Cody Berman went on The Personal Finance Podcast and described hitting financial independence right before his 26th birthday. He held about $500,000 in a Total Stock Market Index Fund, plus 11 rental units purchased…
Most retirement calculators chase a single goal: making your money last as long as possible. Jim Saulnier, host of The Retirement and IRA Show, thinks that is the wrong question. On a recent episode,…
On episode 168 of the Rich Habits Podcast, co-host Robert Croak made a pitch that sounds almost too easy to be a strategy. He noted, “The easiest stream of income you can build because…
Melissa, a 60-year-old listener of the Afford Anything podcast, called in with a clean question: she has $800,000 saved and owns two rental properties, and she wants to know whether selling one to pay…
The 2025 P-Fin Index shows that Gen Z is entering the most complex economy in decades with the weakest set of tools. Averaging just 38% on the survey, this generation scored significantly lower than…
The 2025 Northwestern Mutual Planning & Progress Study asked adults 45 and older when they expect to claim Social Security, and the answers split cleanly into two camps. Only 26% of Gen X and…
Social Security benefits are a critical income source for many seniors, but unfortunately, some people were not getting the full amount of money they deserved. That’s because of federal rules called the Government Pension…
The couple is 64. He spent 28 years at a major tech company, accumulating $423,000 in employer stock through ESPP grants and RSUs. Add another $477,000 in diversified accounts, and the household holds roughly…
A 30-year-old earning $90,000 who routes 10% of pay into a 401(k) assumes the system is working. Contributions go in, the balance grows, the statement looks healthy. What the statement does not show is…
Picture a 68-year-old retired math teacher in San Antonio. She spent 32 years in Texas classrooms, earned a $54,000 annual pension from the Teacher Retirement System (TRS), and picked up work on the side…
It’s not uncommon for middle-aged people to realize they’re not where they should be financially. “At 50, I didn’t know what a net worth was,” said Bill Yount, an emergency physician and co-host of the…
A new study from the TIAA Institute and the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center sets a deliberately low bar for retirement knowledge, then watches almost everyone walk under it. The test covers six essential…
Generation Z is understandably discouraged. There’s the horrible job market. There’s the home affordability crisis. For many, there are crushing mounds of student debt. No wonder many make bad financial decisions, living by the…
The retirement plan looked straightforward until March 2026. A 64-year-old couple in Pennsylvania had built a $2.4 million portfolio around a familiar target: roughly $96,000 a year in retirement spending supported by the classic…
A new measure of how Americans understand money has surfaced the same finding researchers have documented for nearly a decade: women score about 10 points lower than men on financial literacy, and the gap…
