There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from owning land. It feels ancient, almost biological. You stand on something solid, something that cannot be emailed to another country or deleted by a software update. For most of human history, owning property meant you had won. You were safe. Japan believed this more deeply […]
Safe as Houses? How the World’s Safest Asset Class Bankrupted a Generation Read More »
Buying a house with someone is the moment the relationship stops being poetry and starts being accounting. Up until then, love can survive on shared playlists, inside jokes, and a vague agreement about who pays for dinner. But a mortgage is a thirty year contract that does not care about how you met. It wants
How to Stress Test Your Partner’s Financial Integrity Before You Buy a House Read More »
The internet has produced many pointless debates. This is not one of them. When someone who owns a total stock market index fund argues with someone who owns rental properties about which strategy builds more wealth over three decades, something genuinely interesting happens. They are both right. They are both wrong. And the reason for
There are two ways to use other people’s money to get rich. One takes thirty years. The other takes thirty minutes. Both are forms of leverage. Both can make you wealthy. Both can ruin you. The only real difference is the speed at which the consequences arrive. The real estate investor borrows from a bank,
Slow Leverage vs. Fast Leverage: Real Estate Meets WallStreetBets Read More »
There is a strange kind of symmetry in finance that nobody talks about. Every investing community has someone they look down on. And almost always, that someone is looking down on somebody else. The contempt travels in one direction, like a river that only flows downhill. At the top sits whoever thinks they are working
There is a strange paradox in the world of income investing. Two groups of people who want the exact same thing, a steady stream of money they did not have to clock in for, have developed a deep and almost theological disagreement about how to get it. Dividend investors look at landlords and see people
There is a specific kind of person who gets excited about a stock trading below its book value. There is another specific kind of person who gets excited about a triplex in a neighborhood nobody wants to drive through yet. These two people rarely end up at the same dinner party. When they do, they
Cheap Stocks vs. Cheap Buildings: Value Investing Meets Real Estate Read More »
There is a particular kind of person who buys a duplex in a boring suburb, spends a weekend fixing a leaky toilet, and then does almost nothing for the next five years except collect rent checks and watch the mortgage balance shrink. And there is another particular kind of person who, on a Tuesday afternoon,
Why The Landlord Plays the Long Game and WSB Plays Options Expiring Friday Read More »
There is a particular kind of argument that happens at dinner parties when someone mentions real estate. One person leans back and says they own a few rental houses. Another person, slightly smug, says they own real estate too, but without the tenants, the toilets, or the phone calls at midnight. They own REITs. Shares
REITs vs. Rental Properties: The Dividend Investor vs. the Direct Landlord Debate Read More »
Humans have been arguing about what counts as real wealth for as long as humans have had wealth. The conversation usually sounds sophisticated. It is not. Strip away the jargon and the charts and the confident predictions, and you find the same instinct that made our ancestors carve their names into stones. People want to
Land vs. Ledger: The Oldest Asset Class vs. the Newest Read More »