Tom's Top 3: November 26, 2024
Praying for First Dollar Gross
Hi everyone! Welcome to this week’s installment of Tom’s Top 3 Tuesdays, where I highlight three pieces of content (Podcasts/Shows/Songs/Articles/etc.) that I found interesting or noteworthy from the prior week.
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[Newsletter] Sahil Bloom - The 10-10-10 Rule, Advice on Life, & More
Sahil Bloom is a finance-bro turned productivity guru. Actually, calling him a productivity guru may be pejorative. He is rather impressive, having quickly scaled a newsletter and YouTube channel to over 800,000 subscribers. Add to the list: marathoner, father, and upcoming author.
I’m not the biggest fanboy out there, but I have to say that his latest newsletter gave me pause. He started the post with this thought-provoking question:
Are you allowing the things you prayed for to become the things you complain about?
This hit home for me, as I assume it does for other Type A personalities. I seem to have a permanent case of the-grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side-neosis.
I always have my eye on what’s next, forgetting that it wasn’t long ago that I prayed for my current reality. With Thanksgiving just around the corner, this is a good reminder to take a breath and be thankful for all I have.
[YouTube] Morning Brew - Making a Fake Movie to Understand Hollywood’s Shady Accounting
This entertaining video describes how Hollywood studios obfuscate film profits through accounting practices that would make Enron proud.
It comes down to the specifics of “backend” deals. In an attempt to lower the upfront costs of a film, studios started negotiating deals where they would pay the talent a percentage of the gross profits of the film. This would protect them against taking substantial losses from a flop, but if a film hit it big, studios would have to pay up.
Rather than pat each other on the back for a job well done and aligned incentives, studios got greedy. Rather than gross profit deals, they started negotiating net profit deals.
Now, talent would only be paid out a percentage of the film’s profit after expenses. Through criminal creative accounting, a film could appear to have lost money, even though it was a smashing success.
To illustrate this, the video explains that the Tolkien estate never received it’s 7.5% of the Lord of the Rings franchise, despite the films generating $6 billion in revenue.
What I don’t understand is, if this is a known practice in the industry, why do agents still negotiate net profit deals for their clients?
[Black Friday Deal] CardPointers - 50% Off
CardPointers is a cool, little service.
I haven’t gotten it yet (planning on taking advantage of the Black Friday deal), but the use case I am most excited about involves Amex and Chase offers.
Many credit cards will showcase offers on their apps and mobile sites — a certain amount of cash back or points for shopping at specific merchants. Normally, you’d have to go into each app and activate these offers for each card.
CardPointers takes out that headache by automatically activating all offers on your linked credit cards. Better yet, since they are activated simultaneously, you aren’t locked out of the same offer on multiple cards. For instance, say you have multiple Amex cards with the same “spend x amount at Amazon and get y Amex points.” Typically, when you activate one of those offers, the offer on the other card disappears. With CardPointers, you get to take advantage of both offers.
That wraps up this edition of Tom’s Top 3 Tuesdays. If you made it to this point, please drop a 1️⃣, 2️⃣, or 3️⃣ in the comments to let me know what you found most interesting/useful. And as always, please like and consider sharing with a friend who you think would enjoy! I’ll be back next week. ✌️
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