About

About Me

My name is Nick, I’m 26, and I am a saver. I like to check my bank account balances daily, I pay off my credit card bill every month, and I get excited about high yield checking accounts. I’m finally at that point in life where I can say that I am financially independent, and as a result I am thinking about many financial issues for the first time. This blog is about those questions – and the answers that I’ve come up with.

Before you read any further, you should know that I am not financial professional and that I do not have a degree in finance. I have Master’s degree in City Planning (think Architecture, Real Estate, and Policy all mixed together) so I am pretty handy with some real estate finance topics. Other than that tangential connection to finance though, I am just your average working professional armed with an internet connection and Microsoft excel.

About the Blog

When I first started doing my own research on personal finance, I was amazed at how unhelpful some of the financial advice books and articles were.  Typical columns you read online or in the newspaper have a funny way of telling you that you are doing something wrong, but avoid telling you actually how to fix it.  For instance, a column might say “Save more, the key to financial stability is to pay yourself first!”  Great, thanks for that gem of advice, but now I have more questions than I did before:  How much should I be saving a month?  What kind of bank account should I put the money in? Should I be buying stocks with this savings? If so what kind of stocks?  I think you get the idea.  These were the kind of questions I would get stuck on, and to me, they were paralyzing.  Having someone tell me to save more, or to diversify my portfolio – without step by step instructions on how to do it – was worthless.

I encountered exactly this type of shallow advice right after I landed my first job.  I wanted the answer to a seemingly simple question:  How should I save for retirement? As you might guess, there are lots of articles telling you that yes, you should in fact save for retirement. But I couldn’t find any articles that would take me through a logical thought process and tell me exactly what fund I should buy and which broker I should use.  As a result I ended up doing hours of research on my own, and when I was done I had a 12 page word document and 4 different spreadsheets.  It seemed silly that no one else would benefit from what I saw as the ultimate solution, so I started the blog and made my first post about retirement investing.

Of course, there is a small part of me that hopes this blog will become super popular and will get me some kind of sweet book deal – but I’m not delusional.   The real purpose of the blog is that it is a place for me to record  research about my latest financial questions, and arrive at a decision through the act of writing a post.  Hopefully, by making my research available online, I’ll be able to help others with the same question too.