Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEOMy two favorite books of 2014Fun mosaic effect with GoAninvestment reading listNew 30 day challenge: "hermit mode"30 day challenge wrap-up: writingBuyViagra online?Thanksgiving turkey hatNine hard-won lessons about money andinvestingThankfulElection Day should be a holiday

ntent-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8 https://www.mattcutts.com/blog Fri, 02 Jan 2015 04:08:34+0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1 https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/best-books--f-2014/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/best-books-of-2014/#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2015 04:08:34+0000

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=6806

I'd like to mention two books that stood out for me in 2014:

Nonfiction: The First 20 Minutes. Gretchen Reynolds is a New York Times columnist who distillshealth and exercise research down to practical, readable advice. I've never dog-eared as many pagesin a book as The First 20 Minutes. Reynolds writes about why you might want to brush your teethstanding on one foot, work out before eating breakfast, and how pickle juice might help with cramps.Should you get a cortisone shot? Does it help to believe in luck? Does long-distance running makeyour knees less healthy? Is chocolate milk a good recovery drink? Read the book and find out.

Whether you're a couch potato or a ultramarathoner, you'll probably learn something interesting andhelpful from Reynolds' book. Reynolds also writes with the easy readability of a seasoned newspapercolumnist, and each chapter ends with bite-sized summaries of what the current scientific researchrecommends. My only nitpick is that I wish Reynolds had included footnotes pointing to the originalresearch for people who want to dig deeper.

Fiction: As I've written before, The Martian describes an astronaut stranded on Mars who needs tofigure out how to survive and get home with minimal supplies. Some of the science gets detailed, butthe book builds to a very successful ending in my opinion.

What was the single best fiction or nonfiction book you read in 2014?

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/best-books-of-2014/feed/ 20 https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/photo-mosaic-effect-with-go/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/photo-mosaic-effect-with-go/#comments Sun,14 Dec 2014 23:54:09 +0000

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=6771

A few months ago I saw a cool mosaic effect in a Wired ad for CA Technologies. Here's what part ofthe ad looked like:

I liked the ad, so I wondered how they did it. Can you see out how to create a similar effect? Take aminute to figure it out as an exercise.

Here's what I came up with: divide the image into tiles. For each tile, compute an average overallcolor for that tile. Then go back and blend every pixel in that tile with the average color. So if a tileis partly dark and partly blue, the average color is a dark blue, so the blue in that tile becomes evendarker. I like that the effect is pretty simple once you figure out how to do it.

Of course, once I had an idea of how to do it, I wanted to write some code and see whether I couldrecreate the effect. Go has good libraries for handling images and I've been meaning to try Go. Iended up with about 70 lines of moderately-ghastly Go code that did the job.

For this Creative Commons image (thanks Fuelrefuel/Wikimedia Commons!)

I ended up with a photomosaic like this:

As far as I can tell, that's pretty much the same filter that ran in the ad. Here's another example.First, a picture of me:

and here's the resulting mosaic'ed image:

That's all the interesting stuff. You can stop reading now.

This part is boring. Really. No need to keep reading. The code I came up with is really ugly, but thepseudo-code is pretty simple:

- Read the picture into a go image

- Number of horizontal tiles = image_width / desired_tile_width

- Number of vertical tiles = image_height / desired_tile_height

- Loop through tiles with nested vertical and horizontal for loops

- For each tile, loop over the tile's pixels to compute average RGB values

- Loop over the tile's pixels again & set new_color = (avg_color+curr_color)/2

- Write the image out as a new picture

That's it! I wanted a quick and dirty test, so I didn't worry about things like the leftover pixels if thetiles didn't evenly divide the image.

Let's see, what else. Things I liked about Go:

- It's super-easy to read and write images, so I could concentrate on the fun stuff.

- I like that documentation like this gives a clear, easy way to set up your environment. The golangtour is great too. And installing Go on Ubuntu is easy: "sudo apt-get install golang" and you're done.

- The language makes a lot of sense to me, in a C kind of way.

Some things didn't make as much sense to me, or at least I need to do more reading:

- My initial program just read a JPEG and wrote it back out, and the output image was considerablydimmer. I was just using default encoding values, so maybe some gamma values got left out, but itwas a little weird. I was expecting read->decode->encode->write to be a no-op.

