A Thought on Failure

People often fail because the price tag on their goal is more than they're willing to pay.

Perfectly Uncomfortable

My favorite place to be is about three miles out of my comfort zone, where I can still juuuust see it on the horizon and know my way back, but its gravity is too weak to lure me away from the task at hand.

Too Many Eggs in Too Many Baskets!

By now, most of us know better than to put all of our eggs in any one basket. Something I've found myself learning from experience, however, is that there's also such a thing as too many baskets - like...WAYYY too many baskets sometimes. When you can no longer keep track of or keep from dropping some of your baskets (i.e., when you're no longer able to adequately keep up with any of your endeavors), it's time to either eliminate, consolidate, or delegate. Rehome some however appropriate (for financial gain or otherwise, at your discretion), merge or purge some if possible and appropriate, and/or outsource to others who can look after them for you either permanently or til you've freed up some room in your life to manage them yourself. It's not a sign of weakness to share your charge and its dividends with others but a sign of wisdom, rather, to have the foresight to aptly distribute them in a way and at a time most beneficial to all.

Now have an unrelated but wondrous video in case you were wondering why you're still bothering to read my blog entry:

https://pin.it/6xaqoGT

Free Ivy League Online Courses

Soo...Who's going to Harvard with me (virtually) this spring?! 👩‍🏫

Info on online offerings at ivy league schools here:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.freecodecamp.org/news/ivy-league-free-online-courses-a0d7ae675869/amp/

I recommend following this link and using the available filters to find the courses most suited to your current interests:

https://www.classcentral.com/collection/ivy-league-moocs

^You may also subscribe to Class Central's newsletter and/or make a free account with them to stay up-to-date with online courses available.

Or skip straight on over to Harvard's selection if you've got crimson fever like I always have ❤:

https://online-learning.harvard.edu/catalog/free

Note that some otherwise free courses may charge a fee if you elect to earn a certificate upon course completion. 

Free Stocks, Cash Awards, Investment Money and Tips

With so many stocks currently seeing multi-year lows, a major topic of recent discussion has been how to get into the market while it's down or "buy low" now so you can "sell high" later.

To get you started, I've rounded up a list of brokers you can check out in case you'd like to see the different ways each is able to manage your stock and even cryptocurrency investments. To help you find which it's in your best interests to use as primary investing accounts, I would be more than happy to discuss my experiences with each as well as the promos I know of and how they all work if you'd like or you can Google them or try them out yourself! Either way, each has its pros and cons but all exist because they have their own merits AND each one I've listed gives you either fractional or whole stock shares for joining. They are all also completely free to set up, they all have mobile apps you can use to manage your account on the go, and most offer comission-free trading. Some even offer decent interest rates on the uninvested money you hold in your account and/or considerable cash awards or additional stock shares for funding your account, whether you choose to invest the money or not. Disclaimer: I do benefit if you decide to use any of the referral links below but I also believe these are worth a look for various reasons (the free stock, if nothing else) and am more than happy to discuss investing and anything else related to finance whether you decide to use them or not.

Without further ado, here are your brokers:

-Robinhood: Join Robinhood and get a share of stock for free when you use the following invite link: http://share.robinhood.com/aletae

-Webull: Open a Webull brokerage account and receive ONE (1) free stock valued between $2.5-$250. Deposit ANY amount and get an additional free stock valued between $12-$1400. https://bit.ly/37Q1F2Z (case sensitive)

-Nvstr: a new, collaborative way to invest, they will give you up to $1,000 free cash to invest when you join. Sign up here: https://www.nvstr.com/share/ac9b367c

-Firstrade: Join Firstrade today and get a free share of stock. Use the following link to claim the stock without having to invest money first: https://share.firstrade.com/AletaM0WG

-Moomoo: Join moomoo and open a trading account, you'll get a free stock card valued $4-$200. When you deposit $500 or more, you'll get another one valued $10-$1000. It could be Netflix, Beyond meat, Uber or Groupon. https://j.moomoo.com/00163m 

-Public: Join me on Public and own the companies you believe in. Get started with free stock 👉 share.public.com/JOKRlovesBBC

‐M1 Finance: With M1, you can automatically invest in what you want for free. Try it today and get $10 to invest! https://m1.finance/ZidFcwhLlVsV

