It’s been a wonderful year for me and as I reflect back on my posts for the year I realize there are a few themes at play.
Travel
My first post for 2025 was a bit of a rant about over tourism in Europe. That post foreshadowed a key them of 2025 for me, international travel. This year I did extended trips to Asia, South America, and Europe.
I was able to travel so much because I got laid off at the end of May with a generous severance package that enabled me to travel freely for long periods of time. It also helps that I have plenty of money, lots of hotel and airline points so that most of my travel was practically free.
Money
On the investment front, I started the year with IWM and finished the year liquidating most of my position (margin call image below). I took profits over and over again on this ETF using options. I also loaded up on municipal bonds throughout the year, switched my investment strategy for safety with net credit collars, and ended up getting a new job. Surprisingly, I didn’t write a post on rental properties this year, this income stream is so passive that I sometimes forget that I have it!
AI
But the biggest transformation for me in 2025 has been using AI. I now use AI daily and even wrote this post foreshadowing how deeply ingrained AI would become in my life before I even knew what I was talking about back in January.
When I look back on that post from January, it has an impressive list of things that I use AI for now: music, art, entertainment, travel, productivity; But it all pales in comparison to creating my own financial apps for finding base put ratios, equity put ratios, and net credit collars.
AI is winning so easily that people are getting openly mad about it now. I am truly sympathetic for young people trying to find their way in the world right now because as AI improves it will decimate most “office” jobs and they will have to revert to physical labor jobs like plumbing, electrician, carpenter, nurses and doctors. If AI ever gets embedded into a functioning robot then even those jobs might be in danger.
Final Reflections
The hardest reflection however is the fact that I’m getting old. Sure I feel fine and I’m very active traveling the world and doing a variety of things but many of my peers, friends, and family are getting older and sicker and I see myself with their illnesses at some point in the future and I know I am about to start the last best decade of my life as things go downhill shortly thereafter. I’m ok with it, I’ve had a great life and wouldn’t change too many things if I had to do it all over again. In the end, I really did get rich slick!