- When I read the JPEG into an image and tried to write directly to that image, Go gave me an error.That was a little strange. I ended up copying the JPEG to a new image and then I could write.

- In the spirit of just doing stuff without reading the documentation, it seemed like Go images storedtheir At() component colors with 16 bits of range (from 0..65536). But when I wanted to write colorswith Set() it seemed like Go wanted 8 bits in the example I found. So for a while I was casting stuffwith (uint8) and getting totally random bits written into the image. That also generated a fun image:

but it took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on. I'm sure some reading would clearthings up, but.. who cares? I was also doing some weird float arithmetic to compute color averages.This was just quick/dirty code, and I can read more about the nitty gritty later. As soon as I got theeffect I wanted, I rapidly lost interest. I even hard-coded image filenames because I couldn't bebothered to search for go command-line flag info. All in good fun.

- Arrays and slices are cool, but allocating 2D arrays and slices seems a little verbose.

- I like that Go's designers have opinions and enforce them, at least 99% of the time. When you'rehacking ugly code, it was annoying to get the "you didn't use this variable" errors. But I understandthe rationale and it's probably a good idea for writing Real Code that's not intended to be thrownaway.

- I was all set to grouse about go fmt's enforced indentations/spacing, but it actually looks prettyreasonable. Basically, each indent is a tab. Then if you're a 3 or 4 space indent kind of guy, you canconfigure your editor like vim or emacs to change how the tab width is displayed.

Historically, Python is my language of choice to knock out a quick script thing-I love Pythondictionaries. But with Go's speed, support for dictionaries/maps, and capability to do HTTP serversvery easily, I might end up switching to Go. I think I'll use Go for my next little fun project.

Added: Thanks to Tom Madams who whipped a prototype of this filter in video using Shadertoy!

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/photo-mosaic-effect-with-go/feed/ 36https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/investing-reading-list/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/investing-

reading-list/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2014 07:54:28 +0000

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=6743

If you've read Scott Adams' financial advice and my financial tips in case you win a startup lottery,then you might be interested in a few more pointers to good resources. Some web pages and books:

- Don't Play the Losers' Game, by Henry Blodget. This is a short, accessible piece that explains whypicking individual stocks on Wall Street is a bad idea for almost anyone.

- Website: the Bogleheads forum. An incredibly smart group of people who like to discuss investing,finance, and money. Their investment philosophy page is pure financial wisdom distilled.

- A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel. This book is remarkably readable, though itcan be dense at times. If you believe you can pick individual stocks with enough success to beat adiversified portfolio of low-cost index funds, this is the book you should read to throw a wet blanketon that belief.

- The Lazy Person's Guide to Investing, by Paul B. Farrell. This book will show you how tooutperform the majority of active money managers in just 15 minutes a year. This book is seriouslygood. If I had to recommend only a single book, this book might win: it's a breeze to read, but itimparts nearly as much wisdom as much denser tomes.

- This is a great description of how Google tried to educate and protect its employees beforeGoogle's IPO. You'll get most of the idea from the first page. How can you not love an article where afinancial advisor admits "We work in the most overcompensated industry in the country"?

- The Wall Street Self-Defense Manual, by Henry Blodget. In many ways, this book is a deeperversion of Blodget's article that I linked to above. This book is short, readable, and packed with mostof the advice that you need to know.

- If you're ready to go deeper, consider The Four Pillars of Investing, by William Bernstein. Youmight also check out Bernstein's The Intelligent Asset Allocator.

- Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki. This book has its flaws, but it's very readable and could begood for teenagers or college students. The book uses stories to discuss the goal of financialindependence via assets that produce money. I grew up in a family focused on academia, so thisbook was a good wake-up call that a lot of people care about money, not just getting a Ph.D.

Money and Wall Street stories, color, and culture

- Realistically, I'd recommend almost anything that Michael Lewis has ever written. His most recentbook is Flash Boys and I enjoyed that story. But I also enjoyed Liar's Poker, The Big Short, andBoomerang.

