Category Archives: Money Matters

How To Stay Together

Posted on by
Reply

My amazing playwriting aside, the Jeff Bezos/MacKenzie Scott divorce is an illuminating tale for people committing to one another for the long haul.

The conventional wisdom is that a lack of money and related money fights explain why so many relationships fail. That’s certainly true, but not the whole story. Even people with money can have devastating money disagreements because everyone has a unique money history and no two people will ever think about it the same way.

The bottom line. Couples don’t explore their “money compatibility” nearly carefully enough in the early stages of their relationships. The key is to figure out whether you and your partner are more similar in your thinking about saving, spending, gifting, and investing than not. No, that’s not particularly sexy, but do you want to measure your relationship by decades or not?

One little complication, by which I mean, huge complication. People change over time. Maybe MacKenzie didn’t know Jeff wanted to be the richest person in the world because he may not have wanted to be until his first or one hundredth billion.

What to do about the unknown? Anticipate that your thinking about money will change over time, not radically, but moderately. Similarly, anticipate that your partner’s thinking will change too. Meaning “money compatibility” is always a work-in-progress. Talk about saving, spending, gifting, and investing with some regularity or run the risk of serious differences creating dangerous cracks in the foundation of your relationship.

A One Act Play

Posted on by
Reply

The setting: Jeff Bezos’s and MacKenzie Scott’s Medina, WA kitchen. After working together to make Kraft macaroni and cheese with hot dogs, they serve themselves, grab two cans of Mountain Dew, and sit down at their formica dinner table. It’s one of their last dinners together as a married couple. A few days following this meal, they decide to pull the plug on their marriage. 

Jeff: Mac and cheese with dogs never gets old. [laughs uncontrollably] 

MacKenzie: No, it doesn’t. [inner voice. . . but your laugh has sure started to] 

Jeff: What did you do today?

MacKenzie: I spent most of it journaling. Which helped me realize I don’t want to help you turn Amazon into the world’s retail store anymore. I think $182 billion is enough money. I want to make the world a better place through writing and giving my share of our money away.

[All the while, Jeff texts Lauren Sanchez under the table.]

MacKenzie: [Softly, sadly, and with a deep sense of resignation.] Did you hear me?

Jeff: Yes, you said you want to help me make Amazon into the world’s retail store. 

[MacKenzie stares at Jeff in silence]

Jeff: [Head in his lap.] Can you pass the applesauce? 

 

My Person Of The Year

Posted on by
2

A New York Times primer for anyone who doesn’t know MacKenzie Scott, the eighteenth wealthiest person in the world.

“Ms. Scott, who was formerly married to the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, has pledged to give away most of her wealth. Her shares in Amazon were valued at about $38 billion last year but would have gained value during the coronavirus pandemic.”

Scott isn’t letting the pandemic stop her from making true on her pledge. Quite the opposite. Last week she revealed she was “the one behind the donations to dozens of colleges and universities, part of nearly $4.2 billion she had given to 384 organizations in the last four months.”

As impressive as the amount Scott’s given away is is how her team did it.

“The money came after weeks or months of hush-hush conversations in which Ms. Scott’s representatives reached out to college presidents to interview them about their missions, several of the presidents said on Wednesday. When they learned who was behind the effort, it was a surprise to them, too. But it could not have come at a better time — when the pandemic was hitting their student bodies hard, they said.

‘I was stunned,’ Ruth Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black college in Prairie View, Texas, said of learning that Ms. Scott was giving $50 million, the biggest gift the university had ever received. She thought she had misheard and the caller had to repeat the number: ‘five-zero.'”

Scott is the antithesis of most ultra wealthy philanthropists who almost always give to their alma maters, most of which are already flush with nine or ten figure endowments.

“Ms. Scott’s latest gifts bring her charity to almost $6 billion this year, an extraordinary amount. In another unorthodox touch, she announced them in a Medium post on Tuesday. ‘This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,’ she wrote. ‘Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color, and for people living in poverty.'”

Experts on philanthropy were surprised to see Scott associate herself with institutions that were “much more humble and, indeed, needy.”

“To these institutions, a $20 million donation was the equivalent of several times that to a Harvard or Yale, and could have a disproportionate impact.

‘One of the things that’s so incredible about this massive grouping of gifts is that she does not have a personal connection to most, if any, of these universities,’ said Kestrel Linder, chief executive of GiveCampus, a fund-raising platform that works with colleges and universities.

Ms. Scott made gifts to more than a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, as well as community and technical colleges and schools serving Native Americans, women, urban and rural students.”

Dare to be different. And hella generous.

Seattle Leans A Little Left

Posted on by
2

Moderate Democrats are splitting with more radical leftists on Seattle’s plans to give misdemeanor suspects a pass for crimes committed to meet a basic need.

Jason Rantz, right wing radio host tells a precautionary story. Seattle CM called police she defunded to report crime she is effectively legalizing.

