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

Financial Update Aug 2017

Another month, another update. A few random comments. Good Reads/Listens/Watches I stumbled across a new podcast called ChooseFI (http://www.choosefi.com/) via Jlcollins blog. I’ve binge listened and am halfway though their episodes. I recommend checking them out, particularly their travel hacking podcast & guest interviews. It’s now my second favorite FI podcast now, behind MadFientist’s. I … 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

Excel Tools

To improve the navigation of this site, here’s a directory of Excel tools I have made: Federal Income Tax Calculator Calculates estimated tax liability to within a few bucks, but more importantly computes effective marginal tax rate at any level of income. Debt repayment & Net worth projection tool A tool to visualize the optimal … Read more