How did you do it? Financial Success Thread

[hobbes9324]

I'll throw out one more HUGE issue for financial success. Get married ONE TIME TO THE RIGHT PERSON. In my group of 44 MD's, at least half have been divorced at least once. Without exception, they have gotten KILLED financially each time.

And if you're thinking "the prenup will save me" - dream on - cause as soon as you have a kid, financially you're on the hook no matter what.

A good partner (I've been married for 22 years) is a tremendous asset. But you better be sure.....

MM MD

[DcifrThs]

thanks to all who have contributed to this thread!!!

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this thread keeps getting better and better. love the recent contributions from El D, Howard, and JaBlue. And TC I have been intrigued by your comments as well since they come from a perspective that most posters on this board can't share: that of a motivated and extremely intelligent person who isn't especially risk averse. You talk about foresight and initiative being a key component of scouting out the next boom, but I know my 'boom' success didn't come from any particular foresight except a jonesing to gamble when I was in college. I got good at poker, and it got good after I did right as I came into an inordinate amount of free time. In short, I got lucky that such an opportunity came along and that I was talented and motivated enough to capitalize on it.

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this is basically what happened to me (and i also think enon and quite a few others who are now doing well)

My quick one:

my goal was always to find something i could do where i could get paid to think about what i love.

poker was for me a fun game to play while i was an economist at the dept of labor. at that salary, i couldn't live in DC. but with poker i was doing quite well.

i then decided to go to get an MBA because thinking about finance >>>>> thinking about survey data collected by the census beaurouaeau (i worked for years & could never learn to spell that word). however, that job as an economist taught me a TON. i excelled there, and while i didn't get published in either Econometrica or the Journal of Economics, i got good feedback from them & could have gotten published in the Journal of Health Care Economics had i put another 6mo-1yr into one of my papers. but the world of finance beckoned.

i went to a top 25 MBA program & played poker through the stuff i didn't like (passed everything though & excelled at all finance related stuff). i was one of 8 students out of 280 in two MBA classes to take the hardcore mathematical finance courses (stochastic calc--> mathematical finance --> derivative securities --> advanced derivative securities)...and one of 3 to finish the 4 course series. (the other two contacted me to interview at the fund at which i most recently worked. they didn't get past the first phone screen)

i got offered a job in august of my first year to start when i graduated. for those that don't know, this means that i didn't have to do ANYTHING other than learn or play poker for my 2nd year. after my first year though & that summer (where i earned the most i ever have to date via poker) i realized i couldn't stomach the huge amt of variance & both played lower & invested a ton in real estate & some CDs.

that year i didn't do as well but i didn't need to.

then the SH*T hit the fan for me. i was going to be an MBS (mortgage backed security) associate for a top investment bank in NY (my home). however, the group i was going to work with left. they all told me they hated the firm and the new firm they went to were only accpeting experienced hires.

so i could take the way more boring basically data-analyst role at the bank at which i had an outstanding offer, or gamble and try to find a better job.

care to guess what i did??

so i interviewed & traveled for the summer & early fall until i saw newhizzle win the borg tourney. there i met a great guy who introduced my to a top fund from which he recently left to play poker. they have possibly the toughest interview process i've seen (widely known amoung headhunters since they place very very few people there) and i "sailed through it."

i was "a dream" to work with in terms of my character & love of some of the material and my intellect according to my managers & collegues, but the job wasn't a fit for me. I've spoken with diablo about this and he basically knew i'd run into this from the start. it blindsided me. i didn't see that i wouldn't be doing enough financial market research/ trade analysis etc.

instead, i was doing all client service work. it was analytical & i got trained by two of the three CIOs in financial market analysis & market history (performance of asset classes/ diff types of securities etc. throughout varying time periods in history). it just didn't work out.

while i learned a ton & would repeat the experience if given the opportunity, it isn't what i think i should be doing in terms of job function.

i am now "unemployed" for the first time but feeling pretty good about it.

my severance package is good & i have two free months to find another job after working there for 6 months.

i'm not technically "financially successful" in the sense that howard and diablo are...but i think i'm slowly getting there. between real estate and other investments i have a fiarly good future from this vantage point.

