Who does the bride resemble? Post your answers below!

Down in the comments sections, Sister Renee asks a really interesting question:

What is the difference between plagiarism and paraphrasing. How much does it have to be changed so that your giving the idea or drawing upon a story to make your own logical point?

There seem to be multiple, disjoint definitions of plagiarism. The one I’m most comfortable discussing is academic. The other(s) – and I assume that’s plural – are legal definitions, which arise in lawsuits over patents and copyright infringement and such. I’m not an attorney, so I leave it to you to seek out sound advice from a qualified professional who knows what he’s talking about, if this is what you’re interested in.

Before I go further I should note that I learned the precise definition of plagiarism in a meaningful and difficult way, when one of my advisors politely asked me for a chat a few years ago. She was reading a chapter in my dissertation, and she wanted to let me know that I had plagiarized at least a dozen people. She didn’t know exactly who I plagiarized, because that’s how broad the definition is. She just knew that the ideas I was constructing weren’t mine. It’s interesting to note that she was the only person who pointed this out. No one else, from the beginning of my education, up to and including the chair of the committee who was steering my dissertation, cared enough to point out the problem. I had been plagiarizing others throughout my entire academic life, from the beginning of first grade, up until that day.

Obvious cases of plagiarism include a former student of mine, who decided to cut-n-paste a page from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, rather than think up 500 words of something interesting to hand in to me. (If you take classes from Brother Boxer, you have to write papers, even if we’re studying single variable calculus.)

If you’re a bit more careful than that fella, you might consider stealing someone else’s work, and merely rewriting some of the stolen paragraphs in your own words. This is what I believe our old friend, radical feminist Sheila Gregoire did, when she published her feminist interpretation of the Bible, a few weeks ago. Of course, she might argue that she thought all her arguments up independently, but the likelihood of this is fairly remote, especially given the multiple sources from better thinkers that strangely lined up, precept by shoddy precept, with her kooky feminist ranting.

And then there is the duty of the researcher to properly cite sources for ideas not his own. The IEEE has a pretty good blurb about this here.

A great number of people, including celebrities, like Sheriff David Clarke, have fallen prey to these finer points of the definition. My understanding is that Clarke was not malicious. He merely failed to give proper credit for ideas he didn’t come up with independently. I should point out that I was well on my way to doing the same thing. I had to go back, and insert dozens of footnotes throughout about 200 pages of my own boring text, citing people who helped me develop my ideas.

Many times, you don’t really know who first thought up the idea. Who thought up the axiom of choice? Supposedly it was EFF Zermelo, but the idea had been implicitly used for a long time before that guy well-defined it. So, given that I used it, for something or other, I had to cite him. I also had to cite the guy who gave me the idea of using it to break down someone else’s proposition.

Some of my footnotes were pretty esoteric, and some of them were pretty informal. For instance, not a few of them look like:

I first encountered this idea in a private conversation with Dr. Joe Jackass, at Transylvania University, during the Penthouse Forum conference, on or about February of 2010. The idea is roughly equivalent to the Formal Statement of Midget Porn, first defined by Seymour Butts, in the mid 17th Century, with an exception in the case of transfinite sets, where the domain is restricted to denumerables. I’m also grateful to Cookie Monster and Big Bird, who helped me to understand its use when applied to standing on one leg in the supermarket…

This is very cumbersome, and while it reveals that you’re sorta well-read and well-connected, it’s also an admission that you’re not the groundbreaking genius that your grandparents always said you were. I find the insulation against a charge of plagiarism to be well worth the trade of an ego boost … and let’s face it, anyone who knows me, knows I didn’t come up with most of the shit I use in my arguments. I am of average intelligence, and just smart enough to understand some brainiac shit, and see its connection to yet unexplored areas, which is enough to get through grad school, but it’s a long way from being the next Isaac Newton.

Anyway, I hope this illustrates the scope and the spectrum of the definition. If you’re in school, be careful. Cite your sources, and give credit to the brothers and sisters who came before you. Otherwise you come out, at best, looking like a careless hack; and more often like a total fraud.

Someone told me in email that my habit of screenshotting text was annoying. Apparently you can’t read this crap on your gay electronic toy, designed by Steve Jobs. No, I don’t do it to evade copyright laws (that doesn’t work, and I always comment enough to meet fair use standards anyway.) I do it because I’m lazy.

Anyway, here is a heartwarming story about a poor old boy who busted ass his whole life to give his wife the little extras. They bought a house, raised a family, saw good times and bad go by, and generally contributed to civilization.

