The world’s economic plight continues. The housing market continues to fall, the stock market is in yo-yo mode, and a logical investment plan is drastically needed.
I consulted my crystal ball and am ready to unveil my very best investment idea. Most people do not want to risk a lot of money, so they are searching for low cost opportunities. They are avoiding mortgages because of Fanny and Freddie and not borrowing because of bank mismanagement. They are staying away from Wall Street, wary of OPEC and you can’t even get in on the ground floor of a good Ponzi scheme anymore!
I actually learned the basis of my investment strategy from an old man I met from Chicago. He was very down-to-earth and told me that his basic stock portfolio contained only one kind of stock. He believed that the best stocks to buy were those companies that produced commodities that you could eat. No matter how tough times can get, people always need to eat and therefore he only bought food company stocks. His portfolio included such stocks as Kraft, Heinz, Betty Crocker, General Mills and Robin Hood. Not a bad idea when you think about it.
My best investment advice is to invest all that you can in cans – of Campbell’s Soup. Canned soup is the ultimate wise investment. Each week I advise my clients to buy a case of soup from a wholesale food outlet. A basement full of cases of canned soup is your best hedge against hard times, recession and even potential depression.
If we sink into a depression, a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup will become the equivalent of a gold coin during the Middle Ages. A can of soup can be traded for clothes, firewood, fresh produce or transportation. It will become the most sought after and valued currency of the day. In a real pinch, it can ultimately provide food and what greater need will we possibly have during very hard times. He who has the soup will have the power.
Canned soup also has the advantage of a long shelf life and being easy to prepare. A can opener and a little hot water (think melted snow) and you will be able to carry on during the toughest of hard economic times. If you want to get fancy you could stock up on other canned goods but soup is the key to survival.
Feel free to pass my advice on to friends. I only charge one can of soup for each of your referrals!
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Lifelong Learning Comes in Many Different Shapes
The movie Slumdog Millionaire is based upon a very interesting premise. A young uneducated man wins a major quiz show by correctly answering all the questions from a wide variety of categories. The promoters of the show cannot fathom how an unschooled youngster could be an expert on so many diverse topics.
The young man knew all of the answers not because he was a book learner, but because his life experiences had put him into some unique situations that revealed some snippets of information that by chance were the basis for the questions on the quiz show. His life experiences were his teacher.
On reflection, I tried to identify a number of occasions in my own life where I incidentally learned something. As a child I remember playing the card game Authors. By playing this game I became familiar with the key works of such authors as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Robert Lewis Stevenson, William Shakespeare, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sir Walter Scott, Louisa May Alcott, and Edgar Allen Poe. Without really studying them, I can still remember the key works of these authors.
In a similar vain, I was a big fan of Classics Comics as a child. Famous works of fiction were capsulized into a comic format and because of the comics, I became familiar with the plots and characters of dozens of famous books that I probably would have never read in their original form.
One of the real books that fascinated my as a child was an old tattered family atlas. I remember spending hours finding such exotic locales as Timbuktu, Cairo, Rangoon, Bombay and Katmandu. I loved to find strangely named countries such as Borneo, or strange rivers and mountain ranges. Although it is not a particularly practical skill, it probably helped establish a springboard for my passion for travel in later years.
My childhood love of movies and baseball were also the sources of a lot of incidental learning. I knew the winners of all of the Academy Award winning movies and the works of many actors from the post war years. As a huge collector of baseball cards I was familiar with the teams and records of dozens of famous and obscure baseball players from the 50s and 60s. It was all pretty much useless information except when I was forced to play the board game, Trivial Pursuit, or watch the TV-show, Jeopardy.
I am a wizard at trivial information on a lot of topics. If I had been on Who Wants to be A Millionaire and the questions had to do with authors, famous books, geography, movies or baseball I could have been a millionaire too!
On what subjects are you an expert?
The young man knew all of the answers not because he was a book learner, but because his life experiences had put him into some unique situations that revealed some snippets of information that by chance were the basis for the questions on the quiz show. His life experiences were his teacher.
On reflection, I tried to identify a number of occasions in my own life where I incidentally learned something. As a child I remember playing the card game Authors. By playing this game I became familiar with the key works of such authors as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Robert Lewis Stevenson, William Shakespeare, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sir Walter Scott, Louisa May Alcott, and Edgar Allen Poe. Without really studying them, I can still remember the key works of these authors.
In a similar vain, I was a big fan of Classics Comics as a child. Famous works of fiction were capsulized into a comic format and because of the comics, I became familiar with the plots and characters of dozens of famous books that I probably would have never read in their original form.
