Sean Ongley

Author: Sean Ongley

  • Before Going Zero to Sixty, Get Out of the Negative

    Before Going Zero to Sixty, Get Out of the Negative

    Let us imagine you’re fifteen years old and you have a drivers permit. Your parents are middle-class and they have two cars: a Ford Mustang GT Shelby revival series with a six-speed manual transmission, a 250hp V8 motor, but the other is a Ford Focus 125hp 4-cylinder automatic with safety alerts. As a new driver, you may just be excited about the horsepower, but little do you know how to drive it, and your lack of experience could run you off the road. The Focus is a better bet. You should learn to drive with that, then move onto the beast.

    Take this scenario as an allegory for finance. The basis of your financial plan has to be the long run. If you’re driving cross country, you’ll be glad for the fuel economy of that Focus. If you’re trying to get somewhere fast, you might need that Mustang. In other words, you’re used to being in the negative financially speaking, so if you’re in a hurry to go 100 MPH, you need to stop going backward first.

    My allegorical Mustang is an old one that needs a lot of work, and I’m the one doing that work.

    In my previous blog posts, I discussed the importance of changing habits, developing a budget, and broadly changing your outlook. You need to investigate your spending patterns and conform it to a budget. Do a quick search for a budget template and fill it in by looking at your expenses. If you are unbanked, you have to get banked. This makes everything much easier. No doubt you’ll find a place you can reduce your spending when you look at your bank statements. Usually this involves cutting back on entertainment, services, and conveniences.

    You might have dozens of specific line items in your budget, but they can fall within four broad categories: Housing, Food & Bills, Transportation, and Discretionary. Part of the budget needs to be a 5-10% savings rate of your gross income. This needs to land in your discretionary budget. All vacationing and entertainment has to fall into that budget as well. I think this is a good psychological way to handle it, for me at least. Because I consciously connect my impulse desires to my long term wealth. Maybe I can grow that money before spending it. Maybe I don’t need that right now. But that is a little advanced, you have to build the structure. The structure is all about banking. It is possible to literally own your bank using cryptocurrencies, but this is risky, advanced, and most likely, you’re paid in fiat currency.

    The ideal middle class budget splits the income four ways evenly, with 25% for each of those four categories. That would mean the individual median income of about $50K annually would have a monthly budget of $1,100 available for housing (mortgage or rent), $1,100 for transport (cars, fuel, repairs, taxis, bicycles, public transport), $1,100 available for bills (utilities, taxes, loans), and $1,100 for discretionary spending (vacation, travel, savings, investment). An adult earning the median income with no kids can quickly step into that Mustang. Most folks blow their money on the nicest apartment and car their money can buy. They are foolish.

    I personally have never earned more than 50% of the median income. So you can take those figures, cut them in half, that is my budget. It means I spend more on housing and less on transportation, more on investments and less on entertainment. My split is more like 45/15/30/20. I ride my bike and walk most of the time. I bought a cheap house. I repair stuff. I don’t buy new stuff. It is a tight squeeze every month, and yet, I have been able to buy a house, fund an IRA, invest in stocks and cryptocurrencies. My allegorical Mustang is an old one that needs a lot of work, and I’m the one doing that work.

    Next, look at where you are banking. Do they charge maintenance fees? Do you get surprised on a regular basis by fees? How about their overdraft policy? Is it straightforward and in your favor, or is it against you? Generally speaking, you are better off with any Federal Credit Union than a standard corporate bank. You will find they don’t have tricky minimum balances, and they will pay you tiny little dividends in your checking rather than charge you every month. One thing I have found is that corporate banks have better online platforms, so I like to use both. It is just a matter of doing your research to decide where to move your money.

    I do not endorse any banks, and I’d rather not reveal where I bank. There are interesting features at all banks. Credit Unions were consolidated after the 2008 bailouts, so they are more accessible than ever, but they are State-based. CapitalOne is a tech-based national bank, ideal for those building credit, or prefer mobile services, but branches are hard to come by. Other corporate banks may have unrivaled branch access in your region. Charles Schwab offers standard checking and saving accounts plus brokerage services. Robinhood now offers debit cards and you can trade cryptos there. You must evaluate your needs and select the most advantageous banks for your needs.

