The pure products of America go crazy— When William Carlos Williams opened his poem To Elsie with the above, he did not apparently have dividend stocks in mind, but a poem can be whatever the reader makes of it. So let's play a game of overrated/underrated:...
In my last Friday Brief, I shared some of the lessons I learned about the importance of simplifying our lives during my time hiking the Appalachian Trail. This week, I'd like to build on that theme by sharing several ways we can simplify the financial...
Understanding the actual performance of your investment portfolio is harder than it should be. Investments typically show returns net-of-expenses, but often fail to show how much of the gain the expenses consumed. This is especially important when an investor or advisor is using active stock...
The United States income tax system is known as a "progressive" system, meaning that as your income goes up, your marginal tax rate goes up, to a point. This has been the case for a long time. The brackets and the top rates have moved...
In the show Your Friends and Neighbors, Jon Hamm plays Andrew Cooper, a hotshot hedge fund manager making “master of the universe” money. Coop seems to have it all: the good looks, the house, the friends, the career, the ritzy lavish lifestyle – but then...
On March 17, 2001, I left Springer Mountain, Georgia, with all my belongings stuffed into a backpack and one goal in mind: to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. The A.T. is a footpath stretching from Georgia to Maine, covering nearly 2,200 miles with more than 464,000...
One of the great financial crisis movies is Margin Call. Set over one night at a Wall Street investment bank during the early stages of the 2008 financial crisis, the film unpacks the moral pressure, fear, and self-interest that drive the characters as the collapse...
Let your life be a pleasant surprise. Save more than you need to, mainly so you can easily and at the spur of the moment leave a large tip or anonymous gift. Curiosity and openness seem to correlate much more highly with joy than the...
Last week Geoff wrote about the deposits that really matter into all the accounts we manage, including time, energy, social, and memory accounts – plus the obvious financial accounts. If you missed his post, I highly recommend going back to it and sitting with his...
When we hear the phrase bank account, most of us immediately think about money. Checking. Savings. Investments. The financial accounts that reflect our income, spending, and saving. But over the years, I’ve come to believe we’re all managing several other types of accounts, whether we...
