The future value (FV) formula is a Finance 101 and retirement planning staple that allows us to estimate what current assets will be worth at a future date. It’s one of the baseline formulas that let us build more complex personal financial models using elaborate spreadsheets or more sophisticated tools like NewRetirement and ProjectionLab. Future…
A former coworker once told me how happy he was with his financial advisor. He’s made me A LOT of money! It wasn’t an appropriate time for me to ask the obvious follow-up questions: define a lot? or what are his fees? Financial advisors play a critical role for many, like my former coworker, who…
Inflation is destroying wealth and making food so expensive. The Fed keeps raising interest rates — how can the housing market survive it? The 16th largest U.S. bank failed a few months back. Then the 14th largest bank failed! The COVID-19 pandemic happened. That sucked. Now there’s a stupid war in Eastern Europe. The stock…
The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson wrote an article about the best career advice he’s come across that “might be marginally useful.” Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life was applicable to my situation back in September 2022 when I was approaching my career departure date, and it’s still relevant today as a self-employed blogger….
NewRetirement is an online retirement calculator and planning tool. It’s the most comprehensive financial tool I’ve ever used — miles better than any elaborate spreadsheet. I’ve been tinkering with NewRetirement since 2017, when I met the Founder, Stephen Chen, and explored the tool for some articles I was writing at the time. I used the…
My Uncle gifted me one share of Chevron stock in 1995, seeding my lifelong dividend stock investment portfolio. But I didn’t start living off dividends until I left my IT career in 2022. There were no online brokers or index ETFs making it easy to start investing in 1995. Trades cost $30+. IRAs and mutual…
Financial advice can be free (google it) or expensive (hire an advisor). But financial advice tends to be tactical — buy this investment, optimize that tax advantage — instead of behavioral — think this way, stick to the plan, and be patient Success in building wealth is less about how much you know (or can…
Happy New Year! The turning of the new year brings two things to mind for a lot of us: Whoa, I spent too much money last month/year How can I improve my finances this year? I’m not a big fan of new years resolutions (most don’t stick). But I believe in habitual change — deciding…
Inflation is eating away at our wealth quarter-by-quarter. It appears to have peaked in May 2022, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate increases. But the chart below shows how the products we consume have recently become more expensive. Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi The Federal Reserve is mandated to target 2% annual inflation as measured by the…
Traditional retirement is a suboptimal goal. Building a career you genuinely do not want to retire from is better. Writing those words here or in a 240-character tweet takes little effort. But it’s an enormously complex concept for most middle-aged workers. To say: Hey, all you people aged 30-55, with kids, a mortgage, not-enough retirement…
Our perceptions of the value of time and money shift as we age. In early adulthood, time is abundant, while money is scarcer. We want more money and are willing to sacrifice our time to get it. By middle age, a thriving career helps us earn more, but job and family obligations consume our time….
Maybe you’ve heard of universal basic income (UBI). UBI is a type of social program administered by governments to provide basic income for citizens — ideally, enough money to cover basic expenses or meet poverty level income. Universal basic income became a popular topic in the political discussion during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, promoted…
A former colleague once told me that if I ever started drinking coffee, I’d never stop. Frida drank ten cups a day. She was an administrative assistant in the media department at my university. I worked in the darkroom developing film and printing black and white photographs for various campus publications. The coffee maker was…
Doing taxes is never fun. But each year, I find that our income has become more diversified than the previous. We now earn more than 7 streams of income — not counting my salary. A salary is great if you don’t mind full-time work. But it can become an unhealthy addiction. You can break the…