-Dough: Use this link to download the dough app and get a free share of stock! https://bit.ly/38Z63N9 (case sensitive)

-SoFi Invest: SoFi Invest 📊 allows you to buy and sell stocks (and pieces of stocks) with zero fees. Open an Active Investing account with $5,000 or more, and you'll get $100 in stock!: https://www.sofi.com/share/invest/2731202

-Cash App: Cash App allows you to send money for free as well as invest in fractional shares of stock and cryptocurrency. Enter the code FQKNJDV when you sign up and we'll send you $5 when you try it. https://cash.me/app/about

-TD Ameritrade is fantastic as well. I don't have a referral code for them and they don't offer any free bonuses that I'm aware of, unless you fund your account with a large dollar amount, but their platform and phone app are both intuitive and loaded with the tools you need for efficiently and quickly analyzing and placing trades.

Next, I highly recommend Morning Brew's newsletter for keeping up with markets and news, new investing ideas, and more. They've provided insight regarding and turned me onto a number of traditional and alternative investment ideas of which some of the more unconventional ones include DiversyFund & Groundfloor (types of real estate investments), SeedInvest (where you can invest in startups and companies such as Winc), and Masterworks (where you can invest in fine art). Their description: "A free daily email that delivers the top business news in just a 5-minute read." You can sign up here:
https://morningbrew.com/daily/r/?kid=980a6ae4&utm_source=twitter_share

Mentioned above, if you're interested in Groundfloor, I do have a referral link for that which will get you a free $10 to invest: https://www.groundfloor.us/new_referral/iec633

I'm not saying that trading or investing without the help of a financial advisor is for everyone or that you should go and put money into obscure investments without doing your homework (please don't!), but anyone can at least benefit from the array of free stocks and investments above and decide where to go from there. It all adds up and investing and diversification are obviously extremely important, especially for and in times such as these.

If you're interested in brushing up on your technical analysis skills for trading or need to learn fundamental analysis for investing or how to get into forex or crypto trading or anything, I'd be happy to send some extremely beneficial learning tools your way for that too. (These would be in the form of free online courses, YouTube videos, or articles I've found and bookmarked over the past couple of years.) Some of these are topics I'm still getting a handle on myself but I'm learning quickly thanks to the myriad of resources currently available online and would love to share and discuss with anyone interested!

Hope this helps at least a few of you! Stay safe out there and happy investing! :)

Don't Enter Without Confirmation Joke

You should always establish confirmation before entry! 🤭

"Self-sufficiency is inefficiency.."

I used to want to be a badass, independent woman. It's good to be strong and able to get by on your own, but surviving is not thriving, and we do need each other to excel. One fundamental concept economics teaches you:

"Self-sufficiency is inefficiency and inefficiency can lead to poverty." - Adam Smith. You may need to give this some thought or perhaps look into how and why it holds true, but you won't be hard-pressed to find the merits of working together.

^Obvious statement of the day, totally worth it if one person benefits.

Why Do We Dream of Flying?

A thought I had just after waking up yesterday and without much research on the topic:

We humans tend to dream much of flying using our own two arms. I believe these are dreams we are likely to have before any significant familiarity with airplanes. I can't say whether exposure to flying creatures such as birds is a factor. We seem, however, to dream considerably less about things such as swimming, being invisible or even camouflaging ourselves the way a chameleon does, moving around on all fours, swallowing our food whole, and infinite other things our bodies are no less capable of than flying under our own power. Given that flying was never a part of our evolutionary history, do we have theories as to why?

Heart Rate Monitor Curiosity

Sean and I got some TomTom Spark watches for free awhile back. I just started using mine and haven't used heart rate monitors too much before so going from 55 to like 172 bpm during a short jog seems like my body is overreacting. Lol I'm curious what it'll say when I try it out on 30+ mins of shuffling something like those Pendulum Essential Mix or NFG Talents ITG things.

Coronavirus ready right here! xp

All these people out shopping... Sometimes, I don't step one foot outside my front door for 1 to 2 weeks at a time. Pretty sure Sean and I could hole up in here with current supplies for like 6 months and be totally fine if we could somehow resist the urge to murder each other after we run out of booze.

Turning Down SEX?!

Turning down sex with a hottie because you're tired or not horny yet is like turning down a million dollars because you don't really need the money right now. Like...what?!