A dividend is when you own a stock and receive a cash payment from the company your own for your share of the profit. Many people like to buy stock in companies that pay strong dividends to get these free payments (which are usually made quarterly). I don’t personally buy specific dividend stocks. Instead, […]
Teachers are underpaid. I believe the long term solution to all of the world’s problem is education. And we should be paying teachers to reflect that. But still, it’s not like teachers make NO money. In 2019 the average US teacher salary was $61,730. Pretty close to the median US household income of $68,703 […]
We talk so much about Roth IRAs, 401ks, 403bs, HSAs, etc, I often get questions like “Where else can I invest once I max out my Roth IRA?!”. But let’s not forget, all those fancy accounts are just special TYPES of brokerage accounts. A brokerage account is simply an account that you invest inside of. […]
A Roth IRA offers a really good deal on taxes. Anything that is in there grows FOREVER without any additional tax. So if you contribute $6,000 this year and it grows to $60,000 at retirement. You can take it all out with zero taxes owed and spend every penny! But here’s (one of) the […]
Sin #1: Holding cash in a retirement account. This one always breaks my heart when I see it from a new investor. Here’s how it goes. You’re young and finally get a job making some money. You keep hearing this funny phrase “Roth IRA”. You know it’s something you probably are going to wish you […]
Fees are these tricky little guys. They hide all over the place, then can erode half of the value of your investment. These two charts show the devastating effect of fees compounded over many years of investment. On the left is a typical index fund with a very low expense ratio of 0.04%. Compounded […]
I wouldn’t call this an “optimal” investing plan. Notably, Valerie and Valentino decided to invest in a joint brokerage account, not individual Roth IRAs. Maybe it was the hopeless romantics in them, wanting their money to commingle. They knew that Roth IRAs, by law, are individual accounts. If they had chosen to invest in Roth […]
Remember retirement isn’t an age. It’s an amount of money. Once your investments have grown to 25 times your annual spending, you are financially independent and can live off your investments forever! And on the flip side, nothing magical happens at 65 that allows you to stop working. If you don’t have your money invested […]
Let me paint you a picture. You have plans to go out to a nice dinner. So you find yourself a hot date, grab a crisp $100 bill, and head for your local Red Lobster. Your date is cool, so he knows that the hundo has to cover the whole dinner. So you order an […]
They’re the wise words of wisdom every budding narcotics entrepreneur will happily share: “Don’t get high on your own supply.” Why? Because if you smoke your own product, you can’t sell it! Then you don’t make any money. That’s business 101. While that lesson seems obvious to drug dealers, many of us make the exact […]
