I started building my personal brand as a way to exit my 9-5. Sam started hers as a way to ditch being a lawyer.

The common thread between us (and I’d argue most entrepreneurs) is that there’s no playbook. No set of rules you have to follow.

That’s the beauty of owning a business right?

No micro-managing boss giving you today’s list of tasks to check off. No clocking in and out. No permission needed to take the month of July off to go road tripping across Europe.

On the other hand, there’s also no HR department sending you 401k enrollment reminders.

No employer match boosting your portfolio in the background. No default plan you opted into without thinking about it.

Running your own business can be a double-edged sword. Especially when it comes to thinking about building wealth and retirement.

When you’re self-employed, every single piece of your financial future is an intentional choice YOU have to make.

And yet most of us were never taught the ‘what’ or ‘how’.

In today’s special guest edition of ‘Building Quiet Wealth’, I’ve teamed up with the amazing , to share our personal experiences and help you avoid the solopreneur mistakes we made.

Sam built a multi 7-figure online business completely from scratch, centered around the legal stuff you need to know in order to protect yourself and your livelihood. She’s also a fellow dog mom who is obsessed with coffee (the best kind of people IMHO).

She’s here to help you walk through the business structure decisions that shape your financial options. You know, the stuff that has to happen before the money ever hits your investment account?

And I’m going to help you with what to actually do with it once it does.

It’s the conversation we both wish someone had with us sooner.

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From Lawyer to Online Business Owner

I started my online business as a way to ditch being a lawyer – but also to pay off my law school loans. I never thought I’d get to a place where I could actually save for retirement.

At first, I did what I had to do to get my business off the ground (and to pay off those loans!).

But once I was settled in my business and realized that my early success was no temporary accident, I realized no one was coming to open a retirement account for me. Whether I felt ready or not, I opened an account and started making contributions, however small.

One of the most important decisions you can make as a business owner is what type of business entity structure you choose for your business.

Think of your business entity like choosing a structure for your house. There are different options: sole proprietorship, limited liability company (LLC), partnership, etc.

Each option comes with its own pro’s and con’s, both legally and financially.

When it comes to saving for your future as a small business owner, you want to consider both the legal and financial implications your business entity type (ie., LLC, sole proprietorship, etc.) has on you.

Under both an LLC and a sole proprietorship, the two business entity types most commonly chosen by new entrepreneurs, you have a number of different investment options:

• A Solo 401(k)

• SEP-IRA

• Simple IRA

• Personal / Traditional IRA, etc.

Personally, when I started my business as a single-member LLC and initially filed taxes as a disregarded entity (the default unless you elect to be taxed as an S-Corp), I contributed to a SEP-IRA.

Once I became an S-Corp (for taxation purposes) and hired a full-time employee, I started a company 401(k) and match program.

The biggest impact on you both financially and tax-wise comes into play with what counts as compensation.

The “employer contribution” amount changes depending on whether you are an LLC/sole proprietor or an LLC electing S-Corp taxation.

Since this area is highly individualized and the contribution amounts change annually, it’s best to speak with your own CPA or attorney to find out which options are best for you, your business, and your wallet.

Solo 401k vs. SEP-IRA

The good news: self-employed people actually have access to some of the most powerful retirement accounts available.

The frustrating part is that almost nobody explains them in plain English.

Let’s fix that.

Real quick before we dive in, like Sam said, none of this is financial advice – it’s all for educational purposes only.

We’re here to shed light on your options. We highly recommend speaking to your CPA, attorney and/or financial advisor on which product or path is right for your personal situation.

Solo 401k vs. SEP-IRA: Which one is better for you?

Both accounts let you stash away a serious amount of money tax-advantaged.

In 2026, a Solo 401k lets you contribute up to $72,000 total (as both employee and employer). And if you’re over age 50, that number jumps to $80,000 with catch-up contributions.

Keep in mind this is combined contributions – meaning it includes both what you put in as the ‘employee’, as well as what your business or company can match.

That means if you’re under age 50, you can contribute up to $36,000, and your business can match up to $36,000. That number climbs to $40,000 if you’re over 50.

A Simplified Employee Pension Individual Retirement Arrangement (SEP-IRA) maxes out at 25% of your net self-employment income, up to $72,000 as well.

The key difference?

The Solo 401k usually wins for online business owners because it lets you contribute as an “employee” first — up to $36,000 — before the income-based employer contribution kicks in.

That matters a LOT when your income is variable, because you can max out the employee side even in a year you don’t make as much money.

The SEP-IRA is simpler to open and maintain, which makes it appealing, but you’ll often end up contributing less.

Don’t forget your Roth IRA either.

If your income allows it ($168,000 or under for single filers, and $252,000 for those married, filing jointly in 2026), max this out every year. It grows tax-free, and offers tax-free withdrawals after age 59 ½ and having the account open at least five years.