i spend my day reading finance books & select sections of he FT, WSJ. The economist i read cover to cover. i try to internalize the info & see what new opinions i can come up with on the topics or how i would improve the writing. mostly though, i try to glean where i should be concentrating my energy

the rest of my time is spent networking & finding new shops to look at/interview with. so in the sense of my earlier goal (get paid to think about what i love), i think i've been very successful & hope to only improve & learn more in the future. i now have the DoL & a top 3 hedge fund on my resume so with hope, and a little luck & work, i'll soon be employed again as a research analyst in finance.

i hope the next time i have something to contribute to this thread i'll be worth many multiples of what i am now.

if not, i am pretty sure i'll be happy with respect to my lot in life based on some luck & hard work.

Barron

PS- oh yea...i'm also dating the best girl for me yet & am in love. so that helps too.

[ITILTEZ]

I'm obviously not worth millions like some of the people who have posted in this thread, but this seems pretty fun so I'll post something.

My grandfather showed me the world of gambling when I was around 10. He used to take me to betting shops to make some $1 sports bets one of the very first slips he gave me won like $18 and I was hooked. Few years after that I was playing slots, betting sports and losing basically all the money I could get(sometimes by not so honorable methods) on horses. I think around when I was 15 I got my hands on maybe one of the best sports betting guides ever written and realized I could actually make money from this. That was a big turning point, I began making my own %-estimations of the games and only betting the games I thought had value. Now that's obviously a good change, but it also had the negative impact of making me much less interested of school so I began skipping lot of classes when I noticed how much more interesting gambling is then studying "boring" books about math and whatever. I was still getting good grades tho and got into good high school.

In the beginning of high school, so this is like 3-4 years ago when I was 16-17, I found out about online poker and the massive rush it gave was insane. Sports betting and horses are both pretty fast action, but to gambling addict they are prolly same as weed to someone who shoots heroin. I began skipping more and more classes and finally dropped out about ½year after finding online poker. At the time my net worth was couple grand and was often betting 50% to 100% of it in single soccer game or taking the whole roll to 25/50nl(huge back then), so my bankroll management skills were non-existent and around that time I found out that I'm capable of going on these huge tilts, where I just don't see or hear anything until Ive lost my whole bankroll. I had few good runs in the beginning where I gambled my roll up to $40k or something, but then blew it by playing way too big games and next day I had to take all my pennies to bank and start rebuilding roll from $30.70. At this point its maybe good to mention that my poker skills are far from great and I have basically no understanding of game theory or the math involved in poker. The busto-robusto-busto thing went on for a couple years, until I got little better with money management, now I would still throw in random $200/$400 fixed sessions with $50k roll or something, but I was most of the time smart enough to quit in

In the beginning of 2006 I got some coaching from someone who was tearing up the online fixed games and singed up at cardrunners( 2 best poker education purchases Ive made) and was suddenly making good money with my improved poker skills. There was some super soft mid-high stakes games back then that not many knew about, so it didn't take much of a player to kill them. I obviously didn't realize that back then and thought I'm the chit, it was nice wake up when I hit extremely bad run for a few months that destroyed most of my bankroll and confidence. Sometime in autumn I got really lucky when I was browsing through all these small poker sites and found one(don't bother asking me, it doesn't exist anymore) where 5 10, 10 20, 20 40nl were softer then 1/2nl on pretty much any other site. Rebuilded my roll and confidence pretty fast there. Sometime around the end of 2006 50/100 and 100/200nl games began running there, there was couple really good players, to who I would every now and then donate decent chunk of my roll. But there was also one guy who was playing 100 200 headsup all the time, who I figured to have pretty big edge against. One day after a bad run I hopped into that game with like $70k total roll, ran really good that night and some other nights after that. Around that time I also began playing similar stakes on other site where I also did pretty good, as well as I was hitting all my bigger sports bets for a while. The success got little into my head and I took some foolish shots in too big games, like 200/400 and 250/500plo which costed me some money.

