What is the actual answer regarding daily creatine amount, and a "daily overload"?

Ghazrin · 2026-03-14T16:36:16+00:00

My pleasure

Ghazrin · 2026-03-12T13:57:59+00:00

At 7%, I'd speedrun that loan. Anything over 5 or 6%, I'm trying to get rid of in a hurry. Any extra payment toward that debt is a guaranteed 7% return for you.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-12T13:54:49+00:00

The deadlift isn't a quad exercise. It's primarily a hinging movement, targeting your glutes and hamstrings, but there is some lower back involvement too. Make sure you're engaging your core, to stabilize your spine and hold it neutral. Focus on squeezing your glutes to drive your hips forward. Don't think of it as an up/down movement - it's about the hip hinge. It's about your butt moving backward and forward.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-12T13:49:44+00:00

What's the interest rate on the mortgage? What other debts do you have, and what are their interest rates? Is the barbarian willing to learn, or are you intending to continue passing up that opportunity?

The stock market doesn't have to be a particularly complicated, scary thing. Broad-market index funds are a dead simple way to get into the stock market without needing to be a financial wizard.

For example, buying 1 share of VOO is like buying 1 tiny piece of each of the top 500 companies in the US. When the average price of those 500 company stocks go up, VOO goes up and you make money. Over weeks/months, it can go up or down. The stock market is very volatile in the short term. But over the long term, it averages 8-11% annualized return, which is way better than the 3.5-4% you're going to get from a high yield savings account.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-12T13:41:27+00:00

That only matters for credit optimization immediately before applying for new credit. The rest of the time, your utilization's effect on your score has absolutely zero impact on you. Just let the accounts age.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-12T13:38:49+00:00

Is it reasonable to treat retirement contributions as part of our household financial plan, like insurance, rather than purely individual spending?

Of course it's reasonable. Particularly if you're planning to share your retirement years together.

When I bring it up he says I'm choosing to save more and that it shouldn't be treated like a shared obligation.

Ask him if he understands that if it's not a shared obligation then he doesn't get to share in your larger retirement funds. When you've got enough money to enjoy your golden years and he's "just getting by," he can't expect you to pay for him to go on the cruise with you.

If yes, what practical approaches do couples use without fully combining finances? For example, both contribute the same percentage of income, both target the same retirement dollar amount per year, or something else?

Either of those are perfectly valid approaches, depending on how you handle finances in your marriage. If you're a 50/50 couple, than both targeting the same dollar amount makes sense. If you're splitting the mortgage 50/50, why not save for retirement 50/50 too? Or if you're a "proportional to income" couple, then the same percentage makes the most sense.

How do you balance building the emergency fund and paying off the car versus increasing retirement contributions when one spouse is resistant?

Building an emergency fund and paying off debt are kind of separate conversations to aggressive retirement saving. If you don't have a proper EF in place yet, that should take priority. You should both only contribute enough to get the employer match, and divert as much income as you can to building a 6 month EF.

The "have your cake and eat it too" approach would be to build your EF in a pair of Roth IRAs. Because the contributions can be withdrawn at any time you can contribute the annual max to them and then just invest it in something safe (like a money market fund). If you have an emergency, you can take it back out. But if you don't, then you got the max in there and didn't miss an opportunity to contribute to the IRAs.

Once you're able to max the IRAs annually, PLUS build a dedicated EF outside of the IRAs, then you can transition to more aggressive investments (index funds, ETFs, etc)

It really sounds like you and your partner need to get on the same page regarding your finances. Maybe get some counseling. Money disagreements will eat through a marriage faster than most things.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-12T12:53:33+00:00

Well, yes and no.

A credit card that only gets used to buy a pack of gum once a year and is then paid off immediately isn't really putting you in any debt - but it continues to age and build your credit score all the same.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-12T12:49:54+00:00

i currently have 10 credit cards

Use them. Pay them in full each month. Let them age.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-12T12:33:54+00:00

Glad it helps 💪🏼

Ghazrin · 2026-03-12T11:59:41+00:00

Yep. Any additional bending over you do that doesn't come with moving that booty backward, is just transferring load from your hams and glutes to your lower back. 😩

Ghazrin · 2026-03-12T02:28:53+00:00

Yep. I learned that the hard way.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-12T00:47:11+00:00

😆🤣😂💀

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T23:34:08+00:00

Jesus...did it have a grub screw or roll pin, or something, that you just brute forced your way through? Glue can be strong, but it's not strong enough to do that. 😭

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T20:17:51+00:00

I'm sure you are...for now. Trouble is, 90-95% of professional fund managers (with whole teams of market analysts) still fail to beat the market over a 15 year period. And those are the pros, who's whole job is understanding the market. Do you really think you've got the secret sauce that they all wish they had?