Once he got into his golden years, Mr. Alzheimer came to call. I’ll let his grandson pick it up from here…

During the last year of my grandfather’s life he had dementia, and was having trouble keeping track of reality.

His troubles were relayed to you through grandma, I’ll bet.

Before he was placed into hospice, he kept complaining about a man that was in his house. He would say that the man would come around at night, and that the man was taking his things, and using his stuff.

Grandma, of course, kept reassuring him (and everyone else) that she was the only one there. His doctor increased his medications, because he was losing touch with reality so badly.

Trust grandma. She knows what’s what. Trust the doctors, too. Take your Haldol like a good little old geezer, and fall off and go to sleep.

Fast forward to my grandfather’s funeral. A man showed up that wasn’t known by the family. It turns out that he was an old friend of my grandmother’s, who showed up to give his support.

Well, isn’t that nice? I’ve always wanted to crash funerals, to game grieving old widows while grazing on the free cake and casserole.

Well, about a year later, my grandmother lets slip that she is seeing someone. It’s the guy who crashed the funeral. At this point, it didn’t seem too odd. We all assumed that they had met at church. We thought it was sweet.

Yeah, that’s real sweet, all right.

Then a bit later, sweet, innocent ol’ grandma mentions that it’s their 3rd anniversary.

Grandpa died two years prior. Grandma’s new boyfriend was the person that grandpa saw in his house every night. This swinging dick was the reason that everyone thought grandpa was going crazy. This bushwhacking granny-gamer was the reason that grandpa was forcibly medicated into vegetation, for the last horrible year of his life.

O.K., I’m creatively editing for emphasis, but the story’s all here.

So, your grandpa complains about burglary and cuckoldry in his house, you should take him seriously. It might just be a perv with a fetish for old ladies.

And thus we see the fate of all us cowardly MGTOW misogynists, who don’t want to kill ourselves for years to give some filthy wimminz everything she wants, only to be slowly euthanized by the same woman, who will tell our communities that we’re crazy, while she’s cucking us with all and sundry.

I suppose I’ll accept my destiny, and die cold and lonely, using my money on myself.

I’m busy with work and such. I wonder if you boys have any thoughts on this. It’s ~40m long.

The pinnacle of our feminist culture now includes degenerates, broadcasting their moral weaknesses to the general public, totally unashamed.

Choose your fighter…

The following article is courtesy of Scott (PDF) and his wife Mychael. It was originally posted over on Dalrock (Archive; PDF), and it contains solid advice for women who want to escape or avoid the cultural sewer we all enjoy scoffing at.

I have been banned from commenting on blogs by both Lori Alexander and by Scott, so I have to comment here. The text appears to be owned by some Orthodox Church magazine, so to abide by fair use, I have to comment inline. Let’s see what Sister Mychael has to say…

I am not sure I would say I have been dreading this moment. But I have not looked forward to it, and I suppose I knew it would come up eventually.

 

Lori Alexander has written a blog post that everyone knows contains some basic, immutable Truth. And as always when such a thing happens, the vitriol is fierce. And every time the subject comes up, I squirm a little because I am a traditionalist red-pill wife who did not meet these criteria at the time when I married my husband.

Both Scott and Mychael have been candid to the point of professional suicide. Men who read here are strongly encouraged not to follow their lead. Choose a semi-normal sounding pseudonym (like, heh, Jake Lamotta) and stick to it. This goes double if you have children. Feminists are petty and hateful to the point of absurdity, and your kids don’t need to get shit because you express unpopular views on the net.

The attacks on us that appear on other blogs and in our comments section (which Scott never lets through) have been severe. The names I get called (and the making fun of Scott) is relentless. We are called hypocrites. Or that Scott married a former carousel rider. And on and on.

It is acceptable for a man to marry the woman of his choice. It is also acceptable for a man to adopt children, bringing them into his family. If you disagree with any of this, you’re simply not in line with old patriarchal thinking. Eva Cantarella gives a concise synopsis of the tradition as it existed, in section two of this paper.

O.K.: Time to get to the good stuff. I’m skipping ahead a bit. If you’re a skank-ho wimminz, and you want to quit it, then you need to read this article seriously, with an open mind, and try to absorb its truths without being defensive.

