Personal Finance Club

P.S. Last Reminder! The Fire Crash Course starts on Tuesday, but registration closes at midnight or when we hit 500. Comment 🔥 for a DM or check my link in bio.

I’ll admit, I really like talking about that long list on the right. In fact, most of my posts are about them. They’re academically interesting. They can feel like “wealth building hacks”. Who doesn’t want to take advantage of “tax loss harvesting” or a “back door Roth IRA”. So fun! But as with all hacks, they can serve as a distraction from the primary issues. To build wealth, you have to earn more and spend less. The difference between those two numbers is the entire ballgame. A really crappy investor putting away $1,000/month will trounce an optimal investor saving only $100/month.

That’s why I end all my posts with the two rules. Even though I love to talk about the fine tuning, we can’t lose sight of what makes the biggest impact. We should never let fear of failure stop us from getting to work on the big things. “I don’t understand dividend reinvestment, so I’m gonna spend every dollar I earn” is a recipe for staying broke. “I don’t understand investing, so I’m gonna work on saving money while I learn more” is how broke people turn into millionaires.

So focus on the big stuff. Keep learning along the way. Become a millionaire. Retire early. That’s the real wealth building hack.

As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.

-Jeremy

What other industry exists where neither the consumer NOR the service provider knows the COST of the service at the time of purchase? It’s a really wild experience that you go to a doctor, potentially for life saving care, and neither you NOR the doctor know what it’s going to cost. It’s rough.

I don’t pretend to have a solution to health care in the US. It’s one of those extremely complex and messy problems that has no simple answer. But I often get asked about health insurance in the context of early retirement. If you don’t have a job that provides health insurance, how can you possibly retire!?

Here’s what I do: I buy it. Love it or hate it, Obamacare standardized the public market for health insurance so that everyone can get covered and it includes certain critical features, like an annual out-of-pocket max, and no lifetime caps on coverage. But it also isn’t cheap.

When I was single buying it for myself, it was about $400/month. Now, as a family of four our coverage is about $1,400/month. Ouch!

But, while it’s a lot of money, it’s still just an amount of money. It’s up there in scale with housing, transportation, food, etc. These are things I need to cover if I’m going to quit my job, which is exactly what I do.

I primarily cover those costs from my investments. These days I have about $4M invested in the stock market and real estate. Assuming a 4% “safe withdrawal rate”, that gives me about $160K I can pull from my investments (via dividends and selling shares) to cover my expenses each year. It’s enough to pay for health insurance and my other expenses.

If you want to learn more about FIRE (financial independence, early retirement) join us for our first ever FIRE Crash Course! Registration is open but closes TOMORROW at midnight.

P.S. We’re capping registrations at 500, and historically about half of people sign up on the last day (i.e. tomorrow). We’re already at 369/500, so we’re expecting to sell out and have people get locked out.

As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.

-Jeremy

I talk a lot about “investing early and often” and “compound growth”. I’m afraid the implication is that if you deprive yourself enough for long enough, you’ll find a pot of happiness at the end of the compound growth rainbow.

But in addition to the compound growth curve, there’s another curve that decays with your age and your health. Money value to YOU decays as you’re less able to enjoy it. Just as a billion dollars is worthless to you in 100 years, even $10,000 may not mean much to you in your 90s when you aren’t interested in going on a river cruise or in your 80s when you aren’t able to go on a backpacking trip through Europe.

The point of building wealth isn’t to die with the most money. It’s to live your best life today and every day. But, as much as I hate this word, it’s really about BALANCE. If you go 100% YOLO, you’re not optimizing for happiness. You’ll get a few endorphin boosts on your luxury Vegas trip I’m sure, but you’ll come back feeling emptier than ever. And unable to do the next exciting thing. On the flip side, if you’re constantly turning down things that you love in the hopes of an even happier long term outcome, you’re not respecting that decay curve the the value of money. You gotta spend some now to maximize your life happiness!

I’m hosting a FIRE Crash Course at the end of January! We’re covering the mechanics of investing and building wealth, but also talking about the psychology of spending, and when to retire. Some people fall victim to “one more year” syndrome, always chasing the carrot on the end of the string without realizing they could have retired years ago.