Future you will be very glad you did this.

Investing Consistently Even When Your Income Isn’t

Variable income is one of the biggest reasons self-employed people, particularly women, put off investing. The logic goes: “I’ll wait until things are more stable.”

But like almost anything in life, ‘stable’ never really comes — there’s always a slower month ahead or a big expense looming.

Instead, build investing into how you handle revenue.

When a good month hits, a percentage goes straight to your retirement account — before it gets absorbed into lifestyle or business expenses.

Think of it like paying yourself twice: once for now, once for later. Even $200 in a slow month beats nothing.

The habit matters as much as the amount.

The Real Cost of Waiting

I say this with love and full transparency: every year you delay putting money aside for your future gets more expensive.

Not in a scary, shame-spiral way — in a purely mathematical way.

A 40-year-old who invests $500 a month for 25 years at a 7% average return ends up with roughly $405,000.

A 45-year-old doing the same thing for 20 years ends up with about $262,000.

Same contribution. Five fewer years. $143,000 difference.

Time is the one variable none of us can buy back.

The best day to start was ten years ago. The second best day is right now.

Bottom Line

Here’s what we want you to take away from this.

Building a business and building wealth aren’t separate conversations.

They belong in the same room, and the way your business is structured has a direct impact on what’s possible for you.

Legal decisions shape financial options. Business income becomes retirement security — but only if you set it up that way on purpose.

Neither of us can tell you exactly what to do — your situation is yours, and both legal and financial decisions deserve personalized guidance.

What we can tell you is that you deserve to see both sides of the picture clearly.

You’ve worked too hard building your business to leave the wealth building part to chance.

Start where you are. Learn what you can.

And if you’ve been putting this off — let today be the day you stop.

Always rooting for you,

Charlie (& Sam)

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📚 The 4 questions you need to ask your financial advisor today (that saved one reader over $175,000).

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📇 Need help building your portfolio together? Apply for the Quiet Wealth Woman. A 1:1 experience using your numbers where we build a roadmap to your version of financial freedom. It’s the EXACT system I used to build a 7-figure net worth from scratch by my mid-30s, with no finance background and no fancy degree.

“Max out your 401k every year.”

“Wait to retire until you can take full Social Security.”

“Every extra year you work makes your retirement safer.”

And for most of your career, this is solid advice.

However, there’s a specific moment in most people’s financial lives when they cross over from, “I have to work” to “I’m choosing to work”.

Here’s the problem…

Almost nobody notices the day it happens.

They keep commuting, keep contributing to retirement accounts, keep grinding for years after the math already set them free.

Giving up arguably the single most valuable decade of their entire retirement. Years they’ll never get back.

In this week’s newsletter I’m going to show you 3 things…

First, what I call the ‘Tipping Point’. The moment your portfolio will reach your number through growth alone with zero additional contributions.

Second, why so many people blow right past that point without realizing it (some for 5, 6, even 10+ years!).

And third, the one thing the Tipping Point costs you when you ignore it (hint: it’s not money).

Why ‘Work Until You’re 65’ Is Bad Advice

Ok, maybe not ‘bad’, but it’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Early in your career, your retirement contributions are doing the heavy lifting. Your balance is small, and what you add each year matters A LOT.

But once that flips, and your portfolio gets large enough, the growth on what you already have starts to outpace anything you could add.

Here’s an example:

A 7% return on a $1.6 million portfolio.

That’s over $110,000 per year.

That’s most than most people contribute to their retirement accounts in 3 or 4 years combined.

The bigger your balance gets, the less your continued work actually changes where you end up.

This is the part early retirement really hinges on.

Now let’s look at how to find this tipping point for you — what I call your Tipping Point.

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The Tipping Point

Most people assume that retiring early means sacrificing security, ie. that you trade safety for time.

But past your Tipping Point, growth takes over and you’re not choosing between safe and early. You’re choosing between early and later.

I break the Tipping Point into 3 numbers:

• Your current balance (what you actually have in your portfolio today)

• Your retirement number (what your portfolio needs to provide on top of SS, and any other income to fund the life you actually want

• Your runway (how many years until the age you want to retire)

Let’s say you’re 58 years old and you’ve got $1.6 million across your retirement accounts.

You’ve always just assumed you’d work until 65.

Based on your spending, plus SS, the number your portfolio needs to hit is right around $2.5 million.

So the question is…

Do you actually need those next 7 years of work to get there?

Here’s the math:

7% return a year for 7 years on $1.6 million with zero new contributions = $2.57 million.

That’s it. You’re already done.

The 7 more years of working and saving you assumed you needed?

You didn’t.

Now here’s what I see most people in this situation do.

They ignore it.

They keep working til they’re 65 anyway, contributing say $30,000 a year for 7 more years.

Run the math forward on that and you’d have another $265,000 by age 65.

