Act Smarter. Live Richer.
Imagine being the typical SpaceX employee over the last few months. Your shares IPO at $135 and within a few days they peak at $225/share (up 67%) before they begin to decline. As of this morning they sit at around $139, or about 3% above the IPO price. Given this, what percentage of your shares would you sell once your lock-up ends? This question isn't just relevant to SpaceX employees, but to…
What if I told you that $100 at 25 is worth $500 at 65, even after we adjust for inflation? Well...it is. There's an unspoken belief in personal finance that a dollar is always worth a dollar (putting inflation aside). We assume that spending $100 today would bring the same amount of joy as spending $100 (inflation-adjusted) in the future. But it won't. Why? Because of how we experience time as we…
I’ve seen a lot of discussions this year around maximizing freedom and optionality. For example, consider this tweet : If you ever get up $1M in cash Buy a new modern apartment in the UAE for like $550k (you have zero property tax). Once you own it, it’s actually yours, and the only thing you pay is utilities and internet. No property tax, no municipality bs, no random fees like in other…
A year ago, I published my second book The Wealth Ladder . It's sold over 100,000 copies worldwide and hit the New York Times bestseller list in its third week of publication. At the time, I was thrilled that my work was finally getting some mainstream media attention. After nine years of writing online, it felt like I had finally made it to the big leagues. But since then, I've learned that many…
As stocks have hit new all-time highs in recent months, I've seen an increasing number of people argue that stocks aren't becoming more valuable, the dollar is becoming less valuable. Investor Lee Roach articulated this "debasement theory" in a recent Twitter/X post : The federal government is running a 7% structural deficit with no political coalition in either party willing to address it. The…
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.…
A few months ago I saw this video of Kevin O'Leary (Mr. Wonderful) arguing that $5M was enough for a lifetime of financial security. On the surface it seems hard to argue with this, but it was how O'Leary recommended investing this money that gave me pause. As he said: I tell everybody this. You should strive very hard if you're an entrepreneur to have $5M in T-Bills. Not in anything else, just…
I recently saw this video where Anna Stansbury, an assistant professor at MIT, explains that people who grew up in poverty end up earning less than their more affluent peers, even when they attended the same university: We know that socio-economic background matters for how well someone does in school, whether they get the chance to go to university, what kind of university they go to, what kind…
Working in England in the 14th century was difficult to say the least. Between the harsh conditions and low wages, you also had to fight against the occasional disease outbreak and a repressive government. As the Black Death spread across England, killing anywhere from 30%-50% of the population, King Edward III issued a decree to freeze wages and prevent workers from asking for more. Anton Howes…
This week SpaceX is having its initial public offering (IPO) where it plans to raise $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation . Anthropic and OpenAI have their own IPO plans for later this year. With these highly valued companies coming to market, there's been a lot of discussion around how index providers will include them in their funds. Index funds are governed by a set of inclusion criteria…