Join us! Registration is OPEN and ends on Sunday! If you have either of my previous courses, you should have a coupon code in your email. Send us at email ([email protected]) if you can’t find it. 🔗 in bio for more details!

p.s. We’re capping registrations at 500 and we’re at 338 at the time of this writing. So registration may close before Sunday!

As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.

-Jeremy

I could probably post this warning every day of my life and I would STILL be finding people making this #1 most common mistake among investors. In fact, before my wife and I got married, we sat down to look at her investment accounts. We opened up her SEP IRA and LO AND BEHOLD there was about $13K sitting there in cash uninvested. So even MARRYING the PFC guy does not make you immune from this mistake!

So what’s the mistake? When you open up an investment account, it’s like opening a savings or checking account. But investment accounts differ in a very important way: They don’t just hold cash, they can hold any type of investment. So if I open a Roth IRA (which is a type of investment account that offers a tax break) then I deposit cash, I AM NOT DONE. Putting cash in a Roth IRA (or any investment account) is missing the crucial point of the investment account: The investing!

So here’s what you do:

1. Put cash into your Roth IRA
2. INVEST all the cash sitting in your Roth IRA. You generally do this by hitting a button that says something like “Trade” and choosing an investment, like an index fund.

Missing step #2 above is the MOST common and most damaging mistake I see in investing!

It’s a good idea to pop into your investment accounts every few months or so to make sure you’re not piling up uninvested cash. That cash can get there either from new deposits, or from dividends paid out from the other investments inside. You can avoid the dividend cash piling up by turning on the “reinvest dividends” option with is a button somewhere within the settings of your account.

If you want to get your investments in order, join us for the FIRE Crash Course! It’s a six week crash course on all things financial independence and early retirement. We already have a wide range of attendees. This is gonna be so much fun! Comment 🔥 for more details.

p.s. Registration CLOSES SUNDAY or when we hit 500 registrants. We’re already at 318/500 registered so we may not make it until Sunday!

As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.

-Jeremy

I often get asked how I “retired at 36” so here is a bit of my story!⁣‎
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This really isn’t supposed to be a “see how easy it is” or “anyone can do it the way I did” post. This happened to be my path. Yours will be different. I went the startup route, and was frankly very lucky that it paid off. But had I taken that Microsoft job out of college and maintained the same degree of frugality, I would have ended up at roughly the same net worth as I have today.

You might look at this and say, “Oh, must be nice, this tall rich white dude started a tech company and is now rich”. And that’s a fair critique. I definitely had a ton of unfair advantages and tailwinds. For example, my parents saved a college fund for me that covered most of my undergrad, and I had a supportive network of friends and family. But I also worked hard along the way. I earned a track scholarship (neither parent was especially athletic), and worked a bunch of jobs. I was a server, a camp counselor, a carpenter’s assistant, an IT guy, and had a few internships. Anything to pay the bills.

I also worked HARD at being frugal. I lived on very little, and tried hard to stay out of debt. I bought used cars in cash (i.e. $3K for a 99 Ford Explorer), rented cheap apartments with roommates, and kept food and travel on a shoestring budget.

All in all, that was my path. It won’t be yours but I think you can absolutely do it your own way!
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For you track fans, I ran the 400 and 800 in 46.8 and 1:49.8. I held the school record in the 600m for 21 years until it was recently SMASHED 😭.

p.s. The Fire Crash Course is filling up fast. We launched it Monday morning around 8am and in the first 24 hours over half the spots got taken. Registration will close when we hit 500, so if you want to join us, comment 🔥 and I’ll send you the link with more info!⁣‎
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– Jeremy⁣‎

A lot of people go through life with an assumption that when they’re 65 they’ll automatically get to retire. But here’s the thing: Being 65 doesn’t mean you get to retire. If you don’t have any money, you have to keep working (or live in poverty). On the flip side, if you’re 40 and you’ve saved up 25 times your annual expenses, then you never need to work again.‎
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This “25X” rule says if you have a bunch of money invested, you can take out 4% of the starting amount per year to spend, adjust that for inflation every year, and be very likely to never go broke. So if you have $1,000,000 invested at 40, then you can take out $40,000 per year forever and weather all the ups and downs of the market.⁣‎ Want to live on $100K/year, then you need $2.5M.