    My recommendation is to keep two different checking and savings accounts, one for processing your regular income and one for managing your savings and investments. Here is how this works. Suppose you have $1000 coming in every two weeks. You set your direct deposit up in the corporate bank, manage all of your bills, and make sure that this account holds $2,000 after every paycheck. Most folks have a wave of bills every two weeks. If you have no income for a month, this account should hold for as much as two months before going negative.

    After you have this amount and you have trained yourself not to spend it, then you can take that savings budget and put it into the credit union account. Here you should also have at least another $1,000 in savings before you start contributing into investment accounts. Moreover, if you’re managing at this rate, your credit has probably improved, so you can also manage emergencies with credit lines. This is a future blog topic, however.

    If your goal is to become a first-time homebuyer, the IRA is where I recommend you stage that down payment money. These accounts are great. Every dollar you put in is tax deductible. You get another tax credit if you’re a low-income earner when you make IRA contributions. When I was saving for a house, I didn’t know this, and unfortunately I could have earned a massive tax refund for both 2017 and 2018, but I was just learning how to save my money — to get out of the negative.

    In my next post, I will analyze how I could have maximized my savings during that time using storages of value such as Bitcoin, while comparing that to other growth options, their risks and advantages. This will be applied directly to our current situation economically speaking. This is one of the best moments in the last thirty years to maximize investments if you are starting from scratch. 

    A thriving stock market recovering from shock, low interest rates for real estate, and cryptocurrencies: This is a rare moment to step into investing. Not everyone is positioned to jump into that, and one should expire their driver’s permit before moving into risk management. Because that is what volatile investments are, a game of risk management.

  • The Broken Armed Drummer

    The Broken Armed Drummer

    “Luna’s Broken Arms” from The Growth Years by Death Worth Living

    Recorded Live at Luna’s Cafe, Sacramento, spring 2007

    Steven “Shane” Schneider aka Pixie Storm aka Reverend Papa Sweat, was a primary source of ambience and spontaneity, drumming and percussion, in the improvisational super group that I led from 2007 to 2011, Death Worth Living.

    This performance took place 24 hours following a terrible accident in which Shane dropped eight feet down through an opening to a llama stable, because Shane was feeding the llamas, because we both lived on this farm on the edge of Portland, Oregon, in 2007.

    Shane was already kind of feeble, elderly, and weakened due to a life of great times, strenuous activity, and the onset of Parkinson’s Disease (he was not quite yet diagnosed) and previous injuries and surgeries that bothered him, so he had vicodin and weed. We did not go to the doctor.

    My bandmate at the time Joe helped set up a few shows in Sacramento and Davis. We are in Luna’s Cafe, Sacramento, 2007, and a Sony MiniDisc recorder is keeping the memory.

    We encountered some mushrooms from a backwoods type of dude in central Oregon, and we bought them. We later took them, with ground nutmeg in the form of tea, and performed our show.

    This is the audio of that performance, where Shane has a badly damaged arm, is delirious from vicodin, weed, and mushrooms. I too must have been on another planet as I had been driving all day, stoned, and also on mushrooms.

    Shane is the only member that played in my first show, and last. This is on a Bandcamp collection (there was a small handmade CD-R run) called The Growth Years.

  • Setting Your Stride from Rock Bottom

    Setting Your Stride from Rock Bottom

    A Look at Personal Struggle and Social Inequity in Finance.

    In my first two posts in this series of short articles grappling with the preparatory steps required to embark on the path of financial planning and investment, my personal story was revealed for the purpose of discussing how we get ourselves into the rut of hand-to-mouth living — with a buck earned a buck is spent. I want to dig into that a little further to demonstrate how to get out of it.

    I am still in the process of becoming an Investor, and I am starting from a position that anyone can relate to, because I grew up with one foot in the door to the middle class, but we never really escaped the lower class. That door ultimately closed on my family again, as they are retired and still possess more debt than cash. 

    The fact is, if you are born poor in America, you are privileged compared to Guatemalans born equally poor in scale to Guatemala. And it gets worse from there — god bless whomever is the poorest person in the world. Every American has access to financial tools far greater than that person can probably conceive of. The financial markets are a public, democratic tool that anybody can wield. 

    I live in Philadelphia, we have a third world within the first because these folks were abandoned by their employers in the name of profit. Blight and unemployed men are a volatile combination. While I assert we have to hold ourselves accountable for job creation and community building, we also have to adapt, and for the folks living there that have to work at Wal-Mart, I have a financial strategy for them.

