When I first started my adult life, I believed the standard middle-class narrative that a good job, a house, and a 401k were the secret to a good life. I worked long, hard hours at my job trying to get a promotion and a raise, I had a big house because I believed it was an investment, and I maxed out my 401k every year hoping I would have enough to retire by sixty-five.

The reality was, however, that even though I had a good job, I wasn’t building wealth. After I realized that what I was doing wasn’t working…

Before the locked last year, my focus for stock investing was low-cost index funds. I knew the market wasn’t always efficient, but I wasn’t sure how to take advantage of it when it wasn’t.

During the crash, I was prepared to buy with cash on the side. The problem was that the S&P 500 never got back down to what I thought was a reasonable level, then it quickly took off again. After that, I decided I needed to learn how to evaluate individual stocks.

If the market as a whole could stay overpriced, maybe I could find some stocks…

No matter how you look at it, debt is powerful. It can be a force for good or bad, depending on how you use it.

As fellow author Sam Dixon Brown recently wrote in his article Stop Calling It “Good Debt”, most debt, at least as it is used by the general public, is bad debt. If used poorly, as it most often is, it will keep you running on a financial treadmill. If used wisely, however, it can help you build massive wealth and break free of the rat race.

That is why I disagree with people who say…

There have been a couple of articles published recently about people being so bad with money that they are living paycheck to paycheck even while earning $100,000 per year.

These hit home because I used to live like that.

The first article was this piece by Rocco Pendola, who chastises us for being so bad with money. The second article was a follow-up posted by Ben Le Fort, who said that while we deserve to be criticized, we are just following the path pushed by society.

They are both right.

In this article, I will walk through my story so…

The majority of articles I have read about the financial independence / retire early (FIRE) movement proscribe a fairly simple, straightforward plan such as that laid out by Mr. Money Mustache many years ago:

• reduce your spending to save a massive portion of your take-home pay every month (targeting more than 50%)
• invest everything in low-cost index funds
• retire once the balance in your investments is 25 times what you need to live, without increasing your spending (allows for a 4% withdrawal rate)
• hope the market continues to go up enough so that your withdraws don’t pull down your balance…

Stories you may have missed.

Summer has come to an end. Kids are back in school, trying not to catch Covid. Just yesterday two grades were shut down to send the kids home to quarantine for 7 days as they had positive cases. Hopefully, we’ll keep learning how to move forward with everything going on!

I can’t help much with Covid, but I hope I can help you some with your financial education and your path to build wealth. Below are the top 3 stories from Building Arks in August.

If you want to learn about how to create wealth…

Like most of us, I grew up believing that the way to get ahead in life was to focus on my job, my house, and my 401k. I worked long hours and was well-paid for it, owned a beautiful house in the suburbs, and maxed out my retirement plan every year.

After a few years of doing this, however, I realized that I was not building wealth as fast as I had hoped. Much of my money was tied up in my house, and most of my cash flow was used to pay bills (mortgage, car payments, etc.). …

Why you shouldn’t listen to just anyone about investing.

I often run across articles, written by people who have never been landlords, talking about how horrible it is to own real estate. Just today I read an article by Tim Denning titled “I Don’t Ever Want To Be A Stinking Landlord” that I found full of inaccurate statements.

Tim is quite popular on Medium, but his guidance is often questionable, in my opinion. He says his background is in finance, but he seems to have made his money as a writer, rather than an investor, best I can tell. …