Retirement

I must live in a bubble. Because in my circle, I don’t know anybody who has a car worth more than 1/10th of their annual gross income. I came up with the 1/10th rule for car buying over 15 years ago to help people achieve financial freedom sooner. Thousands have followed this standard rule since, […]

As someone who’s been writing about FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) since 2009 and actually leaving full-time work for good in 2012, it’s been quite an interesting ride. For the most part, I’ve been lucky because the stock market and real estate market have generally trended up, except for in 2018 and 2022. 12 good

Since I started Financial Samurai in 2009, I have been on a mission to help readers achieve financial freedom sooner rather than later. And one of the core strategies I keep coming back to is encouraging readers to get neutral on real estate by first buying a primary residence. Once you have secured your primary

One of the biggest fears workers have about retirement is losing their sense of purpose. That fear is not unfounded. It is one of the negatives of early retirement nobody likes talking about. For the first several months, maybe even a year, you may feel a little lost. The steady paycheck is gone. The camaraderie

At the end of 2024, a relative asked me for financial help. She was planning to leave her expensive money management firm at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, where she was being charged close to 1.5% in fees and placed in a series of esoteric GS funds that charged another 1–2%. I’m not a fan of double-dipping, so I

Recently, a home in the beautiful Forest Hill neighborhood of San Francisco was listed for $2.4 million. It had four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a modest 2,250 square feet. The home had been remodeled about 15 years earlier. As we do with every open house, my wife and I made bets on what we thought

Robinhood is one of the most popular online brokerage firms today, especially among younger investors who actively trade. During COVID, Robinhood famously restricted trading in 13 stocks on January 28, 2021. As a result, thousands of investors were unable to buy or sell, and billions of dollars in value swung during the freeze. Robinhood does

From 2009, when I started writing about FIRE, until now, the FIRE movement has had a great run. It was born out of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, when hundreds of thousands of people were losing their jobs. In order to cope with the sudden disruption to their economic livelihoods, the concept of FIRE was

In an attempt to better understand the potential discount or premium to NAV for the Fundrise Venture product (VCX), I wanted to examine Pershing Square Holdings, ticker PSHZF, listed on the London Stock Exchange. Pershing Square manages over $18 billion and is run by American, Bill Ackman. Meanwhile, the fund currently trades at about a

There’s an endless debate over whether real estate or stocks are the better asset class. Although I’m a fan of both, I just realized the feel-good wealth effect adds another feather to real estate’s cap. In my post about avoiding the real estate frenzy zone if you want to get the best deal, I highlighted