    It was my personal choice to live in chronic poverty as an artist and activist from 2003 to 2016. The consequence of that included the same kind of discrimination any poor person deals with: Unable to get credit, build credit, secure home leases, auto leases, and all that. 

    Folks are discriminated against on the long pathway to the bank loan, but not at the bank branch, where truthfully, the final decision is made by computer systems, and most of the employees considering your loan are from minority groups or working families themselves, and they understand discrimination. You just have to have reliable credit behavior and an income to get good, non-predatory loans.

    Generational poverty and social biases can set one on the wrong path from day one. However, once a person lifts themselves up and out of the situations that keep them down, they cannot learn to present themselves to the financial system toward their own advantage. 

    It is interesting how there are moral implications to good credit behavior, you know, like paying your debts rather than stealing from your debtors, being honest about your income on tax returns, on public assistance applications, rather than lying, and so on. If we abide by it, life seems to open up. 

    There can also be crippling repercussions to our financial system, it broadly produces social inequity. But how to reform the system is beyond my scope, and beyond our personal control. I really believe however that mass adoption of stock trading would improve inequity. One way to achieve that is worker-ownership through stocks, either by law, or by strike. But these are the weeds of political-economy, again. So it is indeed another discussion.

    I do feel that finance can be applied to my own Buddhist morality. The code that we go by is “Right Living.” This means that earning your money can be earned in a wrong manner. It won’t matter how generous you are with your profits if you are making your living in a rapacious way, hurting others in the bullheaded drive for money, or investing in companies that behave that way. My moral compass determines how I invest and from whom I seek employment.

    I cannot tell you where your compass will direct you. I am not saying outcomes will be equal under our system, but that won’t be a problem if we can, together, through self-determination, pull wealth back from the upper-upper-class and end this era of deep inequity. You, as an individual, making the system work for you, realizing that a better democracy and economy depends on your cooperation with others, can improve the world.

    The more of us that own stocks, the closer we are to real democracy. That is how we literally own the corporations and make demands of the Board. This is a radical endeavor that I’m embarking on, not one that will make me soft, or turn me into a Republican. You may however break from the spell of party-line thinking. That would be good, because when you associate securing your financial health with greed, then they win, by planting this negative seed in your mind. They have tooled your mind to keep you out of the game.

    This series of financial articles is for people like myself, starting with, maybe a hundred bucks, zero investments, no credit cards, no direct experience. That is how I started three years ago. I am not wealthy, but I broke from a 15-year streak of hand-to-mouth budgeting, securitized my savings into retirement and brokerage accounts, became a property owner, raised my credit score at least 100 points, and bought my first house. My income has averaged just $23K per year.

    All that said, in this article, I can just outline the main structural points that build credit and financial strength: Income, Debt, Budgeting, Banking, Insurance, Investment.

    Without income, you cannot (or you should not) take on debts. You cannot budget without an income, and you cannot manage debt without a budget. You really cannot manage all of that without banking. When you have your cash flow keeping your bank account well above water, then you can begin the path of investment. Finally, to protect your assets, and your debts, you must have insurance. Let’s go through that again with a simple story. 

    Someone, lets call them Ra, is born urban poor and managed only a high school education. Ra starts working at age 16, but other kids in the neighborhood, even Ra’s own family members, hustle Ra out of every extra dollar, so that by age 18, everyone in the community is still broke. Ra loves the family but realizes they will never let money accumulate in the household. Ra strikes out with their next paycheck before anyone can hustle it. 

    Ra struggles but gets it together in a new place and after several months of work finds there is an extra paycheck sitting on the dresser — it wasn’t cashed because it wasn’t needed. Ra opens a bank account and realizes that this bank can grow with a little budgeting. After putting together a budget, saving receipts and looking closely at spending habits, Ra settled on a savings rate of $100 per month. 

    It has been a year since leaving the house, so Ra takes a vacation. After two weeks off, travel costs, and gifts for the family, Ra notices that they still have one month’s budget leftover. They research investment and secondary banking options to begin taking that $100 a month directly into investments.

    About a year later, Ra has $1,200 invested at an average growth rate of 5%, so the portfolio is now worth $1,323. But during that time, Ra earned a first promotion at work, taking home an extra $200 per month after health benefits. They got their first credit card, and have researched first-time home buyer opportunities in the area.

    Over the following year, Ra saved $200 per month and advanced through the home purchase process with a down payment partially funded by homebuyer grant. Nevertheless, that savings is stored in the value of the home and that position improves month over month.

