Inspiring LBYM story

[MBAustin]

Saw this in my Twitter feed today from Vanguard - talk about starting with nothing, this Vanguard analyst lived in a 200sq ft room with her parents and 3 siblings:

https://retirementplans.vanguard.com...jsf?z_rl=T8189

Wonderful to read how she is passing this on to her daughter as well. Worth reading and sharing.

[Finance Dave]

Very nice...extreme too. I know we sacrificed as kids, but not nearly that much lol. And today, I rarely talk about any sacrifice now...because I know most people sacrifice WAY more than I do. For us, it's buying a brand new Honda CRV versus a Lexus.

[grasshopper]

Mabel Yu our woman of the year at Vanguard

For a bond to get a AAA rating, it is supposed to have passed a particularly strong test. The rating agencies would simulate a worst-case scenario and see how the bond held up.

But those scenarios were sometimes perplexing to outsiders. Mabel Yu analyzed bonds for Vanguard, which manages $400 billion in bond investments. The new deals would land on her desk, with their AAA ratings. She says she could never get a straight answer about what the worst-case scenario really was.

"I got names of the rating agency analysts, and I asked them lots of questions," she says. "In the beginning, the questions would be 15 minutes to half an hour. But then it turned into hours, and many hours." She asked them about the possibility of house prices falling, of interest rates rising, of people not being able to refinance their mortgages. "If all of those things happen at same time, what would happen to our investment? I could not get a straight answer."

Yu says she was told repeatedly that she worried too much. "I felt so dumb," she says, adding that she was told, "Don't worry about it. Have a life."

Standard and Poor's says investors also have to make their own decisions. After Mabel Yu at Vanguard raised her concerns, Vanguard stopped buying those mortgage-related bonds.

[meierlde]

JUst proves the point that a lot of folks in financial services don't have the backbone that Mabel does. They are not willing to just say no, if something does not smell right. If one does not understand something, they should just say no to turn Nancy Regan's line around. (After all financial junk might well be the equivalent of drugs)

[Free To Canoe]

I quit work to go back to school for my BS at age 34. I went to CSUN where I had classes with many like Mabel Yu. That is, immigrants who not through money or intellectual gifts, but through sheer will power and hard work were able to excel. In reflection, knowing these people was perhaps the most valuable thing that I learned at school.

[martyp]

Sure this shows what you can do in the extreme but personally I recommend moderation. Saving for the future should be guided by specific goals. Saving as much as you can is not a goal. You should spend enough now to be happy but you should have a modest expectations about what happy means. After all, you could die tomorrow and then what was the point of scrimping and saving?

[martyp]

Also, this kind of "in your DNA saving" discipline was what held back China's economy for a very long time.

[BigE]

Quote:

Wonderful to read how she is passing this on to her daughter as well. Worth reading and sharing.

Thanks for sharing this. A great success story that gave me a little boost after a very hard day at work. Reminds me of how small my sacrifices are compared to others. Some would argue too extreme, I would counter that it takes what it takes to get a better life, especially coming form literally nothing; and clearly the father and mother made great sacrifices out of love for their children. I celebrate her success!