Tag: money

Beware of the Grifters and Scammers

“As important as it is today to protect your personal peace, it is just as important to protect your own money. With the widening economic inequalities and uncertainties in society mixed in with the invasive nature of social media and AI technology, it is easier now more than ever to fall victim to ‘grifting’ or ‘scamming.’”

As important as it is today to protect your personal peace, it is just as important to protect your own money. With the widening economic inequalities and uncertainties in society mixed in with the invasive nature of social media and AI technology, it is easier now more than ever to fall victim to ‘grifting’ or ‘scamming.’

With technology and social media, grifters and scammers can do serious damage almost instantaneously and it is becoming much more widespread each day. You should be on your guard and look to avoid these people at all costs even though in positions of power, influence, or leadership as they are often looking to line their own pockets with money from yours.

Unfortunately, many of us are dealing with the effects of societal factors outside of our own control including financial stress, political polarization, and technological vulnerabilities that make us more susceptible to grifters and scammers. The proliferation of “get-rich quick” scenes are not new in society and have been around for centuries but now it is in your face more than ever. You really must be careful of what you are buying into and to do your due diligence before trusting anyone with your money or credit. Rising living costs, inflationary pressures, and job insecurity all can lead to people falling victim to scams and grifts because of desperation but you need to hold strong against any kind of scheme or falsehood to make your financial situation worse off.

In addition, more than ever, social media influencers, online personalities, and leadership figures are using their followings to proliferate courses, products, ‘coins’, and other services without telling you about the trustworthiness of the product or service as well as more about their background or reputation. There are always some risks involved with financial transactions, but you should be careful with regards to who is selling you, what their background is, do they have an ulterior motive, or are they pressuring you to buy without taking your time to verify what you’re buying first. There are numerous fake investment opportunities, Ponzi schemes, and pump-and-dump stock schemes out there but they have been fueled furthermore by cryptocurrency coins, deepfake technology, and false information given by certain AI tools.

Always look to see if the person your business doing with is trustworthy, their business background, look to see what clients say and verify the reviews are real, what the money-back guarantee is, and be skeptical of any ‘easy money’ scheme, whether online or over the phone or face to face. Grifters will use your fear, anxiety, or general need for money against you and will pressure you to make bad decisions. If someone ever pressures you into something especially regarding your money, you should not trust them or do business with them.

Fact-checking takes time and can be arduous, but you must look at influencers, businessmen and women, and these online financial personalities to see if they can be trusted. Be informed also about ways to protect yourself by studying the latest schemes and bait-and-switch tactics that scammers and grifters are using. AI scams and deepfakes and voice manipulation over the phone is going to become more prominent in the future so you need to stay up to date on the latest trends especially with how many crypto scams, Ponzi schemes, and spam messages are out there. Use your best judgment, trust your gut if something feels off, and make sure your finances are protected with strong online security factors and make sure any passwords or authentication used is changed regularly. Never divulge that information as well to anyone and make sure you don’t give it up to any scammer as well.

Scams, grifting, and financial manipulation tactics are not going away anytime soon so you have to continue to be on your guard especially with modern technology improving upon the sophistication of these schemes. Constant awareness and vigilance is necessary and are your best defenses against the grifters. Protect yourself with verification tactics, avoiding emotional manipulation, financial security protection, and improving your digital literacy as often as possible.

Keep yourself informed about the latest scams, grifts, and ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes out there, think critically about who you trust your money with, and protect yourself and your loved ones from those grifters who profit off other people’s ignorance. These are the steps I take in my life, and I hope you will consider doing the same to avoid the scammers and the grifters, which continue to proliferate in our society.

Mi Cuarto Conjunto de Poemas en Español (My Fourth Set of Spanish Poems)

My fourth set of Spanish poems with various topics focusing on freedom, money, dance, forgiveness, and about natural settings.

La Plata
Tienes que cuidar mucho
la herramienta más constante en el mundo.
Porque la plata te puede seducir,
creación o destrucción de vida.
Cuidado con ese instrumento;
si no, la plata puede destruir tu vida.

Libertad
La libertad no es una garantía.
Generación tras generación,
todos nosotros necesitamos luchar.
La libertad existe en nuestros corazones y nuestras almas.
Sin luchar por la libertad,
puede extinguirse para siempre.

Cómo tú bailas
Cómo tú bailas,
no puedo resistirte.
No puedo dejar de mirarte,
no puedo dejar de pedirte:
¿Si puedes, bailarías conmigo?
Toda la noche podemos bailar juntos.

Perdóname
Yo tuve la culpa.
Viste a través de mí.
Sabías que no era perfecto,
pero aun así me acogiste.
Con tu tierno cuidado,
perdóname, mi querida.

