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Month: August 2018 (Page 2 of 3)

Move out skills

August 15, 2018 /

The Edit Your Life podcast recently aired a short episode about teaching life skills to your children. One of the co-hosts referred to such skills as “move out skills” which I find to be an awesome phrase that I’ve started using.

Getting your kids to buy-in to learning a new skill can be tough and the hosts had these nuggets of wisdom to help with some of those challenges:

  • Emphasize to your kids how little time it will take to learn a given skill. Of course, this depends on the skill in question. For maximum effectiveness, you should keep your skills as bite-sized as possible.
  • Point out that very few people get a skill right the first time. Tell your children, “don’t be frustrated…you’re not good at this thing…yet, but you’ll get there.”
  • Use a recent experience as an example and catalyst for learning a life skill. With college looming over the head of my oldest, this is the perfect opportunity to teach her more household responsibilities.
  • Make it a challenge. Consider turning life skill learning into a competition with rewards at the end.
  • Encourage other adults in your child’s life to teach him skills. I really like this point. For one, this helps distribute some of your work to others. For another, I’m frankly not as skilled as other friends and family and wouldn’t be the greatest instructor on a lot of these ideas.
  • Start today. Enough said.

And in case you’re unsure what sort of skills to start teaching your young ones, the hosts also created a handy, “100 Life Skills You Can Teach Your Kids in 5 Minutes or Less:”

Those skills are fantastic! Here are ten more I’d add to the list:

  1. Balance a checkbook, reconcile credit card statements, and, in general, manage your finances
  2. General computer skills especially with regard to security
  3. Air up a tire (maybe even change one)
  4. Identify when there’s an issue with the car (that engine light generally means something bad is going on)
  5. Operate a drill
  6. Put together a piece of furniture (bonus points for Ikea)
  7. Go grocery shopping with coupons
  8. Use a can opener (both manual and electric)
  9. Mow the grass and learn basic lawnmower maintenance skills
  10. Check and change the furnace filter

 

Teaching your kids about money

August 13, 2018 /

Recently, I listened to an episode of the Rich Dad podcast centered around teaching financial literacy to our kids. Here are my notes on the episode.

In the opening monologue, the host ascribes as “garbage” the convention to:

“…save money and get out of debt and invest for the long term in a 401k. So if you’re teaching your kids to save money, go to school, get out of debt, buy a house, and invest for the long term in a 401k or trust that your company pension or your state pension plan is going to be there to save you, this program is for you.”  (Robert Kiyosaki)

Hmm. So saving money and getting out of debt are not good things? I can certainly understand how putting your complete faith in 401k and pension plans is probably ill-advised and that home ownership as an investment is a dubious proposition. But saving and being debt-free is bad? I think what he really means is that it’s bad to save in US Federal Reserve notes, as the Federal Reserve seems to increase that supply with seeming reckless abandon, eroding the purchasing power of those notes over time.

Cash Flow

The crux of the episode focused on the husband-and-wife team of Andy and Marcy Tanner and how they’re raising their two young boys to be financially literate. Mr. Tanner is the author of two books: 401(k)aos and The Stock Market Cash Flow. 401(k)aos seems to be a book describing deceptive practices in the 401k industry while The Stock Market Cash Flow appears to be more of a prescriptive book about how you can take advantage of the stock market.

The Tanners seem to do a lot of international public speaking and take their boys with them to speak in front of thousands. Learning to speak in front of crowds of adults by itself is certainly a great experience for their children. The family are also avid players of a game called Cashflow–I assume it’s this “Cashflow” game from the Rich Dad franchise, which they say is a chief instructional tool they use with their boys.

Infinite Returns

The episode then detoured from tools and techniques to teach our children about money to “those bums in Washington” and Wall Street. One term that kept coming up was Infinite Return. The best I could gather, Infinite Return is a technique, largely achieved in real estate investing, where you somehow invest no money in an asset and then turn around and sell the asset for an “infinite return” on your initial $0 investment. Tanner did make one observation that never occurred to me before: with 401ks, and probably most other investment vehicles, people invest their own money in these instruments. The 401k managers call this money “assets under management.” Those managers take a fee from the investors. Thus, this is a form of Infinite Return for the managers: they make no investment of their own capital and take none of the risk yet they make a return off the transaction all the same.

Taxation without representation

The conversation then shifted to the age disparity between the host and the two young guests. The host claimed that pension programs use, I guess, incorrect actuarial tables that expect most participants to die at age 70. Since people are living longer these days, retirees are drawing on these programs longer and shifting more and more burden on the young for support.