Here’s the first, hard truth. Scott was not red-pilled when we met, and if he was, he probably would have “nexted” me at the first sight of my online dating profile because I was a single mom. Hurts, right? It should. The aggregate risk of marrying a woman with a child (if she is not a widow) is huge. It speaks volumes about your decision making processes and it says they are very impulsive and faulty. The data is clear that a woman with seven or more sexual partners before marriage is almost statistically certain to divorce later. Scott and I have passed the danger zone in years on that one, but it is still quite high.

The fact that both of these people know about the phenomenon means that the danger is probably a lot lower than in the typical duo of American ignoramuses, who married as virginal teenagers. Wimminz in that scenario usually excuse bad behavior by resenting their “lack of experience,” thanks to feminist programming.

Next, I had a tattoo on my toe and he asked me about it. I had to tell him that it was done on a whim and that my son’s dad has a matching one. Every time Scott looks at it, I wonder what he thinks about that.

I can tell the girls what I think about such stuff. I consider it a visible reminder that you are another man’s piece of ass. That skank-ho tat is a tangible Private Property: No Trespassing sign.

I had a fairly large amount of student loan debt, and frankly so did he. But since he was on a path to making about four to five times the national average, he didn’t need to worry about his. He needed to worry about mine.

I am going to tell writers something that almost no one in our “God loves me and forgives me no matter what” age wants to hear. If you are a typical 30-something girl who had been playing the field in your twenties, the ONLY way you have any chance to marry a high quality, high status man is to humble yourself in the presence of any man you might like to marry, and answer any and all questions he has for you. At any point, he may decide that is too much baggage and walk away. And you deserve it.

There is almost nothing that is less attractive, to me, than the weird entitlement complex most of you filthy wimminz have. Everything else pales in comparison to your attitude. If your outlook and demeanor are negative, then nothing else really matters, including a promiscuous past, a series of skank-ho tattoos, and huge amounts of debt.

If you can not follow Sister Mychael’s advice, lose the attitude, the expectations, the mercenary love of money, and the princess mentality, then you may as well not bother with the laser tatt removal or the trip to the dress shop.

By the same measure, a completely chaste virgin who radiates the sarcastic, hateful sheen of feminist entitlement will likely never score the man she truly could, if she behaved appropriately. Sucks to be them, and it’s an incredible opportunity for wise sisters who are willing to drop the fronting. Those chicks routinely land men who would otherwise be way out of their league.

Blessed are you O God, King of the Universe, Who has not made me a wimminz…

Even though Scott was not a red-pill guy at the time, he is not stupid. And he grilled me for weeks before he really committed to dating exclusively. And let’s face it, our relationship was consummated well before the wedding date. This is what Scott calls the “standard American mate selection process” and neither of us felt weird about it at all.

It’s a minor flaw in Sister Mychael’s thinking, this regret for fucking her husband, but it’s worth expounding upon here.

I’ll tell you sisters a little secret: The minute you fuck Chad, you have committed to fucking every other man who ever wants to fuck.

The minute you decided to sit on Chad’s cock, you lost any claim to modesty or restraint. Everything you gave Chad had better be enthusiastically on offer to any man you are interested in. Otherwise, you’re telling that man that you prefer Chad to him. In that case, he should dump your ass, and tell you to go back to fucking Chad. Through your actions, you are privileging the man who hit your holes and quit you, over the man who might give you a honeymoon.

It’s all part of the romantic story you are supposed to tell your friends when they ask how you met. Its the “meet cute” in every romantic comedy. And it’s wrong.

It’s not wrong. It’s the way of things. I’d argue it is one of the things Mychael did right, when she married Scott. She probably fucked him with enthusiasm, and made him food after, proving she had the potential to be a valuable addition to his household.

My guess is that while Scott was dating Mychael, he was also dating a series of skank-ho Christian whores, who would boast about fucking a long string of men, before telling Scott that they wouldn’t fuck him until they got a wedding date, and also, he can cook his own food.

Are you surprised at his choice, girls? Yeah, me neither.

It’s wrong when other people do it, and it was wrong when we did it.

If a woman fucks one man, and then fucks a second man, and she eventually marries the second man, then she shouldn’t express regret for fucking the man she marries. It’s a visible sign of disrespect.

It really doesn’t matter if you were married to one man, divorced him, and then married the second man. It doesn’t matter any more than if you had fucked 26 men, Abe through Zachariah, and then finally fucked the man you married. You should be thankful to man number 27, who gave you the honorable title of wife.

Will you write to our blog and say “you trapped him with sex?” (Already heard that one). How can that be? He had several girlfriends between his first wife and me, and all followed the same relationship trajectory.

No one cares what feminists say. Their screeching ought to be sweet music to a solid sister’s ears.

