Archive for the ‘Society’ Category
Regrets Of The Dying – Bronnie Ware
I am sure some of you have read this before. It is a short article by Bronnie Ware.
“For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.
People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learnt never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.
When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.
It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.
Read More…
Of Art and Wealth
I have been meaning to write about art investments for some time. According to Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management and Capgemini, Singapore’s millionaires are quite fond of having art as part of their investments in luxury items, at 26% of value of luxury investments. The top preference are small items: gems, watches and other jewelry.
Investments in art is not only restricted to the very wealthy. As the middle-class art buyers in wealthy Singapore grow, galleries are aiming lower, taking advantage of an art-buying boom. Growth of so called affordable art and second Affordable Art Fair is reported HERE.
I recently met a friend who started a online Art portal for emerging countries’ artists – www.artyii.com. She wrote an article for Business Times as an introduction to art investment.
Everything Can Be Structured Into A Money Making Product.
The global financial crisis have presented us with such crazy happenings driven by greed. More is to come, the following is from an actual New York Times article and not FHM or Happy Potter novel. Investors Put Money on Lawsuits to Get Payouts.
“Large banks, hedge funds and private investors hungry for new and lucrative opportunities are bankrolling other people’s lawsuits, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into medical malpractice claims, divorce battles and class actions against corporations — all in the hope of sharing in the potential winnings.”
This insane practice, thankfully, cannot be found here. Or at least not to any extent of common knowledge. Will you as an investor, want to own payout of your wealthy neighbors’ ugly divorce battle in a loan structure? After all, this thing looks like its gonna hurt the plaintiff good, which is profitable for my clients!
Fresh Graduate And Staying At The Sail?
Will you wish there was a housing crash in Singapore if you can get a 3-bedroom luxury apartment at The Sail over looking Marina Bay Sands for just $3,000 a month? The equivalent was what happened in Miami.
Brandon Klein, a 26-year-old tax accountant, stays at 50 Biscayne Boulevard, one of the luxury holiday condos built during the 2004 to 2008 boom to attract second-home buyers. Housing market has plummeted in end 2008, and with 7,000 unsold condos, almost a third of the 22,079 units in 75 buildings in Miami’s core, it has transformed Miami. With US$2,700 shared among 3 friends, Brandon is living in an apartment with 24 hour concierge, a ‘sick’ view of Downtown and a life he can never imagined. Some areas, previously only middle aged wealthy appear have transformed into dorm like residences. Interestingly, this has infused life into the vacation beach environment.
The Culprit In BP Oil Spill
We have met the culprit and he is us. It is us that cause the oil spill.
We — both parties — created an awful set of incentives that encouraged our best students to go to Wall Street to create crazy financial instruments instead of to Silicon Valley to create new products that improve people’s lives. We — both parties — created massive tax incentives and cheap money to make home mortgages available to people who really didn’t have the means to sustain them. And we — both parties — sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much oil as possible at the cheapest price. (Of course, we expected them to take care, but when you’re drilling for oil beneath 5,000 feet of water, stuff happens.)
I’m going to be an Affluencer.
Parsing the Language of Influence and Affluence
Posted by Lewis Schiff in The Affluentialist
I recently read an article in The New York Times about an up-and-coming media mogul who claims to have coined the word “affluencer” which means: someone who tries to influence the affluent. In her role as the chief of NBC’s Bravo network, Lauren Zalaznick creates programming that will influence affluent people—in particular, her network’s target demographic of 18 to 49 urbanites.
China’s 400 Richest
China’s wealthiest are gaining against their U.S. counterparts.
The total net worth of China’s 40 Richest, all of whom are now billionaires, doubled in the past year as bust turned to boom. A quick comparison of our new Forbes China Rich List with that of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, published in September, appears to tell a expected story. China’s 400 Richest are worth a record $314 billion, just one-fourth the total net worth of their American counterparts. China’s richest person, BYD’s Wang Chuanfu, has a net worth of $5.8 billion, far below the $50 billion fortune of U.S.’s richest citizen, Microsoft’s Bill Gates. In the U.S., Wang would only rank no. 40.
But the more interesting story is the fact that Chinese tycoons are making huge gains, at a time when many of the world’s richest haven’t been as lucky. As a result, there is a record 79 billionaires, up from 24 a year earlier, more than Germany, Russia or India had published in our worldwide billionaire rankings. The U.S. has 391 billionaires, down from 489 a year ago. The total net worth of the China 400 jumped 81%, or $141 billion, at a time when American’s wealthiest lost $300 billion, or 20% of their cumulative total, dropping to $1.27 trillion.
I Want the Old Goldman Sachs Back!
By Morgan House
December 1, 2009
Over the past year, it’s been Us vs. Goldman Sachs. Conspiracy theories have multiplied aplenty. Loathing hasn’t been shy. Heads have been called for. That much is certain.
But what would a sensible Goldman Sachs look like? One that we could put up with, without being the butt of every egg-throwing anti-Wall Street protest imaginable? To answer that question, we might want to go back and look at the Goldman Sachs of years past, when it commanded respect.
Goldman Sachs went public in 1999. Before that, it was a private partnership, structured the same way many law firms and accounting firms are. Partners were senior employees who, after years of devastatingly long hours, were selected into a small fraternity of owners.
These partners owned the entire firm. All of the capital was theirs. They literally supplied it out of their own earned income. As Charles Ellis writes in his book, The Partnership: “Goldman Sachs retained most of each partner’s yearly earned income. As a result, anyone who became a partner in Goldman Sachs usually experienced a drop in spendable income.”
When the smart people works for Wall Street
Wall Street Smarts
Interesting opinion from a random guy the author met. I’ve never thought of this, but like him, I cannot find a compelling flaw to the theory. I am not sure what the smartest guys from my dad’s generation, born around war times, do as their profession. Maybe doctors, businessmen, teachers. Is there even a demand for banking people then? However, I do know that the smartest people works in banks now. Can’t imagine the cream of the crop working for the government or MAS…
The best MBA program
There are quite a lot of interest in MBA these days. Here are some of the more logically and statistically sound articles and rankings available. A lot of these will have an international focus.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article about the return on investment (ROI) from an executive MBA (EMBA) program. I did not find clear statistics of the surveys but, but the methodology and assumptions seemed to be directionally sound. In short, the calculations depend on these assumptions:
- The MBA program attended and its cost.
- The amount of tuition and fees paid by your employer.
- The increase in salary that you can expect from graduating the program, based on median results from other respondents.
Take note of the profile of the median results reported by graduates of these survey rankings, if your circumstances differ from them substantially, the result might not be what you will expect. Moreover, these analysis is conducted on a pretax basis which may greatly overstate your ROI, since salary increase will be subjected to taxes, whereas expenditure on tuition fees is likely to be non-deductible.
