Investing in Financial Counseling
Filed under: Experts Invited, Investing, Op-Editorials | Tagged: Financial Counseling | Leave a comment »
Investing in Financial Counseling
Filed under: Experts Invited, Investing, Op-Editorials | Tagged: Financial Counseling | Leave a comment »
The MIT Westgate Studies
By Prasad Nilanth
The “P” theory was first crafted by psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back in what came to be called the Westgate Studies conducted at MIT.
The study investigated how friendships developed among students at the new Westgate Complex at MIT. The results clearly showed the role of proximity in the formation of friendships. The strongest friendships developed between students who lived next to each other on the same floor. Where friendships developed between students who lived on different floors, one of those students tended to live near the stairways.
In social psychology, propinquity (/prəˈpɪŋkwɪtiː/; from Latin propinquitas, “nearness”) is one of the main factors leading to interpersonal attraction. It refers to the physical or psychological proximity between people. Propinquity can mean physical proximity, a kinship between people, or a similarity in nature between things (“like-attracts-like”).
Two people living on the same floor of a building, for example, have a higher propinquity than those living on different floors, just as two people with similar political beliefs possess a higher propinquity than those whose beliefs strongly differ.
Propinquity is also one of the factors, set out by Jeremy Bentham, used to measure the amount of (utilitarian) pleasure in a method known as felicific calculus.
MORE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicific_calculus
Conclusion
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Filed under: Experts Invited | Tagged: felicific calculus., PROPINQUITY, utilitarian | Leave a comment »
By RICK KAHLER, CFP
You have probably never seen an ad like this, because entrepreneurs are not hired. They hire themselves. Merriam-Webster defines an entrepreneur as “a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money” or “one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.”
God bless entrepreneurs. Without them our world would look much different. We would probably still be living in caves, hunting with clubs, and eating raw meat. They create companies from scratch. In so doing, they create jobs and take significant monetary risks of a business failure.
They also stand to gain substantial rewards for success, but that success is far from guaranteed. Few people realize that most entrepreneurs fail in their attempts in business. According to Investopedia, 50% of all new businesses fail in 5 years, 66% in 10 years, and 75% in 15 years.
Given those statistics, the entrepreneurs who succeed must be rich, right? A study by Career Explorer found that the average full-time salary of an entrepreneur is $43,240 a year. To put this into perspective, the average starting salary for a graduating four-year degree student at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology is $63,354. Maybe there should be a song, “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be entrepreneurs.”
My experience, however, is that it really doesn’t matter what Mama says. The entrepreneurial mindset is somewhat inextinguishable. While there have been some attempts at teaching entrepreneurial skills, it’s hard to teach grit, determination, and perseverance, coupled with a good dose of fantasy thinking and denial. It’s really hard to “tell” an entrepreneur anything.
Fittingly, entrepreneurs love to invest in their own companies. Investment advisors call such holdings “tangible” investments, ones you can see and touch. Tangible investments include start-up businesses, family-owned businesses, and all types of directly owned real estate. They are inherently non-diversified and illiquid. Typically, entrepreneurs have the vast portion of their net worth tied up in their businesses. It’s incredibly rare to find one with a stash of cash or any type of liquid portfolio or retirement plan.
Why? The entrepreneurial mindset. First, entrepreneurs don’t believe in traditional diversification. Why settle for earning an average of 5% a year when you can earn ten times that in your business? Never mind that the chance of losing it all is three to one. Most entrepreneurs firmly believe they are the one guaranteed to succeed even though the deck is stacked against them.
Second is that since 75% of businesses ultimately fail, most entrepreneurs are losing, not making, money. They are perennially cash-poor and need every dollar they can find to fund their negative cash flows. Even those who are making money rarely have any liquid investments because entrepreneurs are always looking for new ventures, which of course, need funding.
One of the most difficult tasks I face is persuading a successful entrepreneur to take some hard-earned “chips” off the table and sock away a low-risk, diversified nest egg to assure a comfortable retirement. The only ones I’ve convinced to do that were older entrepreneurs who had owned their companies for well over 15 years and were under five years from retirement. All the younger entrepreneurs to whom I have given that advice have refused the notion. All have eventually lost 75% to 90% of their net worth and, sadly, the opportunity to secure their future.
The entrepreneurial mindset of determination and perseverance can bring significant financial rewards. Expanding that mindset to include a broader, more diversified view of investing for the future can turn those rewards into long-term financial independence.
Assessment: Your thoughts are appreciated.
BUSINESS, FINANCE, INVESTING & INSURANCE TEXTS FOR DOCTORS:
THANK YOU
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Filed under: Experts Invited, Investing, Research & Development | Tagged: business ownership, CEO, Rick Kahler CFP® | Leave a comment »
A BLACK MARKET PODCAST VIEW OF THE OPIOID CRISIS
Courtesy: www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner,org
Opioid Overdose Crisis
Every day, more than 130 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids.1 The misuse of and addiction to opioids—including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl used to help relieve severe ongoing pain —is a serious national crisis that affects public health as well as social and economic welfare.
