Tag Archives: Twitter

Retired Money: Time for a Newsletter Purge?

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My latest MoneySense Retired Money column suggests that for retirees and semi-retirees like myself, it may be time for a newsletter purge. You can find the full column by clicking on the highlighted text here: Check your inbox: Investing newsletters can cost you more than a sub fee.

The column is a frank confession of some rather painful investment losses sustained the last three years, mostly from recent IPOs or SPACs.

When I asked myself where some of these investment “ideas” came from I realized that almost all of them came from investment newsletters published by various American stock pundits, self-proclaimed or otherwise, including two I mention below.

The worst of these is supposed EV play Lordstown [RIDE], down in my account an astounding 100%, following its recent bankruptcy. And no, I did not renew the newsletter responsible, which I have been persuaded I should not divulge here.

Credit another Letter for tipping me to such losers as Matterport (MTTR/Naqsdaq: down 83% after its recommendation), Zoom (ZM), down 80% and Coinbase (COIN), down a whopping 78%. I won’t name his newsletter as it doesn’t matter: the culprit responsible left some time in 2022, his patience exhausted long before the “Hold with strong hands” patience he recommended for his hapless readers.

When I further asked myself how it came about that I subscribed to these newsletters in the first place, I realized that well more than half were the result of email pitches and — typically — a US$49 per year offer. You know the drill: get 3 or 4 “special reports” that divulge the ticker symbols of these moonshots that are as apt to crash your portfolio as they are the hoped-for 10-baggers.

From a risk management perspective, I tend to invest far less in such speculations (for that’s what they are), compared to blue-chip individual stocks, broadly based ETFs or GICs, but those $1,000 or $1,500 per spec losses do add up.  The MoneySense column goes into some detail on the hazards of holding such losers in registered accounts, versus tax-loss selling in taxable ones.  [The tax tail often waves the investment dog in both directions.}

Stop biting on initial pitches, then stop renewing

So job one is to stop clicking on those email pitches. Second, do not renew them when they come up for it, typically after a year. Beware automatic renewals: you may have to contact the publishers directly to cancel.

A few exceptions

I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater and it’s only fair to say there may be the odd exception, particularly here in conservative Canada. I have long been on the record for reading and sometimes acting on the recommendations of Patrick McKeough of The Successful Investor and his stable of newsletters like Wall Street Forecaster and Canadian Wealth Advisor. Most of Patrick’s stock picks are well-known blue chips. When he does go further afield with foreigner domestic juniors he identifies them as being riskier and suitable mostly for “aggressive” investors. Fair enough! Incidentally, Patrick kindly allows us to run an article here on the Hub roughly on a monthly basis: you can do worse than act on recommendations like this recent instalment: Use these successful investment strategies for your portfolio success.

I also respect the work of fellow Canadian Gordon Pape, who is a regular writer for the Globe & Mail. For the most part I find the Motley Fool to be decent, although I tend to focus on their free audio podcasts rather than their paid-for newsletters. At one point, in fact, I wrote for them.

Minimize media market noise

The MoneySense column also mentions some related topics, like monitoring cable TV all-news channels that also run stock quotes. We’ve looked before on the Hub about steps to take to avoid investment noise and the Fear of Missing Out (aka FOMO: currently, it’s all about AI). CFA and investment advisor Steve Lowrie, also a Hub contributor, and one who I initially met through the aforementioned Pat McKeough, captured this nicely in this blog: SPACs, NFTs and another Tech-inspired Silly Season. Continue Reading…

Life after Twitter: Mastodon & other alternatives

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As I posted on Twitter a few days ago, Elon Musk’s ownership is causing a lot of Twitter regulars to rethink their commitment to the platform. Personally, I have invested a lot in the Bird since joining in 2009 and so I am reluctant to storm out of there merely out of sheer petulance. Better, I think, to take a wait-and-see approach and give Elon a chance to salvage it or to burn it to the ground.

But it does behoove regulars to have a contingency plan or Plan B. Once upon a time, I viewed Google Plus as an alternative but it proved to be a virtual ghost town until Google pulled the plug on it. If Twitter keep imploding, perhaps the folks at Google will think of giving it a go again. But in the meantime, there are still LinkedIn and Facebook.

