Shuka World Comics

created: 2024.05.04. 12:38 · modified: 2024.05.07. 08:54 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

I want to explore some thoughts I’ve been having lately about money and material things over the course of a few posts. This is the first in the series.

I’ve been working at a company since January. It’s an accelerator that invests in early-stage companies. I first got in touch with them late last year to seek investment for a startup idea, and that connection eventually led to a job. Rather than directly handling the company’s core work—evaluating investments and managing them afterward—I research and develop tools that make that work more efficient by automating and assisting with parts of it. When I joined, I hoped to put my experience and strengths to use while learning about an investment process I knew nothing about. That’s worked out quite well, and I enjoy the job. But there are definite downsides, too: I’m the only R&D person here, so it’s lonely not having anyone to exchange technical ideas with, and it’s hard to grow faster without those conversations.

This is my first time working full-time at a company, and I’m earning more money than ever before. My spending has gone up along with it—not to any extraordinary level in absolute terms, but compared with last year. In fact, I spent all of last year trying to start a business without much income, and I was more reluctant to spend money than ever. I’ve found that what affects my willingness to spend most isn’t my bank balance in absolute terms, but the money currently coming in versus going out. Prices kept rising, and with nothing coming in, every expense pushed me further into the red. By the end of last year, I was genuinely afraid to go out and buy a meal.

Once I started earning a steady income, that feeling quickly faded. I’ve also recently become interested in a wider range of consumer goods (I’ll go into that in a later post in this series), giving me more things to spend money on. Still, being at work limits the time I have to spend, and I’m not an impulsive shopper, so I think my spending remains within reason—for now, at least.

In short,

$$(\text{Highest income of my life}) - (\text{Spending that hasn't risen as much})$$ $$ = (\text{Highest savings of my life})$$

That’s the equation, and it’s only natural that I’ve become more interested in managing my assets.

Ever since I became an adult and started managing my own money, bank deposits and installment savings have always made up the largest part of my portfolio. Apart from those, I’ve only tried stocks and investment funds for a few months each, so it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say my portfolio was almost entirely savings products. At one point, I had nearly half my assets in stocks. I made a little money in the post-COVID recovery and started thinking I knew what I was doing, only to get battered in a downturn. I sold everything at a small net loss overall. I think of it as paying a reasonable tuition fee to learn that stocks aren’t something to jump into blindly.

Since then, I’ve moved all the money back into bank deposits. Whenever income came in, my only rule was to put as much of it as possible, as quickly as possible, into the highest-interest deposit I could find. I’d estimate when my next payment would arrive, how much I’d spend before then, and therefore how much I could deposit right away. Now that many deposit products allow emergency withdrawals, and I’ve recently got my own credit card, I worry about that a lot less.

If putting money in the bank were the only way to save, I couldn’t ask for a better policy. But it isn’t. Interest rates have stopped rising, and as my assets grow, the difference in returns between investments with different yields grows too. So I’d been thinking I should hold something with higher returns alongside my deposits. But I couldn’t just jump back into stocks blindly, and even if I studied on my own, I had no idea where to start or what to do. Time kept passing like that until one day, a YouTube thumbnail caught my eye…

“Wait, I can’t let myself get screwed,” I thought, and clicked through as if in a trance. Despite its considerable length, I watched the whole thing in one sitting. Then I eagerly watched the follow-up, with its much more reassuring title (deliberately so, I’m sure), along with related videos uploaded much earlier:

After watching more than an hour of videos in total, I came away with two things.

First, a reminder that I need to keep learning about investing and actually put what I learn into practice. Not really a spoiler, but the videos don’t reveal any magic trick guaranteed to make you spectacularly wealthy. They simply advise you to invest as much as you can as early as you can to make the most of compound returns, and to diversify to reduce the risk of losing your principal. It hardly even counts as advice—who doesn’t know those are good things to do? The first point even matches the rule I already followed with my savings. But by the time we’re adults, the solution to most problems depends less on knowing what to do than on doing it. These videos are an excellent push to take action.

Second, I picked up some knowledge and found a direction for further study. I used to understand diversification only in the sense of the familiar saying about not putting all your eggs in one basket: spreading your assets across multiple products. It was only fairly recently that I learned you can combine assets that move in opposite directions to reduce risk while keeping returns roughly the same. The videos made that idea more concrete for me, and I learned for the first time that it’s called portfolio theory. I followed along with a simple example of the theory in action, too. Now that I know its name, I can study it more deeply and look up more examples. YouTube’s algorithm has already put an MIT OpenCourseWare <Portfolio Management> lecture in my feed.

It was incredibly useful. I was so impressed by the series that I started watching the other lessons, too. I think I’ve watched just under ten so far, and the choice of topics has been excellent every time: housing subscriptions and interest rates, reform of the National Pension, analysis of the industrial structures behind high prices, and more. I feel as though I’m learning, one by one, all the things I should know, keep an eye on, and act on at this age and in this era—including the things I wondered, back in high-school economics class, “Why isn’t this in the curriculum?”

I was especially moved when they recently uploaded a video about year-end tax settlement. It seems to have been planned to coincide with income tax filing season. Around this time last year, I’d had a harrowing experience filing two years’ worth of income taxes that I’d put off. Between employment income, business income, other types of income, all the deductions, and the dozens of fields on the forms covering them all, I thought my head was going to explode. Thankfully, it didn’t: I learned a lot and even helped friends in the same situation. Seeing both them and myself struggle, I’d thought, “I wish there were a tutor who could explain all this.” Then this video appeared, as if someone had read my mind.

I haven’t watched that particular video yet. They upload so frequently that I still have a backlog of videos from before the tax one. I’m so grateful to Shuka World for turning out such useful content as if it had a factory. I’m sure it does well financially as a business, but it creates far greater social value, too. In that respect, Shuka World reminds me of Sungsimdang.

I’m writing this both to record how deeply Shuka World Comics has impressed me and to get you to watch the videos, too. I highly recommend them. Most have close to or over a million views, so I imagine quite a few of you have already seen them. If you haven’t, start with the “If You Don’t Do It Now, You’re Screwed” video above. You won’t regret it.

I even found myself thinking I’d like my future spouse to be someone who enjoys learning from material like this. I want a relationship where we can share the joy of learning, fill in each other’s gaps in knowledge, and have constructive conversations about how to build a stable home together using what we’ve learned. But never mind a spouse for now—I should find someone to date first…