Strategies & tactics to get ahead financially & in life
When I was younger, I was taught that the key to financial freedom was saving as much money as you could.
While true, it's not the whole story. Saving can only get you so far - you need to invest prudently too.
You need to build passive streams of income, most millionaires have seven or more passive streams, if you want to escape financial gravity.
You can learn about how I built a dividend portfolio, how I think about market valuation, and even my thoughts on angel investing - and much more!
As always, email me or tweet @wallethacks if you want to discuss anything!
Just the other day, someone read my post about how we track our net worth and asked me a really simple question – how do I track our investments? The short answer is… well, I don’t. I check my investments once a month, when I update the spreadsheet, and then I don’t really look at […]
Early retirement is a popular subject lately and with good reason – being able to tell your boss to “shove it!” is appealing (unless your boss is cool, then maybe it’s bittersweet… but still a little sweet). There are a lot of fantastic early retirement blogs that can show you the path but the steps […]
When I started investing, there were no apps. It was the late 90s and early 2000s. Practically the stone ages. I had a Vanguard account, paid gobs of money for trades, and basically kept all my money in various mutual funds. Back then, you didn’t have much of a choice. Trading commissions were expensive and […]
There’s an old adage in real estate… location, location, location. I live in the DMV – Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia – and it’s an area where real estate is higher than average. It’s challenging to find investment properties and as someone who is neither experience nor patient, it doesn’t make much sense for me to […]
I’ve invested in real estate before. With less than stellar results. It was a small little partnership that invested in single family homes in Kansas City. The homes were very small, in a blue-collar neighborhood, and things were fine when they were fine. We had a partner on the ground managing it but eventually little […]
They say that millionaires have 7 streams of income. And most of them are boring. Common examples of income-generating assets include your classics like real estate (rental income, depreciation benefits, equity appreciation) and dividend stocks (dividend income is taxed favorably), which I love. But every so often, there’s one in there that sounds as exciting […]
Every few weeks, someone emails me asking for the best short-term investment. They’re usually saving for their first home and they want to optimize their earnings. They don’t want to gamble it in some bitcoin. Or put it all on black. They want some kind of return without putting it at risk. The 0.01% from […]
When I started investing, I eased into it very gently. I didn’t trust the stock market. I was comfortable with saving the money. I wasn’t comfortable putting it in the “stock market.” My formative adult years started in 1998, the year I started college. I was going to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and studying Computer […]
I use Personal Capital on a monthly basis to collect my net worth information. I’ve been at it for over a decade. When I tell people I use a tool to do it, they all ask me the same question – is Personal Capital safe? Security is one of the biggest concerns people have with […]
I love Vanguard. The bulk of my investments are there, minus a few dividend growth stocks I hold in an Ally Invest account (formerly TradeKing). I’m not the only one. Of the top 25 largest mutual funds by assets, sixteen are from Vanguard (source). A clarification – many of the funds on the Marketwatch list […]