Category Archive

One of the things I love about blogging most is the historical reference points left in the posts I publish. I started a business in early 2019 with the full intention of selling it. Some people dream of building a business that they run and then pass on to the next generation. In contrast, the business I created was built to sell from inception to help accelerate my big hairy audacious goal of achieving a $10,000,000 net worth. The original goal was to accomplish this in 20 years or by the time I was 48. Fortunately, that timeline has proven to be very conservative and has actually happened in approximately seven years – hello $10,000,000. I say “fortunately” because my …

Seven years ago I got this wild idea to chase an absurd net worth goal. At least it seemed absurd at the time to the outside looking in. We had just ended the year (2014) with a net worth of $181,364 and I published my $10M goal in early 2015. In that moment, we were only shy of hitting that goal by $9,818,636. Yeah. Crackpot or not, I allotted 20 years to hit this goal by the time my wife and I would be 48 years old. Spoiler alert: Not only did we exceed that crazy original goal, we did it in less than seven years. In the original blueprint, I had called out the fact that I believed that …

I recently read Josh Brown’s book How I Invest My Money: Finance Experts Reveal How They Save, Spend, and Invest and thought it would be a good exercise for me to take Josh up on his offer at the end of the book to write my own essay on how I invest my money. Think of this as my money philosophy defined by a set of standard operating procedures. The first time I really thought about money in a structured way was back in 2015 when a blogger friend of mine asked me to participate in the “personal finance index card challenge,” where you get only a single index card to convey your best financial advice. The idea was that …

With so much uncertainty in the world, it’s difficult for me to allocate incremental capital to traditional investments right now. I’m currently dumbfounded by the performance of the stock market and I’m waiting to see how this pandemic spills over to the real estate market. While I wait, I continue to build our war chest of cash, while simultaneously looking for creative ways to manufacture financial returns. Since mid-March when the COVID-19 outbreak started dominating our lives, I shifted the majority of my focus to things I could control, like our expenses. I’ve gone through a detailed analysis of all of our outflows looking for opportunities to cut out unnecessary spending. Like many, if not most, we are naturally going …

About four years ago, I wrote a post outlining what I believed to be the ten guidelines a Freedom Fighter could follow in order to reach Financial Independence in 10-20 years. Here they are now shared as The Tenacious Ten! That post, paired with this infographic, succinctly distills the principles I’ve personally followed and espoused on this blog over the last five (going on six) years. Since it’s been over four years since solidifying these, would I change anything? Yes, there are a few modifications or tweaks I would make. What I would change #6 Learn Two Basic Investment Strategies with Options. I still think anyone that actively manages their money and invests in the stock market should understand and be …

I wrote myself a letter back in October of 2012 wherein I set out a vision for my life 10 years into the future. I can’t believe it has already been seven years since writing that letter (2.5 years since I shared it here on the blog). Many of the things I envisioned accomplishing have already come to fruition. I feel fortunate to have had such a clear vision of what I wanted to accomplish and to know where I wanted to be in my future life. I don’t think I would have been able to accomplish so much in a relatively short period of time if it were not for the act of sitting down, thinking through, and writing …

You can find all of Zach’s previous posts here. Today Zach is going to challenge you to start exploring how you want to spend your time. In the post below, Zach is going to ask you to participate in a thought experiment where you contemplate what life would be like if money were no object. I would say this is an exercise in lifestyle design. I’ve found this to be a very useful exercise personally, one that I regularly go through. It’s also been very useful in gaining more clarity and autonomy over my own time faster than it would have ever happened had I left it to chance, or by waiting to hit Financial Independence (see related links at …