Imagine dumping $625/month into an S&P 500 index fund from 2000 to 2009 during the lost decade. You'd have loaded up on shares right before a generational bull run sent them 9x.

My wife starts her new job today. Pay raise, fully remote, and a 401k match. Cheers to her. She earned every bit of it. ☕️

Courses get a bad rep on here. But the best $34 I've ever spent was a potty training course for my 22-month-old daughter. Could I have found it all online for free? Sure. But having it all condensed into a 3.5-hour course with step-by-step instructions saved me hours and my sanity.

Yesterday a 7 year old girl knocked on our door with a stack of papers. She was selling her drawings. $3 each. I asked which one was her favorite. She said the blue dragon. I handed her a $10 and told her to keep the change. Her eyes lit up. Biggest smile. She said thank you and sprinted back to her mom. Not sure whose day that made more. The blue dragon is going on the fridge.

When I was a kid, my neighbor's family was rich. They had a BMW, a MasterCraft boat, and took 3 vacations a year. I asked their son how they had so much money. He said his dad invested in the stock market. My dad always said stocks were too risky. I've thought about that for 17 years.

Goldman Sachs studied some of the country’s highest earners. What they found was: • More than 1 in 3 people making $300,000+ are living paycheck to paycheck • Over two-thirds of $300K+ earners have put a major financial goal on hold That’s not an income problem.

$HOOD Gold card is unmatched. $278.95 straight into the brokerage account. What should I buy?

People overcomplicate investing. Listen, if you're a beginner: Avoid: • Picking individual stocks on day one • Chasing whatever went up 40% last month • Checking your portfolio 10x a day • Paying 1% fees for advice you don't need Instead: • Open a Roth IRA or grab your 401(k) match • Buy one low-cost index fund • Automate $100 a week • Build a 3-month emergency fund first • Understand the power of time in the market Focus on this for the first 12 months. Build from there.

You're 28 with $30k saved. Put it toward a house down payment, or invest it and keep renting? Mortgage rates are around 7%. S&P 500 10-year average is around 10%. What would you do?

In case you needed a reason to take investing seriously:

Store managers at Buc-ee's and Panda Express clear $100k+. Which one are you picking?

The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 lets you sell your home and not pay capital gains tax on the first $250k of profit if you're single and $500k if you're married. But it's never been indexed for inflation. It should be $500k/$1M. In 1997 the average new home sold for $176k. Today 242 US cities have starter homes worth $1M or more. It's time to update it.

Why wasn't I scared buying houses no money down in my early 20s, despite not making $50k in my job until I was 30? Because I'm a nerd. I was confident. Confidence is a statistics word. Fear is the unknown. Translate that fear into just being the margin of error. Reduce your margin of error (which increases your confidence) by reducing the amount of unknown. Then hedge the risk. I bought houses undervalued "just in case." Then "just in case" happened in 2008. If you back up and see it as probabilities, it takes the primal emotions out. (.....and that answers the question of "how did I use my useless psychology degree!...and the stat classes that went with it")