I wanted to start this blog to remind myself of my original goals and as a quick way to track my progress. As I’ve mentioned before, I studied finance and spend a good amount of time tracking the markets and doing security analysis. It’s a hobby of mine and something that I like to share with others and this seems like the perfect avenue to foster discussion regarding my ideas and strategies. I think investing is one of those interesting realms of study where divergent opinions exist and are often given equal weight depending on what you happen to believe. It is hard to make sense of that sometimes because…

My early retirement dreams started when I first got out of college. I was lucky enough to find a job after the 2008 stock crash that had a relatively solid starting salary of 45000 which didn’t go a long way in my state but was enough to start putting some money away. I knew back then that the work until 65 in a corporate job lifestyle wasn’t for me and I wanted some flexibility to do something else before than if I wanted to so that’s where my journey stared. I had a background in finance and had read a good deal about retirement planning back then coming to the…

Taxes are probably the most important part of your retirement plan. Your tax strategy is possibly even more important than your asset allocation and like the asset allocation, there is no one size fits all approach. There is however a relatively similar path that most people should follow in order to maximize their returns and minimize their tax impact. The below lays out how you should be investing your money in order to do just that. There are exceptions to the below rules but we’ll talk about those later. Note that I do not mention a savings account in the below strategy. However, I am a firm believer that you…