As I predicted yesterday, the markets got hit big. But then came back and will come back more this morning — after Japan’s bounceback.
I was able to buy some “cheap” stocks yesterday, including DXJ, DBJP, BX, SNE and GPT. I covered my BBY short because I had eyed the financials to cause the stock more damage and the thing was rising (for whatever reason). Anyho, I made a few hundred bucks for my efforts, and most importantly, got out before the long weekend. Not good to be short on weekends.
The greatest investment theme is our recent huge oil and gas discoveries in the U.S. The biggest theme is transporting all the gas and oil we drag out of the ground to refineries, factories and power plants. Pipelines and railroads are clear beneficiaries. I am impressed with Cramer’s recommendations of the MLP called MWE and the railroad UNP. But there are others. That’s a little research we can all do this weekend.Drop ideas in Comments below, please.
It’s a long weekend.We’re going away. My ritual is to empty the pigsty that is my deskI filled a couple of garbage bags and learned:
+ All utility bills are incomprehensible. Deliberately so. There’ s nothing I can do about them. They’re already paid by auto-pay. Stop keeping the paperwork. Trash them. Out of sight. Out of mind. I already paid my Verizon bills (and more) with my Verizon stock. It’s up huge.
+ 99.9% of the stock ideas I read in magazines like Money don’t work or make no sense. So, stop piling them. In fact, unsubscribe to them. I don’t get the paper Wall Street Journal any longer. I read the little I read online. It’s rarely relevant. And Rupert is making it into a lifestyle magazine.
+ The best paperwork is annual reports. Treasure them. Reading them on paper is better than reading them online. They feel more like a real company.
+ I’m interested in too much. I buy too much junk. I bought a $25 solar battery charger from Amazon this morning at 4:15 AM. I don’t need it. But it is neat and it’s on sale. Clkick here.
We’re going early today to our country “palace.” Heck, it must be a palace. Only a palace would incur all the maintenance attention and bills. For those of you not burdened with a second house, remember all those adages about “If it flies or floats, rent it.”
As Susan says, there’s nothing more beautiful in life (with the exception of compound interest) than handing the keys back to the owner who can then deal with the leaky toilet, the unmown grass, the intermittent Internet, the blocked gutters, the half-working air conditioning units and the mice. Ah the wonderful mice. Those little critters chew everything — especially the most important heating and cooling system cables. They make nests in our cars. And when you turn on the fan in the car, you get sprayed with nice feces. Which is what they have a lot of in the country. You should see Susan’s face when the feces hit the fan.
Which brings me to a favorite article i found as I cleaned my desk. It was the cover story on the New York Times Sunday Review of March 9, 2013. Savor it this weekend. Maybe it will keep you away from all those wonderful online stores this weekend and all the bricks and mortar ones having their Memorial Day Sales — so you can buy more stuff you absolutely don’t need.
Living With Less. A Lot Less.
By GRAHAM HILL
I LIVE in a 420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall. I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads and main dishes. When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable dining room table. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the books I once did.
I have come a long way from the life I had in the late ’90s, when, flush with cash from an Internet start-up sale, I had a giant house crammed with stuff – electronics and cars and appliances and gadgets.
Somehow this stuff ended up running my life, or a lot of it; the things I consumed ended up consuming me. My circumstances are unusual (not everyone gets an Internet windfall before turning 30), but my relationship with material things isn’t.
We live in a world of surfeit stuff, of big-box stores and 24-hour online shopping opportunities. Members of every socioeconomic bracket can and do deluge themselves with products.
There isn’t any indication that any of these things makes anyone any happier; in fact it seems the reverse may be true.
For me, it took 15 years, a great love and a lot of travel to get rid of all the inessential things I had collected and live a bigger, better, richer life with less.
It started in 1998 in Seattle, when my partner and I sold our Internet consultancy company, Sitewerks, for more money than I thought I’d earn in a lifetime.
To celebrate, I bought a four-story, 3,600-square-foot, turn-of-the-century house in Seattle’s happening Capitol Hill neighborhood and, in a frenzy of consumption, bought a brand-new sectional couch (my first ever), a pair of $300 sunglasses, a ton of gadgets, like an Audible.com MobilePlayer (one of the first portable digital music players) and an audiophile-worthy five-disc CD player. And, of course, a black turbocharged Volvo. With a remote starter!
