EAU SURE

Mark Willcox: “And when you are up a creek, maybe with a paddle but without a canoe, it’s eau contraire.  (On another note, if you are without a paddle, isn’t it better to be up the creek than down the creek?  I mean, you can drift!)”

☞  An exceptionally good point.

WHAT’S WEALTHY

Ken Doran:  “Yesterday, you quoted someone saying ‘[M]any people making $250K are not wealthy’ and let it stand without comment, as if it were a plausible position!  My research library (Wikipedia) tells me that a household with that income is top 2% or so of the U.S., easily top few tenths of a percent worldwide.  If that doesn’t count as wealthy, let’s retire the word as meaningless.”

☞  Well, I think the distinction here may be between income and assets.  A family earning $250,000 a year is certainly fortunate and affluent – and all but obscenely so by Third World standards, if only barely so if trying to raise three kids in New York or San Francisco.  But affluence (at least as I think of it) is about disposable income.  Wealth is about assets.  If that $250,000 a year comes from dividends on a $10 million portfolio, they are wealthy.  If it comes from both spouses working to pay the mortgage, the nanny, the tuitions, and everything else, their net worth could be close to zero.

ACORN

Well, the forces of the wealthy (and I do mean wealthy) crushed this advocate for the poor.  Basically, ACORN was Swiftboated.  If you missed that column, and bought the Swiftboat line, I’d consider it a personal favor if you went back and took a look.

Magic formula investing

I was encouraged by this affirmation of my friend Joel Greenblatt’s approach, that I have plugged here (and in my introduction to his book) from time to time.