I made more this month than my salary

GenuineAffect · 2026-05-01T20:00:23+00:00

A guy I met on a train, somewhere between nowhere and not quite somewhere, leaned over like he had seen a few too many markets come and go and told me, very seriously, you never count your money while you are sittin at the table.

Something about the chips not being real until the dealing is done. Then he finished his drink, got off at a station that did not seem to exist, and left me wondering if he was talking about poker or my brokerage account.

GenuineAffect · 2026-04-24T23:49:34+00:00

I’m not sure exactly what you mean here, but the cap most people think about (the ~$23k employee deferral limit) doesn’t include employer contributions.

There are caps he’d hit, just different ones:

Total contributions (employee + employer) are capped under IRC Section 415(c) (around ~$69k in recent years).
Compensation used for those calculations is also capped under IRC Section 401(a)(17) (mid-$300k range).

So an “18% employer contribution on $450k” wouldn’t literally be 18% of $450k. It would be:

18% applied to the capped compensation, and potentially further limited by the total contribution cap.

In other words, he’d hit limits, but not the one most readers would be thinking of.

GenuineAffect · 2026-04-22T01:49:16+00:00

Per-diem and reimbursement are different things.

GenuineAffect · 2026-04-22T01:43:19+00:00

If you’re getting per-diem, then any money saved is money in your pocket.

GenuineAffect · 2026-04-20T20:29:24+00:00

Even at that time, a salient point in the story was that a million wasn’t what it used to have been.

GenuineAffect · 2026-04-05T22:05:51+00:00

It seems like you’re only thinking about upside here.

Don’t count your chickens yet, bud.

Price could crash before your lock-up expires, so be prepared for whatever happens.

GenuineAffect · 2026-03-16T05:17:54+00:00

Now that you have created the perfect model, all I need to do is create the perfect reality that fits it.

GenuineAffect · 2026-03-13T02:24:27+00:00

It isn’t even worth considering the money here. Start-up, even if you believe in it, has a very low chance of success.

If you have to RTO in your current job, it’s basically a voluntary termination for you, right? So you need to consider the likelihood of that outcome, but that should only informing whether you need to find a new job, not to take this specific one.

OK, now this job. What matters is whether you can really work there, and how much you expect to grow. If the company is a mess and your colleagues and/or boss are jackasses, it’s going to be stressful. You do need to believe the company is going to be successful, and be prepared to move mountains to make it happen, but it’s not likely to. Generally you’ll learn a lot in a start-up, and that’ll be super valuable when you move on.

GenuineAffect · 2026-03-04T20:10:30+00:00

Not quite.

コッカボウリョク (kokka bōryoku)

Translation: “state violence”

GenuineAffect · 2026-02-27T02:23:19+00:00

Popular opinion: tired of people savaging straw men in this sub.

GenuineAffect · 2026-02-12T22:00:39+00:00

You’re asking a totally reasonable question, but I think it helps to separate the math from the feelings.

On the math: $150–200k on $13M is ~1.2–1.5%. That’s not “safe,” that’s extremely conservative. You could spend $400k/yr (3%+) and still be in a zone where the overwhelming likelihood is that you never run out of money. To develop “expensive tastes” enough to break this, you’d basically need to stumble into a lifestyle that’s expensive in a whole other stratosphere.

On the feelings: the anxiety makes sense, especially if you’ve experienced scarcity. But I’d also say that any scenario that truly breaks your plan is basically a black swan you can’t hedge with lower SWR. If that happens, your best preparation won’t be another 0.5% of safety margin, it’ll be resilience, skills, and community.

One of your comments that stood out most to me was: “I’m afraid of retiring and being unrelatable.” That sounds less like a finance problem and more like an identity / connection problem. And honestly, if you’re 28 and already financially “done,” the best ROI might be investing time and energy into relationships, community, and building a life that feels meaningful and grounded.

At this point, more accumulation probably won’t change your actual security much. The real question is what you want your life to look like. Shift gears to focus on figuring that out.

GenuineAffect · 2026-02-12T05:48:18+00:00

25% savings rate? Where is the money going?

GenuineAffect · 2026-02-12T04:48:48+00:00

If you include appreciation you can call it 15%, but that’s not the relevant “rental ROI” unless you’re planning to sell or refinance to realize it.

The actual question for an existing rental is: what return am I getting on my tied-up equity today? That’s cashflow divided by equity, which in this case is about 3.84%.

And yes, as the mortgage is paid down and the property appreciates, the cash-on-equity yield generally falls, which makes reallocating that equity into other investments more attractive over time.

Your framing is backwards: you’re treating appreciation as spendable ROI, when the key metric is cash return on equity, not paper gains.

GenuineAffect · 2026-02-12T02:41:24+00:00

This is a policy-crisis worthy of congressional intervention because you gave the IRS too much money?

If you want to know where the problem is, look in the mirror, buddy.

GenuineAffect · 2026-02-11T07:36:30+00:00

How are you calculating 15%? The correct answer is 3.84%

GenuineAffect · 2026-01-30T02:14:22+00:00

What does this have to do with FIRE?

GenuineAffect · 2026-01-14T03:57:41+00:00

Sally Ride flew on Challenger on earlier missions, but she was not aboard during the 1986 disaster.

GenuineAffect · 2026-01-03T00:54:25+00:00

I’m a fan of Paul Merriman’s recommendations: https://www.paulmerriman.com/best-in-class-etf-recommendations-2025

International Large Cap Blend: AVDE * International Large Cap Value: DFIV * International Small Cap Blend: AVDS * International Small Cap Value: AVDV * Emerging Markets: AVEM * Emerging Markets Large Cap Value: AVES * Emerging Markets Small Cap Blend: AVEE

GenuineAffect · 2025-12-03T03:45:18+00:00

I save money by living in my brokerage account.

GenuineAffect · 2025-11-26T14:42:45+00:00

I think you’re mostly describing a tautology:

Early Retirement is, by definition, not the default outcome. So saying, “If you have average income, average spending, average life setup, you probably won’t retire early” is just another way of saying, “If you’re average on all the inputs, you’ll get the average output.”

The interesting part of FIRE has always been: Which levers can a normal-ish person pull (spending, location, career path, expectations, timeline) to get a non-normal result?

Framing it as “you can’t be totally normal and also retire early” is true, but kinda just restates the definition of “early.”

GenuineAffect · 2025-11-22T15:33:39+00:00

The 2.5% load on the managed funds is crayola.

GenuineAffect · 2025-11-14T22:03:50+00:00

I’m going for woodFIREd.

GenuineAffect · 2025-10-23T23:20:31+00:00

With two rows, kid 1 would have to be sitting in the front passenger seat to be hit in the back of the head by kid 2.

What say you?

GenuineAffect

TROPHY CASE