Retiring early is normally pretty simple: Just spend less money than you earn, invest the difference in index funds, and follow the 4% rule. The 4% rule says that once you have at least 25× your annual expenses invested, you can withdraw enough money to…
When you’re trying to research an investment of any kind, you probably go straight to a historical price chart before anything else. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that most people have absolutely no idea how to read a stock chart correctly. It seems like…
When I buy shares of VTI (Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund), I get a tiny slice of almost every publicly traded company in the United States. I own a piece of the entire stock market. Historically, this type of low-cost index fund has delivered…
We’ve been blogging about saving and investing money for nearly three years now, and somehow we’ve never actually shared what’s inside our own portfolio. Oops! I guess the main reason is that it’s really nothing special. We don’t have any super secret investments that helped…
I started college during the Great Recession, and I admittedly wasn’t very tuned in to politics or financial markets at the time. In the years leading up to that crisis and the recovery afterward, I was mostly focused on paying my bills and trying to…
We get a lot of “interesting” comments on TikTok and Instagram explaining why saving tons of money to enjoy life more is a dumb idea. In the past few months, the most popular argument against us has gone something like this: “By the time I…
Do you know the interest rate on your savings account? If not, don’t feel too bad — most people have no idea. But since nobody really pays attention to this number, big banks get away with paying way below the fair market interest rate on…
In his early twenties, Jeremy Schneider founded RentLinx, a website that helps landlords list their properties for rent on multiple platforms simultaneously. At age 34, he sold that business for millions of dollars, invested the proceeds into stock and bond market index funds, and retired…
We don’t own cryptocurrency. We have no immediate plans to buy cryptocurrency. And we believe that cryptocurrency is unsuitable as a long-term, buy-and-hold, wealth-building investment. Simultaneously, the technology, mathematics, and philosophy behind cryptocurrency is super cool. It has lots of practical applications. And I would…
Anyone can write an investing book and seem smart in the moment. A “hot” stock-picking strategy might even get lucky and succeed for a few months or a year, as more people jump on the bandwagon — enough time to make the author rich. But…
A stock market crash is coming. Is it because interest rates are at an all-time low? Is it because there’s a pandemic sweeping the globe? Is it because nearly 20% of all US Dollars in existence were created out of thin air in the last…
Imagine that you walk into a bank to open a savings account, and you’re offered a bizarre opportunity instead. Here’s how it works: You make an initial deposit, and each month it sits, the balance gets multiplied by a random number between 0.9 and 1.12.…
By writing a series of blog posts about personal finance and stock market investing intended for his daughter, JL Collins (somewhat by accident) reached an international audience of millions. Now, in the world of financial independence and early retirement (FIRE), few authors are as well-respected…
It’s the 2020s. Your stock broker isn’t some guy you call on the phone and ask to place trades for you. When you want to invest money, you click a mouse or tap a screen a few times, and it’s done inside your brokerage account…
Expense tracking, budget making, checkbook balancing, bill paying, stock trading — all of this stuff requires an endless input of time and brain power. That’s why, for the last eight years or so, Lauren and I haven’t done any of those things. Being good with…
“Early retirement?! In this economy? You must be insane! Interest rates are near 0%. The stock market has seen some of the quickest drops ever recently. Unemployment is through the roof. People are living longer than ever. Social Security is doomed. And you think your…
We’ve gone without live television for the last 11 years or so, but I recently installed a fancy antenna in our attic, and now we get a bunch of crystal clear local stations in high definition for $0 a month. Normally, I’d say that’s an…
In January of 2016, we were headed back home from the high of a 6-month honeymoon in Hawaii. Ready to buckle down and get full-time jobs again, we figured it’d be a good idea to buy a house, so at ages 25 (me) and 26…
If you make a decent living, and you’ve found ways to slash some of life’s biggest expenses, you’re naturally left with a surplus of cash every month. The next step is to get that money working for you ASAP by investing it. But this whole…
In the three years following graduation in 2012, Lauren and I extended what you might call our “college lifestyle” into young adulthood -- skipping cable TV, sharing one car, riding bicycles instead of driving, strategically living in one-bedroom apartments in mostly low-cost-of-living areas, getting our…