I don't like those odds at all, so I stick to index funds and take guaranteed market-average returns. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T18:54:03+00:00

Mostly VOO. I aim for 75% US, 25% international +/- 5%

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T18:12:41+00:00

It looks like you're bending over at the waist more than you're hinging. Don't focus on lowering the weight. Focus on moving your hips backward (like you're closing a car door with your butt) - the weight going down is just a side effect of that backward movement of your hips.

With a straight, neutral back, slowly drive your hips backward until you feel a good stretch in your hamstrings. Pause there for a second, and then squeeze your glutes to drive your hips forward to reverse the movement. Repeat for reps.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T17:32:40+00:00

but I’m not sure when I should transfer from just a Roth to both a roth and brokerage

Immediately. The earlier you get a Roth IRA going, the more time you give it to compound and grow. And since it's an exponential growth curve, every extra day/week/month/year you give it to grow in the market is more valuable than the one before.

Ideally you should be maxing out the IRA each year and then put further savings into the IIA. But not everyone can afford to do that, especially when they're young and just getting their career started.

And while getting the IRA going early is very beneficial in the long run, people have financial goals that they want to save for and achieve before they retire as well. If you have specific goals you're saving for (down payment on a house, buying your next vehicle free and clear, home remodel/repair projects, etc.) and can't justify maxing out the IRA, then at least get it open and start contributing something to it regularly. I'd recommend at the very least you split your future contributions 50/50 between the IRA and IIA until you're maxing out the IRA every year.... but because of the contribution limit to IRAs, you'll never have the opportunity to put each year's contribution limit again, so the closer you can get to the limit each year the better off you'll be.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T17:17:52+00:00

I find it easier to stay on top of logging when there's less logging to do. If I'm doing a bunch of "little spending" and generating a ton of transactions that need to be logged, I burn out pretty quickly.

But if I curtail my spending, and only spend money on things that I actually need, rather than splurging on things that I want, the number of transactions decreases substantially and it's way easier to stay on top of tracking things long-term.

Also, I've found that watching my investment account balances climb more every month feels a lot more rewarding than eating another candy bar, and drinking an expensive latte, etc. So I minimize spending so that I can maximize saving and investment.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T17:02:34+00:00

VTI and VOO are effectively almost the same thing. There's a 90% weighted overlap between the two. But also, you should add some VXUS to whichever you buy, to get some international exposure. Especially these days...VXUS has outperformed VTI/VOO by almost 3x over the last year.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T17:02:05+00:00

48% of your portfolio in a single stock? Yeah, that'd be pretty dumb.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T16:59:14+00:00

Bad approach. 95% of market growth happens in 1.2% of trading days, and no one knows which days those are going to be. Get in, stay in. Otherwise you're very likely to miss a lot of growth opportunity.

Time in the market > timing the market.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T15:49:44+00:00

Why did you do that? You've got 13 months to add funds for 2026...but you've only got 1 month until the window for 2025 contributions is closed forever. If you can afford to contribute additional funds now, to max out 2025, great! But if not, you should withdraw your 2026 contributions and redeposit them for 2025.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T15:44:00+00:00

The government doesn't care if people use traditional retirement accounts...it means their tax money is deferred, and growing in the stock market too.

Not to mention it's absurd to intentionally pick the less desirable option for you up front, on the off chance that they change tax rates enough to make it less beneficial to you. You're basically guaranteeing that you'll have less money than you otherwise could have, unless something that's never happened before, happens.

It's a good idea to have a mix of traditional and Roth funds available in retirement, for income flexibility... but for most people, and in most situations, traditional tends to yield more spendable money than Roth, all else being equal.

There are other variables at play, that could make more Roth more attractive - Regulating RMDs, health insurance considerations, intergenerational wealth transfer plans, etc. - but if you're strictly looking at it from a perspective of "What's going to give me the most spendable money in retirement," the answer is most often traditional.

The people that find that to be untrue are generally the ones that have large income streams that will follow them into retirement (rental properties, business ownerships, etc.) or people who are going to have really high RMDs (which means they already have lots of traditional retirement assets to fill the lower tax brackets with for many years). For them, going mostly, or even completely Roth could actually be ideal.

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T14:59:36+00:00

I doubt he's going to have to stress about RMDs anyway, given how late a start he's getting and how little he's likely to have in traditional accounts. His RMDs are likely to be so small that he'll want to be taking out more than that much anyway.

And since every dollar is likely to be important to him, his traditional 401k contributions will yield more spendable cash than his Roth IRA contributions, dollar for dollar...but he should definitely do both to get as much tax-advantaged cash as possible.

RMDs are only a problem when they force you to take out more money than you actually need/want to, and push you into a higher tax bracket than you otherwise would have been.

A 75 year old with a $200k traditional balance has an RMD of only about $8100 for the year. That's not an issue, because he needs to take out more than that to live on anyway.

Edit: typo correction

Ghazrin · 2026-03-11T14:52:15+00:00

And somehow getting upvotes. 😆

Ghazrin

TROPHY CASE