The Illusion of “Tax Hacks”: Why Optimization Is Not a Strategy
Part 6 of the Rational Compounding Framework There’s a certain type of finance content that feels incredibly productive to read. It goes something like this: max your HSA, do the…
Buy the Dip—But Only If You Have a Deployment System
Part 5 of the Rational Compounding Framework March 2020. The S&P 500 drops 34% in 23 days. I watched three groups of people respond to the same event in completely…
The RSU Trap: When Employer Stock Becomes a Hidden Liability
Part 4 of the Rational Compounding Framework A friend at Google had a realization last year that I’ve watched play out more times than I can count. He’d been there…
Why High Earners Still Fail to Build Wealth
Part 3 of the Rational Compounding Framework There’s a specific kind of broke that doesn’t look broke. Last year I came across a thread on Blind where a $350K Meta…
The 3 Engines of Wealth: Income, Investment, and Optionality
Part 2 of the Rational Compounding Framework I know someone who made $400K last year and lives paycheck to paycheck. I know someone else who makes $120K and has $800K invested,…
The Math of Wealth: Why Compounding Rewards the Disciplined (Not the Lucky)
Part 1 of the Rational Compounding Framework There’s a conversation that happens every December at some holiday party somewhere. Someone mentions their portfolio is up 47% for the year. They caught…
The Rational Compounding Framework: A Systematic Approach to Wealth
There’s an entire generation of high earners who can’t explain their net worth. Not the number itself — most people know that — but why it is what it is,…
The Government Pays You 5%. Most People Still Don’t Know How to Collect It.
I’ve been watching the HYSA rate decline for about eighteen months now and I keep noticing the same gap: families with meaningful cash reserves sitting in savings accounts earning 3.5…
The Market Dropped. Did You Collect Your Tax Refund?
The standard mental model for investment losses is backwards. When a position in your taxable brokerage account goes down, most investors experience it as a pure negative — a paper…
The 529 Isn’t Just a College Bet. It’s a Tax Break You’re Taking This Year.
The mental model most parents have about 529 plans goes something like this: put money away for eighteen years, hope the markets cooperate, hope your kid goes to college, get…