A few more to consider:

- Perfectly Legal (rich people get away with lots of tax loopholes)

- Confessions of a Tax Collector (a tale from inside the IRS when the IRS had more teeth)

There's also a whole sub-genre of books about rich people:

- Richistan (pretty entertaining)

- The Millionaire Next Door (most millionaires are cheap!)

- Rich Like Them (mostly a bunch of anecdotes from interviews)

Stock Options

- Consider Your Options, by Kaye A. Thomas. If you're joining a startup that offers stock options, Istrongly recommend that you study this book from cover to cover. It can help you avoid a lot oftreacherous mistakes. If you don't put in the time to understand your stock options, you might regretit later. Thomas also has a good book called Capital Gains, Minimal Taxes that covers the mechanicsof a lot of tax issues and logistics for investors.

- I really recommend Consider Your Options as the definitive work, but An Engineer's Guide toSilicon Valley Startups, by Piaw Na is very accessible. This book also covers a wide range of skillsthat you might need if you want to join a startup. Disclosure: I know Piaw from his time at Google.

- I have used Stock Options: An Authoritative Guide to Incentive and Nonqualified Stock Options as areference for at least one complicated situation.

- Want to understand stock options at a basic level? Stock Options for Dummies isn't too bad.

Anti-recommendations

- This won't be popular, but I just don't find John C. Bogle's books very readable. I agree with himabout lots of things, but his books like Don't Count on it! just didn't grab me.

- Hedgehogging, by Barton Biggs. I'm not even going to link to this book-that's how angry this bookmade me. Biggs actually writes stuff like this: "My real theory is that the investment superstars havesome special magic with markets that enables them almost intuitively to do the right things most ofthe time." What hogwash.

Elsewhere in the book (which lists a copyright date of 2006), Biggs quotes someone who accuratelyidentifies the housing bubble: "another bubble is about to burst. Existing home prices have beenrising 7% to 8% a year, financed by Fannie and Freddie." Then Biggs goes on scoff at the guy, like"Look at this dork, predicting a major depression due to a housing bubble in the next three years."The Wikipedia page on Biggs reports that Biggs' hedge fund was blindsided by the subsequentglobal financial crisis. If you want a snapshot of how Wall Street can suck, then you might want toread this book.

- I'm not a big fan of Jim Cramer. If you want to watch Cramer for entertainment that's great, butexercise caution on his advice.

- Beating the Street, by Peter Lynch. I just don't think this book has aged very well. You can pick upmost of what you need from other books. The advice to "invest in what you know" can be good.However, it also risks becoming "invest in what's familiar" instead of doing your homework.

So those are some books and websites that I've liked or disliked. How about you-what books about

investing, money, or finance would you add to the list?

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/investing-reading-list/feed/ 33https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hermit-mode/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hermit-mode/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2014 05:07:36 +0000

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=6739

I've been spending more time surfing the web on my laptop than I'd like to. I've also noticed moreemails that lure me into short tasks, but eventually eat up a large chunk of my day.

I'd prefer to be spending more time working on projects, reading, and unplugging. So my new 30day challenge will be to enter a sort of "hermit mode" where I don't spend more than an hour a dayon my laptop. I'm also going to try to say "no" more often. My hope is that if I turn down a fewmeetings for a while, I'll end up working more on projects that I want to tackle. I don't knowwhether that will work, but I'm going to try it. I might still write a few blog posts or say somethingon Twitter, but I want that to be a conscious choice, not just something I back into.

This challenge will be a hard one to judge for success, but my hope is that at the end of the month,I'll be making more active choices about how I spend my time, and tackling more things that I wantto do.

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hermit-mode/feed/ 20 https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/30-da--challenge-wrap-up-writing/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/30-day-challenge-wra--up-writing/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2014 03:49:29 +0000

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=6727

So how did I do on my 30 day writing challenge? Well, the picture tells the story:

Not too bad! I did miss one day, but here's a secret about 30 day challenges: if you miss a day ortwo, you can just keep doing the challenge for another day or so at the end. Or don't worry about it:you're trying out something new, and you only have to answer to yourself.

What went well this time? Well, I finally wrote down a few things that I've been meaning to publishfor years, from Scott Adams' financial advice to my own hard-won financial tips, and from a pieceabout a level playing field to how to buy viagra online. Some posts were like hairballs that I justneeded to get out of my system.

