When my brother first started making a decent amount of money, I told him that the smart thing he could do was to save as much of his income as he could, live modestly, and invest his money in low-cost, passively managed index funds. I assured him that if he did all of this, I […]
Investing
What Matters In A Downturn – It’s Not Your Investments, It’s Losing Your Job
When I graduated from college back in 2009, the country was in the midst of the biggest recession since the Great Depression. During that two or three year span, the market lost nearly 50% of its value, and it didn’t fully recover until well after 2009. Luckily for me, I was a broke college student […]
Don’t Like Your 401k? Create Your Own 401k Instead
A few weeks ago, I finally went ahead and made my 2017 tax-year contribution to my Solo 401k. Being the lazy guy that I am, I ended up making my contribution at the very last minute, literally overnighting a cashiers check to my Solo 401k company so that I could meet the contribution deadline (I […]
Why I Spend Money Attending Conferences
Over the past year, I’ve spent a pretty decent chunk of change attending various conferences and meetups. As I write this, I’ll be spending the next couple of days at FinCon, the major financial blogger conference that’s held each year. Compared to some conferences, FinCon can actually be pretty affordable. But it’s still not cheap […]
Robo-Advisors Would Have Changed My Investing Life
When I look back at my investing life, one of my biggest regrets is just not getting started sooner. It’s really kind of a shame when I think about it. I didn’t start investing until I was 27 years old, almost a decade after I had graduated from high school. That’s years of potential growth […]
An Investing Tip – Learn To Be Happy With Enough
I recently read an article on Marketwatch about some kid that lost his life savings doing some fancy stock market thing that I didn’t really understand. According to the article, this dude lost his life savings trading something called a “contract for differences.” Whatever that is, it predictably ended up not working out and he […]