Skip to content

“Simple tricks” to a $264 retirement fortune

I didn’t come up with this clickbaity title, the Washington Post did. 🙂

But read the whole thing – it has a lot of interesting nuggets in there and there isn’t anything he did that you can’t do. He invested in stocks, swung for the fences, did a backdoor Roth, etc.

The simple tricks that turned one investor’s $70,000 retirement account into a $264 million fortune [Washington Post] – “It quickly became clear that Weschler wanted to show that even though his initial IRA stake grew more than 300,000 percent from 1989 to 2018, unlike Peter Thiel he hadn’t played any insider games by having his IRA pay mega-cheap prices for securities that regular people couldn’t buy. Weschler said he had put up his numbers by investing in only publicly available securities.”

6 things I wish I knew the day I started Berklee [Derek Sivers] – Derek Sivers gives a talk to incoming first-year students at the Berklee College of Music in 2008. Like much of Sivers’ writing, it’s concise and without fluff. It’s also a non-stop firehose of good advice that doesn’t give you a choice but to take it all in. Replace Berklee with life and it still applies.

2 Years of FIRE: Life After an Early Exit From Medicine [Physician on FIRE] – “It’s been two years since I had surgeons, nurses, and patients depending on me to be in a certain place at a certain time to perform as an anesthesiologist. It’s been two years since I donned scrubs as an outfit, and I doubt I’ll ever wear them again. As FIRE bloggers tend to do, I like to reflect upon my past life in a demanding career and celebrate the anniversaries of my departure date. August 12th, 2019 was that date for me, so let’s recap the life I’ve been leading for these past two years and the lessons I continue to learn, shall we?”

The Fun Scale [REI Blog] – “Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect. It usually begins with the best intentions, and then things get carried away. Riding your bicycle across the country. Doing an ultramarathon. Working out till you puke, and, usually, ice and alpine climbing. Also surely familiar to mothers, at least during childbirth and the dreaded teenage years.”