Of course that is a lot of money, BUT once you get started investing aggressively and start to see the dollars add up, things tend to accelerate. Got a bonus? Throw it in? A raise at work? Spend some, invest some. Things compound and you get there faster, taking years or DECADES off of the need to work rather than waiting until you’re old.
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So instead of planning to work until a magical age, think about making a plan to lower expenses, invest aggressively and retire young!⁣‎
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p.s. REGISTRATION IS OFFICIALLY OPEN for the FIRE Crash Course. It’s a six week crash course program to get you on track to join the FIRE movement and retire early. Jenn and I will be hosted and joined each week by several Nectarine fiduciary experts. Everyone who enrolls also gets ALL of our (three) courses included for free. We’re capping registrations at 500 and expect to hit it, so don’t wait to register! 🔗 in bio.

As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.⁣‎
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-Jeremy⁣‎

p.s. Registration for the Fire Crash Course opens TOMORROW (Monday) for just 1 week (until Sunday the 25th) and we’re capping attendees at 500. We expect to sell out. Sign up to be notified at my link in bio!

There is so much noise out there in the world of investing. But when you cut through all the nonsense, optimal investing is pretty simple. Here’s a checklist you can use to measure your investing strategy. This simple list optimizes your tax benefit, uses index funds to guarantee your fair share of US and international market growth, and eliminates notoriously bad human decision making through automated investing and rebalancing.⁣⁣⁣
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⁣Note that if you use a single target date index fund for that second checkbox, you don’t have to choose an asset allocation and the rebalancing and reallocating checkboxes happen automatically. ⁣⁣⁣
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⁣It’s difficult to make an argument for another investing strategy that will beat what’s on this list without relying on luck or speculation. If you follow these simple steps, you’ll beat the vast majority of investors.⁣⁣⁣

Note that the limits listed on this image are for a single person under 50. If you’re 50+ or making family contributions to an HSA your limits will be higher (+1,000 for IRA, +8,000 for 401k, $8,750 total for a family HSA).
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⁣Here’s the text if you want to copy and paste:⁣⁣
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⁣THE ULTIMATE INVESTING CHECKLIST⁣⁣⁣ 2026
⁣□ Invest in these accounts (in this order)⁣⁣⁣
⁣ 1.) 401k/403b (up to match)⁣⁣⁣
⁣ 2.) HSA ($4,400)⁣⁣⁣
⁣ 3.) Roth IRA ($7,500)⁣⁣⁣
⁣ 4.) 401k/403b ($24,500)⁣⁣⁣
⁣ 5.) Taxable brokerage⁣⁣⁣ (unlimited)
⁣□ Choose 1-5 low cost index funds diversified across US, international and bonds⁣⁣⁣
⁣□ Turn on dividend reinvestment⁣⁣⁣
⁣□ Set up automatic investments⁣⁣⁣
⁣□ Rebalance on a fixed schedule
⁣□ Reallocate towards bonds as you age⁣⁣⁣
⁣□ Don’t sell anything until you retire⁣⁣⁣

As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.⁣
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– Jeremy⁣

I often get asked, “what is the best index fund?” And the answer is “it doesn’t really matter.” There aren’t “good” or “bad” index funds. They all do the same thing and that’s the point. They follow the index they’re assigned to. All the little details just don’t matter that much.‎
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The twelve index fund listed here are kind of a mixed bag: ‎
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• 7 are mutual funds, 5 are ETFs. ‎
• 7 follow 500 of the biggest stocks. 1 follows 1,000 stocks. Four follow the total stock market (~4,000 stocks)‎
• They’re offered by a bunch of different companies (Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab, iShares/Blackrock, State Street)‎
• Their expense ratios range from 0.015% (FXAIX and FSKAX) to 0.14% (VFINX). ‎
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With all those differences, they all essentially do the same thing. Own a bunch of US stock. EVEN the fact that some follow 4,000+ stocks vs others follow only 500 doesn’t make a big difference (for those asking me S&P 500 vs total market).‎
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With all those differences, and after over 14 years of tracking them the top performing index fund outperformed the lowest performing one by growing the $10,000 to $70,392 versus $66,164. Not a big deal.‎
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It turns out the S&P 500 index funds all outperformed the total market index funds by about 6% over this time. That doesn’t mean that trend will continue in the future (I actually expect it won’t), rather I think it reflects that large companies fared slightly better than small ones during the pandemic and AI tech boom.‎
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And if you want to know which one actually performed the best. Drumroll… It was, surprise surprise, the one with the lowest expense ratio (0.015%): FXAIX (Fidelity 500 Index Fund).‎
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The moral of the story is don’t get caught up in the weeds. Don’t worry about which exact index fund to buy, just pick one with a low expense ratio and spend your effort plowing more money into it.‎

