My Wife Tried to Poison Me

My wife tried to poison me?

Not once, but twice!

How does the old saying go? “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Let me explain.

The first time was years ago when we were on our honeymoon in Venice, Italy. At that time, I was still drinking sodas. So everyday we would stop somewhere and get me a diet coke.

Every time we stopped, we noticed this Italian soda called Chinotto. My wife suggested we try it. I was game. After all, when in Rome (close enough) right?

With a big gulp, I coughed and sputtered wishing I had never put my lips to that nasty concoction. To this day, I’m certain that a brew of cough syrup, GoLYTELY, and cow urine would have tasted better.

I wasn’t about to take a second drink.

I purchased a bottle of diet coke to wash that taste out of my mouth and walked back to the hotel to call it a night. It had been a long day and I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

I slept like a log and woke up the next morning refreshed and thirsty. I noticed that partially drank bottle of diet coke on the nightstand next to the bed.

“Hello good friend,” I thought as I twisted off the cap and downed a big swig.

My eyes filled with tears and my faced grimaced with torture as my mouth immediately recognized the taste of sewer water that had been bottled and labeled CHINOTTO!

I jumped out of bed and ran to the bathroom sink to spit it out. All the while, my wife howled in the background. Turns out that my new bride was a saboteur. While I was sleeping, she had poured out my remaining diet coke and replaced it with that pungent elixir.

Certainly, this was grounds for annulment! But what can I say, to know my wife is to love her.

Several months later, she switched the regular jelly beans in the candy dish to Harry Potter jelly beans. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I wasn’t eating banana, blueberry, watermelon, and apple. Instead, I was downing flavors like liver, phlegm, rotten egg, and vomit.

Fortunately for me, it wasn’t very long after this that we expanded our family. Now we have two boys and it is their job to taste everything before dad dives in.

It’s called due diligence.

Not only do I practice it in my home life, I also practice it when it comes to my investments. As I said before fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

That’s why I:

• Value diversification and don’t have all of my money tied up in the stock market.
• Don’t invest solely for growth. Instead, I look to create passive streams of stable income that don’t require me to trade time for money in a job. Developing yield without sacrificing growth can be quite profitable and freeing.
• Look to minimize my tax burden legally so that I can keep more of what I make.
• Seek to maximize returns while minimizing risk (volatility).

I once read a financial blogger say that high returns coupled with low correlation to the stock market is the “holy grail” of asset classes. That certainly describes commercial multifamily real estate investing the way I do it.

P.S. What say you? How do you diversify your portfolio? Is your financial plan centered around you working full-time for 30 to 35 years? or are you developing passive streams of income? Is your financial future tied to the ups and downs of the stock market or do you have some investments in more stable asset classes like commercial multifamily real estate?

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