Tag: retirement
Closed-End Funds vs. Dividend ETFs: It’s All About Life Stages
When do you plan on retiring? Are you already retired? These questions will be vital in determining what financial instruments you’ll need to leverage. Investing is all about your time horizon, goals, philosophy, and risk tolerance. The good part is you don’t need to have all of the answers the first day you start investing.…
Financial Security vs. Financial Freedom 2: The Difference Between Saving and Investing
Financial education given in school is a disgrace to the American public. We all have different viewpoints on why this is, but finding a solution is a better use of our time. The main thing hurting Americans is not knowing the difference between saving and investing. I have met many people who can balance a…
Passive Income: How Do You Spend Your Free Time?
The main difference between the rich and the poor is how they spend their time. How do you spend your free time? Feel free to answer honestly to yourself. Once I learned this golden rule, my income, and net worth doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled in a couple of years. If you want to create…
Dividend Investing 106: Building a 60/40 Portfolio
Receiving dividends is one of the best joys in life, but you can make it even better. As much as I love the stock market, it does have its ups and downs. One of the best ways to counteract (or hedge) the unpredictability of the stock market is to invest in something more solid and…
Debt is Your Birthright: How to Overcome It
You shouldn’t feel bad about being in debt; however, you shouldn’t be comfortable living in debt either. Debt is a very complex topic with a straightforward premise—debt is about control. I’m fresh off the book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” which changed how I view debt. There is nothing new under the sun, and our…
Dividend Investing 105: Add a Safe Options-Trading Strategy
Trading options get a bad reputation from horror stories of people losing it all in a casino-like fashion. But options trading can actually be quite safe. As you amass a huge portfolio of dividend stocks, you may get the urge to generate some more income. Likewise, you may look to buy dividend stocks at rock-bottom…
My Secret Formula to Determine Housing Affordability
The housing market is out of reach for most American households. However, there are still small pockets of affordable places to live—you just need to find them. I have been using an affordability technique over the last ten years that has served me well. It uses a combination of Zillow and Military housing calculators to…
Happy Financial Independence Day 3
The American Dream is still alive and kicking, just not in the same way we envisioned. We thought it would be easy (and straightforward) to free ourselves from our jobs. NOT. In 2023, we will have rampant inflation, crazy housing costs, high utility bills, and low marriage rates. So we are getting squeezed and are…
Cursed Retirement? What is Sequence of Returns Risk?
Most of us spend our working years dreaming (and planning) for retirement daily. We know that to free ourselves from bondage, we must have a solid retirement plan in place. Conventional wisdom has us invest 10% into our 401Ks and Roth IRAs over 35-45 years. Hopefully, we retire with $1-2 million, but that is rare.…
Dividend Investing 103: Picking Your Platforms
Your investing platform will determine how much you invest. You’ll have a blast if it gives you many options and tools. You’ll avoid it like the plague if it is old and clunky. I use five different brokerage platforms because they all offer different experiences. These experiences include depositing money, automated investing, instant investing, fractional…
The Magic of High-Yield Index Fund Reinvestment
Index funds pay an embarrassingly low amount of dividends. However, they are a great product to dollar-cost average over a long time because it’s hard to beat their gains. The problem arises when you need to generate income from your index funds in your working or retirement years. Most people cannot live on a 1.5%…
Dividend Investing 102: Picking the Right Dividend Stocks
Now that you know some basic terms of dividend investing, it’s time to jump into picking the right stocks for your risk tolerance and investment philosophy. Welcome back to the Dividend Investing 101 series (101), where we get you into the passive income game. The three types of dividend securities. I categorize dividend investing into…
My Five Year Plan for My Book Business: I’m Creating a Passive Income Machine
I have 930 books on Amazon. Yes, they are high-content books with words and pictures. I published my first book in January 2021 (today is June 19, 2023). When I first started, I aimed to create 1,000 books on Amazon. Well, now I don’t have an end goal because I plan to write until the…
Dividend Investing 101: What Are Dividends?
Have you ever wondered how rich people always seem to make money, even when not at work? This magical existence is what we call “passive income.” One of the major types of passive income is dividends, along with rents, royalties, and automated business. But what are dividends, and why should you care about them? You’ll…
Saving is Defense: Investing is Offense
Do you know the difference between saving and investing? What is the difference between having $100,000 in a high-yield savings account (HYSA) and $100,000 in an income investing portfolio? Once they get out of credit card debt, most people become savers. Saving comes naturally because you have complete control of your money—there are no risks.…
Saving & Investing 102: What is Your Relationship with Money?
The most essential ingredient to building your wealth is your relationship with money. I hear you thinking, “But money isn’t alive.” Money isn’t what you think it is—it reflects value. The more value you give, the more money you will receive. Welcome back to the Saving & Investing 101 series (101), where we start the…
Saving & Investing 101: What is Your Risk Tolerance?
I talk to many people who cannot even fathom moving a portion of their money into a high-yield savings account. They fear the thought of not walking into a brick-and-mortar bank to handle their transactions. Other people I know put everything they had into cryptocurrencies back in 2021. They lost nearly all of their money…
Rents Go Up: Which Side of the Equation Are You On?
Rent prices across the United States and the world will continue to rise. There is little we can do as the average consumer. Once institutional investors, foreign interests, and the Airbnb crowd entered the real estate game, it changed the landscape forever. So how do we become homeowners in today’s environment? Even better, how do…
Personal Loans vs. Credit Cards: Which is the Best Lifeline?
I hate credit cards with a passion, although I’ll admit they are a necessary evil. There are just too many random events that can occur, especially when you have a family. Personal loans are a much better option than credit cards, but they require you to keep a tight handle on your spending. Most of…
Become Middle-Class PLUS: Insert Growth Multipliers into Your Life
Most people fear becoming rich. Somewhere along the lines, they adopted a belief that rich people are bad; therefore, they avoid the path to wealth. However, it’s still not wrong to make a little more money. The problem is that most people cannot fathom earning income outside of a 9-5 job. Most times, people’s jobs…