One of the real books that fascinated my as a child was an old tattered family atlas. I remember spending hours finding such exotic locales as Timbuktu, Cairo, Rangoon, Bombay and Katmandu. I loved to find strangely named countries such as Borneo, or strange rivers and mountain ranges. Although it is not a particularly practical skill, it probably helped establish a springboard for my passion for travel in later years.
My childhood love of movies and baseball were also the sources of a lot of incidental learning. I knew the winners of all of the Academy Award winning movies and the works of many actors from the post war years. As a huge collector of baseball cards I was familiar with the teams and records of dozens of famous and obscure baseball players from the 50s and 60s. It was all pretty much useless information except when I was forced to play the board game, Trivial Pursuit, or watch the TV-show, Jeopardy.
I am a wizard at trivial information on a lot of topics. If I had been on Who Wants to be A Millionaire and the questions had to do with authors, famous books, geography, movies or baseball I could have been a millionaire too!
On what subjects are you an expert?
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
How to Vacation For a Year For Free!
If I had really set my mind to it, I could have made millions. Instead I chose to become a teacher and live a simple life with simple pleasures. As a retiree, I am now prepared to share one of my million dollar ideas with friends at no charge.
How would you like to take a year long vacation for free? All you have to do is use Ken’s Klever Share-a-Lease Plan. To begin, I suggest you assemble either four or six couples that have similar interests to yours and love to travel. The group needs to select either four or six North American destinations where they all would like to holiday for an extended period of two or three months each.
To illustrate, let us decide that six couples would all like to visit San Francisco, San Diego, Puerto Vallarta, New York, Boston, and Montreal which form a convenient circle of destinations. Each couple would be charged with leasing a condo or apartment in one of the locations for a year. After two months, the couples would move around the circle to the next condo that has been leased by one of the other couples. Over the course of the year each couple would have access to each of the six condos for a two-month period. Four couples would share four condos for three- month periods.
Since the accommodations are all in North America, couples could travel using their own automobile, so the travel expenses would be minimal. The best part of the plan however is that it can operate at no cost to any of the couples if they are willing to lease out their own home for a year. The revenue from leasing your own home should more or less pay for the cost of a condo lease. Brilliant concept don’t you think?
The question of only being out of the country for six months, like most snowbirds, is not an issue. There is a provision through Alberta Health Care that allows a person to be absent for up to two years, without forfeiting AHC coverage, for the purpose of travel. Most people do not know of this provision but we have been using it for years.
If you are a BIG thinker just imagine the possibilities. How about a year in Europe with two months in London, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Rome and Madrid? Or if you are a GIANT thinker, consider the world as your oyster – Seattle, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Istanbul and London? The options are endless and a round-the-world airfare can be less than $3000!
So there you have it. One year of excitement and travel, and all it will cost you is a dram of courage and the commitment to say, “Count me in!” Interested?
How would you like to take a year long vacation for free? All you have to do is use Ken’s Klever Share-a-Lease Plan. To begin, I suggest you assemble either four or six couples that have similar interests to yours and love to travel. The group needs to select either four or six North American destinations where they all would like to holiday for an extended period of two or three months each.
To illustrate, let us decide that six couples would all like to visit San Francisco, San Diego, Puerto Vallarta, New York, Boston, and Montreal which form a convenient circle of destinations. Each couple would be charged with leasing a condo or apartment in one of the locations for a year. After two months, the couples would move around the circle to the next condo that has been leased by one of the other couples. Over the course of the year each couple would have access to each of the six condos for a two-month period. Four couples would share four condos for three- month periods.
Since the accommodations are all in North America, couples could travel using their own automobile, so the travel expenses would be minimal. The best part of the plan however is that it can operate at no cost to any of the couples if they are willing to lease out their own home for a year. The revenue from leasing your own home should more or less pay for the cost of a condo lease. Brilliant concept don’t you think?
The question of only being out of the country for six months, like most snowbirds, is not an issue. There is a provision through Alberta Health Care that allows a person to be absent for up to two years, without forfeiting AHC coverage, for the purpose of travel. Most people do not know of this provision but we have been using it for years.
If you are a BIG thinker just imagine the possibilities. How about a year in Europe with two months in London, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Rome and Madrid? Or if you are a GIANT thinker, consider the world as your oyster – Seattle, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Istanbul and London? The options are endless and a round-the-world airfare can be less than $3000!
So there you have it. One year of excitement and travel, and all it will cost you is a dram of courage and the commitment to say, “Count me in!” Interested?