I also liked my running tips post, my post about dial tone moments, and my tips to protect youraccount security. I even got to pick on active.com for their Active Advantage membership program. Ialso enjoyed loosening up a little bit ("fuck Columbus Day"). It's so much more fun to write when youdon't put as much pressure on yourself.

What didn't go well? Well, I meant to do some journaling, short stories, and private writing, butsomehow this challenge morphed into a public blogging exercise. That's okay. I like that I wrote abunch of new things. I still put too much emphasis on polish (or at least correct spelling/grammar) inmy writing. Part of my goal was to lower my bar a little bit so that I could knock out a quick blogpost whenever the mood strikes. I partly met that goal. Overall, I'm glad that I did this challenge.

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/30-day-challenge-wrap-up-writing/feed/ 19https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/buy-viagra-online/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/buy-viagr--online/#comments Sun, 30 Nov 2014 08:34:28 +0000

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=6711

Working in webspam, we sometimes use the phrase "buy Viagra online" as an example of a searchquery that might be spammy. That's why I noticed and remembered the 2013 announcement that

you can officially buy Viagra online.

As this Time article points out, you've actually been able to buy Viagra online through legitimatepharmacy websites for quite some time. In May of 2013, Pfizer announced the process wouldbecome more direct through a collaboration with CVS.

What about "generic Viagra"?

To the best of my knowledge, some patents on Viagra haven't expired in the US. Consequently, ageneric version of Viagra has not yet been approved in the US. So I believe there's no exact thing as"generic viagra" in the United States.

Interestingly, there is a drug called Revatio which is also sildenafil. The patent for Revatio expired in2012 and so there are generic versions of Revatio. Revatio is intended to treat pulmonary arterialhypertension, but your doctor could legally prescribe generic Revatio for an "off label" usage.

It's even more interesting to read about generic Viagra in other countries. For example, Canadainvalidated Pfizer's patent on Viagra, so there is a generic version of Viagra in Canada. Likewise, thepatent on Viagra has expired in many countries in Europe. It also looks like India makes a genericversion of Viagra. However, at least in the US it appears that there's still not a generic version.

What about "herbal Viagra"?

I believe "Viagra" is a brand name, so it's not correct to refer to "herbal Viagra." The term may beinternet slang for wide variety of different things, but it's not Viagra as such. As a result, you shoulddo your research and exercise caution with anything that claims to be "herbal Viagra."

What about Cialis?

As long as I was doing this research, I was curious about the situation with Cialis, which is a similardrug to Viagra. In case you were wondering about how to buy cialis online, you can find officialinformation about that here. It looks like if you get a prescription, then you can order official Cialisfrom legitimate online pharmacies.

If you see something that I got wrong, please let me know.

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/buy-viagra-online/feed/ 30https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/thanksgiving-turkey-hat/https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/thanksgiving-turkey-hat/#comments Sun, 30 Nov 2014 03:32:27+0000

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=6706

Because not every blog post has to be serious:

Special thanks to my friend Amy who crocheted this masterpiece! Amy also works with an awesomegroup of volunteers that crochets dolls for kids fighting cancer and other illnesses.

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/thanksgiving-turkey-hat/feed/ 11https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/make-money-investing-tips/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/make-money-investing-tips/#comments Sat, 29 Nov 2014 06:20:39 +0000

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=6646

Any time you talk about money, you risk sounding like a jerk. I'm going to take that risk in this post.I'll start out by talking about a couple ways I shot myself in the foot financially and what I learned asa result. Your mileage may vary. Before we start, you might want to review this financial advice fromScott Adams.

You are probably a bad stock picker

I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, near the end of the dot com craze. Back then, an online brokerwas offering $400 for free if you opened up a stock trading account with a starting balance of $1000.As a grad student, I had a ~$14,000/year fellowship, so that was two weeks worth of salary for free.Thinking that I was investing with "house money," I signed up.

All the business magazines recommended Cisco as a safe, conservative stock. So I bought shares ofCisco at about $60/share. Can you guess what happened next? The dot com crash happened, andshares of Cisco plummeted to $12/share. Shaken and nervous, I was able to sell at $18/share after amild bounce.

