Retirement

By many objective measures, 2025 was a good year. Investment returns were solid. I published another bestseller in Millionaire Milestones. My kids are healthy, happy, and continuing to grow in loving environments. On paper, I should feel satisfied. But the reality is different. The downside of writing consistently, responding to hundreds of questions, managing the […]

Happy New Year 2026 everyone! With another year wrapped up, I thought I’d do a 2025 year in review so I can one day look back fondly as an old man. Overall, I give the year an A for effort, which is all I can really control. Unfortunately, the result didn’t match the effort, as

In July 2009, I started Financial Samurai to make sense of the financial destruction unfolding at the time. I had been toying with the idea since 2006, when I graduated part time from UC Berkeley’s business school, but kept kicking the can down the road. After losing around 40 percent of my net worth in

Every year, as December rolls in and holiday lights start appearing on houses, a curious phenomenon shows up in the stock market: the Santa Claus rally. If you’re an investor, it’s the kind of quirky, seasonal pattern that’s worth understanding, both for context and for timing your year-end investment decisions. So what is it, exactly? The

As someone who has been writing about financial independence and escaping corporate America since 2009, I’ve developed several rules that serve as the backbone for achieving FIRE and staying free. They are simple, but not easy. Ignoring any one of them can set you back years. Below are the first two rules as a reminder,

As savers, we are being rewarded with higher risk-free yields. Treasury bills (T-bills), Treasury bonds, and money market funds are still paying over 4% without taking equity or credit risk. Because Treasury interest is exempt from state income tax, these instruments are especially attractive for higher earners in high-tax states like California and New York.

Conventional wisdom says we’re in a housing affordability crisis. With higher mortgage rates and higher home prices, buying a home has supposedly never been more expensive. But what if I told you this entire narrative is wrong? In reality, housing affordability could actually be at or near an all-time high. Sound crazy? Maybe. But if housing

At our core, we all just want a fair chance to compete. We don’t want handouts, and we certainly don’t want to rely on the Bank of Mom & Dad to prop us up as adults. They have their own retirement to worry about. The real satisfaction comes from seeing what we can build through

About 10 years ago, I tried logging onto SSA.gov to check my Social Security benefits. You would think after decades of paying FICA taxes (6.2% for SS, 1.45% for Medicare), the government might make it easy to see what you’re entitled to. Nope. Instead, the system demanded to physically mail me a PIN. I tried three times

The maximum employee 401(k) contribution limit for 2026 is increasing by $1,000 to $24,500 according to the IRS. For workers over 50, the catch-up contribution rises to $8,000, bringing the total to $32,500. With the median household income of roughly $80,000 today (employee 401(k) max = 30% of income), that’s a substantial amount of money to shelter in

I love Halloween, especially seeing how much fun the kids have. But for financially aware adults, the real chills don’t come from ghosts or goblins. They come from spreadsheets, surprise bills, and market meltdowns that turn your net worth chart into a horror movie graph. After over three decades of studying, working through, and writing

Despite finally having the permission to live it up in retirement, I still find it hard to spend money on things I don’t truly need. A big part of building wealth has always been about endurance and suffering. The more we can withstand—long hours, delayed gratification, and the occasional investment blowup—the greater our odds of

A poor millionaire sounds like an oxymoron, but they definitely exist. Roughly 6% of U.S. households are millionaires, yet many of them still don’t feel rich. A poor millionaire is someone worth over $1 million but unable to access much of their wealth. In other words, their net worth is highly illiquid. A layoff, bear market, or

One of the key conclusions from doing a deep-dive analysis of my IRA with Empower, is that I should be able to live it up more in retirement. In fact, we should all be able to live it up more in retirement based on a higher recommended safe withdrawal rate by Bill Bengen, one of America’s

After doing my first free Empower financial professional review back in 2014, I decided to do another investment portfolio review with them. Given the portfolio review is free for anyone with over $100,000 in investable assets, and my financial situation has changed so dramatically since then, I figured, why not spend a little time uncovering potential

If time is truly more precious than money, then spending money to buy back your time is the wisest trade of all. Here’s an example of overcoming my frugality to live a better life. Perhaps one of the main reasons I initially didn’t want to go on a family vacation to LegoLand and SeaWorld was