Episode 93 - Be direct with me

We live in an era of bad, predatory, and just down right dangerous financial products! Given that back drop, it seems like Direct Indexing may be a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. Let me share with you why I think that, what’s good, bad, and just plain interesting about direct indexing, and why you might want to pay attention.

Episode 92 - Social media is not research

Do you follow financial content on social media? If you do then you need to remember that social media is not research. At best, it’s idea generation. You should never invest based on what some random person says on social media.

What you should do is learn some key concepts about investing to make you a better investor and to help you filter the noise you get on social media. In this episode JJ talks about why you need to learn more about:

• Inflation

• Opportunity Costs

• Diversification

• Value

• Simplicity

Episode 91 - Our favorite restaurants

Once again my family joins me on our holiday special to count down our five favorite things. This year it's our five favorite restaurants.

Thank you all for a great year. I look forward to sharing more crazy saving, investing, and life nonsense in season 4 next year. Until then, from me an all the gang around the chronicles, may you and yours have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Episode 90 - What’s in the box?

Have you been asked which stock is a better investment? Have you been asked if the cheaper ETF is better than the expensive one? Well I sure have!

In this episode we try to untangle that time honored question every investor eventually gets asked. Is investment A or B the better choice?

Investments discussed Include:

• VOO - Vanguard S&P 500 Index ETF

• VTI - Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF

• VT - Vanguard Total World Stock ETF

• VXUS - Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund ETF

Join the conversation, leave us a comment!

Episode 89 - Your not so silent partner

If you have an IRA or 401k or 403b, you have a silent partner in uncle Sam. That’s because of taxes on qualified withdrawals. The Roth IRA is the cure for partnership blues. Once you get your money in a Roth IRA uncle Sam has to go hunting elsewhere for his revenue.

In this episode JJ provides another ill conceived and poorly acted skit to get his point across about the perils of partnership. Then he discusses strategy considerations for accumulators and with drawers when it comes to Roth IRAs and retirement savings. What could possibly go wrong.

Episode 88 - Is Utopia a 4 letter word?

Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Hybrid? We have all kinds of economic systems in the world today. What would a post scarcity world order look like? We have talked on this pod before about knowing the game you are playing. Would you know how to play the game of life in a post scarcity world?

In this episode we consider what a post scarcity world is, what it might look like, and what a transition to it might entail. Are you ready to make the trek through the valley of despair to reach higher ground?

Episode 87 - Alignment

What is the impact of Agentic AI? What is the impact of General AI?

In this episode we present a fictional news show inspired by the research paper AI 2027. Are any of us really ready for the future where AI becomes unaligned and where society struggles to adapt to capitalism without the value of human capital.

Episode 86 - Paris is lovely this time of year

Diversification is a great way to protect our portfolios from unexpected risk. One simple way to broaden exposure and therefore reduce risk from the stock portion of our portfolio is to buy stocks from different countries. Indexed international stock funds offer a low cost way to do this.

In this episode we will compare the performance of US vs non-US stocks and offer some suggestions on how to think about adding international stocks to your portfolio.

ETFs discussed on this episode include:

VTI - Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF (CRSP US Total Market Index)

VXUS - Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund ETF (FTSE Global All Cap ex US Index)

VOO - Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (Standard & Poor‘s 500 Index)

VEU - Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Index Fund ETF (FTSE All-World ex US Index)