Despite what all those business magazines said, the first stock I picked to invest lost 80% of its valuealmost immediately. On one hand, losing several hundred dollars of my own money, in addition tothe "free" $400, was an expensive lesson. On the other hand, what a great lesson-I suck at pickingstocks!

It turns out, almost everyone sucks at picking stocks. And the very, very few people who can do itwell probably won't take your money. If I could encourage you to read just one short article aboutpicking stocks, read this one about why it's a fools game. I may add a lot more references here-I'veread a lot of books about this over the years-but if you're trying to pick individual stocks then you'llprobably get creamed. Like, "amateur football player against professional NFL football players"creamed.

No one cares about your money as much as you do

On to my next mistake! I was very fortunate to join Google when it was small, so I did well inGoogle's IPO. Research says that if you buy nice things, you adapt to those nice things pretty quicklyand then you're not much happier. I tried to avoid that trap by stashing my money somewhere andnot thinking much about it. That's not the mistake, by the way. I still think it's pretty good advice ifyou win the lottery to park your money and take some time to get used to the idea.

My mistake was where I parked my money. Google worked out a deal with "full service" broker togive us free accounts. When I talked to this broker, they recommended that I part my money in"commercial paper." I didn't really know what commercial paper was, but the broker said it was

safe, easy to pull my money out, and it would provide about 4-5% return on my money.

That worked great for a few years until the entire world financial system almost fell apart. In theearly days of the financial crisis, I called my full service broker to make sure things were fine. Iremember the phrase that the broker used was that "lightning would have to strike" for there to beany problems. It turns out, lightning did strike, and then the broker said that I couldn't get mymoney back-the commercial paper market was completely locked up. The money was still all there,they claimed, but I couldn't withdraw any of it.

In this case, I lucked out. Someone else filed a class action lawsuit against the financial company,and the financial company returned peoples' money relatively quickly after that. How many storieshave you read about a rock star or athlete who trusted their manager and got burned? It's your jobto pay enough attention to your finances that you don't get burned. Don't expect your stockbroker,bank, financial advisor, or really anyone handling your money to care about your money as much asyou do.

Wall Street is not your friend

Fred Schwed wrote a book called Where Are the Customers' Yachts. The title comes from a storyabout how brokers and bankers all seemed to have yachts, but somehow none of their customers did.Schwed wrote that book in 1940. Things on Wall Street aren't really any better today.

Honestly, I consider this lesson pretty self-evident after the financial crisis. We've learned aboutcompanies packaging up toxic assets and betting against their customers. We've seen multi-billiondollar settlements for fixing foreign exchange rates and LIBOR (a rate that banks charge each forshort-term loans). We've seen companies trading against consumers' interest in dark pools withhigh-frequency trading. We've learned that Wall Street traders think of us as muppets, or worse.

Wall Street excels in taking simple financial instruments and making them more complicated. In thatcomplexity, there's plenty of shadows for financial companies to hide things that take advantage ofyou. If it sounds too good to be true, look out. If you don't understand everything going on with yourmoney, you're increasing your risk.

So far, this has been a downer, so let's talk about some positive lessons.

Think about working for equity vs. salary

As I mentioned in my post about Kevin Kelly's talk at XOXO, there are many different kinds ofsuccess, and you should pick your own. One common financial aspiration is to make enough moneythat you can live off the interest and dividends from that money.

If you're an employee working for salary, it's going to be hard to reach that level of independence.That's one reason I worry about franchises, because it tilts the playing field toward more employeesand fewer independent businesses. You can try to radically lower your financial burn rate, and somepeople do, but few Americans have taken that step. Of course, starting a business completely onyour own can be stressful and scary too.

One reason I like startups is that they represent a middle way: you can get some equity or ownershipin a business that might turn out very well, but you also get a salary. You can pick your startup tomatch your personal profile of risk: from founder all the way up to companies with hundreds ofemployees or more. Especially if you're young, it can be a good idea to try some more adventurous

things like a startup.

If you're investing, prefer index funds

Okay, let's suppose you do win the lottery or do well at your own business or startup. Now what?Well, you could double down on new businesses like Elon Musk, but my advice would be to set asideenough money that you can live off the interest or dividends.

