My 1st Million At 33 – yes, you can do it too

Congratulation to Ramit first of all on his very successful book “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”. It’s amazing how he has made so far. Success never comes easy.

I must first make a disclaimer, that I have not read his book. Therefore my following comments can be biased and inaccurate.

Like most of the traditional advice for personal finances out there, it’s regular saving and investing. Yes, those are just the basics. However, when it comes to investing, I have been shying away from ETF. In fact, my 401K goes pretty much all cash since year 2000 January. And I have never regretted it. In fact, if they offer me a choice of buying ultra-short ETF, I would probably have chosen that. Unfortunately, most of the 401K investment choices are very limited.

In the Yahoo’s interview on Ramit, he said,
“The past doesn’t predict the future, but it gives us a fairly accurate view of what’s likely to happen. Whether it returns 6 percent or 8 percent — we can split hairs over that — the question is, do you fundamentally believe the stock market will go up. If you believe that, then invest. If you don’t, where do you put your money? If you only put it in a savings account, it’s not going to give you the returns you need to live on. You have to take risks to get potentially high returns.”

My personal opinions have always been that it really depends on what timeframe you choose to base your opinions on. For example, many civilizations/currencies have collapsed in the past. Who is to say that USA is not on the same track? Once you expand your historical horizons, things are no longer as easy as “stock markets always fundamentally go up”. The primary reason that stock markets go up “in the long term” or rather in recent modern history is that human population increases exponentially. If human population stops growing at the same exponential rate, or heaven forbids, decreases, then stock markets will NOT go up.

Why do I keep playing the devil here? Not because I want to earn advertising revenues of less than 0.01% of my net worth, with my pre-hypertension blood pressure going north of 130/90 partially due to excessive working hours. I only have one reason. For anyone who would care to listen, and in the case that I’m right, I hope that people can avoid financial catastrophes from stock markets. I believe that there will be another 40% to 50% collapse from the next intermediate peak in the general stock market going towards 2010 to 2012 timeframe. The credit excess is just not washed out yet.

Anyone ever wonders why one of the best seller “Currency War” in China was never mentioned in most of the traditional media nor published in USA in English? There is a recent English book “Currency War” on Amazon.com but it’s an impostor. It’s simply inconceivable why any publishers wouldn’t want to publish this book based solely on business reasons. I think if people start to read “Currency War”, US Federal Reserve will go down for good. In the US, there is the freedom of speech unlike China, but then there is the “freedom of press coverage” based on money and power. No wonder Ron Paul only got 1 minute press coverage for his historical “money bombs” raising over 5 million dollars.

Truth is out there, but you have to go out and find it out for yourself. The big money & power won’t tell you, and they will flood you with other AIG bonus news instead of reporting that Bernanke paid tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars to Goldman Sach through AIG. Will the American public wake up before Wallstreet robs the future of the next two generations of USA blindly with their partners at Federal Reserve, Senate, and the Congress? This will be an infamy recorded in economic history, only to be expounded in details after maybe 50+ years from now.