It’s December and I finally made some decisions around tax planning for 2025. As your income grows higher and higher, tax planning becomes a core part of your long term strategy. W-2 Income I decided to defer about 1/4 of my income for 2025 in the company deferred compensation plan and I will also be…
Category: Investments
Using Swiss Currency To Hedge Your Investment Portfolio
There are many ways to hedge an investment portfolio especially if you have a majority of your investments in the U.S. market and indexes such as the S&P 500. One of my occasional tools is to hedge my portfolio through purchases of FXF or it’s related options. SPY vs FXF Divergences I asked AI to…
Stock Market Frenzy
It’s the dot com bubble all over again! I’ve spent a few days researching topics and opinions on Reddit and other social media and there is quite a bit of stock market exuberance. The S&P seems to be breaking all new highs on a daily basis, bitcoin broke $80000 this week and keeps climbing and…
XPAY, IRMAA, Medicare Premiums & AI
Does the title of this post have you confused? Well bear with me as I explain…. XPAY XPAY is a new ETF that does nothing more than give you your money back. If you invest $10,000 in XPAY, at the end of five years you’ll have gotten all your money back because it will give…
AI: Three Bucket Portfolio Allocations
I’ve been playing with AI again and this time I asked it about various financial retirement scenarios but this one feels worthy of sharing. Background: I asked ChatGPT to allocate the following buckets of money from various retirement accounts from whatever ETFs it thought was best. The table below represents how ChatGPT allocated the funds…
Order of Spend Operations: Taxable; Tax Free; Tax Deferred
Do you remember first learning the order of operations for a math problem such as 3 x (5 + 4) – 12 / 4 = ? The acceptable way to solve that problem is to add the parenthesis first then multiply by 3 so you get 27 then divide 12 by 4 to get 3…
ETF Covered Calls On IWM – Probabilistic Determination
One of my favorite income generating strategies is to write covered calls on index funds. My favorite one to do this on is IWM. But what’s my approach & strategy? I generally like to write covered calls 45 to 75 days out so I decided to share my strategy here for anyone interested however this…
Lost Decades, Moves To Cash & Sequence of Returns
A Wealth of Common Sense had a great post about the Sequence of Returns which is a must read because it fits into a theme I’ve been writing about for a while now. The Sequence of Returns post makes the argument that the time to buy stocks is when they’re getting hammered because ultimately, when…
Health Insurance Premium Up 7% For 2025
It’s that time of the year when company’s start their health insurance enrollment for next year and I got a big surprise when I logged on to check what the cost would be next year. The health insurance premiums went up 7 percent. This was on top of about 7 percent from the year before…
Financial Planning Software Overview
After several disappointing discussions with “financial advisors” I decided to take matter into my own hands and start researching the software these firms use and look for my own Do-It-Yourself apps. Here is a list of what I’ve come up with so far after visiting dozens of websites and watching dozens of YouTube videos. Professional…