Andy's FIRE Club

06/20/2020

My ENTIRE 35K Portfolio Fully Revealed! (Part One) | Andy's FIRE Club

By popular demand I've decided to fully reveal my entire investment portfolio for all to see. Took me a long time to make this video so please smash that lik...

04/01/2020

https://youtu.be/y7LVDXV1DEc

An announcement for you guys! I sold all my stocks and I'm going all in on Dogecoins! I think this is a fantastic investment opportunity and a surefire way t...

03/30/2020

https://youtu.be/RgVAGog9ovA

Answering a question that I've been getting a lot lately, which is: do I think that the market has bottomed out as of last Monday. Let me share some of my th...

02/26/2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh9euiPhXiA

Wanted to introduce the topic of FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) and why this is something that I is important to me and something that I want to...

02/26/2020

Hey Guys, an announcement! By popular demand I've decided to move this club online by starting a YouTube Channel around the topic of FIRE. I think this is the best way to reach the most amount of people (and people outside of UW as well if they're interested). Now you can enjoy the feeling of attending a club meeting and learning how to retire early but at the comfort of your own home!

I will post the link to the YouTube Channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWbhXA6BAT_BcWQkO5RAZrw

Hope you guys enjoy!

-Andy

Hi Guys! My name is Andy, I'm 24 years old, and I'd like to invite you all on my journey to Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE). I hope to retire by ...

02/19/2020

Hey Guys, it's Andy here! I'm pleased to announce that my book, Financial Independence Theory: A Beginner's Guide to Financial Liberation, is finally published!

Since we are all trying to retire early, I thought maybe at least some of you would be interested. It is a helpful guide on how to get good personal finance and investing and based off of real life stories from both my personal life and out there in the real world.

Don't take this the wrong way, not trying to upsell you. You absolutely do not have to buy it if you don't want to, just letting you guys know that it exists. I'll leave the Amazon link down below just in case if anyone is interested:

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1777080908

Thank you all!

11/05/2019

Here is a recap of what we talked about tonight:

1. Ratios, other quantitative measures  price to earnings, price to sales, current ratio
2. Trusting in the leadership  WeWork as an example of what can happen when trust in leadership breaks down
3. Balance sheet analysis and grading balance sheets  looking at total assets vs. total liabilities
4. Value vs growth investing  two strategies with different risk levels, value stocks generally have low P/E ratio while growth stocks have high P/E ratios
5. Index funds vs mutual funds, active vs passive investing  most actively managed funds do not outperform the market, investing in index funds is a great way to diversify but your returns would be by definition, average. Index funds are never the worst nor the best in terms of return on investment

Ran out of time for a couple topics I originally wanted to cover today so let’s just move them to next week,

1. Short selling
2. Real Estate and Financial Leverage → mortgage refinancing
3. Vertical vs horizontal integration, the rule of two
4. Best investments for a small amount of money (less than $1000)
5. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and gold
6. Options and using options to hedge against risk
7. bonds and yield curve -

10/29/2019

Today we took our first step into the world of investing and how it applies to the concept of FIRE. In summary, here is what we talked about:
1. Investing vs gambling/lottery, what’s the difference?  gambling often has negative expected value while investing is the act of looking for positive expected values
2. Short term vs Long term investing  buying stocks for the long term means buying with the intention to hold it for 5+ years. If you buy and sell immediately, that is called trading and it is short term. Short term trading is very risky and very hard to do well at. For FIRE we will focus on long term investing
3. time value of money, Power of compound interest  Warren Buffet made his fortune by compounding at around 25% annually, general stock market yields about 8-10% annually over the long term. If you can get around 15% returns annually, retirement in less than 15 years is very doable
4. Dividends  don’t go chasing the yield, look at payout ratio, dividends are great because it is passive income
5. Types of stocks like common vs preferred shares  preferred shares often lack voting rights but the dividend gets paid to preferred shareholders first before common shareholders
6. IPO stocks  very risky due to lack of historical data
7. Price vs Value  price and value are not always the same and are not interchangeable. Your goal is to find investments which have a price that is lower than its value

