What I Write About, and Why
Summary
- This site turns financial decisions I have actually made into useful starting points for your own.
- Each essay includes real numbers, the downside, and enough context to separate my experience from a universal answer.
- Use the reasoning and evidence to test a choice against your life rather than copying my conclusion.
A friend told me I should start sharing what I have learned about money. Some of what I had told him over the years had been useful to him, and in his own words, “This is gold.” To me it felt like general knowledge. He did not know it, and that made it valuable. I have had the same conversation with colleagues and family often enough to notice the pattern, so this site is where I write those lessons down.
Most personal finance advice tells you what to do. I am more interested in showing you a decision I actually made, the numbers behind it, what went wrong, and what I would do differently now.
I made work optional through a normal corporate job, consistent saving, and years of investing. There was no startup exit or inheritance. The path is in My Ten-Year Path to Making Work Optional, which is the best place to start. The first months after leaving are in 3 Months After Quitting My Corporate Job to Build With AI.
The decisions range from small, such as tracking every expense for ten years, to large, such as using options to enter a stock or renting to keep the cost of leaving work lower.
What you will find here
- Actual decisions. What I did with cash, credit cards, retirement accounts, housing, and investments.
- Enough numbers to test the idea. Not every private detail, but enough evidence to show whether the conclusion holds.
- The tradeoff, not only the upside. A strategy is not useful if the risk appears in the final paragraph.
- A rule you can reuse. My choice may not fit your life. The reasoning behind it still might.
What you will not find
I will not always have the right answer, and I do not want to turn one person’s experience into a universal prescription. A stock that fits my portfolio may not fit yours. A housing decision that gave me flexibility may cost someone else stability. An options strategy that has worked for me can still lose money.
I also do not want to repeat generic advice without showing where it met real life. When I write about keeping eleven months of expenses in SGOV, the important part is not the ticker. It is why I wanted a year of runway, what access I gave up, and what that runway made possible.
That is the promise behind the writing: firsthand experience, actual numbers, and honest tradeoffs, offered as a starting point for your own decisions rather than a substitute for them.