#MIDLIFE
I used to own bit of a REIT that paid dividends 4x a year.
Sounds good, right? But other kinds of dividends exist too, the non-monetary type.
Example: In 2019, when my kids were 10- and 9 yo, we went to Vietnam to ride the famous 400km UNESCO-certified Ha Giang loop in North Vietnam on scooters, before visiting 12 more towns and cities in a North-to-South trip of the entire country over 23 days.
The memories of that trip pays me a dividend whenever I want: weekends, weekdays, whenever.
No payment schedule, no withholding tax and no limit on the number of payouts.
My guest this week, , calls this a memory dividend.
It’s an idea similar to Bill Perkins, who wrote ‘Die With Zero’: the idea that life is to measured by how much one truly lived, versus one’s assets at death.
Thomas grew up poor in Singapore. An anomaly in itself, since it’s one of the world’s richest countries. But he talks about how the electricity was cut off because the bills went unpaid. To escape poverty, he read his way through the local library, saved obsessively and reached financial independence at 31.
His new book, ‘The Lunch Break Investor’, is dedicated to his mother, with a promise that her lights will never go out again.
It’s written so that people like you and me can better understand the world of equities — the share market — so we can participate in it profitably.
It’s full of useable information like how identify a company’s competitive advantages (economic moats), simple mental filters to test if you understand how a company makes money (the ‘Crayon Test’) and a six-step easy-to-implement valuation method to prevent overpaying, among many more others.
But there was a counterpoint, and this relates to the memory dividend, mentioned above: the warning to not overdo it.
Make money by all means, but understand the Why as much as the How.
See, I’m 55 in a few days time.
Same as my classmates and many others in my peer group. I’ve witnessed too many of my peers trade their health, their marriages and their children’s best years for money.
Then, on the wrong side of 50, they suggest a family holiday and find the kids have already left home. Or their health prevents them from doing so. And that doesnt include the so, so many who have already left us and continue to do so at quite a frightening pace.
Thomas doesn’t define financial independence as doing nothing. To him it’s the privilege of doing what you love.
Steady compounding works on money, and it works on regret too. So by all means, own productive assets.
But some things won’t wait for the perfect entry point: your health, your parents, your kids before they grow up.
Book the trip.
Create the memories.
It may be the best-yielding asset you ever own.