At that point I looked back and realized how incredible lucky I had been, as well as I saw that the bigger games were suddenly getting much worse and with my personality its almost impossible to grind something like $2/$4. So what I did was I put almost all of my winning to some funds that I cant touch, as well as I bought part of small business that has been doing great. For a while now I've been just playing poker and sports for fun and don't have any kind of passion to gamble for living in future.

Now I'm just trying to figure out what to do in future. The first thing is getting the high school done and enjoy life by travelling, and doing other stuff that I have sort of skipped so far in order to gamble. I think that also relates to only thing I learned from this, despite of the money(peanuts in my case) you make you shouldn't let work become the only important thing in your life.

[tmfs]

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One other thing it got me thinking about is you can't just blindly follow the trends. I can't tell you how many people I know tell me "I plan on making a little money and then getting into real estate because that's where the money is." Yeah, you could still make a lot of money if you are really good at it but the market is filled with millions trying to do the same. Find a new market that is just getting started (BEFORE it is getting hot) and learn everything there is to know about it if you really want to give yourself a chance for financial riches.

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I agree with your general sentiment, but disagree with a few things. First simply because there are already millions of people involved in real estate shouldn't be a major deciding factor in it's profitability. Second finding the next new thing is probably a lot easier said than done. It's likely that most people making significant money from poker right now stumbled onto it as a hobby instead a premeditated move because there was significant money to be made from it. It's not to say that being in the right place at the right time is a result of dumb luck but it would seem to me to be in the position that you describe you would need a fortunate series of events to take place.

[Taylor Caby]

thanks for the feedback, guys. I'm not claiming I'm out spotting all these opportunities that no one else is, rather I'm just sharing the mindset I have about my future. I'm certainly being as proactive as possible as far as finding new opportunities and not just limiting my investment strategy over the next X years to index funds.

Keep them coming.

tc

[James282]

Hey Taylor, hope it didn't seem like I was calling you cocky or anything. Not at all. I do think there is a big difference between 'not limiting my investment strategy over the next X years to index funds' and 'i guess i am hoping that in 30 years that extra 100k will be insignificant compared to the money i have made by working harder and taking more risks than everyone else along the way.' I find myself firmly in the 'not limiting my investment strategy' camp but I am definitely not in the working harder and taking more risk than everyone else camp. I admire that mindset, and believe that only a small percentage of people will succeed with it. I may be one of those people, I may not. I would definitely just kill myself if I somehow lost all my money and had to work a job I hated just to get back to even.

James

[TheWorstPlayer]

Thanks, techno. I guess I'm the grinder of the group (at least for now) but I'll give my perspective anyways. I work at a very successful large consulting firm, am towards the top of my class, and am on track to make partner in a relatively short time period (4-6 years - maybe 3 if I get lucky and really bust my ass?). Partners at my firm make around 1-5 million. Assuming I'm still towards the upper end, that means I'll be making 2-3 million per year within 5-10 years.

There is no way that's not enough to live a [censored] awesome retirement after doing that for 10-15 years. And it's not like the money making opportunities vanish once a successful partner in a large consulting firm 'retires'. The previous retirees from my firm are working part-time on the boards of companies, at VC firms, at private equity firms, etc. Sounds pretty kickass to me. Of course I may quit consulting early and do something else but there is very little chance that that 'something else' would be less lucrative. Quite the contrary in fact.

[z28dreams]

[ QUOTE ]
Thanks, techno. I guess I'm the grinder of the group (at least for now) but I'll give my perspective anyways. I work at a very successful large consulting firm, am towards the top of my class, and am on track to make partner in a relatively short time period (4-6 years - maybe 3 if I get lucky and really bust my ass?). Partners at my firm make around 1-5 million. Assuming I'm still towards the upper end, that means I'll be making 2-3 million per year within 5-10 years.

There is no way that's not enough to live a [censored] awesome retirement after doing that for 10-15 years. And it's not like the money making opportunities vanish once a successful partner in a large consulting firm 'retires'. The previous retirees from my firm are working part-time on the boards of companies, at VC firms, at private equity firms, etc. Sounds pretty kickass to me. Of course I may quit consulting early and do something else but there is very little chance that that 'something else' would be less lucrative. Quite the contrary in fact.