I guess I’m a moderate Democrat since I find the proposed legislation problematic for the reasons Rantz explains. However, since we already imprison a larger proportion of citizens than any other country, we know Rantz’s solution of locking up more people will do nothing to reduce crime or improve Seattleites’ quality of life. Because criminals aren’t rational. They don’t plan on being caught, and therefore, don’t ponder the odds of going to prison.

We also now know we can’t afford our prison population if we want balanced state budgets. I wish I could direct a larger proportion of my city, county, and state sales taxes to mental health and substance abuse treatment.

That still leaves the question of what to do with all the criminals of sound mind who commit property crimes and other misdemeanors. On that, I’ll defer to experts to propose smarter, more viable alternatives to prison.

I May Not Have Been Completely Truthful

Posted on by
Reply

I didn’t spend any money yesterday, but I did shop. And I got very close to spending a lot. So I probably don’t deserve that “counter-cultural-minimalist icon” statue the art world commissioned on my behalf.

Truth be told, I went so far as to put an expensive carbon frame bike in my Colorado Cyclist shopping cart. But I couldn’t pull the trigger. Sometimes when I put something in an online cart and don’t complete the purchase, the next day the vendor sends me a message that includes a deeper discount to help me decide. Alas, nothing from Colorado Cyclist yet.

Shifting gears, pun-intended, despite being cynical about most fads, I find myself on the precipice of embracing one of the biggest trends in cycling—gravel riding. I concede, sometimes the crowd is right. What’s not to like about riding in nature free of heavy metal objects hurtling by at high speeds? Not to mention all the adventures the cool bikepacking kids are having. I wanna be a cool kid.

But I can’t decide if I should get a Santa Cruz Stigmata or a Santa Cruz Highball. What say you gravel riding reader? I deserve at least partial credit for narrowing it down to one California city, don’t cha’ think? Juliet has me leaning Highball.

Back to my mea culpa. This morning, before I got out of bed at 6am, I spent $47 on this. Yes indeedy, I am taking it on myself to brighten your winter.

How Much I Spent Today

Posted on by
2

How much of our consumption is the result of social contagion? More than we care to admit.

My day was wonderfully counter-cultural. $0 spent out-of-pocket. 

Lest I not kid myself about my minimalist street cred, the digital cash register was continuously updating in the background. The YMCA membership, property taxes, utilities, groceries, coffee beans, auto/house/health insurance, gasoline, internet and streaming services, digital and print subscriptions, the family’s cell-phones. And I’m sure I’m not accounting for some other recurring expenses.

Still, don’t I deserve some credit for saying “no thank you” to the legions of marketers and their super sales?   

 

The Billionaires Are Winning

Posted on by
Reply

From Farhad Manjoo’s, “Even in a Pandemic, the Billionaires Are Winning”. The title should begin, “Especially in a Pandemic”.

Manjoo turns to Chuck Collins, a scholar of inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, to tell the sordid story.

“In previous recessions. . . billionaires were hit along with the rest of us; it took almost three years for Forbes’s 400 richest people to recover losses incurred in 2008’s Great Recession.

But in the coronavirus recession of 2020, most billionaires have not lost their shirts. Instead, they’ve put on bejeweled overcoats and gloves made of spun gold — that is, they’ve gotten richer than ever before.

On Tuesday, as the stock market soared to a record, Collins was watching the billionaires cross a depressing threshold: $1 trillion.

That is the amount of new wealth American billionaires have amassed since March, at the start of the devastating lockdowns that state and local governments imposed to curb the pandemic.

On March 18, according to a report Collins and his colleagues published last week, America’s 614 billionaires were worth a combined $2.95 trillion. When the markets closed on Tuesday, there were 650 billionaires and their combined wealth was now close to $4 trillion. In the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, American billionaires’ wealth grew by a third.”

Meanwhile, as the rise in homelessness and strained food banks illustrate, ordinary people are losing.

Bam Adebayo’s Mom

Posted on by
Reply

Is going to be okay. Because Bam is getting paid. From ESPN News Services.

“The Miami Heat and Bam Adebayo have agreed to a five-year max extension, Adebayo’s agent, Alex Saratsis, told ESPN’s Zach Lowe. The deal includes escalator clauses that can take its total to $195 million over five years.”

Let’s not forget, social mobility is extremely low in the (dis)United States these days. And if one wants to improve their lot in life, education is still a much safer bet than professional sports. Neither of those two facts mean we can’t celebrate Bam’s and his mother’s changed fortunes.

“Adebayo had told The Associated Press during the NBA’s restart earlier this summer at Walt Disney World that his lone financial goal was to take care of his mother, Marilyn Blount. She raised him by herself in North Carolina, making about $15,000 a year from her multiple jobs and with the family calling a single-wide trailer their home.

‘That competitive nature comes out when I feel like I’m playing bad and when things aren’t going right,’ Adebayo said in the September interview with the AP. ‘I think about how she fought through struggle. … You see that for 18 years straight, you take that load on and feel that responsibility. And my responsibility is to provide for my mom, and the best way to make sure I can do that is to help us win.'”

Consider her provided for.