So instead of $2.57 million, you’d retire with ~$2.83 million.

Not to mention the growth on the contributions, so that number is likely even larger.

Why So Many Blow Past It…

Here’s the real comparison…

Retire or partially retire at 58, and you hit your number right on schedule on growth alone, with 7 more years of life in your pocket to do what you want instead of working.

Work to 65 and end up with an additional $260,000+, but you spent 7 years buying a cushion you didn’t need.

I’m not saying $260,000 isn’t a lot. It is.

At a 4% withdrawal rate, it’s about $10,400 a year in extra retirement income.

So the honest question becomes:

Is an extra $10,000/year starting at age 65 worth working full-time for another 7 years?

Only you can answer that.

And here’s where the early retirement lens changes everything, because I know what you’re thinking.

More money is more security. Why wouldn’t I take the extra cushion? If I retire early I’ll have to pay for my own healthcare longer until Medicare kicks in.

All of those questions are 100% fair.

But here’s the point I’m trying to make…

If you crushed your Tipping Point, your number already built in a reasonable, not best case, growth assumption.

And protection against a bad market isn’t something any of us can buy even with 7 more years of work. Because none of us know what’s going to happen tomorrow, let alone in the next 2,556 days.

The cushion exists whether you keep working or not. So those extra years don’t actually buy you safety. You already have that.

What they cost you is something you can’t earn back later.

The (Real) Cost of Waiting

This is the part nobody can put a number on for you.

The decade from roughly 58-68 is what most retirement experts call the ‘Vitality Decade’.

It’s when you can still hike the hard trail, can still take the long trip, can still keep up with the grandkids.

Money you earn at 64 can be spent at 74.

But the energy you have at 60?

You can’t save that and use it for later. It’s not something you can ‘transfer’ at 75 like you can money from your account.

Every year you work past your Tipping Point, you’re spending precious, (hopefully) healthy time, working to buy retirement income you don’t need.

That’s the real risk. Not a bad market.

In our example here, it’s an extra $10,000 a year you may never even need, against years of the one decade you can never get back.

Now again, nothing in personal finance is one-size-fits-all. That’s why it’s called ‘personal’.

And back to your question about Medicare because yes, it’s the one piece that has to be handled before you actually retire.

Medicare doesn’t start until 65, so retiring at 58 means a 7-year gap where you’re covering health insurance on your own through COBRA, through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, or a spouse’s plan.

Depending on your income and your state, that can run you anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 a month per person.

But here’s what most people don’t realize, and I think it’s one of the hidden advantages of retiring early.

Those years between retiring early and SS kicking in?

Before Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from your 401k kick in?

They tend to be the lowest income years of your entire life.

And that creates a window where you have real control over how much taxable income you show.

Which means real control over your marketplace costs through subsidies and real room for Roth conversion at lower tax rates.

Retiring early doesn’t just buy you precious time, which is the one thing money can’t buy.

It opens up a tax planning window that people who work to 65 often miss entirely.

So before 58 becomes real, that healthcare bridge has to be built into Your number on purpose, not treated as an afterthought.

For a couple, that might mean an extra $150,000 - $250,000 dollars earmarked specifically to bridge to Medicare (or less if you can figure out a plan with subsidies).

If your Tipping Point doesn’t account for this, your real point may land a year or two later.

But for a lot of people, even with a fully-funded bridge, they’ve still already crossed the point of no return without realizing it.

When This Doesn’t Apply

There’s a reason I keep mentioning nothing in finance is a one-size-fits-all solution.

There’s a few cases I can think of where this Tipping Point isn’t as clear or clean.

1. You don’t actually know or have a good handle on your spending yet

In this case, you can’t know if you’ve crossed your point because you don’t have a frame of reference for how much you actually need. So that’s Step 1.

2. If you genuinely love your work and stopping it isn’t a goal for you.

Then none of this is an argument that you have to retire, only that you get to choose if and when. And ‘retiring’ doesn’t have to mean quitting cold turkey.

For a lot of people, the real shift is to part-time or consulting work that covers their day-to-day spending, while their portfolio keeps compounding past the number on its own.

Bottom Line

For someone who knows their number, has the healthcare bridge accounted for, and finds their balance already gets them to their Tipping Point through growth alone, working past it isn’t a requirement, it’s a choice.

And it’s a choice between your time and your money.

I think the real question isn’t, “when can I afford to retire?”.

It’s, “have I already crossed the point where my money does the work?” and “am I spending my best years earning income I don’t need?”

Find your Tipping Point before you lose another precious year.

If you’re in your late 50s or early 60s, and you’ve never had your current balance projected forward against your real number, your real timeline, and the healthcare bridge, you may be closer to freedom than you think.

The tool I use to find and track mine?

Tally.

Tally allows you to connect all your accounts and pulls everything into one clean dashboard: checking, savings, investments, debt.

