I received a phone call from a family member a few weeks ago. They were calling with a coworker on speaker phone with a question about how he should invest his retirement funds now that he was approaching retirement. His question was, “I am 10 years from retirement and with the stock market as […]
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Toasting Your Buns
When I was a kid my grandparents and aunt owned a house together in Vermont. It was in a rural setting about 30 minutes from Stowe. In the winter, it was a house out of the movies. Surrounded by towering pine trees that had branches heavy with snow. The house had vertical rough-cut pine […]
How to Invest for Retirement
Warren Buffet defines investing as the delay of consumption today for greater consumption tomorrow. Think about that for a moment. Instead of buying something today for $100 dollars, if I wait a year at a 10% annual return, I will be able to buy something for $110 without having to do any additional work. […]
Tax Efficient Investing
Investing is the act of tying up money today into an investment with the hopes of getting a greater amount of money tomorrow. There are two main ways to achieve that “greater amount”. One is that your investment grows in value. The other is that you reduce the amount of taxes paid on the […]
How to be Happy
We all seek happiness. It drives many of our decisions. But how do we obtain happiness? It’s not taught in schools and its rarely talked about. Many of us go through life mistaken material objects for happiness such as nicer cars, bigger homes, or expensive clothes only to learn that we are not any […]
How Stoicism Will Make You Rich
What do you want out of life? You might answer by saying that you want a good job, a nice house, and in general to be successful. But those are things you want in life. When you ask what you want out of life do you want material possessions, to reach predetermined goals, or the […]
Twenty-Four hours of Silence
After reading about Stoicism I decided to put one of its core principles, negative visualization, to the test. The principle is that we can learn to appreciate what we have by imagining being without it. Then we can begin to be truly grateful for what we have. But how could I conduct my experiment? […]
How to be Healthy
I’ll just come out and say it, from third to seventh grade, I was a fat kid. Not obese, but definitely chubby. It mostly came down to lack of exercise and overeating. While it may seem strange for a young kid not to get exercise, it was just the way things worked out. I […]
How to Cope with Market Volatility
Investing in the stock market is not for the faint of heart. Sure, everyone feels smart and like a great investor during a bull market, but what do you do when 2009 repeats itself? When the market punches you in the gut with a 54% decline from its peak causing you to lose half […]
Pay Yourself First
I was talking to a friend recently who was recommending an app that helped him managed his budget. He was telling me how much easier it was than the complicated spreadsheet that he was previously using. After a few more minutes of him explaining how the app worked, I offered a different approach. Instead […]
What Makes a Healthier and Longer Life?
We all want to live a long and happy life. Isn’t that the point of living? I don’t know about you, but no one has ever formally taught me how to live longer or to be happier. But, what if the two were correlated? Now that would be something, to live longer by doing […]
US vs Non-US Stock Allocation
You will hear many times to invest in stocks, but what does that mean? Are you to buy a few individual stocks, the S&P 500, or stocks overseas? There are different views of what one’s equity allocation should be. In this post I will attempt to simplify and offer a low-cost solution of an […]
Warren Buffet’s Asset Allocation for his Wife
Everyone has heard that stocks are risky. If you want to be conservative and not lose money in the market, bonds are the way to go. But what if holding bonds in your retirement portfolio is a greater risk than holding stocks. Most people think of risk as volatility. For purposes of this post, […]
The 4% Rule
Anyone who has read about being financially secure or the FIRE movement, Financial Independence Retire Early, has heard to save for retirement. To make sure you have enough money saved and invested for you to support your lifestyle without working. But how much is enough? The answer to that question […]