“One of the questions that was a real epiphany for the boys was: ‘David, are you old enough to vote?’ ‘No.’ ‘And Zach, are you old enough to vote?’ ‘Nope.’ So you guys didn’t get to vote for all this spending. You didn’t get to vote for these policies and, yet, you understand clearly that you’re going to have to pay for it.”  (Andy Tanner)

“So if you didn’t vote for it and yet you have to pay for it, David, what’s that called? ‘Taxation without representation.'”  (Andy Tanner)

Cashflow Quadrant


Mr. Tanner off-handedly mentioned another tool, The Cashflow Quadrant, that he used as an initial teaching device to show the four different roles the kids could assume as they enter the workforce.  Just this image alone seems like a powerful teaching tool I can use today.

Learn how to sell

“The most important skill of an entrepreneur is sales.”  (Andy Tanner)

The Tanners raised their children to hone and enjoy the skill of sales. Lemonade stands advertised on Facebook became the boys’ training ground. With their profits, the boys invested in Disney and McDonalds stock. Then, after learning about the detrimental effects of inflation on their cash savings, they began purchasing silver. Lately, they’ve gravitated toward investing in real estate.

“One of the thing’s that’s fun is Mom and Dad will invest in bigger projects and you get to be part of that….We do have some real estate as a family–in a family trust–but you really want your own, don’t you?”  (Andy Tanner)

Real estate in a family trust. Might be something good to remember.

The biggest asset of the US federal government

In closing, the host mentioned an astonishing statistic that, at first, I just couldn’t believe: at $1.3 trillion, student loan debt is the biggest asset of the United States federal government. What?! How can that be?  How depressing!

More tools, please

So, this podcast episode was decent, I just wish the host and guests would have detailed more tools and techniques they use to educate their kids–particularly tools that aren’t part of the Rich Dad brand.

Downloading files in bulk

August 8, 2018 /

With the recent changes in Firefox of late, several of my favorite plugins no longer work. That’s really frustrating. One of those plugins is DownloadThemAll.

Suppose you navigate to a webpage that contains links to several files you wish to download. You could: 1) right-click each link, one by one, select “Save As” from the context menu, and download each file or 2) open up the DownloadThemAll plugin window, check the files you want to download from a list DownloadThemAll auto-magically populates, and click the “download” button to download all those files together.

Or at least you could go with Option #2 until Firefox Quantum came along and made the plugin incompatible. So, what’s one to do? Well, here’s one approach I tried recently in Python, although it could be a little gnarly for the non-technical:

Step 1: Load a few helpful Python packages

Requests, BeautifulSoup, and lxml will serve you right!



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import requests

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import lxml

Step 2: Load up and parse the webpage

Use the requests package to grab the webpage you want to work with and then use BeautifulSoup to parse it so that it’s easier to find the links you want:



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url = 'https://ia801501.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/12/items/NSAsecurityPosters1950s60s/NSAsecurityPosters_1950s-60s_jp2.zip'

result = requests.get(url)

soup = BeautifulSoup(result.content, "lxml")

Step 3: Download those files!

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. First, I had to take a look at the HTML source code of the webpage I wanted to work with and then find the HTML elements containing the download links. In this case, the challenge was relatively easy: I just needed to find all the elements with an “id” attribute equal to “jpg”. With BeautifulSoup, I could easily find all those elements, loop through them, and pull out the data I needed, including the download link. With that download link, I can use requests again to pull down the content and easily save it to disk:



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for jpg_cell in soup.find_all(id="jpg"):

    link = 'https:' + jpg_cell.find('a').attrs['href']

    # I noticed that part of the download url contains the HTML encoding '%2F'.  I need to replace that with a 

    # forward slash before I have a valid link I can use to download

    file_name = link.replace('%2F', '/').split('/')[-1]

    print(link + '  ' + file_name)  # just to visually validate I parsed the link and filename correctly

    r = requests.get(link)

    open("./data/" + file_name, 'wb').write(r.content)

Check out the complete source code on my Github page. Also, check out this fantastic article from DataCamp.com that goes into even greater detail to explain web scraping in Python.

Not so fast!

Ok, so you can go through that somewhat cumbersome process for all the download jobs you might have, but in the future, I think I’m just going to pop over to Chrome and use the Chrono Download Manager extension.

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