El Lago Profundo
Bucea más rápido.
Sigue buceando conmigo.
Lleguemos juntos al fondo,
a mil metros de cualquier lugar,
azul cristalino, profundo y puro.
Me pierdo en tu profundidad.

El humo en tus ojos
¿Tú puedes mirarme?
Con el humo en tus ojos,
¿a qué eres adicta más?
¿A mí o a tus cigarrillos?
Elige sabiamente, porque
ambos podemos matar.

What Is The Real Rate of Return on Investment?

“As you get older, you realize just how valuable time as a commodity is. You tend to start measuring the cost-benefit analysis or the return on investment that you are receiving not just regarding finances and how you spend or invest your money but also on how you spend your time.”

As you get older, you realize just how valuable time as a commodity is. You tend to start measuring the cost-benefit analysis or the return on investment that you are receiving not just regarding finances and how you spend or invest your money but also on how you spend your time. Unfortunately, this is a topic that we do not prioritize or learn about very well at a young age. Often, you must figure out what are the best ways to use your time wisely and your money.

There are numerous tools out there to help guide you find the real rate of return on your investment, but you must be the one making the decision on what you prioritize. We know for a fact that our time on this Earth is limited from the day we are born. Having such knowledge shouldn’t be morbid or despairing, but rather help us to prioritize how we spend our lives in search of a good use of our time, our money, and much more.

Now, not everything that we do in life should be correlated with a ‘cost-benefit analysis’ or ‘opportunity cost’ involved. Such behavior should be discouraged if you’re obsessing over how you spend every waking minute each day. You should be leaving some room for spontaneous actions that you enjoy regardless of if it’s geared towards health, wealth, and personal satisfaction. There are times each day where we have to commit to actions that take time when we would rather be doing something else and that is what adulthood entails sometimes.

The true focus is what can we do with our time that is free, which will help us in the long-term. If we have goals of wealth, health, and pursuing our own happiness, your time should be spent in looking in investing each day in building yourself up in each of these areas. For example, when we look at investing in our health, we know there are concrete things that can be done, which will help us with a return on having a healthier body, a healthier mind, and managing our stress and anxiety.

We may have to join a gym, change our diet, sleep more, and make time for exercising, and these are the kinds of investments, if done consistently, that can pay off in the long-term. These investments that I cite will not guarantee a longer life, but it is giving yourself the best possible chance of living a healthier life, especially if you are focusing on multiple investments.

In this case, the real return on investment may not be seen right away but you are likely to see some results if you’re consistent with your investments on a long-term basis. You can measure how your diet is helping you lose weight, how your sleep patterns have changed, and how much time you spend at the gym, the yoga studio, or in playing sports. These investments are measurable but the results on these investments will eventually show up in a real rate of return that will put you on a path that leads to a healthier life in the long-term. Returns are not guaranteed but if you are putting in the work over a long enough period, I believe the chances are good that you will be better off than you were years or even decades ago.

Similarly, how we save and invest financially for our long-term financial future, we can do the same with our health and our happiness. Everyone has different financial goals, and I won’t talk about specific investment advice to give, but you can always estimate to a degree what kind of percentage return you’re likely to get from your investments over a year or a decade or a century in terms of growth. These real returns will come to you but if you’re not consistently investing in building your wealth, those real returns will not be as impactful or as fruitful as you would have hoped. It goes to show that with either health, wealth, and happiness, that the earlier you invest in those facets of life and the more that you invest in them, the better off that you will be.

What makes someone truly happy is complicated and will differ depending on your emotional state, but I do believe spending more time with those who care about you, and you who care about them, enjoying more time spent doing the hobbies and interests that give you joy, and being able to invest time in learning new skills, exploring new places, or investing in your home and community, those kind of investments will have real returns on making you happier in the long-run. There will be times when what you did or do no longer makes you happy and that is alright. The key here is to keep trying out new things, keep meeting people, keep trying to be involved in areas of life that you think will make you happier, that is key in continuing to make those investments in building your happiness into the future to keep producing better and better returns.

Time is fleeting and you must prioritize health, wealth, and happiness in my view, which will give you those real returns in your life to enjoy and take joy in. Most of all, you have to know the difference as you get older between what’s give you actual returns for your hard work and efforts, and what you have to stop doing that is giving you no real returns. It is important to prioritize more of what will pay off in the future throughout your life and increasingly avoid those activities that produce a negative return and will leave you worse off.

It is one thing to be able to invest well in activities that bolster your life satisfaction, but you should also remember to avoid those other ways of spending the time that lower your real returns or negate them entirely. Be sure to know what a waste of your time is, if you can cut that activity out or lower your exposure to it and be able to replace the time spent on that activity with a good alternative. which you can take part in to continue to invest in building a life and a future that will make you healthy, wealthy, and happy.