    As a new homebuyer, Ra is also spared almost two months of bills, as mortgage repayments and utilities are delayed. By the first mortgage payment, Ra has returned $1,200 into investments.

    One year later, investing $200 per month, the home down payment has been restored plus 5% and is now valued at $3,843. With compound interest and more aggressive strategies, Ra doubles the growth rate to 10%, holding now $6,483.

    Over the next twenty years, the portfolio improves to an average return of 15%. Some years are better than others. Ra never increased the original monthly contribution because they started a family, and expenses have kept up with every increase in pay. 

    Ra and spouse are now in their mid-fifties, the kids are gone, they paid off their house, and the assets have grown. They do market research and determine they can sell their house for $250,000, and relocate somewhere to buy a smaller home at half the price, and enjoy their retirement. The portfolio has grown to $58,920. Meanwhile the spouse who worked after raising the babies also squirreled away $50,000 in an IRA account.

    They become semi-retired Investors with a capitol I, spreading that $308,920 toward a house, putting 50% down to maintain low payments, but also to keep substantial liquid capital. Ra takes a more aggressive approach toward stocks, diversifies brokerage accounts, accumulates precious metals, and keeps an eye out for unique investment opportunities. Altogether Ra and spouse are spending maybe 15 hours a week managing the portfolio. The growth rate of their capital falls flat, because their new home is being paid down again, and the good life is being lived without new income. So they make do for the rest of their lives with about $250K, living on quarterly returns.

    This is not ambitious. It is responsible behavior — basic risk management. I never said Ra didn’t party, have fun, have family emergencies and all that. That is what budgeting and credit is for. They just managed risk. Ra learns to save money, only a little, to build that into an early, comfortable retirement. It is an average story, not a perfect one. Your story is more complex. Your story is yours to realize.

    Each post will get into those specifics: Income, Debt, Budgeting, Banking, Insurance, Investment. They will be more research driven than narrative, although I’ll continue sharing personal experiences. 

    Thanks for reading. You can support me by joining Robinhood using my join link here, as well as by joining Coinbase here.

  • Doing What You Want

    Doing What You Want

    Not everything in life comes as planned. You can favor your life heavily in the unexpected or try to control the events surrounding you. William S. Burroughs said that control cannot be used toward a practical end, it only leads to more control. I suppose his principle is true, that control leads to more control. So my lesson actually is that you control and release in life so that you have certain predictable, stable factors, and try to enjoy the remaining chaos.

    How do you do what you want to do, with your life? By choosing control, you can be like Frank Underwood and go up against the world, manipulating it, deceiving, controlling the chaos like a dark wizard. Most of us are just trying to play by the rules and achieve optimum outcomes for ourselves and those we care about, without interfering with the will of others.

    The question however goes round and round: How do you do what you want to do? It has been asked and struggled over by countless souls forever. I’m finding some semblance of a solution in this control and release strategy.

    I’m approaching middle-age, but thankfully my generation has extended youth by ten years. Most folks say I’m young enough to start over. I have started over. I moved out of Portland where I lived, built and destroyed my career, over fourteen years. I live in the more dangerous, more dense, urban, and lawless Philadelphia, now. Very different, very new, although I’m coming up on two years here.

    I never had a career. In fact, only recently have I put on my to-do list to write a full and complete professional CV, tracking every position I’ve held in my life. Looking back, it is kind of amazing. I’ve done quite a few things. 

    I spent six months as an insurance claims investigator for a private investigation firm. I was assistant manager for a small café until it shuttered. I volunteered as a broadcast engineer and programmer for radio. I started a bonafide 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation and directed seven music festivals. I installed 200 televisions and audio systems in people’s homes. I installed extensive professional audio systems in a haunted house and historic prison. I was “the best suites bartender ever” for Portland Timbers and Thorns matches. I did the same work in a horse track. I have practiced hundreds of hours of yoga and meditation. I delivered weekly magazines throughout the entire Portland metropolitan area: That city is mapped in my brain forever. I launched and failed with a media startup, but in the process wrote hundreds of articles and produced dozens of podcasts. I operated two art galleries with public exhibits. I restored a rental property, learning permaculture 101. I bought a house and learned all there is about home maintenance. I lived on a farm for altogether four years, learning gardening, forestry, carpentry, how to manage sheep and llamas. I developed prototypes for combustible hydrogen, retrofitting several cars. I rebuilt two engines, one a ford truck and one a Volkswagen, with very different engineering. I managed two music projects, taking the groups on four west coast tours at notable venues. I was in a metal band for a while, and they became a notable band. I was certified in Audio Engineering under the great Brian Ingoldsby, and was blessed with brilliant teachers at one of the best community college systems in the country, Portland Community College, where I earned a degree with honors. I spent a full year as a music student at Portland State University. I was a depressed, D and C student in High School, smoked pot and became an intellectual overnight. I have taken heroic doses of mushrooms and other natural hallucinogens. I trained myself how to manage diet and weight by age 12. I made goofy videos with a boy that became a genuine Hollywood Film Editor. I survived the cult of Scientology. And I’m still learning how to speak spanish.