The reason so many people got upset at reading the Lori Alexander piece is because upwards of 90 percent of all American singles fail to meet her simple, tried and true standard for maximizing marital success. Rather than take a little humble pill, they are defiant against God and his simple-to-follow rules. They want to equivocate, obfuscate and make themselves the exception to the rules. It’s totally understandable. We all have that desire.

Both men and women used to be socialized out of the desire for mindless rebellion, but those days are over. This is terrible collective news for our civilization, but a great boon to the individual. Wise women take a lesson from Che Guevara, and use what they’ve got available to win, based on material conditions.

Let’s review Mychael’s situation. She was a divorcée and a single mom, who supported her kid(s) by working a crappy job as a nurse. She ended up marrying a doctor. This would have been completely impossible in any other society, or in any other era. How did she manage this?

• She was honest, and
• She refused to devolve into a human-walrus hybrid, by overeating, and
• She was nice.

In her photos, he wears dresses. She also smiles. She doesn’t complain about her father, or go on kooky rants about “rape culture”.

These are incredibly low-effort demands.

Serious women should be grateful that so many of their sisters have made themselves so unworthy. This allows women like Mychael to score men they never would have been approached by. You can do this, too.

Read More:

Russian Faith: Christian Renaissance 

Under The Skin is a 2013 feature, directed by Jonathan Glazer, starring Scarlett Johansson. This film was originally billed as a sci-fi movie about an invasion by extraterrestrials, which is certainly the reason I (and the rest of America) ignored it at release. I caught it last night on one of the streaming services, and it is nothing like the tedious space alien faggotry we all hate.

The movie opens with an undefinable sequence of light and geometry. It might be a spaceship or an MRI machine. Micha Levi’s score evokes some hybrid of John Cage and industrial machinery. An unintelligible narration alludes to a female who is practicing elocution, trying to sound out simple English words. The scene fades into something a bit more sinister. A motorcyclist stops on a highway, and its driver bounds down a hill toward a culvert, shortly to return with a limp, lifeless female body, which he, unexplainably, places into a large white van, parked in the breakdown lane nearby.

A female figure assumes the form of the dead woman. The female, wearing the dead chick’s skin, then goes out shopping, tarting up her new body with clothes and makeup. This unnamed wimminz (Johansson) proceeds to drive around Scotland, picking up random men, luring them to her scroungy little council flat, with the promises of fucking.

In the film, as in life, the protagonist never forces her male victims to their demise. She backs through her front door, unbuttoning her blouse, and they follow, drooling as they fumble with their zippers. As she backs further down a long hallway, with a blank expression, in the process of disrobing, her victims slowly, voluntarily, submerge themselves in a preservative oil.

There in this strange, silent abbatoir, the sacrificial victim meets his predecessor. Who is he? We don’t know. The wimminz’ ex-husband is my guess.

One can apparently breathe in the oil, but he’s immobile and mute. The victim meets the previous male companion of the femme fatale only briefly, and he is shown bloated and lethargic in the solution. Mere seconds elapse before he is pulled, forcibly, out of his skin, and his body is processed into foodstuff. The captured male, now horrified, jerks and thrashes in silence. We get the sense that he is now being fattened up for the day when the object of his affection repeats the process with a new victim. We don’t know when harvest-time comes, but as the protagonist leaves her house to search out new dick, we’re sure it’s on its way.

There are a number of allusions to the psychoanalytic tradition in this movie. Immolation as wish fulfillment… Deep water as the unconscious… This is an obvious hat-tip to Carl Jung. At one point, one opfer asks his mistress if he’s dreaming, as he takes that long walk into the void. “Yes,” she replies. “We both are…”

This is a very strange film that asks more questions than it answers. I enjoyed it, if only because of its obvious similarities to our contemporary culture, in which a series of expendable men sacrifice their lives, fortunes and selves for the same skank-ho wimminz.

In life, as in art, we must always be careful when the hot chick asks for directions. Think carefully before you get into the car with the next slut that bats her eyelashes. Always remember that other men have been on this ride before you. In your own participation, you’re volunteering to end up in the same straits as they.

****

The graph above supports Lori Alexander’s claim, that quality men prefer to marry chaste women.

Alexander has proven herself a very astute and top-quality troll. Her posts elicit various responses from immoral Christians, ranging from insulting her appearance, to denouncing her as a sexist bigot. The one topic her critics seem unable to touch is her original claim repeated here, that high-quality men don’t want to marry a tattooed skank, with five figures of frivolous debt.