While in Spain this month, I started to experiment with the platform that seems most likely to accumulate disaffected Twitter users: Mastodon. (spelt with the letter o in two places, NOT the letter “a”!

Unlike the centralized Twitter platform, Mastodon is decentralized and that’s the first thing you need to know about it when signing on. First you have to pick a server, which is run by volunteers around the world. I picked one of the few (or only?) Canadian ones: mstdn.ca. It’s also called Mastodon Canada and bills itself as being run by Canadians for Canadians

A new meeting ground for Canadian finance Tweeters and bloggers?

 

Perhaps it’s too early to say, or that it’s wishful thinking, but it seems possible that a critical mass of disaffected Canadian Twitter users may be building there, including a subset of Canadian financial tweeters; I mean tooters!

For me, Truth Social was never an option, for reasons that should be obvious, given its ownership. If there are other Canadian Mastodon servers and there may be, Google Canadian Mastodon servers.

Mastodon takes some getting used to and the learning curve seems steeper than Twitter was in its heyday. At the same time, it’s fun to give one’s atrophied social media little grey cells a new workout, and it’s a learning experience to see new networks and patterns of networks evolve almost from the ground up.

It was helpful to be fairly early with Twitter and in the same way Mastodon has that pioneering feeling here in November of 2022, the first full month of Elon’s Twitter ownership. Mastodon has been around much longer but there’s little doubt there is now a wave of Twitter users descending on the place. Most of the new arrivals admit they’re looking for a possible alternative, or don’t really know why they are there, and most either need a bit of help or encouragement or are a bit more experienced and willing to offer assistance to the newbies.

In fact, mstdn.ca is so new they are still asking for volunteers to moderate and assist with the technical side for those who have the skills. They’ve also just set up a PayPal account to accept donations to offset the server costs.  Continue Reading…

Tips for building brand awareness online

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By Emily Jones

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Marketing your online business isn’t necessarily a cut and dry endeavor. For instance, you may have the best products on the planet but are having trouble getting them in front of the right people. Or you’ve found the right people but are unable to communicate with them clearly. Either way, you won’t be making any money.

In the marketing world, there’s no quick fix to success: there are things you should know before choosing your business growth strategies and the following brand building strategies can help you take your efforts to the next level.

The Internet is now pervasive

There’s no denying it: the Internet dominates virtually every aspect of our lives. Thus, it comes as no surprise that it has become very a popular and effective marketing medium. Take control of this monster with these two tips:

Leverage social media

Sites like Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook have the potential to boost the popularity of your brand exponentially. But to get the most out of these sites, it’s important to know which one works best for your brand. For instance:

  • Pinterest and Instagram are best for sites with a lot of pics
  • B2Bs do best on Twitter
  • Small businesses in creative industries do well on Instagram

To succeed, you must create a creative and engaging marketing campaign to help you stand apart from your competition. Do so by posting updates several times a day to make sure you are engaging with your audience on a regular basis.

Embrace influencer marketing

Influencers are well liked and trusted by their audience, making an endorsement by them very valuable. To take advantage of this, find key influencers who are already in your industry. Just make sure that their business complements (rather than competes) with your product or service.

Popular influencers are being courted by my many companies. Give yourself an advantage by researching them: this will give you an idea of what you can do capture their interest and get them to listen to your story.

You may also want to create a couple of influencer strategies. In this way, if your desired influencer decides to go another way, all is not lost. You have other options to choose from.

Offline Brand Building

Although most of your brand building marketing work will be done online, there’s still something to be said about offline marketing. Continue Reading…

My Response to Happy Money as an alternative to Findependence

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Jenya Rose

Yesterday we ran a guest posting from financial planner Jenya Rose, who argued there’s no need to seek early Financial Independence (Findependence) as long as you eventually find a line of work that allows you to generate  “Happy Money.”

This started as an exchange on Twitter, and I said initially only that I didn’t think the two concepts are far apart. After letting Jenya speak for herself, I also said I’d respond more fully today. This is my response.

