What if we’re giving exercise too much credit? It’s not uncommon for clients to come to me who are exercising regularly and are still overwhelmed. Or exercising regularly and still not losing weight. At first glance, that seems confusing. After all, we’ve been taught that exercise is one of the best things we can do for our mental health, emotional well-being, and physical health. But what if exercise is being asked to solve problems it […]

I used to think that perfectionism could only be a positive trait. After all, it comes with a drive to achieve many things, and to do so with a high level of excellence. When it comes to academics or athletics, perfectionism can set you apart from the crowd; in the workplace, perfectionism impresses the boss and earns promotions. But, as with any mostly-good trait, there are downsides to perfectionism — all of which stem from […]

Today was a free day, so I chose to do the optional tour to Sugarloaf Mountain. I almost always pick up the optional tours. I figure that they’ll take us to places that we’ll want to see anyway, and it’s a lot less mucking around. Zero in here. We’re waiting for the cable car. These […] The post Brazil: Day 28: Rio de Janeiro. appeared first on Burning Desire For FIRE.

Most high-achieving physicians I know do one of two things when it comes to reviewing their finances and their life. They either do a big annual reflection in January that fades by February, or they do nothing at all and just keep moving. Neither works particularly well. And I spent years doing both before I figured out why. The annual review is too infrequent. You can be drifting in the wrong direction for months before […]

Save, invest, prosper with My Own Advisor. June 2026 Dividend Income Update Hi DIY Investors! Welcome to a new month and our new tally: our June 2026 Dividend Income Update. For established readers (and any new readers that recently joined my free newsletter (thanks folks!)), this is our monthly update to share how we are now spending our retirement income. This is… Early retiree thanks to DIY investing in stocks and ETFs. The article June […]

The most common question I get when being interviewed about FIRE is “What about health care?” It’s a big, scary question. Health care costs in America, if not managed properly, can easily run into tens of thousands of dollars per year, and that can really screw over someone’s FIRE plan. So we have to deal with it, but at the same time, the reason why it’s so difficult is that the game keeps changing. Health […]

Tomorrow is the final day of the presale event, so if you’ve not already grabbed your copy of Post-Punk Road Show or Rock ‘N’ Roll Zero, with discounted pricing and extra goodies, now is a great time to swing by our new store and get yours! This is a 2-week pre-sale event. If you’re seeing this, it’s because you are a Fates On Fire insider and get special access to the limited, signed, and numbered […]

In honor of America’s 250th birthday, I decided to do a deep dive into U.S. stock returns over the past century. My goal was to answer the following question: If you had invested in U.S. stocks at a random point in the last 100 years (1926-2025), how would they perform over the next month, the next year, or the next decade? What could you actually expect to happen with your money? While U.S. stocks have returned around 7% per year (including reinvested dividends and adjusting for inflation) going back to 1871, would a 7% inflation-adjusted return be the right expectation for the next year? Surprisingly…it wouldn’t be. Why? 7% is too conservative. Yes, you read that correctly. The expected return for U.S. stocks over a 1-year period is around 9% (with dividends and adjusting for inflation). The chart below plots the distribution of these 1-year returns for the U.S. stock market over the last 100 years: If you take each return range, multiply by the probability of getting that return, and then sum them up, you’d get your expected return, which is 9.15% in this case. This expected return is higher than the 7% compound historical growth rate because of volatility on the downside. Negative returns reduce the compound historical growth rate more than they reduce a simple arithmetic average. For example, a 50% gain followed by a 50% loss is a 25% loss overall, but would yield a 0% average return. But the real takeaway from this chart isn’t the expected return, but how often high positive returns occur. For example, there’s a 47% chance that your 1-year return would exceed 10% and a 26% chance that it would exceed 20%. Of course, there’s also a 17% chance you’d lose 10% (or more), but that seems like a good trade. What about shorter time periods? Over one month, the expected return of U.S. stocks is just 0.68%. Once again, there is a wide range of outcomes around this result: Over a 3-month period, the expected return is a bit higher at 2.17%, but the return dispersion remains: It’s only when we begin to look at longer time periods that the return distribution starts to show more positive skewness (i.e., a fatter right tail than left). For example, the distribution of 5-year returns for U.S. stocks has far more weight in the right tail than the left one: In 26% of 5-year periods, U.S. stock returns exceeded 12% on an annualized basis, while in just 10% of all 5-year periods returns were below -4%. This demonstrates how U.S. stocks can trend upward (or downward) for extended periods of time. But the longer you extend your time horizon, the rarer the negative returns have been historically. Over 10 years, the probability of experiencing a negative annualized return of any kind is just 13%: And, with a 7.03% annualized return, your money was expected to roughly double every 10 years. So not only are you less likely to