What few people do is explain the correlative links between the instinctive choice of men, in favor of chaste women, to the reason such women make better partners. Men more easily trust women who aren’t whores. There are good reasons for this, which feminists dare not address.

Before I continue, I’ll admit that I’m speaking in broad generalities. One of the more interesting manosphere writers married a single mother, and adopted her kid. This is perfectly acceptable, according to old-school rules of healthy patriarchal society. Even so, most of us realize that this is not the ideal. That guy doesn’t like me too well, so he probably won’t show up and explain the circumstances. My assumption is that he makes marriage look easy on his blog, when in reality, he has had to work very hard at building a home and life for his family. A young man can take on such a challenge if he chooses to do so, and I won’t mock him for it; but, I also won’t be surprised when I hear it all collapses around him, a few years later.

While traditional men of the manosphere often go to absurd lengths to fetishize virginity, there is a valid argument that holds virginity as a practical marker for a certain constellation of qualities, which make a woman a good wife and mother. The most notable of these is self-discipline. A skank-ho who fucks anyone, and breeds children for everyone, is not a good choice for a wife. To the point, a man wants to know the biological origin of his children, and that’s going to be more difficult with a wimminz who has a long history of fucking random strangers.

It is perfectly cool to be like Scott, and make a well-informed choice to adopt a child, bringing it de jure into your own family line. What is not cool is allowing a nasty skank to pass off Jeremy Meeks’ offspring as yours, unbeknownst to you. Feminists will shame wary men as being “weak” and “insecure.” In fact, such men are refusing to be swindled, and are actually the opposite of weak and insecure. They know their worth. Moreover, they’re being rational, rather than emotional, in rejecting the ho’. This is a sign of moral strength.

There are inherent risks involved in marriage, and thanks to the endless efforts of feminists, nearly all the costs of failure are offset onto men. When a man marries, he voluntarily walks a tightrope. The quality of his woman is roughly analogous to the height and condition of the tightrope.

You can marry a virgin, who was raised in an intact family, with a decent father-figure. Consider this marriage a well-maintained rope, that’s hung four feet off the ground. You can marry a skank-ho slut, who has fucked hundreds of men, with a history of IV drug use. This rope is frayed, slack, and hangs between hirise office towers downtown. Each of these marriages has a very real chance of dissolution, however, one choice is markedly riskier than the other.

Wise men deliberate at length about such things, and wise women know it. Lori Alexander’s good advice, directed at our sisters, merely acknowledged these realities.

Obsidian directs this monologue specifically to black men; but in my experience, the bailing out of irresponsible wimminz is a general problem.

Mormon wimminz are the whitest wimminz in the world. Mormon men are routinely called upon to cut the yards and take out the trash for these skank-ho bitches. We need to take a lesson from our black brothers, and just say “no” to the ho’.

A few days ago, I was offered free tickets to another continent. I decided to grab them and go. I just got back home. It was exhausting, thrilling, and all-round just fantastic.

I am able to do such stuff because I am a single man, beholden to no one, with a disposable income and the freedom to do such stuff. Life is good, and love is always over in the morning.

When I was a younger man, I worked in a big commercial bank. My Uncle Danny got me the job. My job title was “research mathematician,” which meant that I was presented with spreadsheets full of numbers, and I ran regressions on them to try and find some function they best fit. I had no idea as to the application of any of these projects. That was far above my ken. My Uncle Danny would have known. He’s a bigwig private banker. He’s also a multimillionaire, and all his clients are worth much more than he is. If you had 100M USD to park in a portfolio, you’d go see a qualified professional, like my Uncle Danny. If you didn’t, you might seek out investment advice from nobodies on the internet (like me).

During my time in high finance I wasn’t paid very much, and I didn’t do anything groundbreaking. A machine could have done most of my job.

Of course, I have another uncle. His name’s Charlie. He’s your uncle, too. Our Uncle Charlie argues that investing is a bad idea, because it throws you into a false state-of-consciousness, and forces you to have relationships with things, while you use people like tools. While our Uncle Charlie was right on all counts, it is worth noting that:

• we are always already operating in this false state of consciousness anyway, and
• people who follow our Uncle Charlie’s advice are likely to die poor and exploited, just as he did.

I guess I’m touching on a few things in this introduction. The most important is that I’m more like our Uncle Charlie than my Uncle Danny. I’m not wealthy, and I’m sort of a dumb idealist. Even so, it’s easier and nicer to live like Danny than like Charlie.