I’ve always said Findependence is all about working because you want to, not because you have to. (financially speaking).  And I’m fully supportive of career changes where you find a more fulfilling line of work, even if you have to take a pay cut. I did precisely that in 1993, when I took a $25,000 pay cut to leave public relations and return to journalism at age 40.

To me, Findependence facilitates Happy Income

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call P.R. “unhappy income” but I didn’t feel it was my true calling. Certainly my first job (in computer sales) in my early 20s DID qualify as “Unhappy Money” but fortunately I took the advice of my yoga teacher then and quit after six months. Making cold calls and asking for the order just wasn’t my thing.

By contrast, writing, journalism, creative writing (which is what the book Findependence Day was an attempt to engage in), blogging, web videos and even public speaking could in my view all be categorized as “Happy Income.”

I don’t see Findependence as Retirement. That’s the whole point of the Financial Independence Hub. Personally, financially speaking, I could “retire” tomorrow in the classical sense of the word.  But I’m nowhere near ready to settle down to playing golf and watching daytime television.

For me, doing what I’m doing now — including freelance writing for MoneySense and various other media outlets, running a web site or three, writing and publishing e-books, and doing a little public speaking — IS happy money! I totally agree with Jenya. Before this year, I had to do many of those “Happy Income” projects on the side while my day job generated what Jenya terms “Unhappy Money.”

Once I left salaried employment in May of this year (aka Findependence Day), I felt able to spend not just nights and weekends on “Happy Money” endeavours but the precious Monday-to-Friday nine-to-five time. That was always a goal but to do all these projects required, at least for me, some degree of Financial Independence.

Retirement Redux

Findependence doesn’t necessarily have to occur decades or years before traditional retirement. If classical full-stop retirement occurs at age 65 or 67, I fully anticipate “working” long past that age. To me, Findependence is exactly equivalent to Happy Money: I’ll be happy to write full-length books (perhaps one every two or three years), to do the odd speaking engagement and probably keep websites like this running and I’ll likely keep doing all these things between 65 and 75, health and the good Lord permitting. (I’m 61 right now)

My friend Sheryl Smolkin views the world in similar terms. She’s been working on various writing projects and web entrepreneurship for almost a decade since she first “retired.” You can read about her adventures at her Retirement Redux site. Sheryl hopes to write a guest blog for us here at the Hub in the next few weeks.

Extreme Early Retirement is really Early Findependence

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A millennial inspired by Findependence

As for millennials achieving “Findependence” in their early 30s, I say wonderful. Read Sean Cooper’s article on how he plans to do just that by age 31, right here at the Hub. Sean (pictured on the right) doesn’t call it retirement, nor should he. I can’t believe all those Early Retirement Extreme authors and bloggers actually “retire” at age 30. If nothing else, they’re still “working” by writing books and blogging about how they “retired” so young. It’s not retirement at all — they’ve achieved financial independence, as defined here. One of my columns in MoneySense this fall was on this exact topic.

Thanks for starting this dialogue, Jenya and for reminding me that on Twitter references to Findependence should be preceded with a hashtag, like this: #Findependence. Who knows, if one day this trends on social media, we might actually effect some positive change.

Plan for Longevity, not Retirement

This site has a section on Longevity and Aging because I believe we’re all going to live a lot longer than we may have thought when we were in our 20s and 30s. (I’m addressing fellow Baby Boomers here). I wrote elsewhere that 35 years is a long time to go without a paycheque, if you “retired” at 60 and lived to 95. That goes double for those who think they’re going to retire at 30. 65 years is a helluva long time to go without a paycheque.

One of the bloggers in that section to which we’ve devoted space is Mark Venning of ChangeRangers.com. He’s about my age and believes we should be planning NOT for retirement, but for longevity. This is also the subject of my current column in MoneySense.

He’s right. So is Jenya.

Call it Happy Money if you want, call it Freedom 55, Second Age or whatever you like. I think Jenya and I almost totally are on the same page: we’re just using different terms for the same concept. For me, however, it’s probably too late to call this the Happy Income Hub. So I’m sticking with the term Findependence!

In any case, I welcome the exchange and hopefully we can have more back-and-forth once our forums are up and running. That’s the plan anyway.