It turns out that investing in low-cost index funds in a diversified portfolio is a really good idea. Infact, it outperforms the vast majority of "active" investors. Simple is usually better, like many thingsin life. I'd also recommend investing in a bond index fund. Bonds tend to do well when stocks dopoorly, and vice versa, so investing in both will tend to reduce your risk.

If you're a regular person working for salary, you might want 60% of your money in a stock indexfund and 40% of your money in a bond index fund. If you're young or adventurous, you can tilttoward more stocks. You want to invest so that you can sleep well at night without moving yourmoney around based on what you see or read in the news.

If you're fortunate enough to win the lottery, you might want an allocation more like 80% bonds and20% stocks, or 70%/30%. After all, it's pretty safe to protect your money and live off thedividends/interest.

Don't get paralyzed over choosing your allocation between stocks and bonds. There's a great bookcalled The Lazy Person's Guide to Investing to walk you through some easy ways to structure yourinvestments. Honestly a 50/50 mix of stocks and bonds (the so-called "Couch Potato Portfolio") willbeat many "active" portfolios where you or someone else tries to pick stocks.

For that matter, you can buy a Vanguard LifeStrategy fund that will give most of what you need witha single purchase. Such funds tilt toward stocks when you're younger and then transition towardbonds as you get older. You can pick whatever retirement target would make you feel mostcomfortable in terms of risk.

Prefer credit unions over banks

Earlier, I basically said much of Wall Street is like carnival sideshow designed to separate you fromyour money. So is there anybody on your side? Well, credit unions can be pretty cool. Credit unionsare like banks, except instead of trying to turn a profit on you, credit unions are controlled by theirmembers. That means that they can often provide better rates, have better policies, and generallywill try to exploit you less often than megabanks will.

Note that not every credit union is perfect. I once belonged to a credit union that started adding a $1monthly fee that went to a foundation that the credit union ran. The foundation funds a bunch ofsemi-random things ($3M for a walkway?). I called up and asked how to remove the fee. "You can'tremove that charge, the foundation fee is mandatory," came back the reply. I closed my account withthat credit union and now I don't pay that fee.

Do your research on any financial institution's fees, prices, and policies. In the worst case, check outtheir website-if the website looks clunky or hard to use, consider skipping that organization. If acompany supports two-factor authentication, that's a bonus point in their favor.

Prefer Vanguard over almost anyone else

Instead of a regular stock broker, I highly recommend Vanguard. Go with Vanguard whenever youcan.

In the same way that credit unions are controlled by their members and usually better than banks,Vanguard is owned by their clients and provides a much better deal than almost any other financialcompany. Even better, their incentives are aligned with yours. Vanguard provides well-balancedindexed funds at a very low cost. You can also buy stocks through Vanguard. At some point, I maywrite more about Vanguard, but I consider them one of the only companies on your side in thefinancial world. Check them out.

You probably don't need a "assets under management" financial advisor

There's another way that some people take advantage of you: some financial advisors chargeoutsized fees for what they do. Many financial advisors charge a percentage of "assets undermanagement" (AUM). A 1% fee of assets under management might not sound like much, but that 1%can take a serious bite out of your returns. Instead, I recommend making an appointment with a fee-only financial advisor. Or if you put enough money into Vanguard, they may provide access to afinancial planner. A good financial planner can help you determine your risk tolerance and otherspecial factors and recommend a good portfolio allocation for you.

Some newer firms like Wealthfront, Betterment, and Personal Capital offer to provide "robo-advisor"services for lower fees than a human financial advisor. But you're still paying ~0.25% of your assetsfor things like rebalancing your portfolio when you can do it yourself in 15 minutes a year.

I use such a simple plan that I don't pay a financial advisor. I just buy low-cost stock index funds (USand rest-of-world) and bond index funds (US and California). Don't let anyone make you feel like youneed to pay a financial advisor. Remember: they don't care about your money as much as you do,and with a little reading, you can understand the simple strategies that make up almost all of adiversified, low-cost, low-risk portfolio.

Consider municipal bonds

I have some friends who have left California and moved to lower-tax or no-tax states. For the mostpart, I don't mind higher California taxes-I rationalize it as a "sunshine" tax for warm, beautifulweather. Plus California provides the atmosphere where things like Silicon Valley can happen.