No spreadsheets, no mental math, no pretending you’ll figure it out later.

Then it does the part most money apps skip: it projects your finances decades forward — taxes and all — so you can see the age you’ll hit your Tipping Point, know if your savings could actually run out, and what it takes to change that.

If you’ve been meaning to “get a handle on your finances” for the past six months, this is your nudge. Start your free trial at app.thetally.io.

You may be closer to financial freedom than you think.

That’s a pretty awesome thought to start a new week with right?

Always rooting for you,

-Charlie

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content. Links contained in this email may be affiliate links. If you use them, I make a little money off the sale. They do not change the price you pay for the product(s).

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It’s also the month some of the worst moments of my life have occurred:

• losing my best friend to cancer

• losing my horse in an accidental barn fire

• losing my aunt to cancer (three days after losing my horse)

• losing my heart dog to cancer

• my mom coding on the table (twice) during emergency surgery

I don’t share any of this for pity.

I also want to note that I have an amazing therapist, who has helped me work through the grueling mental gymnastics these events have put me through.

I share it to help you better understand why I started this newsletter, and my Building Quiet Wealth personal brand in the first place.

It actually has very little to do with money. Even though that’s what I write about most.

It’s cliché, but money is just a tool. A piece of paper.

It has no intrinsic value beyond what you choose to put behind it.

For me, that’s freedom.

Freedom to not spend my life behind a desk and a computer screen, while the people and things I love most slip away.

Freedom to spend the last year of my 30s, and my 40s and 50s, traveling with my husband, and taking my parents on their bucket list vacations while they’re still here and able.

Trollstigen - Norway - September/October 2025

Mom and I in the Netherlands for tulip season - April 2026

Freedom to make a bigger impact in the lives of others, rather than just make money for ‘the man’.

Who only sees me as another cog in the wheel. A means to an end. Replaceable at any time for someone younger, someone still willing to say “how high?” when he says “jump!”.

That was 20-something me.

39 year-old me does the absolute bare minimum I need to at work to collect a paycheck and not get fired.

I spend the rest of my time building this business, working on my personal brand. The thing that will allow me to realize the future freedoms I want so bad.

It’s why I started investing.

Because I learned about things like compound growth. I read about people getting (consistent) 12-20% annual returns on their money, while my entire life savings was losing money to inflation in my bank’s ‘Checking Plus+’ account.

They should call it a ‘Checking Minus-’ account.

Because of the 1099 they send you at the end of the calendar year. Where you owe taxes on the piss-ant amount of interest they paid you. As a thank you for being a loyal customer.

I digress…

What I’m trying to say is that we all have priorities. And sorry not sorry, the idea of a perfect work-life balance is B.S.

The idea that you can simultaneously be exceptional at your job, build a business, exercise five times a week, have an incredible social life, maintain every friendship, sleep eight hours, cook every meal from scratch and somehow feel relaxed throughout all of it...

Maybe you can. I can’t.

I have to choose my priorities.

At one point in my life, climbing the corporate ladder, garnering all the professional awards, and being the ‘to-go’ person for everyone’s issues was what mattered most.

Now, building this second career to achieve my version of true freedom matters a lot more.

It’s why right now I’m missing my 4-year old nephew’s birthday party to write this.

It’s why I ideate my social media content over my lunch breaks, rather than spend them on my phone doomscrolling or gossiping with coworkers.

It’s why I haven’t ‘Netflix and chill(ed)’ in I don’t know how long, because after my 9-5, I’m working on my 5-9.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating burning yourself out indefinitely.

I’m saying there are seasons.

There can be a season where you have less freedom because you’re building something that you believe could give you much more freedom later.

That’s the season I’m in right now.

You certainly don’t have to start a business, a personal brand, or ever post on social media.

But if you’re in a season where:

• thinking about money causes you stress or anxiety

• you make a ‘good’ salary by any standard, but at the end of the month still have nothing to show for it

• you wonder how some people have multi-million dollar retirement accounts in their 50s while you’re still struggling to hit 6-figures

• the thought of staying exactly where you for the next 10, 20, 30 years makes you sick to your stomach

Then I’m gonna need you to lock the F in.

Because if my June losses have taught me anything, it’s that we only get one shot at this thing. There are no do-overs.

And while I can’t teach you how to start a business or build a personal brand (I’m still working on that part myself)…

I can teach you how to get your money working for you so you can achieve your own personal freedom, whatever that looks like.

To help you do that, I’m putting together a completely free 1-hour investing masterclass.

Everything I’ve learned over the past 16 years of building my portfolio from zero to multiple 6-figures, and hitting a 7-figure net worth by my mid-30s.

Without paying a financial advisor, having a fancy degree, or working on Wall Street.

This is for you if you want to learn how to start investing with confidence (even if you have no idea what to invest in).