I was working hard for Sitewerks’ new parent company, Bowne, and didn’t have the time to finish getting everything I needed for my house. So I hired a guy named Seven, who said he had been Courtney Love’s assistant, to be my personal shopper. He went to furniture, appliance and electronics stores and took Polaroids of things he thought I might like to fill the house; I’d shuffle through the pictures and proceed on a virtual shopping spree.
My success and the things it bought quickly changed from novel to normal. Soon I was numb to it all. The new Nokia phone didn’t excite me or satisfy me. It didn’t take long before I started to wonder why my theoretically upgraded life didn’t feel any better and why I felt more anxious than before.
My life was unnecessarily complicated. There were lawns to mow, gutters to clear, floors to vacuum, roommates to manage (it seemed nuts to have such a big, empty house), a car to insure, wash, refuel, repair and register and tech to set up and keep working. To top it all off, I had to keep Seven busy. And really, a personal shopper? Who had I become? My house and my things were my new employers for a job I had never applied for.
It got worse. Soon after we sold our company, I moved east to work in Bowne’s office in New York, where I rented a 1,900-square-foot SoHo loft that befit my station as a tech entrepreneur. The new pad needed furniture, housewares, electronics, etc. – which took more time and energy to manage.
AND because the place was so big, I felt obliged to get roommates – who required more time, more energy, to manage. I still had the Seattle house, so I found myself worrying about two homes. When I decided to stay in New York, it cost a fortune and took months of cross-country trips – and big headaches – to close on the Seattle house and get rid of the all of the things inside.
I’m lucky, obviously; not everyone gets a windfall from a tech start-up sale. But I’m not the only one whose life is cluttered with excess belongings.
In a study published last year titled “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century,” researchers at U.C.L.A. observed 32 middle-class Los Angeles families and found that all of the mothers’ stress hormones spiked during the time they spent dealing with their belongings. Seventy-five percent of the families involved in the study couldn’t park their cars in their garages because they were too jammed with things.
Our fondness for stuff affects almost every aspect of our lives. Housing size, for example, has ballooned in the last 60 years. The average size of a new American home in 1950 was 983 square feet; by 2011, the average new home was 2,480 square feet. And those figures don’t provide a full picture. In 1950, an average of 3.37 people lived in each American home; in 2011, that number had shrunk to 2.6 people. This means that we take up more than three times the amount of space per capita than we did 60 years ago.
Apparently our supersize homes don’t provide space enough for all our possessions, as is evidenced by our country’s $22 billion personal storage industry.
What exactly are we storing away in the boxes we cart from place to place? Much of what Americans consume doesn’t even find its way into boxes or storage spaces, but winds up in the garbage.
The Natural Resources Defense Council reports, for example, that 40 percent of the food Americans buy finds its way into the trash.
Enormous consumption has global, environmental and social consequences. For at least 335 consecutive months, the average temperature of the globe has exceeded the average for the 20th century. As a recent report for Congress explained, this temperature increase, as well as acidifying oceans, melting glaciers and Arctic Sea ice are “primarily driven by human activity.” Many experts believe consumerism and all that it entails – from the extraction of resources to manufacturing to waste disposal – plays a big part in pushing our planet to the brink. And as we saw with Foxconn and the recent Beijing smog scare, many of the affordable products we buy depend on cheap, often exploitive overseas labor and lax environmental regulations.
Does all this endless consumption result in measurably increased happiness?
In a recent study, the Northwestern University psychologist Galen V. Bodenhausen linked consumption with aberrant, antisocial behavior. Professor Bodenhausen found that “Irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mind-set, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in well-being, including negative affect and social disengagement.” Though American consumer activity has increased substantially since the 1950s, happiness levels have flat-lined.
I DON’T know that the gadgets I was collecting in my loft were part of an aberrant or antisocial behavior plan during the first months I lived in SoHo. But I was just going along, starting some start-ups that never quite started up when I met Olga, an Andorran beauty, and fell hard. My relationship with stuff quickly came apart.
I followed her to Barcelona when her visa expired and we lived in a tiny flat, totally content and in love before we realized that nothing was holding us in Spain. We packed a few clothes, some toiletries and a couple of laptops and hit the road. We lived in Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Toronto with many stops in between.
A compulsive entrepreneur, I worked all the time and started new companies from an office that fit in my solar backpack. I created some do-gooder companies like We Are Happy to Serve You, which makes a reusable, ceramic version of the iconic New York City Anthora coffee cup and TreeHugger.com, an environmental design blog that I later sold to Discovery Communications. My life was full of love and adventure and work I cared about. I felt free and I didn’t miss the car and gadgets and house; instead I felt as if I had quit a dead-end job.