But there is a simple trick to minimize your taxes: buy municipal bonds for the state where you live.For example, Vanguard offers municipal bond funds for many states, including a bond fund forCalifornia. The interest from a California municipal bond fund is tax-free at the federal and statelevel. If you're in a high tax bracket, getting interest tax-free is like getting a much better interestrate.

Bonus tip: tax loss harvesting

I've described a pretty simple way to park your money that reduces cost and risk. If you're willing todo more work, you can try tax loss harvesting. Full disclosure: I don't do this myself because Iconsider it a hassle and a lot of paperwork, but it's relatively straightforward.

The idea of tax loss harvesting is that instead of buying an index fund, you buy individual stocks. Ifyour stock broker gives you 100 free trades, you could buy (say) 75 individual stocks. Then, whenone stock goes down, you can sell it at a loss and buy a similar but different enough stock that youdon't violate wash sale rules. You can use the losses to reduce your taxes. This technique is legal andit probably will save you money, but I prefer the simplicity of owning 3-4 index funds.

Bonus tip: prefer donor-advised funds to foundations

If you do win the lottery or succeed at a startup, you might want to use your money to support thingsthat you believe in. I've explored both private foundations and donor-advised funds and I'd definitelyrecommend donor-advised funds in most cases.

A private foundation sounds cool, but the reality is that it takes a lot of time, work and paperwork.You have to file separate taxes, which can be a big hassle. You can find organizations to handle the

paperwork and taxes for you (we had a good experience with Foundation Source), but then you'repaying someone a chunk of money to do taxes instead of spending that money on things you support.Foundations also have to give away 5% of their assets each year.

With a donor-advised fund, you don't have to worry about taxes or paperwork. You don't have to giveaway 5% of the fund's assets each year either. In my experience, donor-advised funds tend to havelower fees. You can donate appreciated stock to a donor-advised fund pretty easily and get a taxbreak that year for donating to charity. A donor-advised fund isn't quite as flexible as a foundation,but in my experience you almost never used that extra flexibility. Most of the time you're looking todonate money to nonprofits or charities, and donor-advised funds work well for that. And as youmight expect, Vanguard can handle donor-advised funds for you.

Conclusion

I hope some of the mistakes I made and the subsequent lessons are helpful. If you take this postalong with Scott Adams' financial advice, I think you'll be more prepared than most people. Arethere other financial lessons or advice that you would add? Let me know in the comments.

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/make-money-investing-tips/feed/ 69https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/thankful/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/thankful/#comments Fri,28 Nov 2014 05:16:16 +0000

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I'm thankful for family and friends and good health and so many wonderful people I've had thepleasure of working with at Google.

But I'm also thankful for airplanes: "You want to see your family? It would take months to walk tothem, but come sit in this metal tube and thanks to some interesting properties of physics, you cansee them later today."

And I'm thankful for the internet: "Oh, you can't or don't want to sit in the metal tube for hours?Press this button and you can see your family instantly from thousands of miles away. You can talkor just enjoy each others' company."

Our society and world still needs to improve in lots of ways, but I'm thankful for how far we've comein the last century, and I hope we can make things even better in the coming years.

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/thankful/feed/ 11 https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/election-da--should-be-a-holiday/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/election-day-should-be-a-holiday/#commentsThu, 27 Nov 2014 03:34:16 +0000

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I'm looking at this list of federal holidays, and you know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking fuckColumbus Day. Who the hell cares about Columbus Day except for mattress stores?

Instead, let's scratch Columbus Day and make Election Day a national holiday. Turnout on ElectionDay was only 36.6 percent in 2014, according to Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont. If we madeElection Day a holiday, it would be easier for people to vote. People would actually start to lookforward to Election Day, too. By the way, you know you else would like to make Election Day aholiday? Senator Bernie Sanders. I like that guy.

If push comes to shove, I'd be willing to keep Columbus Day as a holiday and just add a new holiday.But really, do you remember what you did on Columbus Day a month ago? No? Me neither.

I'm thinking we can make Election Day a pretty fun holiday. Vote in the morning, BBQ in theafternoon, and drink or set off fireworks in the evening. That's a holiday that a lot of people couldget behind.

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