The big index of all pages on the site

About

Advice from Experience

This is a list (roughly in order of number of times I have come across it).

Advisors

You can hire Investment Advisors or Financial Planners, to help you do the work.

Asset Allocations

After reading Asset Classes we can then start to think about Asset Allocations, i.e. of these Asset Classes what should we own, how much, and should we change our allocation…

Asset Classes

These are the different investable assets, i.e. different things you can buy with your money and a bit about when they do well and when they tend to do poorly. Note, what we…

Beating The Market

This site, and many others recommend buying “the market”, i.e. Total Stock Market funds(TSM), like FZROX/FSKAX or VTI.

Budgeting

We generally have the following expenses one needs to plan for:

Buying Cars

When I was getting ready to buy, I did some math, to figure out if owning a car was financially worth it:

Climate Change

Generally speaking Climate Change(CC) is already priced into the market. It’s unknown if it’s priced in enough. Also Blackrock and Vanguard are already pressuring companies…

Credit

Managing your credit: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-reports/

Crypto Currencies

I currently have 0% of my assets into any crypto currencies, though I have mined a few coins here or there in my time and ran a bitcoin node once for a bit in it’s very…

Debt

Debt is an interesting tool.

Economy

It’s helpful to understand how the economy works. Luckily Ray Dalio did all the hard work for us at his website or just watch his youtube video.

Expense Ratios

How Expense Ratios work, via an example.

FIKFX

What’s it for?

FTEXX

FTEXX “Fidelity® Municipal Money Market Fund” is a Money Market Fund(MMF), which means it is a stable value, 1 share of FTEXX will always be $1 USD. It’s also part of the…

FXAIX

It does, but there are really only 2 equity Mutual funds you should ever bother buying, the S&P 500 index or the Total Stock Market Index(TSM). This page is comparing…

FZROX

FZROX “Fidelity ZERO Total Market Index Fund” is a mutual fund.

Fidelity Setup

This is how I have my Fidelity accounts setup, investment/allocation strategy, and the reasoning behind my decisions. Also see [Investing].

Fixed Income

You have to pay for safety. On a real basis, after tax, etc, “safe” assets generally lose to inflation(with rare occasional exceptions).

Funds to use

Which funds to use and when to use them. Also see Fixed Income. Or you can go get lost in the weeds with Asset Classes and Asset Allocations.

HOWTO: Open and fund Roth IRA accounts

Happy Financial Independence

Welcome to Zie’s Financial Independence website.

Healthcare Costs

$20k/yr per person + deductibles does not include long term care.

Howto for Website

Note: This needs a lot of work.

Inflation

Average US inflation since 1914 is: 3.27% (1914 -> 2023)

Inheritance

“Never spend the “corpus” (also known as the capital) you were left. Steward your assets to leave even more to your children, and then teach them to do the same. And…

Insurance

Most of us can’t afford to pay off someone’s life if we run over them with a car, so we have auto insurance. Most of us can’t afford to replace our entire house, so we buy…

International Investing

If your country is roughly 50% of total worldwide market like the USA, then there is a serious question, do you need to invest internationally?

Investing

First things first, invest in yourself. Concentrate on improving yourself (better paying job, more education, exercise and health, etc). That will be the single largest…

Investing Theory

Investment Plans

Investing should come with a plan, but it never does. Here are some plans from very very lazy to Do It Yourself(DIY) plans.

Legal Information

I’m not a financial advisor and have no legal relationship with the SEC or other financial regulatory bodies. I’m happy to talk about my decisions in my life and what I…

Market Crashes

Source: https://www.morningstar.com/portfolios/6-things-know-about-stock-market-crashes-downturns

Math for Investing

source Assumptions: 5% real CAGR, 25X expenses

Money

It’s also helpful to understand how the [economy] works as part of this talk about money.

Money Markets and Cash

TODO: add more.

Paper Certificates

If you want to give a paper certificate to someone For those following along, you have a few choices:

Pensions

Pensions are going the way of the Wooly Mammoth, but you can still find them on occasion.

Retirement Accounts

Retirement accounts are the special tax-advantaged accounts meant for retirement that are generally always better than a taxable brokerage account, but not always.

Retiring

Once you are ready to start taking money out of your investments, i.e. retire, there are a bunch of options:

Risk v Reward

When it comes to Investing, we should talk about risk vs reward.

Savings Rate Example

We are going to show how to retire in about 15 years through the power of investing, without ever using more math than addition(+), subtraction(-), multiplication(*) and…

Taxable Investing

Rebalance only with:

Taxes

There are generally only 3 times you are taxed on invested money:

Tools and Resources

The US govt mostly does.

Treasuries

If you are 90% stocks, then go 10% long term treasuries.

Treasury Inflation Protected Securities(TIPS)

At current yields (as of 2024-11-15) a 30 year TIPS ladder can provide a a Safe Withdrawal Rate of 4.53%, and a real yield of 2.26%.

US Sources

They arguably started in 1790 and have been continuing ever since on occasion. The most recent was in 1979.

USFS firefighter retirement scenario

One of the people I love and care about is just starting out with the USFS, so I want to generate a reasonable retirement plan for them. Firefighters tend to retire younger…

Vanguard Total World Stock ETF (VT)

Holds every publicly traded stock in the entire world for 0.08% Expense Ratio(ER).

TODO: talk more about them.