p.s. Registration for our FIRE Crash Course opens MONDAY. We’re capping registrations at 500 and we expect to sell out! It’s six weeks to put you on pace to an early retirement! Stay tuned!
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As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.‎
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– Jeremy‎

GREAT NEWS EVERYONE. The annual Roth IRA limit divides equally into 12 months again. Goodbye $541.66. Goodbye $583.33. HELLO $625.00!

I know there is SO MUCH complexity in the finance world. Every day I’m looking into so called “advanced” topics like selling covered calls, velocity banking, tax-loss harvesting, direct indexing, sequence of returns risk, yada yada yada. That stuff is mostly nonsense. Do you know what’s not nonsense and is actually going to make you more rich? PUTTING MORE MONEY IN. That’s the important thing. Everything else is window dressing.

So, now that it’s January, here are the numbers to hit monthly or bi-weekly if you want to max out your tax advantaged accounts. I personally just went to my 401k to change my bi-weekly 401k contribution to $942. Fun fact: SINCE I have a lot of money in a taxable brokerage account, I live primarily off of that, while funneling most of my income into my 401k. That helps a little with taxes, but it’s not as important as PUTTING MORE MONEY IN. (See the theme?)

I quit my job at 36 and I’m ABLE to live primarily off of my investments because I put a lot of money in! If YOU are interested in doing the same, we have a FIRE CRASH COURSE starting at the end of the month. Registration opens on MONDAY 1/19 and we’re limiting it to 500 attendees. As of the moment I’m typing this caption, we have 395 on the email wait list, so I expect to sell out. If you want to be notified when registration opens, click my link in bio!

p.s. We’re gonna have Nectarine advisors live at every crash course meeting to answer your questions live or in the chat. PLUS, those who sign up for the crash course get EVERY PFC course included, with unlimited lifetime access!

As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.

-Jeremy

Let me be clear: Brianna is not normal. She doesn’t use her money like anyone else around her. She rarely buys things the “easy” way, by ordering from Amazon or DoorDash. Instead she hunts for deals on OfferUp or Buy Nothing. She bikes to work. She has roommates. Her phone is six years old and on a discount carrier, always jumping on WiFi to save data. She invests an EYE-WATERING amount of money every month.

Brianna also saved herself 27 years of work by living a very purposeful financial life. After investing for only 13 years, with a modest 7% real return (after inflation) on her investments, she can quit her job and retire indefinitely on a 4% “safe withdrawal rate” of her nest egg.⁣⁣⁣⁣‎‎
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I know what you’re thinking. Brianna is so BORING and isn’t even enjoying her life! But guess what. YOU’RE WRONG. Brianna is living her best life! She’s SO COOL. She’s got cool style, goes on amazing hikes, knows all the deep cuts on her favorite albums, and works out almost every day. She’s also HAPPY. It’s fun not to live paycheck to paycheck. Brianna has a strong sense of self and confidence, and a network of amazing friends.
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It took Brianna 13 years. There’s no secret. It’s living below your means and investing early and often.⁣⁣‎‎

p.s. If you want to learn more about this FIRE thing, we’re hosting a FIRE Crash Course at the end of January. It’s limited to only 500 participants and we expect to sell out! Registration open on Monday. Check out my link in bio if you want to be notified.
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As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.‎‎
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– Jeremy‎‎