This is a conversation between me and my future self, if my financial path wouldn’t have positively forked 2 years ago. The transcript is available here.
What would your future self have to say to you?
The no-pants guide to spending, saving, and thriving in the real world.
This is a conversation between me and my future self, if my financial path wouldn’t have positively forked 2 years ago. The transcript is available here.
What would your future self have to say to you?
This is a guest post.
Winning the lottery is everyone’s dream. You hit the lotto, cash in your ticket and kiss all your troubles goodbye, right? Actually, that might not be true. Just look at the number of lottery winners who’ve ended up worse off than they were before they hit it big. There are several problems here. One problem is that people often spend their money unwisely, without learning how to manage it properly. Lottery annuity payments were designed to help with this. However, those annuity payments might not actually be enough to make a significant difference in your life. If that’s the case, you might be wondering if you can sell your payments for a lump sum. The answer is, yes, you can. But there’s a catch. Actually, there are a couple of catches.
First, let’s talk about buyers. They’re the ones who’ll be paying you a lump sum for your lottery payments. Now, you can’t expect a buyer to offer the full amount you’re owed from the lottery, but you should be able to expect a significant percentage of the winnings. That’s not the case with many buyers. They recognize your desperation and have no qualms about taking advantage of your situation. That’s not true for all buyers, though. You need to recognize qualified buyers from those better left alone. Obviously, that’s tough to do on your own. Most people have never been in the position of having to sell lottery payments before, and it’s easy to get lost in a world with which you’re not familiar.
Another important consideration is whether you need to sell all of your lottery winnings or only a percentage of them. You can easily sell just a specific portion of your winnings, enough to cover your immediate needs, and retain the remainder as regular ongoing payments. This ensures that you have the money you need right now, as well as a financial cushion for the future.
The ideal solution to your quandary is to work with a firm that acts as a go-between. The company will vet and investigate buyers, ensuring that you only have the cream of the crop to choose from. Not only that, but working with a reputable firm will also ensure that you get the highest percentage possible of your winnings, rather than leaving you with a mere pittance.
Of course, not all such firms are the same, and you need to recognize a reputable company. Look for a firm that’s been in business for a number of years – one with an established reputation and a list of satisfied clients. Second, make sure the company doesn’t work for the buyers – the firm should work for you, the seller. This ensures there’s no conflict of interest. A company that works on behalf of the buyer has no incentive to go above and beyond to ensure you get a fair deal. One that works for you certainly does.
If you haven’t been kept under a rock your whole life, you’re likely familiar with actor and comedian John Cleese. Part of the infamous Monty Python crew, he starred in films such as Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail, and television shows such as Faulty Towers. However, are you familiar with what has happened to Mr. Cleese financially over the past few years?
When Cleese divorced his third wife she ended up with a divorce settlement that quite literally made her richer than him, despite the fact that they were married for only 16 years and had produced no children.
Divorce is, unfortunately, a fixture of modern society, and people of both sexes need to know how they can protect their personal finances in case of a divorce. After all, these days more than 50% of marriages end in divorce, so not preparing yourself financially for it is engaging is some rather wishful thinking. So how best to protect yourself and your personal finances, should you be unfortunate enough to have to go through one?
If you are the higher-earning party, get a pre-nup prior to marriage; this simply cannot be overemphasized. Cleese himself, already married to wife number four, incidentally, was told that he should have her sign a prenuptial agreement, he initially didn’t want to, despite having just been taken to the proverbial cleaners. He only reluctantly had one written up when his legal team essentially insisted. Even though prenups can be challenged or modified in court, if you are the party bringing more assets to the relationship, it is irresponsible of you not to solicit a prenuptial agreement from a potential spouse.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you should protect assets you have in joint accounts with your spouse, and also begin to actively monitor your credit, if things become acrimonious between you two. This way, you will prevent them from absconding with the totality of your shared funds, or ruining your credit if they are feeling malicious. If you need further information on how to do this properly, speak with a qualified financial planner.
So if you find yourself considering marriage and either have significant assets to protect or suspect you might have them in the future, you owe it to yourself to look into the legalities surrounding prenuptial agreements, and other thorny issues related to personal finance. Failure to do so can end up seriously impacting your life in a negative way, should you ever be faced with a vindictive or greedy spouse; protect yourself!
How much would you pay for a kiss from the world’s sexiest celebrity?
That was the focus of a recent study that I can’t find today. There is no celebrity waiting in the wings to deliver the drool, and the study doesn’t name which celebrity it is. That’s an exercise for the reader.
This was a study into how we value nice things.
The fascinating part of the study is that people would be willing to pay more to get the kiss in 3 days than they would to get the tongue slipped immediately.
Anticipation adds value.
Instant gratification actually causes us to devalue the object of our desire.
This goes well beyond “Will you respect me in the morning?”
The last time I talked about delayed gratification, it was in the context of my kids. That still holds true. Kids don’t value the things that are handed to them.
The surprising–and disturbing–bit is that adults don’t, either. If I run out to the store to buy an iPad the first day I see one, I won’t care about it nearly as much as if I spend a week or two agonizing over the decision.
The delay alone adds to the perceived value. The agony turns the perceived value into gold.
If I spend a month searching for the perfect car, the thrill of the successful hunt adds less value than the time it took to do the hunting.
Here’s my frugal tip for today: Delay your purchases. While it may not actually save you any money, you will feel like you got a much better deal if you wait a few days for something you really want.
Would you be ready for the apocalypse? The Walking Dead asks that question every week. There is a great deal of human intrigue in the show, but the show is always asking you, the viewer, if you would be ready to deal with an apocalypse on that order. The idea goes much farther than dealing with zombies. Truly, zombies are the easy part of the apocalypse.
Lost People
We live in a world where we are very connected. You know people from all over the world, and it the entire world has been overrun by an apocalypse at once, all the people you are connected to around the world are effectively gone. There is no chance you will ever see them again. The people on the show deal with those ideas every day. There are so many people they miss that they never go to to say goodbye to.
Insecurity
The one thing that the apocalypse creates is insecurity. You will have no idea what is going to happen the next morning. You never know when someone in your crew is going to be bitten or killed. You have no idea when you will run into other humans you cannot trust. There is not a safe place on Earth. Even if you lock down a house, there is no way to know for sure that zombies would not get in.
Violence
The Walking Dead graphically depicts the violence that is necessary to kill zombies. You would have to “kill” thousands of people who have become zombies. You can see their wedding rings. You can see them in their uniforms, and you know that they used to be somebody. However, you have to end them in order to save yourself. Many of us believe we could do that, but we need to think twice before we assume we could be that violent.
Order
The lack of order in the world is the thing that would break most of us. We can reconcile loss, but that loss is hard to reconcile when there is no order in the world. There is not one authority on the planet that is still operating. How would you be able to resolve problems without such a structure?
On the show, all these problems are handled violently. Murdering violent people is all part of the job if you want to stay alive. It is one thing to kill a zombie that is no longer a person, but it is something else to kill a real person who is simply a thieving criminal.
You might think that you would do just fine when you are watching The Walking Dead, but you would not know unless it happened in real life. The zombie apocalypse is not all fun and games. At its heart is a tense human emotion called loss that we would all have to confront head on.