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The Podcast
And so, I was fascinated with this podcast because I often encountered narcotic seeking patients while in city center and urban practice. It was recorded by my neighbor and Austrian economist Peter Raymond over at “The Free Man Beyond the Wall” website.
Colleague Dr. Mark Thornton recently gave this talk at the Mises Institute Supporters Summit on the opioid crisis that is plaguing the US. Dr. Thornton lays out a short history of this tragic epidemic that is taking lives every day. He addresses how doctors prescribe these drugs, how government regulates them and explains what happens when people are forced into the “black market” to sustain their addiction.
PODCAST: http://freemanbeyondthewall.libsyn.com/episode-169-the-opioid-crisis
MORE: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2019/08/22/the-opioid-crisis-rising-2000-2017/
MORE: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2019/02/06/about-the-opioid-crisis/
Your thoughts are appreciated.
BUSINESS, FINANCE AND ECONOMICS TEXTBOOKS FOR DOCTORS:
THANK YOU
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Filed under: Drugs and Pharma, Ethics, Experts Invited, Videos | Tagged: Dr. Mark Thornton, Free Man Beyond the Wall, Mises Institute Supporters Summit, Peter Raymond | Leave a comment »
Please – Do Not Do This!
By Francisco Gutiérrez, MD., Lucio Leon, M.D. at: nejm.org
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Submitted for your consideration. Just In case you ever wondered what injecting 10 ml of elemental mercury would do to you?
Case report: A 21 yo woman attempted suicide by injecting 10 ml (135 g) of elemental mercury (quicksilver) intravenously.
Normal AP Chest X-Ray
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Case: She presented to the emergency room with tachypnea, a dry cough, and bloody sputum. While breathing room air, she had a partial pressure of oxygen of 86 mm Hg.
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Assessment
The patient was discharged after one week, with improvement in her pulmonary symptoms. Oral chelation therapy with dimercaprol was given for nine months. At follow-up at 10 months she was healthy, with no serious consequences. The abnormalities on the chest radiograph were still apparent.
Your thoughts are appreciated.
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Filed under: Career Development, Experts Invited, Risk Management | Tagged: mercury poisoning | Leave a comment »
“Money is supposed to be spent!” “Money is supposed to be saved!”
We may not hear talk-show participants shouting these opposing views at each other with the same level of anger that characterizes some of our political rhetoric. Yet the core polarization that pervades so much of today’s society also shows up in people’s beliefs about money.
I saw this polarization recently in a conversation with a group of friends in Europe. The topic of money came up, as it usually does when people find out one of my specialties as a financial advisor is financial therapy. The thinking of my friends was that money is meant to be spent, not saved. They felt that people who saved money were faithless and greedy hoarders who by their saving threatened the economic system.
At the other extreme, I know other people who strongly believe a person’s first duty is to save and invest. According to them, those who don’t save as much as possible for emergencies and retirement are foolish, deluded, irresponsible, and destined to live out their last days in poverty.
My friends who embrace the money script that “money is to be spent, not saved” are likely to also hold a money script that “the universe will provide.” They tend to fall into a category we label Money Avoiders. Those who embrace the money scripts that “money is to be saved and not spent,” who also believe “one can never really have enough money,” are in the category of Money Worshipers.
Like most other forms of polarized thinking, neither of these extremes is right. Nor is either belief wrong.
Money does need to be spent. The health of our economic system depends on transactions. It’s important that money flows through the selling and buying of goods and services. When a significant number of consumers stop spending, economic activity grinds to a halt. We saw the effect of this in the financial crises of 2008. It’s also important to spend money to take care of ourselves and our families. Saving or investing money to a point that we go without adequate food, shelter, health care, or similar necessities is not healthy.
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Money also needs to be saved to provide a cushion against emergencies and to provide for our needs in retirement. My European friends enjoy a higher certainty of adequate income in retirement. For them, this is the universe providing, a strong government security net. However, those that live in many Asian countries are assured very little, if anything, in the way of retirement income. For them, the universe comes up short and depends upon the generosity of family to provide. Saving in an Asian culture is therefore much more important than if you live in a Scandinavian country.
Saving and investing for retirement is important for those of us in the US, as well. Without it, we face two dubious prospects: we can depend on family to provide or we can eke out a meager living on a Social Security payment of around $2,000 a month in retirement.
Those who are not polarized around money understand that both spending and saving are important for financial health. They can balance their spending and saving, applying both when necessary in their own lives.
Assessment
Ideally, from this balanced middle ground, someone can also see past the limitations of others who are polarized. Those who believe “Money is meant to be spent” or “Money is meant to be saved” have a world view that results in such an extreme position. Labeling them as “wrong” is not a useful way to try to shift anyone’s polarized beliefs.
Conclusion: Your thoughts are appreciated.
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Filed under: Experts Invited, Investing | Tagged: Prioriting Money Beliefs, Rick Kahler CFP | Leave a comment »