Friday, April 3, 2009
Prevent Cruelty to Children – Ban Figure Skating
There are some sports that I would not encourage children to participate in at a competitive level. It is no problem if they play them for fun or with their peers in the schoolyard or gymnasium, but they shouldn’t play them professionally.
I am referring to the sports that do not have an objective scoring system. Sports that can easily determine a winner by the number of goals scored, the fastest time recorded, the distance jumped or that can be measured in some clear concise fashion are fine. Sports like baseball, tennis, golf, hockey, javelin, rowing, or Tiddleywinks can be scored objectively. Play them to your hearts content.
But for your sanity and the sake of your children’s egos and self-esteem, avoid the sports scored by some subjective means. At all costs avoid figure skating, competitive diving, gymnastics and synchronized swimming. The loosey-goosey means of scoring will raise the blood pressure of parents and decrease the feeling of worth in the child. Non-objective scoring by its nature is unfair and faulty. Why would you subject your child to the whim of a prejudiced or marginally competent judge?
Don’t get me wrong. I admire the dedication and commitment of the many Olympic athletes who participate in these later sports. I remember watching a former World Champion figure skater practicing slowly skating the figure eight over and over to try to perfect this portion of the old compulsory program. He must have done it a million times before he was a champion and yet when he competed he was at the mercy of a number of judges trying to assess the perfection of his technique in a fraction of a second. I would hate to see years of hard work, sacrifice and dedication left to be judged by the physical abilities of a group of elderly mortals.
Competitive diving, gymnastics and synchronized swimming all suffer from the same problem. To try to promote some sense of fairness these sports all try to objectively determine “the degree of difficulty” of a jump, a dive or a routine. I think this only makes it harder to compare the performance of athletes who execute different routines. If one diver performs a less challenging dive well, is that better than a diver who performs a more challenging dive less well? How can you tell?
Needless to say I am not taking up diving, figure skating or gymnastics for just this reason. I don’t want to dedicate years of my life to perfecting a five-minute figure skating program and have some judge, who is suffering a hangover or who has just been refused a Canadian residency permit, evaluate my years of effort. I would rather take up bowling because I know that counting the number of pins I knock down is not subject to interpretation.
So help prevent cruelty to children. Let them play water polo not take synchronized swimming, learn lacrosse not the parallel bars, and learn how to high jump not make a triple toe loop! You will be thankful you did.
I am referring to the sports that do not have an objective scoring system. Sports that can easily determine a winner by the number of goals scored, the fastest time recorded, the distance jumped or that can be measured in some clear concise fashion are fine. Sports like baseball, tennis, golf, hockey, javelin, rowing, or Tiddleywinks can be scored objectively. Play them to your hearts content.
But for your sanity and the sake of your children’s egos and self-esteem, avoid the sports scored by some subjective means. At all costs avoid figure skating, competitive diving, gymnastics and synchronized swimming. The loosey-goosey means of scoring will raise the blood pressure of parents and decrease the feeling of worth in the child. Non-objective scoring by its nature is unfair and faulty. Why would you subject your child to the whim of a prejudiced or marginally competent judge?
Don’t get me wrong. I admire the dedication and commitment of the many Olympic athletes who participate in these later sports. I remember watching a former World Champion figure skater practicing slowly skating the figure eight over and over to try to perfect this portion of the old compulsory program. He must have done it a million times before he was a champion and yet when he competed he was at the mercy of a number of judges trying to assess the perfection of his technique in a fraction of a second. I would hate to see years of hard work, sacrifice and dedication left to be judged by the physical abilities of a group of elderly mortals.
Competitive diving, gymnastics and synchronized swimming all suffer from the same problem. To try to promote some sense of fairness these sports all try to objectively determine “the degree of difficulty” of a jump, a dive or a routine. I think this only makes it harder to compare the performance of athletes who execute different routines. If one diver performs a less challenging dive well, is that better than a diver who performs a more challenging dive less well? How can you tell?
Needless to say I am not taking up diving, figure skating or gymnastics for just this reason. I don’t want to dedicate years of my life to perfecting a five-minute figure skating program and have some judge, who is suffering a hangover or who has just been refused a Canadian residency permit, evaluate my years of effort. I would rather take up bowling because I know that counting the number of pins I knock down is not subject to interpretation.
So help prevent cruelty to children. Let them play water polo not take synchronized swimming, learn lacrosse not the parallel bars, and learn how to high jump not make a triple toe loop! You will be thankful you did.
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