Join me for a simple, beginner-friendly investing workshop that shows you:

• what to invest in

• why it works, and

• how to avoid the costly mistakes that keep most people stuck with their money sitting in cash, losing value every single day.

  SAVE MY FREE SPOT

Spots are limited — my Zoom account only allows me so many seats.

Maybe someday I’ll have a fancy landing page you can sign up at, but I’m not techy, and my 9-5 doesn’t allow for hours of cool design time. 😂

I hope you’ll join me, and if not, no hard feelings!

But I’ll leave you with this…

June has taught me that life is short, and time is too precious to waste doing something that makes you miserable long-term.

I hope your birthday month is brighter than mine, but more so, I hope you’re able to give yourself the chance to live the life you want and deserve.

Until next time.

Your wealth hype girl,

-Charlie

📌P.S. I’ve taken free classes before that were amazing, and others that were crap. If this one doesn’t deliver on making investing feel simpler than it ever has before, I give you full permission to spam my inbox with your favorite frowny-face emoji. But you have to take it first, so save your free spot before they’re gone.

More Resources:

• Wealth In A Weekend → A step-by-step roadmap to building a simple, 3-fund investment portfolio you can run on autopilot

• 1:1 financial strategy session → we build out your complete money plan in plain English. No jargon, no lecture

Founder/CEO: Building Quiet Wealth
Helping 19,000+ smart people learn purposeful investing
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Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

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And you actually have some serious advantages the 20-somethings don’t yet.

Once you close the knowledge gap and build a few key habits, getting wealthy from this age stops being a long shot and starts being a matter of time.

Here’s the belief I hold that most women my age don’t:

You are not behind. You’re finally equipped.

The 25-year-old has runway, but no idea who she is.

She’s still guessing at the life she wants.

You’re not.

You know yourself. You know the life you’re building toward.

And for the first time, you have the income to actually fund it.

The thing you keep reading as “too late” is really “old enough to not waste it.”

Yes, you’re juggling more than you did at 25.

Kids, aging parents, a team or a business to run, retirement finally close enough to see.

That’s not proof you missed the window. That’s proof you have something worth protecting and the clarity to aim at it.

A 22-year-old has neither.

Where I’m at now

I still clock into a 9-5.

But, I’m building my way out on lunch breaks.

In content ideas recorded to my phone during my 2hr. commute. In the evenings when I’m drafting emails like the one you’re reading right now, while my coworkers are doing the “Netflix and chill”.

That’s where my future dream life gets built, in the margins most people throw away.

In under 10 months I:

• Grew my social media from 0 to over 250,000 followers

• Grew this newsletter to over 19,000 subscribers

• Signed with a talent agency to land better brand deals

• Built a digital product that makes sales while I’m asleep

• And made more some months online than I do at my 9-5

Unlike the 20-somethings flaunting their exits after having worked one career job for all of 6 months, I haven’t quit and gambled our mortgage just because I’ve seen some success.

I’m building my future in the cracks of a normal, busy life. The same cracks you have.

I don’t tell you those numbers to brag, but so you know the rest of this comes with receipts.

Why bother getting ahead at all?

Because the alternative is worse, and you already feel it.

The cost of living keeps climbing.

The corporate promise (work hard, stay loyal, retire comfortable) is falling apart.

Plenty of women I know are making good money and still feel one bad month away from losing everything.

When you sit with that, building your wealth so you can have options stops being a ‘nice idea’ and starts being the only thing that matters.

And for me, getting ahead isn’t a status game.

It’s not about out-earning my sister-in-law, or having a brand new car in the garage.

It’s about buying back my time while I’m still young and healthy enough to enjoy it.

What “rich” looks like is yours to define.

For many of us at this age, it’s a lot simpler and smaller than the 20s and early 30s ‘life gurus’ make it sound…

Enough invested that work becomes optional, and enough freedom to be there for ourselves and the people we love.

The women who get there aren’t smarter or making more money than you.

They just made a few shifts sooner.

Here’s the five that matter most…

5 rules to get dangerously ahead in your 40s

Rule 1: Build your anti-vision. Get obsessed with “how do I get out.“

You won’t change anything until you get ultra-specific about what you’re running from and towards.

I’m not talking vague dissatisfaction. You have to name it.

• The commute you’ll never get back.

• The meetings that could’ve been emails.

• The Sunday night dread.

• The feeling you’ve done everything right and at 45 still don’t own your time.

Write down exactly what you refuse to still be doing in five years.

We don’t stay stuck because we’re miserable. We stay stuck because we’re comfortable. Numb enough to not move.

But there’s an opportunity cost for that comfort.

Not making a choice is also a choice.

Every year you put off doing the thing that moves you towards your dream life, is a year closer to the future you keep telling yourself you’re trying to avoid.

My anti-vision is ultra-specific:

• I’m going to exit my 9-5 before, or by the time I turn 45.