    With a story like that, you want to feel special, accomplished, but when you’re broke and nobody cares, its not exactly the wind beneath your wings. There are people who deserve their story to be told far more than mine. But mostly we need to take the spectacle off the pedestal, break the hypnosis of celebrity culture, and return to a localized way of life, because individuals are struggling despite having alot to offer. They cannot find jobs commensurate with their intellgence earned through a variety of experiences, simply because it doesn’t fit into a recognizable box.

    I have always done what I wanted to do. I have run a fools errand or two and lost momentum gained in one area by pursuing another. I have been beaten by taking on too much risk. I have learned all the dumb lessons that one can learn — especially now that I’m in Philly where I’m finally getting the street sense knocked into me. However, I have always done what I wanted to do.

    To make sense of all this experience, I really just have to keep going like this. Things that I could see doing for the rest of my life: Media, Music, Real Estate, Finance. All of this can be done by taking up jobs as needed while managing finance really diligently. I just onboarded with the United States Census. That is perfect for me at this moment. Life has a way of bringing you opportunity.

    Not every career has to look like a career. Approaching 40 years old, I definitely have goals in mind toward my long term financial health that would connect my experiences much like a career. Probably, I’ll take that farming experience and enter mid-life in the bliss of rural Pennsylvania, close to the greatest American cities of all time, all grouped together in the Northeast. No offense Portland and Los Angeles. My heart was left there but the blood pumping through it is Pennsylvanian.

    So what is the answer to doing what you want to do? It changes for everyone. That is why you cannot prescribe a how-to. My personality was fucked for twenty solid years. Probably because my parents raised me in a cult. I mean, don’t underestimate the mindfuck of being even a low-totem Scientologist family. It is pretty much behind me though, I mean all the trauma, all the mistakes. I feel vastly more mature and capable of taking on a whole new range of jobs over the next twenty years, to keep funding my 20-year financial plan. Why I bring all this up is simple: Your starting position is not equal to anyone else’s starting position. The outcome of your efforts will vary. My advantages went against my disadvantages and it led to a fairly chaotic scene.

    I am more level-headed, loaded with lessons and skills and things I’ve learned, hoping to just reinforce those skills rather than take more on. I’m looking at a more focused plan, a steadier course, and a less foolhardy approach to whatever thing I want to do next.

  • Robert McChesney and John Nichols Interview

    Robert McChesney and John Nichols Interview

    It was a spring morning in 2016 and there was an omen on my path to make this interview with Robert McChesney and John Nichols, at Hotel Deluxe in Portland, Oregon. They agreed to an interview if I could meet them on their way out the door, in the lobby.

    I woke up in the morning to a landslide that blocked my usual route to St. Helen’s Highway, to downtown early to set up the gear. I made it to a road block and had to reverse course and take the high road to drop down Burnside. The scheduling was already tight, I was setting up my recording equipment in the car.

    I walked into the hotel with my microphones and recorder hot and rolling. I start this interview out of breath and anxious.

    This kind of foreshadowed the reality that was to manifest by the fall of that year: Donald Trump would win a landslide of electoral votes, forcing the left to double back and find a new strategy to reform the dangerously teetering American project.

    The event is also allegorical to the subject of the book, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy, as we are going down a path that will be obstructed sooner or later, and we may have to start a recourse before we know its coming.

    I am proud of this interview and grateful that these guys, who are well known authors and progressive figures, would join me on my little podcast. I never read the book, they didn’t offer a copy. But it’s probably a good read.

    At the time of this interview, the podcast was called Horizon at End Times, but it was published by THRU Media. Intro music courtesy of New Amsterdam Records, composed by Qasim Naqvi.