What is ‘True Wealth’?

“I believe the key is being able to maximize wealth in both facets as much as possible without sacrificing one or the other too much.”

There is a standard definition of ‘wealth’ as a concept: An abundance of valuable possessions, money, or other resources to the degree that it causes prosperity. However, what is prosperity to you may not be prosperity to others. I like to think of wealth is not an abundance not just of material possessions or of money or of how much you can acquire but also how much you value what inherently belongs to you. What I mean by that is your time, your health, and your freedom. While building wealth is key to having success in life, there are other facets to wealth that we can neglect if you are not careful.

Wealth will come with sacrifices whether it is your time, your freedom, or your health as there are tradeoffs involved. You’ll find that to become more prosperous, you may have to sacrifice time, freedom, or health to build that wealth up whether in the form of money, resources, or material possessions. I believe the key is being able to maximize wealth in both facets as much as possible without sacrificing one or the other too much.

In order to gain more money, you may have to sacrifice your time in the sense that you exchange your time to earn money or you are not as free to do what you want each day because you have to work a job, grow your business, or learn new skills in order to earn the money to become wealthy. The same could be said of your health whereas you may have to sacrifice the time you could use to invest in your own health to build material or resource wealth with the time you put in to earn money or other assets. That time that could be used to be spent at the gym, on a run, going on a hike, or practicing a sport could go to your job or your business or investing into a new asset.

If you can find out what you truly value and what you want to maximize in terms of your wealth, make sure you prioritize it to have true wealth for you. For example, if fancy cars, big houses, and a lot of material possessions appeal to you, maybe you don’t mind putting a lot more time into working for that, putting your health on the backburner, and sacrificing certain freedoms to do what you must instead of what you want to. On the contrary, if you care less about possessions, material wealth, but still want to be comfortable in terms of money or investments, then maybe you can work less, focus on your health and free time more, and exercising more freedoms to do what you want with the extra time you have as a result.

You should decide what kind of wealth is best for you. What truly will make you happy, what you are passionate about in life, and what you want to get most out of life, you’ll be able to build that true wealth. I think the key for anyone is to maximize the 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week as much as possible. If you can build your wealth passively to get some of your time back, that is a key advantage in my view to having true wealth too. When you can be financially successful by having multiple sources of income, multiple options to build wealth, and with some or a lot of autonomy in your work or business pursuits, that really can be an advantage in not only being successful but happy too.

Wealth is not just about being financially well off but also about being well off in other areas including health, time, and exercising freedom in what you do and how you do it. There is a distinct difference between someone who must rely on others for their wealth building and someone who is able to create their own opportunities or build their own means of wealth in a business, in real estate, or in investments that can create more freedoms rather than slowly eliminate them.

You can have as many possessions as possible, houses, cars, and money in the world but if you have no free time, no health, or no autonomy in what you do or how you earn that wealth, then you may need to reassess if that is the true wealth that you want out of life. I hope that you’ll rethink what wealth means to you because only you can decide what you would like to prioritize as you build it. You must consider that sacrifices will have to be made, that time, money, and health are all commodities that can be saved or lost depending on what you prioritize these days.

I only ask that you realize that having the freedom to do what you want and when you want is underrated. It is a form of wealth within itself along with keeping your health in good shape as long as possible even if you must sacrifice some time or freedom as a result. Consider that you can be very wealthy in the material sense but if you are unhealthy, working all the time, and have to answer to others in order to keep building that wealth, are you truly wealthy or is it only one kind of wealth that you have?

Think about what you are willing to sacrifice, what you are willing to earn, and how to passively build on the wealth you want to earn to save more time and freedoms that can be used for health, time spent with family and/or friends, or enjoying what the world has to offer outside of your own wealth building. Wealth takes many forms as I mentioned so remember that while we often think of money, cars, houses, and other assets, we should remember that wealth can be time spent away from an office to enjoy a vacation, wealth can be an extra hour in the day to use the gym or go for a hike, wealth can be starting businesses that matter to you with hours of work that you set for yourself and only you can hold yourself accountable for. Think about the wealth that you want to build throughout your life and how you want to make it work for you.

Greed Is Not Good

“My hope is that the ethos paraded in popular culture and media of ‘Greed is good’ first popularized back in 1987 by the fictional character on Wall Street known as Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) will die out and be replaced by a different ethos.”

The ethos of an era or a generation usually spans about 40-50 years. I think we are living in a time of great upheaval obviously due to the COVID-19 pandemic but also due to the economic and social disruptions that occur as a result. What was thought to be as acceptable before the pandemic will likely draw condemnation and pushback after the pandemic. My hope is that the ethos paraded in popular culture and media of ‘Greed is good’ first popularized back in 1987 by the fictional character on Wall Street known as Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) will die out and be replaced by a different ethos.