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TWP - what kind of consulting do you do? I've considered the field but wasn't sure what kind of career paths/upward mobility there was...

[TheWorstPlayer]

management consulting to banks

[N 82 50 24]

Great thread Taylor. The stories I've read so far have been very interesting. I'll share mine in case anyone can get something out of it. I'm going to go a little more in-depth in terms of background because I think it will illustrate why I made the decisions that I did. Skip below if you don't want to read a long rambling semi-life story that really isn't all that interesting to anyone except myself.

I grew up in a pretty wealthy household, but my parents kept me and my siblings pretty grounded. One of the things they did buy for us was a great education. I was lucky enough to go to a great private school for 14 years (pre-K to 12th), graduate in 2000 and then head off to a fantastic private liberal arts college for 4 years after that. Even though I worked hard in school over the years to earn my grades, I owe my parents a ton for giving the opportunity to me.

Anyway, I had a double-major, but the one that I planned on using was my Business degree, with a concentration in Accounting and Finance. In the summer of 2003 (in between junior and senior year of college) I worked at a $3b hedge fund called Gardner, Russo & Gardner in Lancaster, PA while also interviewing with Big 4 accounting firms in Philadelphia. My first big mistake of my life was taking a job with Deloitte over that summer. I guess I just figured that I should lock up a job when I could and it paid mid-40s, but I figured I'd learn a lot. Only down the line during my senior year did I realize all of the opportunities that I'd given up. I was still working part-time at GRG, but that was never really a long-term employment option -- I didn't want to live in Lancaster and I'm not sure if they would have offered me a full-time position. It isn't that I didn't think they liked me, it's just that the nature of the firm didn't really allow for full-time people to be brought on after being an intern unless they were REALLY special and I wasn't really that great outside of my technical competence w/r/t excel and whatnot.

Anywho, I graduated in May of 2004 with all sorts of honors -- the one I'm most proud of being Phi Beta Kappa. That was really hard to get coming out of my majors at my school. I interned as a research assistant with two professors at Wharton. The initial idea was just to kill time until my job actually started in late September of 2004. I also made a little money which was nice. But the thing was, the work was very on and off. One day we'd have a ton to do, the next we wouldn't have any. There was data coming in from all over the world (it was a big research project) and when there wasn't any data coming in or issues to deal with, we just sat there. This is when I got into poker on a serious level. I loaded my work computer up with the various sites (no one there cared) and I started putting in some hands and learning. I'd only played casually before. By that I mean I just played off of what I'd learned from a college roommate and my gut. I had actually played a ton of hands, but most of that was at lower stakes SNGs. I had no idea how to actually play poker, but I had internalized most of the push-botting concepts key to beating those games. I moved up pretty quickly once I started lurking 2+2 and reading a TON of poker books.

Then in September, I started my job. Considering the roll that I built up over the summer, the money that I was making seemed insignificant. Add to the fact that I got assigned to a Sarbanes-Oxley preparedness engagement in Newark, Delaware (a horrible combination fwiw) and I was instantly disillusioned with the job. I stayed up most nights at home playing all night and I often reported to work with 2-3 hours of sleep and zero motivation. It really wasn't fair to the firm, clients or myself to keep working there, but I did. Somehow, I actually got decent reviews at all of my engagements except for one, where the person running the job figured out how [censored] stupid I was on that amount of sleep and called me out on my commitment to the job (I didn't have any, she was right). The problem was that I just wasn't really making enough from poker to quit my job. Sure I was playing high-ish limits for the time and beating them, but I was still very tilt-prone and I wasn't beating them by much. Really only barely beating the rake at some of them when I was playing on so little sleep.

