Master wealth-building strategies like "Buy, Borrow, Die" with The Perfect Portfolio by @markjquann. Learn from top experts to secure your financial future.
Joined August 2024
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Compound interest is not the miracle people quote at you. Time is.
The arithmetic only looks magical because it has been running a long while. So the useful question is not what rate can I get. It is how soon does this start, and how rarely do I interrupt it.
Starting at 58 still works. It works differently than starting at 28, and that difference is a plan, not a verdict.
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Ask the person managing your money how they are paid. Then watch how long the answer takes.
Fee, commission, salary, or a mix. All legitimate, and all of them shape what you are likely to hear. Someone with nothing to hide answers in a sentence. Someone who needs four minutes and never reaches a number has answered you anyway.
I charge for education directly, which is its own answer, bias included.
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Veterans Day. No lesson from me today and nothing to sell.
Thank you to those who served, and to the families who served alongside them.
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Seven weeks until December 31.
Things that generally have to happen before then: realising a loss, a Roth conversion counted in this tax year, certain charitable moves, taking a required distribution.
Things that can wait until April: the filing itself.
Which of these apply to you is a question for your own accountant. Educational only. Not tax, legal, or investment advice.
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A woman told me she had done everything right and still felt behind. She had saved for forty years without missing a month.
She had not done anything wrong. Nobody had ever explained the second half to her, which is how to spend it down. We teach people to save. We almost never teach them to withdraw.
She was not behind. She was unfinished, and that is a very different problem.
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The gap between what people think retirement planning is and what it actually is:
They think it is picking investments. It is mostly deciding which account the money comes out of, in what order, in which years, and what each of those choices costs in tax.
One of those is more interesting to talk about. The other one is the one that moves the number.
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Something I am not going to do: manufacture urgency about January.
The next course is almost three months out. I am telling you now because some of you need to plan around six Wednesday evenings, not because I want you anxious about a deadline that does not exist yet.
If a schedule was never going to work for you, the self-paced version is open today and has no calendar attached at all.
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Final session of this cohort tonight. Open questions, no slides.
And since people keep asking: the next live course starts Wednesday January 13, 2027. Free sessions first, as always. The first paid class is February 3 and the last is March 10.
That is nearly three months away. You have time to think about it, which is deliberate.
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Tomorrow night is the last session of this cohort.
Six weeks, a room full of people who mostly arrived convinced they were behind, and a great many questions I was glad to be asked. That part is the job.
The next live course starts Wednesday January 13. More on that tomorrow.
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theperfectportfolio retweeted
Why don’t schools teach children how MONEY actually works?
We spend 12+ years in school learning how to become EMPLOYEES, but almost NOTHING about investing, inflation, taxes, or building wealth!
Meanwhile, El Salvador is teaching financial literacy to children as young as SEVEN!
This is why I’m so excited about what @BrettPike is building at Classical Learner.
We’ve partnered with Classical Learner through @ThePerfectPortfolio to teach children how wealthy families invest, build assets, and become financially independent.
Imagine if every child started investing at age 10 instead of waiting until they’re 30 or 40!
Financial freedom starts with financial EDUCATION!
Is our education system failing our children, or doing exactly what it was designed to do?
🎥 Credit: @LinaSeiche
I wrote a book called Top 10 Ways to Avoid Taxes, so people expect me to open with something clever.
I do not. I open with boring. Know which of your accounts are pre-tax, which are after-tax, and which are Roth. Most people cannot answer that, and nearly every clever move downstream depends on the answer.
Boring first. Clever later, if at all.
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Something Michael and Melissa said that I think about often.
They did not start with a strategy. They started with high-interest credit card debt, which no strategy fixes and most financial content politely ignores.
You cannot plan around compounding while something else is compounding against you.
One student's experience. Individual results vary.
youtube.com/watch?v=lMTPZGqk…
Stephen did the things you are supposed to do. Saved steadily. Invested. Followed advice that was perfectly reasonable on its own terms.
Retirement still felt like it might not arrive.
Nothing had gone wrong. That is what makes it disorienting.
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Two things are both true about indexed universal life.
It has a legitimate place in some households. It is also one of the most oversold and most misunderstood products in personal finance, frequently sold to people it does not suit, by people paid on the sale.
I teach it either way. What I will not do is tell you it fits everybody.
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"Will we ever be able to retire?"
Michael and Melissa kept asking it. High-interest credit card debt, a young daughter, and arithmetic that would not work no matter how many times they ran it.
The question was not rhetorical. That is what makes it hard to sit with.
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If your whole financial plan lives in one person's head, that is a risk nobody has priced.
I have sat with people who inherited a portfolio and had no idea why any of it was there. The accounts were in good order. The understanding had died with the person who built them.
Write it down. One page. What you own, why you own it, and what to do if you are not here.
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Week five tonight: diversification and hedging.
The short version for anyone outside the room. Diversification is how you survive being wrong about any one thing. Hedging is what you pay so the worst case has a floor under it. Both of them cost you something, and anyone presenting either as free is selling rather than teaching.
Educational only. Not tax, legal, or investment advice.
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One question to ask your accountant before December 31: is there anything I should do this year rather than next?
Most of what can be done about your 2026 taxes has to happen before the year ends. In April they are reporting what already happened. In November they can still help you change it.
That call costs nothing and it is probably the highest-value hour of your quarter.
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I have never met anyone who built lasting wealth by predicting the market. I have met plenty who got there by being ready for it.
Ready means three things. An anchor, so a bad year never forces a sale. A buffer, so a surprise bill never reaches your investments. A schedule, so the buying happens whether or not you feel like it that month.
None of those require you to be right about next year.
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In my experience the most oversold products in this industry have the best brochures.
That is not a coincidence. A product that genuinely suits you does not need forty glossy pages. If you are handed forty, and none of them covers what it costs you or when it does not work, you have already learned something useful about the product.
Ask for the page that is missing.
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