• I’m going to build my personal brand to out-earn my 9-5 in the next 12 months.

• By 45 I will have enough invested that I never have to invest another dollar and can live off a 4% withdrawal rate.

It’s why I record voice notes at red lights instead of doom scrolling. It’s why I spend my lunch responding to emails and writing down B-roll I need to film that night, instead of gossiping about the latest celebrity breakup.

I know exactly what I’m building away from.

Rule 2: Bias to action → pointed at your money.

The most successful people don’t wait to feel ready. They move on an idea the instant they have it.

In your 40s and beyond, the shift is where you point that energy.

Not at climbing one more rung on a ladder you’re already tired of.

At your money.

Bias to action here looks like real, boring moves.

• Learning how to make the money you already earn, work for you instead of sitting in checking losing value to inflation every year.

• Setting up the accounts that protect your kids or loved ones after you’re gone, because at this stage that’s not morbid, it’s love.

• Spending some of it, on purpose, while you’re physically and mentally able to enjoy it.

• And starting to invest, now, before you feel like an expert.

Like most things in life, you never feel fully ready.

In my experience, ready is a feeling that shows up after you start, not before.

Open the account.

Buy the index fund.

Move the money out of savings that’s paying you a rounding error.

Messy action beats a perfect plan you never implement.

Rule 3: Stay curious. Kill the “old dog” story.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us subconsciously decided we’re too old to learn this stuff.

That investing and building the kind of wealth that can be passed down is for people who started at 22, or the finance bros, or literally anyone but a millennial or GenX woman.

Please, I beg you, shelve that storyline.

The women who build wealth, late or not, are the ones who stay curious.

Who read the books, watch the videos, ask the “dumb” questions, and refuse to be embarrassed about learning something new at 40.

I’m obsessed with learning, and have gotten to be intimate friends with failure.

Growing up in a house where we didn’t talk about money, it’s how I taught myself how investing worked, and built a multi 6-figure portfolio in my late 20s, without a financial advisor or fancy finance degree.

It’s how I started posting on social media despite knowing nothing about video editing or content creation, and built a following of over 250,000 followers in less than a year. At 38 years old.

I’m convinced it’s the whole reason I’ve been able to fast-track my future dream life.

Curiosity costs nothing. It’s not a socio-economic status you were born into.

It’s deciding you’re going to understand something instead of assuming it’s beyond you.

Open-minded beats pride every single time.

Rule 4: Challenge the narrative about women and money

Think about what you were told, subconsciously or not, as a young woman in your teens and 20s:

• Men handle the “real” money.

• Your job is the household budget, the savings account, the bills.

• Investing, real estate, and big financial decisions happen in rooms you don’t belong in.

That story was, and is, a lie.

And it cost you, whether you want to admit it or not.

Your money is not just for checking, savings, and keeping food on the table.

It’s for taxable brokerage and retirement accounts. For owning property. For funding your passions, and the version of your life you actually want.

And you have a seat at any table you desire. Without needing anyone’s permission to walk in.

Rule 5: Stay hungry. Use everything you’ve survived.

Here’s your unfair advantage over the younger generations:

You’re a veteran at life.

You’re older, wiser, and stronger.

You’ve been through things a 25-year-old can’t even imagine yet.

Most people treat that as baggage. I want you to treat it as ammunition.

The divorce, the layoff, the year everything fell apart and you rebuilt anyway.

That’s proof you can handle risk, discomfort, and starting over. That’s exactly the muscle building wealth and the future you desire needs.

Don’t let “settled” turn into “done.”

You still have decades ahead of you, and you’re more capable than ever.

Stay hungry for the life you haven’t built yet.

Action points: 5 ways to start building your dream life this week

1. Write your anti-vision. Get brutally honest about what you refuse to still be doing in 5 years. Write it on a sticky note and post it to your bedroom mirror or bathroom vanity where you’ll see it when your motivation dips (because it will).

2. Make one money move you’ve been putting off. Open the brokerage account. Move cash out of the account earning nothing, and put it in a high-yields savings instead. Automate one investment. Pick one and do it before Friday.

3. Learn one thing on purpose. Choose one money topic you’ve avoided because it felt too hard, or you felt too far behind, and spend an hour understanding it. Just one.

4. Rewrite one story you were handed. Name one belief about women and money you absorbed young, and decide, on paper, what you believe now instead.

5. Use your age and wisdom as fuel. Write down one hard thing you survived, and one way it proves you can handle building your future.

You don’t get braver later. You just get busier.

The best time to start taking action was yesterday. The second best time is now.

Because today is the only thing we’re promised.

