Middle Age Investor

Summary

• Sharing the investment experience, in the late stage of a bull market and maybe personal finance.
• Goal should be financial independence, maybe a few years later but not too many.

Wow, what a year 2020 had been. It had been even more incredible to me, as I solidly descended to the 40s, or should I say ascended ? Actually there were lots of firsts for me, and I just wanted to transcribe some of that here, so that some folks can relate and perhaps even take note of what to do, but mostly of what not to :). Of course, they are mostly financial in nature, and so goes the relevance. But the first disclaimer is that this is my very first blog of any kind, which should be obvious from my display of linguistic skills.

It started with a new job at an startup, which forced us to move across the country, in the middle of the pandemic. In case you are keeping count they all are firsts. I mean joining a start up, cross country move and of course dealing with the pandemic. Because of the sudden move, we were kind of forced to become accidental landlords, also a first. 

Since I moved little earlier than my family, I had a little bit of free time in my hand. While I was alone here, and missing my wife and two extremely energetic young boys, truth be told, I am also missing some of those me times now :). But on a more serious note, I may not have tried making lemonades if those lemons were not coming in my way. Of course, there is a possibility that me writing a financial blog is perhaps the end of the bull market, in all asset classes that is. But it could be also a perspective a lot of folks who are in the same boat, missing. The extra push to get going. Now even if you were not hustling all these years, its fair to say you were not a teenager in the matter of money. So those extra experience in life can be useful for doing the homework you need to solve the maze of finance. 

So back to some of those alone hours, I got to redress my mostly dormant investment account, to take advantage of the covid discount. Now that is not a first. But I did delve into SPAC investments, which maybe like many other things I would explain in details in a follow-up blog. 

But I got seriously introduced to the wonderful world of cryptocurrency, which at least looks wonderful in hindsight. Again truth be told I had a dalliance with crypto in the last bull market, but I was too chicken to put any serious money into it. So I ended up investing some in the obvious bitcoin, ethereum with some deFi twists. 

When I came to the bay area last year, of course renting is what I had in mind. But I was hoping that maybe I can somehow score a perfectly priced (for me) duplex or a single family in the near future. However, strangely the covid situation started pushing the prices up on residential real estate. At the same time I saw there were some market dislocation in commercial real estate for obvious reasons. So I started some more research and signed up for two leading crowdfunding sites Crowdstreet and Realtymogul. With some dule diligence I participated in few equity deals as well. For debt I stumbled upon another website called GroundFloor.

I got also another surge of financial calling in 2019. So for the sake of keeping this interesting lets lump those experiences also into the 2020 bucket. If you have read this far, you have become a master of filtering my content. So what was important that I got introduced to two other asset classes/ financial automation tools. One was tax efficient robo adviser (read betterment, Wealthfront etc.). The other being somewhat not too hot at this moment p2p lending (read prosper, lendingclub etc.)

So to summarize my current investment instruments 

A) Traditional brokerage investment (other than retirement accounts)

B) Robo tax optimized advisers ( Betterment, Wealthfront) 

C) Direct Landlord (using zillow rental platform)

D) CRE crowdfunding (Crowdstreet, RealtyMogul, GroundFloor)

E) p2p lending ( prosper, lendingclub )

F) Crypto investment (BlockFim DeFi, bitcoin, ethereum) 

G) SPAC investments 

Now let me spare the details for a sequel of this blog. There other than a deeper dive I will also try to explain some of my thought process on going for a certain investment mix. Hope I was able to keep you interested so far. And please share any feedback.  Promise that the sequel will come really soon.