Next week, we will talk about:

1. Ratios, other quantitative measures
2. Trusting in the leadership
3. Balance sheet analysis and grading balance sheets
4. Value vs growth investing
5. Short selling
6. Index funds vs mutual funds, active vs passive investing
7. Real Estate and Financial Leverage → mortgage refinancing

10/25/2019

Happy Friday guys! To provide you guys with a little extra motivation for FIRE, here's a screenshot of my TFSA as of today, Oct 25th 2019.

Those of you who know me knows that I recently started buying up a lot of shares of Tesla Inc. when the stock was trading below $200 and added more later when the price rose a little. I'm up quite a bit on that particular position in just a few months.

Please do your own research when buying/selling stocks and please don't just copy me, but hopefully this will give you an extra boost on your own path to FIRE.

10/22/2019

A recap of what we talked about today:
Basics of inflation – stories of hyperinflation: Zimbabwe, Venezuela.

Things to spend money on, things not to spend money on – Ubers, food delivery, bank and credit card fees

Using credit cards the right way – earn rewards, and don’t pay interest

Dollar spent vs dollar earned, what’s the difference – taxes eat into the money that you earn. In order to spend $1 you have to earn much more than $1 because of taxes

Importance of budgeting, tracking expenses and setting up an emergency fund – emergency funds help you deal with problems of liquidity, you should keep a budget to help you see where your money is going

Next week, we will finally move on to topics in investing, which I’m sure all of you have been looking forward to. In particular, we will talk about these topics:

Investing vs gambling/lottery, what’s the difference?
Short term vs Long term investing
time value of money, Power of compound interest
Dividends
Types of stocks like common vs preferred shares
IPO stocks
Price vs Value

Hope to see you all next week!

10/08/2019

Reminder that there will be no meeting next week Oct 14th, 2019 due to Thanksgiving/Reading Week. Weekly meetings will return on October 21st, 2019 at the usual time and place, ML354 at 8:30pm.Here is a brief summary of what we talked about today:

Lifestyle Inflation – the gap between income and expense is what you need to focus on maximizing, the amount of money you make doesn’t matter, only the size income-expense gap matters

Levels of Wealth

Absolute Dependence – you are dependent on someone else (whether it could be friends, family, the government) for your day to day survival

Heavy debt – you do not have money to cover your short term bad debts like credit cards or payday loans

Paycheque dependence – you barely have enough money to cover base expenses and short term debt, but you are completely at the mercy of your paycheque. If your paycheque doesn’t come, you don’t eat

Net Zero – your net worth hovers somewhere near zero. This means that if you added up all your debts and added up all your assets, the two would roughly be equal

Stability – your net worth is positive. You have at least 3 months of emergency fund set aside that you can live off of if you lose your job

Financial independence – you have enough passive income to cover your base expenses

Financial Freedom - you have enough passive income to cover your base expenses and also have money leftover that you can either reinvest or buy luxury items with

Transcendence – money does not exist for you. You’re one of the handfuls of people in the world whose net worth is so high that price is literally something that you never consider

Why $100K per year is the new broke – people in this category may make a lot of money but their expenses tend to also be very high. Relates back to the topic of lifestyle inflation, the income-expense gap is very small

Being a contrarian, being the 1% - if you make over $54,000 USD per year, that puts you in the top 1% of the world’s income earners. In your investing career your successes often occur when youre the only one that sees opportunity. You will inevitably encounter times where you go against the tide and everyone calls you an idiot, but this is natural and necessary if you wish to become successful

Next meeting we will talk about the following topics:

Basics of inflation
Things to spend money on, things not to spend money on
Using credit cards the right way
Dollar spent vs dollar earned, what’s the difference
Importance of budgeting, tracking expenses and setting up an emergency fund