I have money. Now what?

Week of June 1, 2021

We get this question a lot. And it takes on different forms – what should I do with my first paycheck after college? Should I pay down debt or save for my first home? What do I do with my company’s retirement plan? What the hell is a stock option? Over the last year, stimulus checks have made this question even more relevant. 

The root of these questions is a desire to understand how to manage your money to create a better future. However you define “having money,” we are here to help you make decisions that, hopefully, improve your life.

We’ve spent a little over a decade in the financial services industry in various roles. We’ve observed that for every honest person trying to help, there’s some charlatan, grifter, or con artist angling for a piece of you. Unfortunately, all these types of people are present in the industry for the same reason: understanding finance to make the right decision can be hard. And we have to make financial decisions almost daily in the modern environment. 

The “average person” is often portrayed as helplessly ignorant of finance and its myriad complexities - especially younger generations like Millennials or Gen Z. In our view, we don’t believe that’s the case. Instead, we’d argue that the younger generation is actually better equipped than any generation before to navigate our complex financial system successfully. We’re not helpless! What we’re missing is cohesion, something that helps tie the tools we have together and points us in the right direction. 

We started the Weekly Upside to empower you with the perspectives, insights, and analysis to make the right financial decision at the right time. We hope to save you time, money, and stress. Our goal for the Weekly Upside is to provide a perspective that helps make what’s going on in the world clearer.

We’ll publish each week, usually on Thursday or Friday. We know you get a lot of emails. Hopefully, this one goes to the top of your list.

What can you expect each week?

Each edition of the newsletter will have three sections: commentary, discussions, and recommended reads or listens.

In the commentary, we’ll focus on one headline or topic that’s moving markets. This section is our take on what’s happening and what, if anything, you should do about it. We believe this section is important because while other news and information sites may offer a balanced discussion, they often omit any suggested next steps (usually by design). 

Our Twitter section is a bit of a catch-all right now, though we expect it to evolve as we build the network. We find Twitter to be the best place to engage with our readers on a day-to-day basis. It’s also a suitable forum to call out social media influencers engaging in disingenuous or misleading characterizations of financial topics (or anything else that may raise our ire). Come for the banter, stay for the takedowns and GIF-wars.

Lastly, we’ll close each newsletter with our recommended reads and/or listens. We publish right in time for your weekend, so hopefully, you look at this section as your shortlist to come back to after the 5 pm happy hour is over. Expect to deviate away from finance or, potentially, take a really deep dive on a subject. Either way, we’ll do our best to make sure whatever is in our recommendation list is interesting enough to spend your weekend time on. 

Whether that’s an insight or a laugh, we’re going to do our best to give you something valuable each week. 

Who are you?

We’re a team of three, each of whom has about ten years in the financial services industry. We’re all employed with a financial services firm right now, which means we’ll need to introduce ourselves pseudonymously (except for Ian). For now, as the kids say, #IYKYK.

Ian: Finance at the University of Illinois because there were no Friday classes. Tricked into being a financial advisor for a year before moving to a startup at the Chicago Board of Trade. Became obsessed with the markets, the Fed, and owning my own business. To this day I don’t know how to use a comma, I just guess, but I can tell you all about option skew.

A love of sports and a lack of athleticism lead to what some might call a gambling problem, but it’s not a problem if I win. Luckily, this also led to being (relatively) early to crypto, buying fractional ownership in dinosaur bones, and starting this newsletter.

 

Jack: Earned an English literature degree from world-famous community college Arizona State. Known to drop deep pop culture references and unspool etymological discussions in equal measure. Failed at sales for actually caring about the clients. Got into marketing and hasn’t looked back.

Professional experience includes time served for the likes of Northwestern Mutual and Ameriprise. Legitimate professional experience includes product marketing for two investment management firms. The only person in the company actually qualified to run a marketing outfit.  

CP: Everything is better in Texas, especially when you grow up in Dallas playing Colonial and cosplaying as a cowboy on the weekends. University of Texas carried on this faux-cowboy tradition while also fueling my love for oil and gas, real estate, investments, and especially SPACs. I was early on SPACs; ask anyone… anyone!

A decently successful salesman who reads more 10k’s and investment research than both of them (and knows how to use a comma and semi-colon). For that reason, they do the writing. May contribute something useful when so inclined; specifically, opportunities to rail about the energy sector.