More Resources:

• Wealth In A Weekend → A step-by-step roadmap to building a simple, 3-fund investment portfolio you can run on autopilot

• 1:1 financial strategy session → we build out your complete money plan in plain English. No jargon, no lecture

Your wealth hype girl,

-Charlie

📌P.S. I wrote this on my lunch break. If I can build the way out in the cracks of a full-time job, you can start in yours. Reply and tell me the one thing you refuse to still be doing in 5 years. I read every one.

Founder/CEO: Building Quiet Wealth
Helping 18,000+ smart people learn purposeful investing
Advertise with me
Follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

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In fact, I ended up listening to two hours of content while helping my husband clean pig pens in the barn.

And what was the topic I found so engrossing?

An 18-year old bride sobbing beneath her wedding veil.

But not just any bride. One worth more than most countries.

Consuelo Vanderbilt.

Daughter of railroad and shipping tycoon William Vanderbilt and his wife Alva (you know, the ones the HBO show The Gilded Age is based off of…).

In November 1895 she was marrying the 9th Duke of Marlborough, Charles Spencer-Churchill (yes, those Churchills).

By marrying her, the Duke walked away with a cool $2.5 million in railroad stock (around $91 million in today’s dollars). All to save his crumbling ancestral estate of Blenheim.

This is usually where the story stops.

Poor little rich girl. Trapped, controlled, sold off. And all of that is true.

Her mother Alva controlled every aspect of Consuelo’s life. She even made her wear a steel rod down her spine to improve her posture. She locked her in her room when Consuelo refused the Duke. She threatened to murder the man Consuelo loved, then faked a life-threatening illness until her daughter gave in.

Alva’s famous line to her own child:

“I do the thinking, you do as you are told.”

So yes. Tragic.

But that’s the lazy version.

The one that makes Consuelo a victim and ends there.

I was more fascinated in the rest of the story.

Stuck in a marriage she never chose, in a country she didn’t grow up in, under rules she had no say in writing, Consuelo could’ve spent forty years being miserable and rich.

Plenty of people would have.

Instead she went to work on things that outlived her.

While married to the duke, she campaigned for free school meals for poor children. National insurance for workers. Old-age pensions. A woman’s right to vote.

In 1917 she won a seat on the London County Council, then won re-election. She helped build a 360-bed hospital in France for working families.

None of that made headlines the way her wedding did.

It compounded slowly, in the background of a life everyone else read as a cautionary tale.

In terms of lifelong happiness, she got the worst possible starting position, and built something real anyway.

Which brings me to your investment portfolio.

3 Things Consuelo Can Teach Us About the Market

1. You don’t pick your starting conditions. You only pick how long you stay.

Consuelo didn’t choose her marriage. You don’t choose the market you start investing in.

Some people begin in a roaring bull run. Some begin three months before a crash.

You get what you get.

The winners aren’t the ones who timed a perfect entry. They’re the ones who stayed in long after the honeymoon ended.

Patience isn’t waiting around for perfect conditions.

It’s staying put through the ones you didn’t choose.

2. The payoff shows up later than feels fair.

Consuelo never saw most of her reforms come to fruition.

Some took years. Some took decades. She did the work anyway.

The market runs on the same delay.

You buy, and for a long stretch nothing seems to happen.

No applause. No headline. No proof you were right.

Then one day the compounding lands all at once and looks like luck to everyone who wasn’t there for the boring middle.

The boring middle is the whole game.

3. The victim story is the most expensive position you can hold.

Consuelo had every reason to quit and coast.

So does every investor after a bad year.

“The market is rigged.”

“The rich already won.”

“I missed my window.”

That story feels good going down.

It also keeps you on the sidelines while your money sits in cash, losing to inflation year after year.

Consuelo could have played the tragic heiress for the rest of her life, yet she refused.

Refuse to be defined by your victim story too.

The Excuse Is Free

Listening to her story, it reminds me of whenever the market scares people out of their own plans.

A red year rolls in, the headlines get loud, and suddenly everyone has a ‘reason’ to bail.

The reasons feel true. Some of them are true. But they’re still just excuses.

Blaming the Fed, the billionaires, the timing, your salary, the year you were born. Comfortable and cheap.

The other line of thinking costs you something.

Staying invested when your account is down makes you feel scared.

Adding more when it keeps going down feels stupid.

Waiting years for a number a spreadsheet promised but your patience and logic is somewhere out in left field.

Almost nobody wants to pay that price.

Which is exactly why it works.

Consuelo Vanderbilt was handed a life she never wanted and built quiet wealth of a different kind.

The kind measured in fed children and enfranchised women, not railroad stock or paper bills.

You get to choose what you build too. Nobody is locking you in a room.

So here’s my question to you:

When the market turns ugly (and it will), are you going to reach for the excuse or stay in your seat?

Steal My Exact Strategy ⬇️ (yes, I really want you to)

I keep telling you the boring middle is the whole game.

And it is. It’s how I went from broke to 7-figures by 35.

And to be completely honest, I’ve been gatekeeping it for a bit.

