I checked my regular bank account one month and noticed a chunk of savings that had been sitting there for longer than I wanted to admit, technically safe, technically earning something, but earning so little that the interest may as well have been zero. That account was not doing anything for me. It was just…
I ran this number for the first time on a slow Tuesday night, mostly out of boredom, and it stopped me for a second. $500 a month for 30 years is $180,000 out of my own pocket. At a 7% average annual return, the account does not end at $180,000. It ends closer to $610,000….
For most of my career I treated retirement as a single checkbox. Employer offers a 401k with a match, contribute enough to get the full match, move on. It felt responsible. And in a narrow sense it was. What I did not understand for years was that the 401k was solving one tax problem while…
Five or six years ago I did not own a single index fund. I knew investing was something I was supposed to be doing but the whole landscape felt overwhelming in a way that made it easy to put off. Individual stocks felt like gambling. Actively managed funds felt like paying someone else to gamble….
At some point in the last few years, personal finance stopped being about managing money and started being about performing the management of money. You know what I mean. The people refreshing their brokerage apps every morning out of anxiety. The group chats about which crypto is about to move. The coworker who just started…