If you’re just starting out, the key is to hone your expertise. “This is a job, like any other,” Brito says. “You should go and see as much as you can. Spend all your weekends going to galleries and spend all your free time reading art news and art publications.”
21. How do I know if it’s the right time to splurge?
We’re not telling you that spending will make you happy or whole—and you should keep an eye out for sales, and be savvy about shopping off-season. But when it comes to nice things, if you’re sticking to your budget, give yourself permission to buy the nice thing today, because very few things will be less expensive tomorrow.
22. Buying a home has always been a fairly intimidating prospect, but perhaps never so much as in the past two years. After interest rates hit record lows during the pandemic, they really spiked back up in 2023. Is right now the worst time to try to buy, or are there advantages to taking the leap now? In late 2024, should I keep renting or should I buy?
“It’s only a great time or a bad time in hindsight,” says Ryan Serhant, CEO of Serhant Real Estate and the face of Netflix’s Owning Manhattan. “Markets are only ever defined when we look back on them. We didn’t know that 2020 was going to be the absolute best time to buy in New York City, for example. It seemed like it was the absolute worst time. You turned on the news and it was, New York City’s dead, it’s over.”
Serhant says waiting for rates or trying to predict the future never truly works out. “Are rates going to change? Sure. Should you wait forever? No. And if you wait for rates to come down, that’s like buying a convertible on the sunniest day—it’s going to be the most expensive.”
When it comes to the buy-versus-rent question, Serhant says he has the same conversation with people every year. “Prices are always the highest they’ve ever been, ever. If you have the down payment and you can afford the monthly, it is much better to own your property, build credit, build wealth, and build future appreciation than it is to borrow someone else’s house. Because all you’re doing is delaying the inevitable, and you’re eating into your own future mortgage payments.”
What’s crazy about right now, Serhant says, is there’s only going to be about 4.1 million trades in the US this year. Last year there were about 4 million, and it was the slowest housing market we’d seen in nearly 30 years. “So you have sellers that are incredibly anxious right now and they’re willing to negotiate. You have sellers who are saying, ‘Wow, the housing market is still slow, rates are high, so it puts a lot more pressure on the buyer pool and there’s less buyers for my home.’ You can take advantage of that.”
23. I’m a die-hard sports fan and I’ve been inundated everywhere with ads begging me to sign up for sportsbooks. I tried some sports betting this year, and I’m up. What would it take to turn my knowledge into more than a hobby—or even into part of my investment strategy?
If you’re new to sports betting, even if you’re the most rabid fan, it’s important to remember that your passion for or understanding of the game isn’t necessarily going to translate to gambling success. As Warren Sharp, founder of Sharp Football Analysis, tells GQ, sports fandom can lead people to be overconfident in their betting abilities when they first start. “While they may believe strongly in their opinions, they are not experts in prognosticating the future outcomes of games,” he says.
