Munger and the Daily Journal Corp CEO hold forth of Gamestop and Robinhood, bankers, Wells Fargo, Costco vs Amazon, and much more! Munger is Warren Buffett’s right hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, and a wise old man!
Watch the full meeting here on Yahoo Finance: https://www.yahoo.com/now/charlie-munger-speaks-daily-journal-162005167.html
We use Altruist to manage your investments. It’s an easy, low-fee platform with commission-free trading and other useful tools that your BTF advisor will use to invest your assets, rebalance them, harvest tax losses to save you money, and keep you on track for your goals.
Your advisor will set you up in Altruist and you’ll receive emails for each account set up on your behalf. Click the ‘Get Started’ link in the email to set up your Altruist username and password that you can use to add your bank account, beneficiaries, and change your address or password. You can also check your investments, view recent activity in your account, etc.
After you set up your login credentials, either go straight to this link or navigate to your profile (top-right circle with you initials) and then hit ‘Settings’:
Click the ‘Accounts’ tab, and scroll down to ‘Add bank’, then input your login credentials to link your bank.
Using your bank’s online login is the best way to link it, but if you don’t have an online login for your bank, or don’t remember it and don’t want to reset it, then you can scroll down on the ‘Select your bank’ screen and click ‘Link with account numbers’ instead.
This method is slower since you’ll have to go to your bank account a couple days later, write down the two small deposits used to verify the account, and then log back into Altruist to ‘verify’ your account.
From the same ‘Accounts’ screen, click ‘Add beneficiary’ then ‘Create new’ to create BOTH your Primary and Contingent beneficiaries. Most married couples choose each other as 100% for their Primary layer, and then use a Trust that benefits their minor child(ren) as 100% for the Contingent layer. You can also name your kids directly if they’re 18+ or until your advisor gets you set up with a Trust (highly recommended for anyone with children under 18!)
You can also name a charity if you wish. One current annoyance is that you’re limited to 20 characters to name your charity/trust, so just abbreviate as best you can. Choose Relationship = ‘Entity/Charity’ for a trust or charity.
If you have multiple accounts, just make sure you’re linked both your bank account(s) and your beneficiaries to all of your accounts. You may need to do this in the future as well if your advisor opens new accounts for you later.
Your advisor will send you a ‘transfer authorization’ via email once you’ve added a bank account. This allows your advisor to transfer funds between your bank account(s) and your Altruist accounts when you would like to invest or cash out.
Click ‘View’ and then approve once you log into your Altruist account.
You are also free to ‘add funds’ to deposit or withdraw money to/from your Altruist account while you’re logged in. It’s easiest to transfer funds electronically, but you can also mail checks or wire the money:
Your advisor will help you move your money at other firms to Altruist. Just approve these requests as they come in to your email by clicking ‘Review’, logging in to Altruist, then approving the transfer.
Your Altruist dashboard should show you any pending transfers you need to approve, so check there to make sure you’ve done everything you need to.
I like reading letters to shareholder from CEOs that like to educate as much as they like to invest and run businesses. Below are links to the collected letters from investing giants including Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway, and Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos. This is the kind of education that I recommend those interested in investing read.
Berkshire Hathaway’s letters to shareholders can be found here individually on Berkshire’s website. (I have yet to find a free, updated, complete collection, but post a link in the comments if you find one!) You can find some edited versions, collections, and other Buffett writings here.
I highly recommend both Buffett’s partnership letters collected & edited in this book, as well as his Berkshire letters edited in this book. Really you’ll learn a lot more, more quickly from those two books than diving through each letter one after the other like I did after reading both those books. I just can’t get enough Buffett!
David Hoang has kindly collected Charlie Munger’s Wesco letters from 1983 to 2009 (the last letter available.)
I’ve put together an (ongoing) collection of the Amazon CEO’s letters to shareholders here from 1997 to the present.
Feel free to bug me if you notice that I haven’t updated the PDF for the past fiscal year. The 2020 letter will come out in 2021, for example.
1. Increase your 401k contribution to 20% (ideally), or at least 10%, or max it out at $19,500 (2020 limit) if you can. Stocks have gotten a lot cheaper, so load up!
Because you’ll save taxes, your take-home pay won’t decrease by nearly that much, and you can also reverse this later if you feel like it’s too much.
2. Review your current investments: I recommend keeping things simple and using only two investment choices for short or long-term savings.
3. Beneficiaries checkup
While you’re reviewing your investments, make sure the beneficiaries on your retirement, and any other investment accounts, are updated. (Usually under ‘my profile/Account Maintenance’ or some such title.)
4. Consolidate your financial accounts into one place: roll over any former employer retirement plans like 401ks/403bs into an IRA. I recommend Vanguard for their low-cost investment options, but Fidelity is also fine.
If you happen to have non-employer investment accounts like any Roth/Traditional IRAs, or just plain ‘ol taxable investment accounts, roll those over too.
6. If your bank sucks (most do!), or you want to use my highly recommended no-budgeting budgeting system to spend more consciously, set up Capital One 360, or Ally Bank, for free after you read this.
