How to defeat your $100/month cell phone plan

This post is long overdue, as cell phone hacking is low hanging fruit in terms of expense optimization. Here’s how I have done it for the past decade, saving us over $10k in the process.   Google Voice – The Key Ingredient Google Voice (https://voice.google.com/) is the critical component of our phone setup. What does … Read more

Frugal Analogs

I’ve enjoyed the podcast ChooseFI very much. I like that the hosts are normal dudes (probably more normal than me) stumbling through life like the rest of us. The hosts talk a lot about the idea of frugal analogs, which is an incredibly powerful concept. Examples of frugal analogs in ***my*** life include: $100/month cell … Read more

You should have frozen your credit years ago

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you’ve probably seen the news that a crap-ton of people’s personal information was exposed through a breach at Equifax, one of the three credit bureaus. You can check whether you were compromised here: https://trustedidpremier.com/eligibility/eligibility.html It turns out that I was compromised. No big deal. Why? Because I’ve frozen my … Read more

Hierarchy of Savings

Every single person should have a clear hierarchy of savings, primarily driven by tax arbitrage (link). On January 1, where do you put your first dollar of savings in the year? What about your second dollar? 10,000th dollar? Etc? I believe the following list should work for everyone, whether you’re making $10k or $10M per … Read more

How to mint money using tax arbitrage

***I spent 2-3 days in 2018 writing down everything I know about the U.S. tax code with the hopes of turning it into a book someday. It’s not exactly a page turner, but it may very well make you hundreds of thousands of dollars richer over your lifetime through the minimization of your lifetime tax … Read more

Retirement Savings Seminar

I was voluntold to give a lunchtime seminar in our community on a topic of my choice. I converged on the topic of retirement savings. My slides are downloadable here. The presentation contains nothing I haven’t already harped on in the blog, of course. I just present the simple case of: 1.) Being frugal 2.) … Read more