I’m Merkado Barkada, ask me anything! (PART 3)

This is day three of celebrating over 1 million weekly readers with an “Ask Me Anything” episode based on reader questions I solicited last week. Here’s the second set of answers! Congrats to all the winners!

• Gracia:  How do you monetize from this work? I can’t figure it out. 
• MB:  I can’t figure it out either, Gracia! MB was all fun and games when my needs could fit neatly within the free tier of all the services that I use to produce it, but now that MB has grown to this size my monthly Mailchimp bills are around P35,000 and my all-in operating costs are approaching P80,000 per month. And that doesn’t even include me! But I have a Patreon page where some amazing readers contribute around P9,000 per month in total, and I run ads from time to time in the newsletter to try and make ends meet. I need to do better with the ad sales to keep MB from dragging too heavily on my finances. I’ve been searching for an Ad Sales Manager for a couple of months, but so far have not had any luck. Anybody who is interested should send me a DM! Let’s make MB sustainable again!
   
• @trinabilities:  How do you teach your kids about saving and investing? Do they read your newsletters, too?
• MB:  My youngest is too young to read, and my oldest is too cool to read his father’s dumb newsletter. The parents out there will know. So it goes. When my son was younger, my wife and I spent a lot of time trying to get him familiarized with how money works. He’s had a weekly allowance since his eighth birthday, which we divided into “spend” and “save” jars. Once he built up some savings in his “save” jar, we started to introduce him to the idea of time deposits and investing. Not through any official channels, but just at home. I made a fake company called “Dada Bank” (complete with a logo) and I would make these one-page “offers” for time deposit opportunities to try to show him the financial world “outside the jar”. Dada Bank would offer him 10% interest on a P1,000 deposit for 30 days, 20% on a P2,000 deposit for 60 days, and 50% on a P5,000 deposit for 180 days. We would talk about his financial goals (usually buying a Pokemon game for his Switch), count his money, and then strategize how he could use these time deposits (in addition to his allowance) to achieve his goals. The numbers were big to exaggerate the differences between the options (no kid gives a crap about earning 1.25%, nor should they). In later years, Dada Bank would sometimes offer equity interests in fictional startups, but by that time he’d already done so well in the time deposit game that I had to nerf the rewards to properly introduce the risk/reward profile of investing in a business. And yes, he did lose. But the scenarios were always funny, and the amounts were always manageable. We talked a lot about the emotions of money. We talk less about that now, but I’m looking forward to Dada Bank’s revival when my youngest starts to understand money a little more.
   
• ApCap:  Are you open to being a platform for future investor activism?
• MB:  Yes, absolutely. Longtime readers will know that I take minority shareholders' interests very seriously and I don’t tend to side with ownership or the powers that be when it comes to how small-time investors are treated. I am very pro-retail trader, very pro-minority shareholder, and I think these opinions probably come across in how I write about topics of power and control on the market and within corporations. The limiting factor for me is time, but I would like to help however I can!
   
• Kris:  I’m going to be 30 years old next year; Do you have any advice as I start this new age journey in my life?
• MB:  Don’t psych yourself out. My life at 30 looked a lot different from my life at 20, just as my life at 40 looked a lot different from my life at 30. I don’t know your particular circumstances, but if I could go back and talk with myself at 30, I think I would focus on just making my 30-year-old self comfortable with his life. There are some things that you can change and some things that you can’t, and it’s important to do periodic audits to remember just how much agency you really have to make change happen in your life. Learning to run was one of those changes for me. Sure, I got a little carried away with it, but all of the Mall of Asia half marathons and the Antipolo trail races were demonstrations to myself that I could change my schedule, that I could stick to a long-term training plan, and that I could make wholesale changes to my body if I wanted to do the work. That whole decade-long process helped me learn that falling in love with the process is far more important than dreaming about the outcome.
   
• Erwin:  What advice would you give to a Pinoy looking to get into stock investing?
• MB:  Advice is tricky, but my main goal when talking to people about investing is to adjust expectations and move away from the “Mad Money” (BUY BUY BUY / SELL SELL SELL) frenzy that can lead new investors into making some terrible decisions. I am not the kind of person to evangelize investing to all the people I meet, but I love to talk about investing with people who have at least some base level of interest, and for those people, the most important thing to learn is that they will not be able to be a pro investor. By that, I mean they will not be able to quit their job and support themselves through their trading income alone. Does it happen for some people? Sure, but so does making the NBA. For some people. For the rest of us short-leggers, the name of the game is using the market to grow our savings. The market doesn’t make us rich. It is a tool that we can use to increase what we have, but it doesn’t replace the work and luck needed to obtain that initial investment and to be able to afford to make that sort of investment. That’s kind of a downer, but for those who are interested, it’s a great filter to remove the people who are only interested in the outcome and not the process.
   
• @vincegurredo:  Do you ever feel burnout? I feel like you put reasonable time and energy into your newsletter and making sure they have substance, but it must take a toll on you.
• MB:  Yes, I do feel burnt out. Some days my data feeds need to be fixed, and it takes a couple of hours. Some days the writing is great but I just can’t seem to find the creative spark to make a good meme. Some days the memes write themselves but the news is dry and uninteresting, like trying to make a meal out of shrimp chips. In those moments, I try to take a deep breath and think about the smallest thing I can do. I also have to recognize that my burnout can impact my family, so I try the best I can to notice the signs of burnout in myself and course correct before I drag that energy into my marriage and family life. My wife supports what I do and gives me the space to maintain this weird schedule in pursuit of my advocacy, but that doesn’t mean she does so without shouldering some “cost”. As with most things in my life, it’s a balancing act that I’m getting better at, but I don’t think it’s possible to “solve” or do it perfectly.

Merkado Barkada is a free daily newsletter on the PSE, investing and business in the Philippines. You can subscribe to the newsletter or follow on Twitter to receive the full daily updates.