So I kept on trucking at the job. But in December 2004 I was playing on one monitor and watching the last four tables of the Sunday million on the other. I saw a player with an avatar that said PSCrew.com on it. I was bored, so I opened it up and saw a message that said "I need help building this website -- contact me if you know how." Did I know how? No, not really. I knew something about computers. But I didn't know the first thing beyond basic HTML (things like bold tags or tables, lol). So I volunteered with the plan of figuring it out. Eventually things worked out and I built the site using the Mambo Content Management system with the Community Building plugin -- the real key was that I avoided all programming and just dealt with pre-built products. And the "PokerStars Crew" website was launched -- right around the same time as PocketFives. We grew pretty fast and I saw what P5s was doing with their rankings. I thought their system of basically making up the rankings was kind of retarded (even though I liked a lot of things about the site), so I decided to try to make something based on actual numbers. I'd done some experimenting with regard to collecting data for my own internal purposes, but this was the beginning of my first real public data-mining project.

So thepokerdb was officially launched. The only problem? I didn't know how to program anything. I was lucky enough to track down a programmer (another 2+2er, although I met him because he is the brother of the PSCrew guy) and we worked together on various versions of the site. It started as a manually entered (ie, paste in a tournament history from PokerStars, then it parses into a database) system and has gradually evolved. Most of the early work on thepokerdb was in May 2005 when I was still at my job. I knew that I wanted to leave my job, I just needed an indication that I would be able to survive without the income.

We kept working on the site and in July of 2005, I decide to take some time off for two reasons -- a) I wanted to completely redo thepokerdb and b) I wanted to study very seriously for the LSAT to give myself another option. So I took August and September of 2005 off from my job (a leave of absence -- I have no idea why Deloitte was so lenient). I took the LSAT on Oct 1st, 2005 and returned to my job on the Monday after that. That lasted like a week or two. After two months off where I could work on thepokerdb and do basically whatever I wanted, the work was just suffocating. I left for good on Nov 4th, 2005 with the idea of making thepokerdb a viable business and poker brand. This was a MAJOR risk, but also one of the best decisions of my life. I needed to get free of the CPA track. It was suffocating me in many respects to work in that sort of environment at that stage in my life. With the help of my co-founder and a lot of loyal supporters, we built thepokerdb very quickly into the premier online MTT database. We were growing by leaps and bounds from a user, subscriber and traffic perspective.

It was around the start of 2006 that I started a blog and started a thepokerdb partner site, PSDollars -- it was a W$ and T$ trading site. Using unique pictures (mainly of online players at live events who hadn't been photographed previously) on the blog, I generated a ton of traffic and utilized it to promote thepokerdb and PSDollars. Both of the businesses began to make a fair amount of money as 2006 went on.

I ended up getting into Emory Law school and I enrolled in August of 2006 with the intention of running thepokerdb while in law school. It wasn't overwhelming to do both. Obviously, this brought me out of the PA area for the first time in my life and I got an apartment in Atlanta. A month or so into school, a BLUFF staffer found out that I was in Atlanta and asked me to come into the office to talk. I did so and after a series of meetings, eventually a deal was worked out for BLUFF to take over thepokerdb. The formal press release was on December 6th, 2006, about 13 months after I quit my job (you can see it here). Around the same time, we reached 100,000 users -- which is more registered users than 2+2 has (although 2+2 has way more traffic with all of the lurkers, etc).

I took a pretty incentive heavy deal. I have a heavy interest in the continued performance of thepokerdb and I made the decision to take at least one year off of law school to work on the site with BLUFF. We've since integrated thepokerdb into the BLUFF website with success, although there were many rocky moments during various periods of technical difficulty. So that's why I've been doing since the beginning of the year.

Now I'm at a point where between thepokerdb, PSDollars, my BLUFF equity stake, a rakeback thing that I can't discuss due to legal implications, various assets and other things, my net worth is in the 7 figures. Considering that in early November 2005 I had like $30K to my name, that's pretty good. Right now I have what I think is a MONSTER idea for a poker related business that I'm working on. I really can't believe that no one has done it before, but surprisingly enough, nothing even remotely comparable exists anywhere in the poker world. And based off of the response I've gotten from people that I've told about it, my opinion is shared. So right now I'm continuing to work on thepokerdb, starting work on this new idea and just enjoying working for myself. I guess that pretty much wraps this up. Hopefully someone enjoyed this even though it goes way above and beyond what anyone else has written or what Taylor was asking. Obviously feel free to ask away about anything.