I’m not sure exactly what that new ethos will become but I do fervently hope that it will push back on the notion of greed being good at all but rather a detriment to the wider society. This new ethos in the 2020s and beyond will hopefully not prioritize the pursuit of money and fame above all else but rather the pursuit of kindness, caring for others, and leaving the world better than we found it.

While Gordon Gekko is just a fictional villain and the movie ‘Wall Street’ fictional in nature, there are examples throughout our society where people actually believe the ethos of ‘greed is good’ and actively pursue it in different ways without understanding or caring about the repercussions.

I’ll give a few examples that are not from 1987 or even earlier in the 1980s but from 2020: A college admissions scandal which involved bribery so the children of well-to-do families could get into prestigious colleges without earning their admissions, Multiple U.S. Senators caught red-handed doing insider trading to profit off of a pandemic and then not admitting their wrong doing, and large firms receiving loans they likely don’t need while they use that money for stock buybacks rather than investing in the solvency of their workers during the height of this unemployment crisis.

These are just three examples of this hopefully dying ethos of ‘greed is good’ but the problem still is that these kinds of practices, while they are being condemned, they are not being cracked down hard enough and the laws have not been changed enough to prevent future misdeeds. When you have an economy that protects high income inequality, lopsided CEO-to-worker compensation ratios, and a consistent hesitancy to guarantee collective bargaining rates for employees and an ability to raise wages to livable levels, that shows that ‘greed is good’ is still a predominant ideology that is hurting the average person.

The stock market may hit all-time highs but that is good news only for those who actually own stocks and that number is only over half of Americans whereas the gains of the stock market are only truly felt by the Top 10% of income earners. The previous financial crisis of 2007-2009 showed the world how ‘greed is good’ can cause companies to go bankrupt, houses to be foreclosed, and businesses to be shuttered, while no CEO who was responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis actually went to jail. The bonuses continued to flow, and the banking system maintained its solvency, but unemployment and inequality grew for the next few years with both now increasing in 2020 even while the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 30k for the first time.

I should state clearly that I am not against people going into business, try to make money for themselves to feed themselves and their families, and enjoying the fruits of their labor. However, when people are caught being greedy and harming others in the process as which continues to happen, there need to be harsh consequences and changes to the law. As Theodore Roosevelt knew as President, corporate oligopolies need to be reined in, broken up, and held accountable. Gilded ages may be good for the few, but they lead to disaster for the many. In this pandemic, many billionaires have seen their net worth skyrocket and their stock prices increase but at the same time, you have millions of people jobless, homeless, and in food lines often for the first time in their lives.

The ethos of a culture has to push back against this kind of greed and ignorance. It starts with condemning the actions of those who don’t play by the rules, won’t change the rules to be fairer, and who go out of their way to make life difficult and unfair for others trying to succeed. It also means calling out those people who refuse to pay taxes, use offshore tax laws to park their money elsewhere, and whose companies don’t pay a time in actual taxes while other parts of society suffer. Not only should these practices be condemned but they should be made illegal as well.

Social trust, belief in the goodness of others, and the willingness to do what’s right suffers when greed is pursued #1 above all else. The past thirty years have shown this to be true as the increased financialization of the economy as a whole, loose regulations, increased corporate influence and money in government have all atrophied our system to where we are dealing with serious labor, environmental, and employment concerns.

Not everybody who has earned a lot of money is greedy, but they have a role in helping to make the system fairer by abiding by the rules and respecting the fact that they do have a role in allowing others to have their chance to be successful. You can’t climb up the ladder and then pull it out from under you when you get there. Others who are not greedy but do well for themselves have to remember that they have a responsibility to hold those in power and those who have immense wealth in check to be consistently vigilant that they are not flouting the rules or if the rules don’t exist yet, perhaps they should be incorporated to combat unrestrained greed.

There will always be some kind of inequality and differences in outcomes in a capitalist system but there are clear signs to tell when that inequality has gotten out of control, when greed has become too prominent, and when justice or basic fairness has taken a back seat. Greed is not good, and it should be one of the guiding ethos of the next generation. Being a success, working hard for that success, and spreading that success around so others have a good shot at it is a much better philosophy to embody. What’s good for you is not always good for others. It is important that those with immense wealth or power understand that they too live in a society and there are certain duties and obligations that we have to one another.

Knowing when enough is enough, knowing the difference between right and wrong, and knowing when things have gone sideways and need to be fixed, those are all key components on pushing back against the ‘greed is good’ ethos, which has had its prominence over the past four decades. Greed can harm others, do tremendous damage, and atrophy the bonds of trust in our society. It is important that we never forget these facts and to fight against it as much as we can in our lives, both personally and professionally.