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…
Category: Financial Odyssey
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…
AI: Using The Pareto Distribution For Investing
AI is starting to know me too well. I was working on fractal image generation related to something I was researching but my conversation with AI turned to finance as I had just asked AI about finance right before I started the fractal talk. AI suggested if i was interested in knowing how to leverage…
Health Insurance Premium Up 7% For 2025
It’s that time of the year when company’s start their health insurance enrollment for next year and I got a big surprise when I logged on to check what the cost would be next year. The health insurance premiums went up 7 percent. This was on top of about 7 percent from the year before…
The Great Retirement Debate: 4% or More?
I read and watch a lot of videos on retirement because that’s the next big stage in my life so I want to maximize my knowledge around the topic. The big debate for the past year has been about what is the safe withdrawal rate for your portfolio. Dave Ramsey thinks it can be 8%…
SPY All Time Highs – I’m Buying More Puts
Every time SPY spikes to all time highs, I tend to buy PUTS on SPY as a hedge. It’s no different this week and you can read about my past SPY Put buying in August here and and September here. So what did I buy? I bought $570 Puts for June 2025. A few of…