Do you know the difference between qualified dividends and non-qualified dividends in your investment portfolio? Knowing the difference could mean a smaller tax bill or a much larger one in retirement. I’ve come across a great YouTube video on the subject so rather than write a wordy explanation, it’s just easier to watch this video…
Category: Financial Odyssey
The Rule of 55 – Cashing Out A 401k
After approaching another round of burnout, I am very keen to “retire” so I have been exploring all my options. One of those options is the ‘Rule of 55’ and I’ve been doing research into this option. I spoke to my current 401k provider and they confirmed that I can pull my money out when…
Paying Your Mortgage With Your Credit Card
The holy grail of credit card reward points has always been to pay your mortgage with a credit card. This is usually the largest recurring expense most people have on their bill pile. There are now potentially two credit cards that will allow you to do this with minimal fees. Rather than type of a…
“No Buy 2025?”
The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article about the hordes of people pledging not to buy anything in 2025. The article describes various people all pledging to cut spending to pay off debt, save money or meet certain goals. People cite high cost of living and inflation as key reasons as well. Tariffs While…
Banking Cyber-security Has Gone Insane!
I’ve now had three different incidents with banking cybersecurity that has resulted in major inconveniences. Wise I use Wise app to transfer money back and forth from the U.S. to Europe. The app and service has been pretty good but lately they have gone insane with cyber-security. It’s already bad enough to jump through hoops…
How Much Money Is Needed To Retire?
One of the most annoying questions I see on websites like Finance.Yahoo.com ask something like, “I have $5 million dollars, can I retire now?” It’s an annoying question because the answer is always going to be the same: it depends. If you have a $100,000/month shopping habit, then $5 million may not be enough to…
Financial Gratitude: The Kindness of Strangers
I started a series on financial regrets highlighting mistakes and/or financial regrets I made over the years but as part of the new year, I have been doing some retrospective look at the positive things in my financial life and I had some memorable moments worth sharing. Washington D.C. I started my first real corporate…
Personal Finance Lessons From Older Americans
I attribute my personal finance success to essentially other people. Over the years I learned so much from people who had higher net worth, education and success than I had but I equally learned as much from people on the other end of the spectrum. I came across this video that shows some personal finance…
2024 Year End Reflections
It’s not exactly the end of the year but I’m writing this post now because I’ll be in Europe for most of December and I have a busy itinerary so I doubt I’ll have time to write too many posts. Here are the most important reflections for me in 2024 from a personal finance perspective….
Order of Spend Operations: Taxable; Tax Free; Tax Deferred
Do you remember first learning the order of operations for a math problem such as 3 x (5 + 4) – 12 / 4 = ? The acceptable way to solve that problem is to add the parenthesis first then multiply by 3 so you get 27 then divide 12 by 4 to get 3…