Summary  Welcome to our February spending post! This month, we spent a total of £2,484.   This was a good month for us. With costs of everything increasing, it seems difficult to get our spending much below this level now.    We’ve sorted our spending into the essentials—housing, food, and transport—plus a catch-all entertainment and miscellaneous category. As always, we’ll break down each area and give you the story behind any standout expenses.  CategoryAmount Housing£409 Food£745 Transport£134 Entertainment/misc£1,196 Total£2,484

I am delighted to announce that the presale event for our newest books, Post-Punk Road Show and Rock ‘N’ Roll Zero: Singles & Rarities, begins on WEDNESDAY, APRIL 14th! This is your chance to acquire these limited, special editions and collector’s packages before the general public launch. To create genuine value for this presale, those who get on board early have tangible benefits. Advance access to the books. All presale orders will ship nearly one […]

In this episode, I sit down with Drew Lee, a former engineer turned personal finance content creator, who made a bold decision to walk away from a six figure career more than once to pursue a life of flexibility and purpose.  Drew reached Coast FI, where your investments grow on their own to fund retirement, in his late 20s, and shares how that freedom changed the way he thinks about work. We talk about the […]

In case you’re not on my email list: Hi friends! ​ Spring is finally starting to peek out here in the mid-Atlantic. I can’t wait to get my bones warm and enjoy all the outdoors! ​ Did you know that DoDEA offers an online program to help CONUS mil-kids keep up with high school educational… | Read More… The post Newsletter 24 March 2026 appeared first on KateHorrell.

Don’t miss an episode of our podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors. Tune in on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Here’s the latest episode: Recently, a retired financial advisor asked me a favor. He wanted me to share his investment newsletter with you. He’s a nice guy. A solid writer. Before he retired, he was, I must admit, wildly successful in his professional career at gathering client assets. He worked for a commission broker/dealer you all have heard of. But I have a philosophical impasse with his newsletter. A problem that cannot be overcome. He writes the classic “hot stock / cold stock” newsletter. Each week, he shares why these 3 stocks are poised for a massive breakout, while those 3 stocks are going down the toilet. That is the antithesis of my investment philosophy. But you know what? His reasoning for each stock pick makes sense and sounds smart. And that’s the problem. They All Sound Smart Ask yourself this: What happens to the stock-pickers who sound dumb? It’s not a trick question. The dumb ones convince nobody of their ideas, gather no client assets, and never get off the ground. They find different jobs. They go out of business. There are no dumb-sounding stock pickers – at least not for long. The stockpickers who last years and decades – the only ones who get to share their ideas in newsletters – all sound smart. It’s a requirement. “Sounding smart” is table stakes. You cannot sound dumb. But there’s a difference between sounding smart and being smart. Or at least, being smarter than the market. I’m sure some of them actually are smart, too. They have the brains to back up their writing. I know it’s possible to beat the market. It must be. Some people are genuinely smart enough to do so. But… The Results…Aren’t Good But the market-beating results don’t look good. If we look at large-cap mutual funds, such as those seeking to beat the S&P 500, over the 20 years leading up to 2026… Over 20 years: 93% underperform the S&P Over 15 years: 97% underperform Over 10 years: 96% underperform Over 1 year (i.e. just 2025): 76% underperformed. My point is that all of these funds – 100% of them – are full of smart people, with smart ideas and smart rationale about why their stock-picking decisions are best. They all sound smart. Yet, what do the results say? “Smart” Isn’t a Good Filter A common line from a lay-investor might sound like, “You should listen to my money guy. He was telling me yesterday why Ford is actually going to define the car industry for the next 25 years. We took a big position in it.” Lots of people hear lots of “smart” stories that convince them how to pick winners and losers. A big portion of the population

Image Source: Shutterstock Downtown condo prices are making a surprising comeback in 2026, and for many buyers—especially DINK couples—it’s creating both opportunity and urgency. After a shaky period where prices dipped and demand cooled, urban real estate is showing signs of renewed strength in key markets. This shift isn’t happening everywhere, but in the right cities, prices are climbing again—and fast. If you’ve been waiting for the “perfect time” to buy, you may already be […]

For months now there’s been an online joke that anyone who doesn’t learn about AI will be a part of the “permanent underclass.” The permanent underclass represents the new have-nots of society—all of those who will be left behind in the coming AI wave. While a subset of the population will have all of their work done by LLM-powered agents, the permanent underclass will be left jobless and in perpetual destitution.  It’s a nice theory, but it has no historical precedent. For example, the share of the U.S. workforce employed on farms fell from 90 percent in 1790 to less than 2 percent today. If I came to you in 1790 and told you that 98 percent of all farming jobs would be eliminated in the future, you’d have a difficult time predicting what all of those people would be doing today. You’d have no clue that they’d be social media managers, real estate agents, data scientists, or the thousands of other roles that literally didn’t exist at the time. This is why the fear mongering around AI today is misguided. Because this technological shift will create many new roles and increase demand within existing ones. This explains why software development job postings are up over 10% over the last year despite increased reliance on AI for creating software. As Kenton Varda, a technical lead at Cloudflare, explained: Worries that software developer jobs are going away are backwards. There is SO MUCH software to build right now, that previously wasn’t possible (uses AI directly) or wasn’t cost-effective (too niche). We’re going to have more developers, and orders of magnitude more software. This phenomenon is known as Jevons’ paradox, where the increased efficiency of a given resource (e.g., software creation) leads to an increase, not decrease, in its consumption. This is going to happen across a host of different jobs and industries as a result of AI. And when it does, humans will be better off in the long run.  Some will argue that “this time is different” because AI is replacing knowledge work, not just physical work. And, if this comes to pass, what will there be left for people to do?  It’s a compelling argument, but people made similar arguments about the automation of physical work. There was literally a group of people in England in the early 1800s called the Luddites who destroyed weaving machines due to their adverse impact on textile workers. The Luddites couldn’t imagine what would replace their livelihoods and the same is true for us now. There will be future roles that require a different set of human skills that we can’t even imagine today. These skills won’t directly compete with LLMs, but will enhance them. And while the speed of AI disruption will likely be faster than previous cycles, the recovery will be as well. Since information travels much faster today than in the past, people will be able to reorganize and re-skill at a much faster pace than in prior centuries.  David

Hey, everyone – we just got back from a two-week Hawaii vacation… super cool trip. We flew down to O’ahu with our best friends, Dave and Kellie, who we’ve known for over 25 years! They stayed at an Airbnb in Waikiki for the first week. We stayed the first week with some of my other best friends, Matt and Mandi (who I’ve known even longer!), and who live in Pearl City We did a ton […]