Grinding for the endgame – Page 2

_Anonymous_ · 2010-12-23T12:15:16Z

Hi. My names Richard and I've been a member of this site for a while but haven't been much more than a lurker over the past couple of years. Recently I started re-evaluating my reasons for playing poker and at 33 years old I also started considering what the next steps were from a work-life perspective for me. I currently live in Cape Town, South Africa and have a wife and 3 young children. I've got a fairly well-paying Job but its one of those that leave you feeling like a complete wreck by the end of the year - probably hence the timing of these thoughts around next steps in my mind. I've always enjoyed playing poker but my goals have tended to reside somewhere in the vague stratosphere of - one day I'll make enough money to pay off all the debt, have the kids education paid for and be financially independent enough to take the plunge. Truth is at the stage of my life, thats going to be a very difficult achievement with me moving up salary-wise, having a family, building a home and a lifestyle, etc, etc. At the same time purely by coincidence I was looking at retirement funding. Its something I've sadly neglected in the past and I felt that now was an opportune time to re-open that aspect of financial planning. The options are to go big in the Job's Provident fund or to just get a financial advisor and pump my monthly contributions into some kind of investment vehicle. Neither option fully appealed to me so I decided to start developing a hybrid approach by developing my own balanced portfolio. It was whilst evaluating the balance of my portfolio from a risk perspective when I started considering the heretical option of including my bankroll and poker play as part of my retirement funding portfolio. And yes it does sound pretty grim - gambling with retirement money - but I considered it from a purely financial and business perspective. The whole idea is to achieve a return on investment and to then have the compounding effect leveraging your investment portfolio into one which can sustain you post-retirement. So why not include poker play as an alternative investment solution. My model is still fairly simplistic at this stage with broad risk categorisations of high, medium and low. I will aim to better sophisticate this over time but its a good starting point. I've also done an initial allocation of the various investment alternatives into those 3 buckets: Low risk: Money market, bank accounts, cash and fixed term deposits Medium risk: Portion of provident fund, portion of equity investments (blue chips, index trackers) High risk:Poker bankroll, portion of equity investments (non blue-chip shares) Also, given that a large portion of my bankroll is $ denominated, I also achieve an element of currency diversification versus the South African Rand (ZAR). Again I'll sophisticate this element more over time. So that brings us to where I am at the moment. I've laid out some capital diversified into these areas with a current split of 20% high risk, 30% medium risk and 50% low risk - a bit conservative given where I am in life at the moment but its a good starting point is my thinking. I'll obviously have to re-balance periodically as things move out of kilter from those ratios but the overall aim remains to grow the entire portfolio by hook or by crook to ultimately provide retirement funding for myself and my family. So its a bit of a different flavour to the whole "I want to go pro" philosophy but its a very exciting thing for me because I think its gives me a sense that I'm giving direct feedback into and really driving my own financial planning and performance. I sometimes think the idea of handing this responsibility over completely to a stranger (no matter how qualified) can be as soul-destroying as contemplating the thought of working 9-5 in an office behind a desk for someone else for the rest of my productive. life. And that sure as hell isn't going to be the way this game plays out. So this will be where I chronicle the trials and tribulations of my road towards grinding for the end-game.... wish me luck

SneakyhanD

Joined: 29.10.2007

Posts: 691

14.02.2011, 18:34 0

Hello, great blog !
Any graphs for the viewers ? ♠_cool:

Peace - accepting everything that occurs in life as love. Everything is just as it is
You're here to witness everything

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_Anonymous_

15.02.2011, 03:50 0

Complete mixed bag to be honest. Here's January. Will do a Feb graph once I finalise the wash-up in 2 weeks

Overall:

NL100:

Clearly NL200 not agreeing with me X(. Feb at the moment is looking fairly crappy although I'm hoping by sticking to NL100 I call pull it back - or at least a chunk of it...

_Anonymous_

15.02.2011, 03:52 0

Originally posted by RaWRpewpew
Fellow south african i see!

GL at the tables!

Hey dude! Thanks! Where in SA u from?

_Anonymous_

15.02.2011, 11:38 0

Stellenbosch! ♠_love:

Whats your thoughts on the precarious position of poker in SA atm? ♠_cry:

_Anonymous_

15.02.2011, 16:01 0

Originally posted by RaWRpewpew
Stellenbosch! ♠_love:

Whats your thoughts on the precarious position of poker in SA atm? ♠_cry:

If you mean on the local site front, its just about dead in the water in my opinion. And the negative publicity (and general lack of media focus on poker - what happened to all the tv stuff????!!) is making a lot of people very nervous and unwilling to try and even go to the effort of getting online. 3-5 more years of meandering seems on the cards before some bright spark sorts out the legal front. What it needs is some fresh blood willing to invest in lobbying and bringing some new options to our shores and to revitalise the market. Whether such a company or person is willing and able to make the time and resource investment is anyone's guess though....

_Anonymous_

15.02.2011, 16:05 0

Not just local, after that judgement banks sent clients emails about not allowing transactions from and to pokersites anymore.

This isnt just a local thing, if they lose the appeal playing abroad is illegal. Even if u play u gonna have to use dodgy ways of actually getting your money.

jbpatzer

Joined: 23.11.2009

Posts: 6,972

27.08.2011, 18:59 0

update?

My Blog: Midlife crisis? What Midlife Crisis?

[Closed] Grinding for the endgame