Hello everybody, it's Sam from Financial Samurai and I just wanted to check in because it's been a while. In this episode I want to talk about why I'm so positive that anybody can achieve anything they want due to all the strange, head-scratching things that are happening in this world.

Here are three recent examples. 1. Felicity Huffman, the actress, gets 14 days in jail for paying someone $15,000 to boost her daughter's SAT score. Although as a parent I empathize with why Felicity did what she did, it just makes me believe that many more parents are now going to try and game the system to give their already privileged children a leg up.

14 days really is only 7 days because each day you serve, you get one day off for good behavior. Think about it, wouldn't you be willing to take a week's vacation in jail if you could set your kid up for life? I'm sure with the hyper-competitiveness today, some parents would probably be willing to spend a year in jail to help their kids.

And speaking of parents, I met a whole bunch of parents this past weekend because it was our first parent-teacher-kids little playground get-together shindig. Raised a little bit of money and I got to see how other parents interact with their kids and how other kids interact in an open setting.

And it was great. It was great to meet people, a lot of international parents. I would say at least 50% of the parents spoke another language so that really motivated me to speak more Mandarin at home. And the jury is still out on preschool. It's only been a couple of weeks, folks.

But the initial reaction was preschool is where creativity goes to die. It's kind of a sad outlook where conformity begins and this is the start of how kids go through the system to enter these schools and these are the parents who are the ones who bribe their kids into these schools.

But that's a pretty pessimistic way of looking at things. I'm still going to reserve judgment for preschool until I would say one or two more months and it's okay. It's a good place to learn. It's a good place to learn how to socialize and listen to instructions and so forth.

But I'm not sure whether it's worth it or not. Okay, two. The second example, a recent example of why I believe anybody can achieve anything. Have you heard of this guy named Shane Gills? Well, he was recently hired along with a couple other cast members to join Saturday Night Live despite repeated racial slurs against Asians.

He even called presidential candidate Andrew Yang a "Jew chink" on a podcast earlier in 2019. So this is not something that he was saying 5, 10, 20 years ago. It was just recent this year. So yet despite all this, he got one of the highest profile jobs on TV and will likely keep his job after his non-apology.

He did write a note and posted on Twitter and said, "If I offended any of you guys, I'm sorry. I'm trying to push the boundaries, yada, yada, yada." So as someone who was called chink quite frequently while growing up in Virginia for high school and college, I've become desensitized to racial insults.

When I hear this type of stuff, it just goes in one ear and out the other because that's just the way it is for minorities in America. And it's kind of sad. It is kind of sad, but the reality is I don't think anything is really going to change.

I've been listening to this stuff for the past 20 something years. I came to the States when I was, what, 14 years old and I'm 42 years old now. I mean, that's a long time, folks. So if you are a target of racism or bullying, online bullying and so forth, you've got to find a way somehow to pay them no attention and keep on going no matter what.

For me, I use racism as motivation, motivation to achieve financial independence. And I do believe one of the best solutions to racism is achieving financial independence because you are then beholden to nobody. If someone wants to come at you and tell you to do this, this and that and then say something bad about your ethnicity, well, if you're financially independent, you can just tell them to screw off.

And then online, if someone's coming at you racially, I don't know, it just doesn't make any sense, especially if they still need a job and money to provide for their own lives. Because if you're financially independent, you can go to war quite easily and win if you choose. So folks, it's a rough world out there.

Try to pay no attention or use racism and bullying to give yourself motivation to work a little bit harder and achieve financial independence because it is one of the best ways to live your life free and live the life the way you want. Okay, finally, number three, Andy Rubin, quote, the father of Android at Google.

He got a 90 million severance package despite having some rather questionable relationships with multiple women at work, including a subordinate. He said he did nothing wrong, it was all consensual, while all the other women said he did do something wrong. So who knows the real truth other than he was asked to go and there's probably something going on there.

And the point is, I still get people all the time saying that negotiating a severance is too good to be true. Despite very sketchy people who probably did something to violate company guidelines getting massive, massive severance packages all the darn time. 90 million dollars, folks. So please, you're fooling yourself if you feel like you don't deserve something you've worked hard for.

People less worthy than you are getting everything every single day. It really is a mindset, folks. You need to believe you deserve to be rich. You need to believe that you deserve to get that promotion or that raise. You need to believe that you belong. And once you have that positive mindset, that strong money mindset, things are going to get much, much better for you.

So what else is going on? Well, in the market, the S&P 500 yield was at one point higher than the 10-year bond yield. And that's really unique because the S&P 500 has historically shown a positive return of anywhere from 5.5% to 10% a year. And so if you've got that yield on top of that principal return, that is a really attractive proposition.

And we've done a little study that shows that whenever you buy the S&P 500 when its yield is higher than the 10-year bond yield, you tend to do well. Moving on to real estate, my favorite asset class over the long term, things are a little bit of a conundrum right now because the 10-year bond yield has actually moved up over the past couple of weeks.

It bottomed out at around 1.55%, and now it's back up to 1.9%. So that arbitrage of going long online savings account for 2.2% or 2.3% and then shorting the bond, Treasury bond fund, for example, IEF, has closed quite significantly. But don't worry, there are other arbitrage opportunities every single day, so you just got to go look.

For real estate, I am seriously, seriously thinking about pulling the trigger and buying a nicer home or bigger home with panoramic ocean views because there are more opportunities right now. Rates are still low, inventory is high, and people are nervous. Now the question is whether we're going to roll over 10%, 15%, 20%, maybe more like in the past financial crisis.

And I honestly think the answer is no. I really believe that real estate, again, real estate is local too, so you just can't take my word and apply it to every single market because we all live in different places. But at least here for San Francisco, I see at most a 10% drop and then it's kind of steady, stabilized and then off to the races again.

That's just our market. You've got to look at your market and check out the inventory numbers because the inventory numbers definitely look like they're piling up in places like New York, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Texas. So just be careful, but if you're looking to buy a property, you need to buy a property because your family is expanding or you just are too cramped in your place or you just want to acquire a street or whatever, it's worth looking aggressively right now from now through the end of the year because this is probably one of the weakest periods of real estate I've seen in a while other than the second half of 2018.

All right folks, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I think I'm going to do more of these check-in type quick episodes with more real-time thoughts and things. So let me know if you like it, if you don't like it. Please leave a comment or a positive rating if you enjoyed this episode and I'll talk to you guys later.