Worst Ideas for 2025?
Decluttering
This time of year, best ideas for 2025 are everywhere (mine is here). It is great to call your shots, have a few high conviction ideas, and to load up on your best ones. I hope they make your year. But in order to focus on what matters most, it is also important to clear away everything else.
Ship shape is how you want all of your space. Everything has a place because the ship needs to weather storms and can’t have stuff flying around. Planes need to be ready for turbulence. Overland trucks are designed for bumps. Design your home and work the same way — everything needs to have a place. Put away, give away, or throw away everything until all horizontal planes are clear. Don’t live or work in a warehouse.
Don’t make the problem worse over holidays. Most gift giving has massive deadweight loss, with the perceived value received a small fraction of the cost. Most people either overspend or clutter each other’s homes with tchotchkes. The best solution is to gift charity gift cards so that recipients feel acknowledged but the value goes where it is most needed.
At least until the necessary compromises of marriage and family, how little can a young guy get away with owning? Very little. Things break, get lost, or stolen. Asset light living is liberating — you can do more when you own less. You can just get up and go without having to deal with the endless management that property requires. Be a hard target, hard for all threats to beat whether that’s salesmen, intruders, or competitor. That is far more about skills than stuff.
What deserves to survive ruthless decluttering? Some basic fitness gear. Everyone can do pushups and dumbbell curls and you see plenty of people with the biceps and pecs to show for it. But everyone should also have a pull up bar and dip bar for backs and triceps. For balance, do as many pull ups as push ups and as many dips and curls each morning. There’s no good substitute for this minimal gear (my favorite is made in Ohio by Rogue).
Have a reliable knife; a good quality one lasts as long as you take care of it. All folders are compromises and some jurisdictions have rules about what knives you are allowed to carry. In all but the most insane municipalities, the combination that causes the least trouble is 4” or shorter blade, one sided, and not automatic (my favorite is made by Daniel Winkler in North Carolina).
Own a rifle that you learn how to shoot safely and accurately. If you get it in a standard military caliber such as 5.56, it will be easy to find ammo. You can’t contractually insure against intruders or civil unrest; for that you need to self-insure. Additionally, tactical shooting competitions such as the Tactical Games (think CrossFit with guns) are fun.
Own a paper book that you haven’t read. I love listening to recordings but am not convinced that retention is as good. In a power outage, you’ll want something that you can read. Ideally have something worth rereading in a long-term outage (my favorite is Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations which is worth reading and re-reading).
Own one ounce of physical gold. This can be a bar, coin, or even a bracelet but this has held a widely acknowledged value for millennia as countless governments and their currencies rose and fell. Buy one bitcoin, today’s digital gold. It makes sense to have both — gold in case you lose access to electronics and BTC in case you lose access to your gold storage. Between the two, you will have something of value that doesn’t rely on any one government.
Have a passport so that you are able to travel internationally as freely as possible. Get Global Entry to expedite borders. Both emergencies and opportunities come fast, far faster than the time it takes to get paperwork in order. So be ready to go anywhere.
These ideas will sound comically inadequate to their respective enthusiasts. Stipulated. I have just one of none of these things. Many hunters and veterans have far more than one knife, shooters often have dozens of rifles in various exotic calibers, private libraries often have thousands of books, and weird libertarian crypto nerds occasionally collect hundreds or thousands of bitcoins. Fine. More than fine even. But we’re already convinced; our enthusiasm points to how risky a gamble it is to have none.
Declutter your finances too. Have a great answer to the question of why you own something. If you don’t, then sell it. Ten great answers on ten 10% investments is reasonable. Twenty great answers on twenty 5% investments is plausible. Beyond that, you risk clutter. Get meaningful or get out. Force the issue one way or the other. There is a unitary cost to actively managed positions in time, expense, and bother. It is better to get small risks to zero.
You just need two things in a decluttered personal account: principal protected cash and tax-efficient equity exposure. Cash should be in treasury money markets. Equities should be in a low cost diversified basket. Frec is the simplest solution offering both. They currently pay an interest rate of over 4% on cash. More importantly, their innovative solution to direct indexing automatically harvests tax losses to lower your taxes each year.
Another way to keep your personal finances simple is this: everyone should own a business. It doesn’t have to be profitable. A non-profitable limited liability company is quite useful for all kinds of opportunities, some of which arise too fast to set up a new entity. You can be asset light but own an LLC that balances its expenses each year to optimally avoid excessive taxes. Surround yourself with art, surround your home with a black walnut orchard, work on the waterfront — there’s no tax on the beauty you can enjoy while your LLC bears the cost. Our whole system is so structured to enrich owners that it is a wonder that anyone but the biggest superstars could ever get rich on salaries. Take full advantage of the unequal treatment of capital and wages.
Complexity will emerge over time as commitments to family and work grow. That is unavoidable. But to be maximally prepared for handling the triumphs and disasters ahead, start with as clean a slate as possible. Begin the new year by identifying all of your worst ideas and murdering them. It will make it much easier to focus on what’s left.
