Marriage is not a financial cheat code. That’s important to say plainly, because too much personal-finance content swings between two extremes: either romanticizing marriage as an automatic wealth multiplier or dismissing it entirely as irrelevant to financial outcomes. Neither is true. Under the tax code, marriage can be a powerful accelerator; but...
Being single is not a financial flaw. That sentence alone needs to be said slowly, because so much of the frustration people feel around money doesn’t come from bad decisions; it comes from silently absorbing the idea that something is wrong with them for not fitting the default household model the system...
My Recent Intentional Mortgage Recast The goal wasn’t to make more money. The goal was to structure my life so it didn’t require money to hit my pocket — so more can stay pre-tax and compounding. Fit & Whealthy principle: If your lifestyle requires income to hit checking, taxes get...
Introduction Most people think the tax code is about money. It isn’t. Money is simply the unit of measurement. It is the ruler the system uses to quantify behavior, reward certain structures, and apply friction to others. The tax code itself is not primarily financial—it is social and structural. It encodes...
The Full Fit & Whealthy System Pre-Tax (Staging) + Invested Tax Savings (Taxable Buddy) + Harvesting + Conversion Harvesting + Margin Optionality Most people talk about pre-tax vs Roth like it’s a permanent fork in the road. Pick one. Commit forever. Hope your assumptions about income, life, markets, and tax...
Why I Keep Investing Simple, Focus on My Work, and Treat Wealth Like Physical Fitness My investment strategy is intentionally simple — not because I don’t understand complexity, but because I understand where complexity actually belongs. I buy VT — Vanguard Total World Stock ETF — and then I go to sleep. That...
Money is never just math. As financial therapist Aja Evans, author of ‘Feel Good Finance’ teaches, our relationship with money is shaped far more by emotion than by optimization. Every financial decision—how much we save, how we invest, how we react to surprises—is filtered through lived experience, nervous system responses, and...
When major downturns hit—real ones, not the everyday noise—I don’t panic. I don’t freeze. And I don’t pretend I can predict the exact bottom. I prepare for 30–40% market drawdowns, because history says they will happen. The question isn’t if—it’s how you react when they do. When pre-tax, tax-deferred accounts...
What in the World Is a QPLO? A Qualified Plan Loan Offset (QPLO) is one of the most misunderstood mechanics in retirement planning, largely because it sits at the intersection of 401(k) loan rules, job transitions, and tax reporting, and most people only ever learned the old version of how this worked....
Liquidity, Control, and the Emotional Safety of Accessible Capital As one of my readers, I know you already know this about me: I am a big fan of investing heavily in pre-tax accounts early and then methodically converting those dollars into Roth accounts over time. That framework has served me...
