I am not doing anything different from you, but I don’t see any major tactical shifts that make much sense. The problem is that 401k and index funds already are the maximum-uncertain-future choices, for any future where the stock market succeeds as an institution. Residential real estate already is the lowest risk bet for any future where land is assessed according to price rather than according to use.
So mostly what I am trying to do is:
Identify ways to make my property more useful. This is basic things, like growing a chunk of our food, increasing the amount of maintenance I can do myself by owning tools and practicing, etc.
Try to identify triggers, which is to say things which clearly indicate it is time to dispose of a particular asset (or at least stop investing further in it). I am not successful in this so far, and the alternative remains “accumulate cash.”
The core of my intuition about this problem: the less certainty there is, the higher the premium on options. On the other hand, the only real options are the ones we can actually execute. This causes me to believe that the best investments have more to do with skills and knowledge—particularly of coherent approaches to problems that you expect to crop up, or at least where to find out about them. This is to save time and resources spent on search when the circumstances change.
There is an entirely different approach which I probably invest more thinking in, though less money and physical effort (so far): opportunities to make a contribution. By this I mean pro-social business ideas. The most recent example was following the supply chain crunch, and after reading A Brief Introduction to Container Logistics and I considered a business which went around buying up these containers and leases from the various participants in the name of being able to agree to both sides of the impasse described in the article. Still might if we hit another major crunch.
I am not doing anything different from you, but I don’t see any major tactical shifts that make much sense. The problem is that 401k and index funds already are the maximum-uncertain-future choices, for any future where the stock market succeeds as an institution. Residential real estate already is the lowest risk bet for any future where land is assessed according to price rather than according to use.
So mostly what I am trying to do is:
Identify ways to make my property more useful. This is basic things, like growing a chunk of our food, increasing the amount of maintenance I can do myself by owning tools and practicing, etc.
Try to identify triggers, which is to say things which clearly indicate it is time to dispose of a particular asset (or at least stop investing further in it). I am not successful in this so far, and the alternative remains “accumulate cash.”
The core of my intuition about this problem: the less certainty there is, the higher the premium on options. On the other hand, the only real options are the ones we can actually execute. This causes me to believe that the best investments have more to do with skills and knowledge—particularly of coherent approaches to problems that you expect to crop up, or at least where to find out about them. This is to save time and resources spent on search when the circumstances change.
There is an entirely different approach which I probably invest more thinking in, though less money and physical effort (so far): opportunities to make a contribution. By this I mean pro-social business ideas. The most recent example was following the supply chain crunch, and after reading A Brief Introduction to Container Logistics and I considered a business which went around buying up these containers and leases from the various participants in the name of being able to agree to both sides of the impasse described in the article. Still might if we hit another major crunch.