For 2024 I published my side hustle income report each month to maintain accountability. This year, my main goal is to be profitable. To maintain transparency with this goal, I’ll be reporting on both income and expenses this year. I haven’t been profitable for years. My day job has been subsidizing my side hustles. My goal this year is to stop that cycle. Working at my business regularly helps me to sleep better at night, […]

There aren’t many negatives to FI life, but one of them may be this: It’s a lot easier to say Yes to all of the fun that comes your way. I’ve been home exactly one weekend this year. The weekend of January 4th, I was messing around in NYC. I got to see Paul Rudolph’s […] The post Old MR2, Politics, And An Angry Iguana appeared first on 1500 Days to Freedom.

A few weeks ago, I had a bad accident that brought me to the emergency room. I was playing outside with my daughter when in a moment, I lost consciousness and collapsed onto the ground. I woke up not knowing what happened, only to see my daughter next to me while there was blood all over my clothes. It turns out that I fainted and my head struck concrete (along with a gardening bed and […]

Over the past several years, my portfolio has grown considerably through a combination of good returns plus regular savings and contributions. These days, I’m comfortably in the Coast FI stage of my financial independence journey, where my portfolio is large enough that it should grow enough to cover my expenses at traditional retirement age, even if I don’t save another penny again (note that while I am at Coast FI, I’m still saving and investing […]

Consultation on the future of water runs until 23 April 2025 It is safe to say that most people are pretty fed up with water companies: The continual pollution of our rivers and seas, the high bills, the lack of investment and the excessive pay outs to bosses in pay, bonuses and dividends. But we now have a chance to do something about it. Seeking solutions for the water crisis The Independent Water Commission (IWC) […]

One of the main tenets of this website is that managing your money shouldn’t be a lot of work. If you put together a few systems, you can be lazy and let your money work for you. I almost never write about budgeting. Most every system, I’ve seen requires significant work. I don’t want to write down all my spending. A long, long time ago in a universe very far away, I tried to use […]

Personal finance 101 can open doors to amazing experiences like traveling to exotic destinations, or it can weigh you down with debt. It’s a double-edged sword: powerful and beautiful or hard and full of worry. To gain control over your personal finances is to gain control over your life. If you’re just getting started, remember: the hardest part is the start. The post Personal Finance 101 appeared first on Budget Life List.

There are many ways in which individual investors can get scammed within the financial industry. Some of these scams are well-known. Consider the classic pump and dump. You join a stock picking “community” and the people running it recommend a stock. You buy it and the price goes up. Seeing such a quick return, you buy more. Then, all of a sudden, it crashes and you lose everything. Unbeknownst to you, the people running the community sold their shares (to you) and got out on the way up. But, there are also those scams that are less well-known. These are what I’m going to be discussing today. Because it’s very easy to deceive in the world of financial services and I’ve seen just about every trick in the book.  To begin, let’s look at when outperformance isn’t really outperformance. You Outperformed Then, But How About Now? One way that active asset managers can deceive individual investors is by using historical performance charts. There is nothing wrong with historical performance charts themselves, but if you don’t use them properly, you could misadvertise your actual results. In some cases, a historical performance chart can show continued outperformance even when that outperformance no longer exists. Benn Eifert recently tweeted an example of this as an investment brain teaser (see below): Exercise for the group: your boss shows you this chart and says, “hey shouldn’t we be selling 10% OTM 1-month calls on all our stocks, won’t we get higher total returns?” What’s the problem with his reasoning? Think about Benn’s question for a few seconds before reading my take below. The core problem with this reasoning is that the performance chart above uses a linear scale on the y-axis. And, unfortunately, a linear scale won’t accurately show relative performance differences over time. In fact, such a scale can make it seem like the performance gap is growing over time even when the strategies are performing the same! Run the following thought experiment and you will see what I mean. From the last point on the chart above give each strategy a 100x return (no relative difference in performance) over the next 40 years. If you did this, the OTM strategy would have a final value of ~$154k and the S&P one would have a final value of ~$107k. Visually it will look like there is a growing divergence in performance between these two strategies though we know that this can’t be the case. Their relative performance is the same (they both went up 100x), yet it looks like one is outperforming the other. What gives? The visual divergence is merely an artifact of a prior period of outperformance. In this case, the prior period of outperformance occurred from 2000-2012. During that period the OTM strategy outperformed the S&P only strategy, but since then, the OTM strategy has actually underperformed slightly. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to figure this out simply by looking at the chart above. How do you fix this issue? There are a