You should always seek advice from a qualified professional, before you make a serious decision about investing your money. Never, ever take advice from an internet nobody, like Boxer. I’m not qualified to give any sort of financial advice; but, since no one else is approaching the topic, I thought I’d recount what I did to make a little side money.

If you’re a young man, just starting out, it can be tough to know where to begin. I made lots of mistakes at first, and I’ll recount a few brief lessons.

Credit Unions are Better than Banks

Even in the age of the internet, you need a local account to negotiate cash, foreign checks, and money orders. Regulation CC doesn’t allow for these to be deposited electronically. Where should you open a local account? That’s the most important question.

At Chase and Citibank and CIBC, you’ll be charged fees for merely having an account. The bank basically gets to borrow your hard-earned money, for free, and lend it out at a giant profit to you. Atop the interest you pay on your car loan and your revolving balances, they actually expect you to pay maintenance fees. Bear in mind that when you charged your last meal on the credit card, you borrowed the money you earned, which never left their vaults. They’ve charged you multiple times, for nothing.

When you think about this, it’s hard not to feel insulted. There are institutions where you can open a deposit account for free, and some of them will actually pay you interest on your balance. These are called credit unions.

In Canada, anyone can join a credit union. In the U.S., membership is sometimes limited by professional license or membership in some organization. If you are eligible to join a credit union, you should do so at your first opportunity. A credit union is usually (not always) organized as a non-profit corporation. Once you join, you’ll be a shareholder, not a customer. This means that if your credit union starts ripping you off, you can organize a campaign to replace the board, or run for a seat yourself.

When I worked at the aforementioned bank, I was required to have a series of accounts, and my bosses wired my paycheck into one of those accounts. Like every single other employee of that bank, I went across the street on payday, and wrote a check to my credit union in the exact amount of my receipt. You shouldn’t blame us. None of us wanted our check images and credit card statements available to our co-workers, and any of us could pull such stuff up, whenever we wanted.

I have found that credit unions always give better returns, have more competitive fees, and offer much better service than banks. The difference is so remarkable that I’m confused as to how Chase and Citi stay in business.

Discount Brokerage Accounts

If you’re in the USA, the best brokerage accounts for a young brother are probably Fidelity and Charles Schwab. Right now, Fidelity has a “Brokerage and Cash Management” account that features an FDIC insured checking account and debit card, tied to a brokerage account, and it’s all available online. Charles Schwab has an identical product, called “Schwab Bank Checking and Schwab One Investment.” Both of these accounts feature insane perks, like monthly reimbursements of all your ATM fees. More importantly, these accounts allow the purchase of shares of mutual funds with no fees to  you. Read the disclosures for both carefully and open an account for 100 dollars.

If I were starting out, I’d use my linked checking account at the brokerage house as a primary account. I’d keep a savings account at the credit union, for those days when I had to deposit cash or money orders someplace.

You can lose your money when you invest in mutual funds, but this is a remote possibility, and mutual funds are typically safer than investing in shares of publicly traded stock, while giving you much better returns than money you park in a savings account.

What I do now is buy 1000 USD shares in mutual funds, every few months. My goal is to invest 10 percent of my net income until retirement. Another 10 percent is put into insured accounts, which I’ll get to immediately…

Online Certificates of Deposit

Goldman Sachs Bank is currently offering a 2.3 APY on its 12-month CD. This is a perfectly safe investment, and it pays twice what the best savings account can offer.

What I did, when I was a kid, was to buy 1000 USD CDs every few months. My goal was to get 12 CDs which each matured a month apart. Once I accomplished this, my goal was to bump up the balance in each to 10000 USD. Eventually, I had 120,000 dollars available, in monthly increments, which meant that I had a year’s worth of savings if something disastrous happened. I still have these CDs, and they continue to roll over. I continue to increase the balance in them.

Warnings

People sometimes run into trouble when they invest too narrowly. This is another way to describe “all the eggs in one basket.” You never want to invest only in one company, or one fund. Ideally, you would never invest only in one specific industry.

Often times, one’s employer will encourage him to invest in his own company. This isn’t always a terrible idea, but we should learn a lesson from the poor chumps who worked at Enron. This was their scam (Renee probably knows this story). Many Enron employees spent years investing their entire paychecks in the company. I’m sure the scumbags running the place had a good time while it lasted. Sadly, all those investors are broke today.

Stories Wanted

Do you have any tips for the young brothers? Has Boxer omitted anything important? Shout out your own investment stories in the comments.