Comments

Episode-2273- John Pugliano and Jack Spirko on The Richest Man in Babylon — 7 Comments

  1. I am understanding correctly that the money set aside is solely for investment and not savings in any way? This would be past your emergency fund of whatever size you choose.

    • Yes and no and kinda.

      Say you have a 90 day emergency fund. Okay say you make 60K annually so 5k a month, so you have 15K in savings.

      While true that money should be held as cash or at most in say laddered CDs so it remains liquid, it isn’t not part of your total wealth, just in a different bucket. In other words to me it is part of your total “cash position”, relative to your total investments. So if you had say to make it simple, 85K in your “investments” all in equities, and 15K in your emergency fund. I would still consider that a 15% cash position.

      Does that make sense?

      To me there is savings and there is emergency fund. I hold them in separate accounts. Savings is well put aside my investments for the month, paid my bills and damn, look at that there is more money that I want to keep in checking, let me move that to savings.

      The difference is I can take money from the savings when I want, the emergency and retirement are don’t break glass unless it is a legit emergency type of thing. Make sense?

      • I think so… I guess I’m trying to figure out how to relate it to my life and my next steps. We have a 90 day fund, and my 401k, nothing set up beyond that for a car fund etc. My inclination would be to put up maybe another 12k before I go beyond that to do investing, or am I missing something?

        • No in the end save, save, save, save.  You can’t go wrong with that.  The more you save the more careful you will be in investing it.

  2. Who wrote the version of “Richest man in Babylon” you are talking about? Clicking the link brings up two books by that title by different authers.

    • George Clason wrote the original version with the ancient language theme, thee and thou and what not.

      Various others have written modernized versions, I prefer the original.