Retiring Soon
Five-to-ten years from retirement: shift from accumulation to decumulation. Roth conversions, Social Security timing, healthcare bridge, sequence-of-returns risk, and behavioral discipline at the exact moment it matters most.
Who it’s for: Pre-retirees within 5-10 years of stopping work; their advisors; adult-children helping parents plan.
Start this track → — no account needed; the lessons are free.
Personal Finance Foundations
- Emergency Fund: Your Financial Foundation — Emergency fund basics: why a cash reserve for surprises is the foundation of investing -- how much to save and where to keep it, explained for beginners.
- Compound Interest: The Eighth Wonder of the World — The future-value formula and the Rule of 72: why starting ten years earlier can more than double a retirement balance, and how the same math compounds debt.
- Inflation: Why Your Cash Quietly Loses Value — How inflation erodes purchasing power -- what a fixed sum buys 30 years later, the Fisher approximation for real returns, and why idle cash quietly loses value.
- Tax-Advantaged Accounts: The Match You Might Be Missing — How 401(k), IRA, Roth, and HSA accounts differ in tax treatment, why an employer match is an instant return, and the order to fill them under annual IRS limits.
- Roth IRA Income Limits and the Backdoor — How Roth IRA income phase-out ranges work, the two steps of a backdoor Roth, the pro-rata rule that can tax a conversion, and why Form 8606 must be filed.
- Index Funds: Why Most Active Funds Underperform — Why most active large-cap funds trail their index over 15-year windows (SPIVA data), and how a small expense-ratio gap compounds into a large 30-year cost.
- Debt Management: Good Debt vs. Bad Debt — Good debt vs bad debt by rate and asset behavior, federal student-loan repayment paths including the new RAP plan, and avalanche vs snowball payoff methods.
- Insurance: Protecting What You’ve Built — Which risks to insure and which to self-insure, why disability coverage is the most overlooked policy, and how raising deductibles lowers premiums.
- Spending It Down: Decumulation and the 4% Rule — The 4 percent rule as a starting point for retirement withdrawals, why sequence-of-returns risk matters most early, and the order to draw down accounts.
Understanding Bonds and Fixed Income
- What Is a Bond? — What is a bond? A bond is a loan to a company or government that pays you fixed interest (the coupon) and returns your principal at maturity. Explained simply.
- Price vs Yield: The Seesaw Relationship — Why bond prices and yields always move in opposite directions, how a 5% bond reprices as rates change, and the yield-to-maturity approximation formula.
- Duration: Measuring Interest Rate Risk — What bond duration measures, how to estimate a price change from a one-point rate move, and why 30-year Treasuries swing far more than 2-year notes.
Capital Markets
- Treasury Securities Essentials — How T-bills, notes, bonds, and TIPS differ, why accrued interest separates clean from dirty price, and why the 10-year yield anchors every other rate.
- Understanding Yield Curves — How to read normal, flat, steep, and inverted yield curves, plus the forward-rate and term-premium mechanics that turn curve shape into a rate forecast.
Personal Finance → Value Investing
- Diversification: Don't Put All Eggs in One Basket — Diversification in order: splitting money across asset classes by time horizon, then world regions, then vehicles -- and why one total-market fund does most of it.
Portfolio Risk Management
- Risk Metrics: Sharpe, Beta, and Drawdown — Sharpe ratio, beta, and maximum drawdown in practice: what each metric measures, why beta times the market move sets your expectation, and how to read your own numbers.
Behavioral Finance: The Investor's Mind
- Loss Aversion: Why Losses Hurt Twice as Much — Why losses hurt roughly twice as much as gains please: the disposition effect it drives, the breakeven trap, and rules-based selling that beats the bias.
- Recency Bias: The Tyranny of Recent Events — How recency bias overweights the latest move: why retail flows peak at market tops, and using base rates instead of recent memory to set expectations.
- Disposition Effect: Selling Winners, Holding Losers — The disposition effect -- selling winners, holding losers: Odean's brokerage-account evidence, its prospect theory roots, and the two-question Munger test.