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 ...
I recently left my 20-year information technology (IT) career to be a full-time blogger. Most of my career involved partnering with a large government customer to modernize its massively-complex and outdated IT systems. My teammates trusted me. M...
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...
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 ...
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...
After 20 years in information technology (IT), I decided to change careers to be a full-time blogger in early December. It’s an exciting milestone I’ve been planning for about five years. Monday morning, after my last day at work, I s...
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-ag...
November is American Diabetes Month. Parents of kids with Type 1 Diabetes laugh that it starts the day after Halloween. My 10-year-old son was diagnosed in September 2021. Type 1 Diabetes is an autoimmune disorder that typically presents be...
The 2022 HBO documentary Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off is a fascinating biography of the skateboarding icon. As told through interviews with his Bones Brigade peers — all trailblazers themselves — Tony’s life is a story of risk-taking, fai...
Our perception of the value of time and money shifts 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,...
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. Univers...
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 p...
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 beco...
My last post was a free book giveaway. To enter to win, I asked readers to include ideas on what kind of future article ideas you’d be interested in reading (the lazy survey) or anything else on your mind. There were 109 entrants to win the...
Over the life of this blog, I’ve recommended books and blog posts by an author named Joshua Becker. Joshua is the founder and primary writer of the website Becoming Minimalist, one of the leading minimalism blogs. Joshua defines minimalism ...
After two years of COVID-19 apprehension, our family is going on a real vacation — airplanes, amusements, and sit-down restaurants. Planning for upcoming trips reminds me of the kind of retirement travel that I’m ultimately working toward — month...
An organization that my son joined needed a parent volunteer for one of the leadership positions. This organization is extraordinarily demanding of its adult volunteers — training, local meetings, regional meetings, continuing education — all on top of...
Our family spent the dog days of COVID at home. No travels, no visitors, and zero breaks from each other. By the end of 2020, we’d had it with school and working at home. So we booked a beach house for Spring Break in the Outer Banks of North Car...
A young reader reached out to me about how investing and finance are underserved topics in high school. He was eager to share that he earned 20%+ returns from day trading in just a few months because he’s spent a lot of time learning how to inves...
On September 13th, 2021, my nine-year-old son was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes. A diabetes diagnosis has immediate impacts. Here are a few for starters: Insulin injections at least four times a day for the...