Retirement

I’m a proponent of stealth wealth. It makes for a more peaceful life with lower expectations and less scrutiny. The last thing you want to do is show off and put you and your family in danger. Stealth wealth is also the natural endgame of following FIRE principles for decades. If you keep living well

As my public equity portfolio gets obliterated thanks to being overweight tech stocks, I started dusting off my resume to go back to flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Then halfway through the application, I wiped away my tears and took a deep breath. As every long-time investor knows, the name of the game is survival. If

The popular image of a FIRE practitioner is someone eating rice and beans, clipping coupons, and driving a car older than their kids. All luxuries are shunned in order to grow their wealth as large as possible to break free sooner. FIRE folks are cheap and should enjoy life more critics say. There’s some truth

If you wait too long to start spending your money, you will have wasted many years of unnecessary work, stress, and worry. You’ll have traded your best decades for a number on a screen that eventually gets passed to someone else. After another summer living with my parents, I’m even more convinced about 45, my

In 2012, two months before my 35th birthday, I engineered my layoff from a 13-year career in investment banking. At the time, it felt like the riskiest thing I had ever done. Was I really going to blow up my career right as my earning power was about to compound? It did not seem wise.

Once both our children began school full-time in 2024, my wife and I had more breathing room. At least six hours a day of free time. No more wrangling toddlers in the chaos of the early years. I used the time to finish Millionaire Milestones, which became a USA Today bestseller in 2025. Now I’m

Ever wonder why Honolulu, Hawaii has the highest median life expectancy of any city in America? Sunshine, moderate temperatures, walkability, and an unhurried pace do wonders for your mental and physical health. As a relatively low-stress guy who doesn’t have to commute to a day job to sit in meetings all day, every time I

A neighbor across the street from my rental texted me at 3:35pm on a Saturday to say something had been beeping inside my property all day and my tenants appeared to be gone. I e-mailed the tenants, drove over, heard the sound, let myself in, and found three smoke alarms stacked on the garage floor

On Tuesday, September 8, 2026, an Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned after six weeks over safety concerns and wrote about why. He said the leading labs are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence” and gambling with everybody’s lives. The people building AI, he wrote, earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of

After publishing The Untold Burden Of Being Your Family’s Financial Provider, I got this comment from a reader named Brian: “I can identify with this post as I am the family CFO / CIO. I think you are WAY overcomplicating this. What is wrong with merely investing in VTI / VXUS and chill? My returns have