The relationship with Olga eventually ended, but my life never looked the same. I live smaller and travel lighter. I have more time and money. Aside from my travel habit – which I try to keep in check by minimizing trips, combining trips and purchasing carbon offsets – I feel better that my carbon footprint is significantly smaller than in my previous supersized life.
Intuitively, we know that the best stuff in life isn’t stuff at all, and that relationships, experiences and meaningful work are the staples of a happy life.
I like material things as much as anyone. I studied product design in school. I’m into gadgets, clothing and all kinds of things. But my experiences show that after a certain point, material objects have a tendency to crowd out the emotional needs they are meant to support.
I wouldn’t trade a second spent wandering the streets of Bangkok with Olga for anything I’ve owned. Often, material objects take up mental as well as physical space.
I’m still a serial entrepreneur, and my latest venture is to design thoughtfully constructed small homes that support our lives, not the other way around. Like the 420-square-foot space I live in, the houses I design contain less stuff and make it easier for owners to live within their means and to limit their environmental footprint. My apartment sleeps four people comfortably; I frequently have dinner parties for 12. My space is well-built, affordable and as functional as living spaces twice the size. As the guy who started TreeHugger.com, I sleep better knowing I’m not using more resources than I need. I have less – and enjoy more.
My space is small. My life is big.
Graham Hill is the founder of LifeEdited.com and TreeHugger.com.
Harry Newton who finally discovered how to remove irksome Comments — like the ones from Cliff who keeps telling me I should have invested every penny (and more) in the market in March of 2009. Not that he did, but I should have. As my friend Todd says, you shoulda, coulda, woulda. But thinking that way post facto would just put you into the local nuthouse. I have enough guilt for stupid decisions I’ve made over the years.
But that’s not the full “story.” It’s that nothing is ever as difficult as it looks. In fact, the more you put off learning how to remove Comments, the more incompetent and stupid you feel. Nike is right: Just Do It. Learn what you can. Trust your instincts. Make your decision and go with it.
By the way, have you seen Nike’s stock? Ever since they split two for one, the thing has gone through the roof. Go figure.
Maybe Apple should split? Or at least put out something new and innovative, not just new ways to save on paying taxes.
Harry – look at it this way, just like you have mice in your country “palace” that irritate you, your site (this one) has its own pesky and bothersome character: Cliff. As you know, in the internet world they are referred to as “trolls”: their sole aim is to bother others by contradicting anything and everything they read and making insulting or incendiary comments yet they never offer anything of value such as ideas to exchange with others. Just about every blog has them, so don’t feel bad. They thrive on the reaction they get by antagonizing others. If I were a betting man, I would say “Cliff” has been on your site for a very long time but started using a different name after the election last November because the comment patterns are virtually identical: no ideas offered but antagonizing comments.
Agree with Devon – I would also point out the impermanence of Mr Hill’s various lifestyles. One wonders when he will have his next epiphany and become a monk or an international arms dealer.
Living with less article – not a big fan of guys who preach about how we are doing it wrong because we live in a house in the suburbs and not in a closet in the city. Don’t want to cut the grass – hire someone. Don’t want to clean the house – hire someone. Don’t want to maintain the house – hire someone. Plenty of people looking for jobs to do the things homeowners don’t want to do. Last time I checked with my friends who live in the city their monthly condo fees were pretty high – more than twice what I pay for my homestead maintenance. They like the city, I like the suburbs.
But, Devon, living in the suburbs is forcing you to drive a car, probably two or more, is causing the demise of the world as we know it. Depleting minerals, gas and oil, etc. Just cause you love it is no excuse – move into a big ugly city (NYC and Chicago come to mind) and help save the world. Yeah, right!
Oh, oh, does this mean Harry’s going to eliminate my Comments?
I finally went back and read Graham Hill’s article, something I should always do before commenting, though not as much fun. His experience somewhat reflects mine and even some of Harry’s comments about the awful accumulation of “stuff.” My big country home with 2 buildings, one we comfortably used for our office, along with Pinot Noir grapes, olives, rose bushes galore and other lovely flowers, two Larry Ellison like Kore fish ponds with small water falls bubbling in, and more, are now gone along with a lifetime of collected “stuff”.
Wow, life is so much easier and free to do things we want, including continue our work. Our “temporary” two bedroom rental in the local town turned into a delight. And tossing things away, giving things to Goodwill and keeping a few things (getting less every month) in storage (in case we need them someday) has had many positive effects, as Graham points out. 400 sq. ft. is a little too far, but the concept of freedom makes sense.