know are going up in price along with inflation – property, gold, commodities and shares.