Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of ads for Barron’s. Are you familiar with Barron’s? You probably know the name from one of two, unrelated publications—1) a weekly magazine self-styled as the world’s premier investing publication since 1921 and 2) a line of Advancement Placement (AP) subject guides (sample title: Barron’s AP Microeconomics/Macroeconomics, 5th Edition). This may explain why you are not familiar with Barron’s … and why I keep seeing their ads when all I want to do is watch Interweb cats giving each other back rubs.
Here’s the ad, in this case for the investing magazine:
Oops. Those are the cats. Here’s the ad, for realz:
My first thought—heeeey, I’m finally part of the 1%!
If you were to ask me what traits die-hard LBYMers should cultivate in their everyday lives, I’d answer in a heartbeat—laziness and paranoia. OK—maybe that’s a bit extreme. Call it efficiency and skepticism. Coincidentally (or not), these two traits are also ones that standardized test takers should embrace. Really! Granted, I can’t speak for how they may affect your performance in the many, many, many other fields out there that I know nothing about, but for those of you who want to build your Net Worth, or maybe get a good score on the GRE, go work on … not working so much.
I’d tell you laziness works for parenting, too, but I can’t confirm results just yet. Check back with me in 20 50 years.
I am suuuuper lazy. Dude, I bought a house across the street from a grade school and a middle school so I could just shove ’em out the door in the morning. Our kids take piano lessons because we shared a backyard with a piano teacher. Their other option was the guitar teacher across the street. I only own clothes that are black, white, navy, and gray so everything goes together. Or I look like a bruise. Lest you think I’m unemployable, Bill Gates once said, I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it. OK—maybe that’s apocryphal, but it fits here, yah? See! Too lazy to go find a real, verified quote!
I don’t read a lot of what passes for financial “news” these days and I’m certainly not going to do so if you’re literally guaranteeing me I’m going to go and do something after I read it. I don’t want to do anything! Especially not take investment actions. What does that even mean? What do you think these 99% of people are doing after they read this week’s Barron’s? I would argue that most anything good they could be doing—saving for retirement, methodically investing in index funds, rebalancing portfolios—should be automated and anything not good—umm, all the other stuff—should be avoided.
Maybe I’m not being fair to Barron’s. Maybe it’s full of excellent and boring advice about how to build financial stability and independence over the long term. Last I checked, though, the newspaper still sold advertising. And those advertisers generally don’t make a whole lot of money from people not doing anything. They need you to check your investments every day and trade securities based on short-term expectations. They need you to buy a bigger house and take out a bigger loan. They need you to purchase financial products you don’t need and don’t understand. They need you to hire them to manage your money.
Barron’s doesn’t use this statistic only in their consumer advertising either. They highlight it in their pitch to advertisers, too, serving up their readers as juicy, rich action takers. How likely is it then for Barron’s to fill their pages with articles and opinions about not doing these things?
Or maybe I’m just paranoid.