But only because I’ve been having some of you test drive the strategy to make sure others can recreate it.

Guess what!? YOU CAN! (and I’ve got the receipts to prove it)

So for the first time ever, I’m giving you my exact blueprint to building a simple investment portfolio, that is crushing the old “60% stocks, 40% bonds” one our parents used.

Tailored to your age, risk tolerance and life goals, even if you’ve never opened an account.

For a fraction of the price you’re paying that financial advisor who’s getting you mediocre results at best.

Whether you’re starting from absolute zero, are wondering if your investments could be doing better, or are looking to lower this year’s tax bill, Wealth in a Weekend gets you to a simple, optimized, 3-fund portfolio you can hold for the rest of your life.

In 48 hours or less.

No jargon. No spreadsheet. No subscription.

Plain English, start to finish.

One weekend. Yours for life.

Build my ideal portfolio this weekend →

You got this!

Your quiet wealth hype girl,

-Charlie

📌P.S. Consuelo needed decades. You need one weekend. Wealth in a Weekend gets you a simple 3-fund portfolio you keep for life. For less than the cost of your upgraded Netflix subscription.

~

Founder/CEO: Building Quiet Wealth
Helping 18,000+ smart people learn personal finance in plain English
Advertise with me
Follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

Not in a brokerage. Not in a Roth. Not even in a high-yield savings account.

I could have explained compound interest to you at a dinner party and sounded pretty smart doing it.

I’d read the articles. I’d watched the videos. I knew exactly what I was supposed to do with my money.

And I did none of it.

Here’s the part I want you to hear, and I want you to hear it before anything else in this email:

I wasn’t lazy, and I wasn’t bad with money.

I was scared.

And I’d never sat down and had an honest conversation with myself about why.

That’s what this email is. 5 conversations.

Not a lecture, not a guilt trip, not a list of things you should have done in 2022 when the market was cheap.

Just 5 things I had to look in the mirror at, and give myself some tough love before anything in my portfolio moved.

If you’re 42 and have never opened your 401(k).

If you’re 55 and scared you’re too late.

This is for you.

#1: “I’m behind because I’m bad with money.”

You’re probably not.

You’re behind because nobody handed you a head start, and head starts compound.

A 20-year-old given $100,000 and told to leave it alone at 8% has over $2 million by 60 without adding a single dollar.

She didn’t work harder than you.

She didn’t budget better.

She just got there earlier, with money that wasn’t hers to earn.

And the odds of climbing without that head start are as steep as they feel.

A child born to parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution has a 7.5% chance of reaching the top fifth as an adult. (Opportunity Insights).

So when you feel like the climb is harder for you, you’re not being dramatic. The math agrees with you.

I’m telling you this to take something off your shoulders, not to pile more on.

If you’ve spent years assuming you’re behind because something is wrong with you, please consider the far more boring explanation:

You’re behind because you started with less and nobody taught you what to do next.

Different problem. Fixable problem.

#2: “I’m educating myself.”

Are you, though?

I ask this in the most loving way possible, because I did this for a solid year with my 401k and called it “research”.

I watched hundreds of YouTube finance videos.

Read through piles of stock analyses.

And then did absolutely nothing, which I now know is what fear looks like when it’s wearing a very productive costume.

But there’s a second point worth mentioning here which is what you’ve been consuming.

“7 stocks to buy before they explode.”

“How I turned $1,000 into $47,000 in six months.”

“The one chart that predicts the next crash.”

That’s entertainment disguised as education.

It teaches you to gamble while you think you’re learning, and if you’re anything like me, leaves you more anxious than when you started.

Real education is boring, and it looks like this:

• How a Roth IRA is taxed versus a traditional IRA, and which one fits your income

• What an expense ratio actually costs you over 30 years

• How to read a fund’s holdings so you know what you own

• What happens when the market drops 30%, and why you leave it alone

Nobody’s going viral with that. Which is why nobody’s making it.

Watch what you’re watching.

Notice when “researching” has become the thing you do instead of starting or tweaking.

#3: “I need to find the right stock.”

You don’t.

This is the one that costs us women the most money. And I’ve got the receipts to prove it.

S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes the SPIVA Scorecard twice a year. It’s tracked professional fund managers against their benchmarks for over two decades. From the year-end 2024 data, here’s what it found:

• Over 15 years, 89.5% of actively managed U.S. large-cap funds failed to beat the S&P 500 (SPIVA U.S. Scorecard).

Read that again.

These are professionals. Bloomberg terminals. Teams of analysts. Data you and I will never see.

9 out of 10 of them lose to a fund you can buy on your phone in your pajamas for an expense ratio of 0.03%.

Then there’s the piece nobody talks about.

The whole market runs on a tiny handful of monsters.

Apple. Microsoft. Amazon. Nvidia. Tesla.

Pick 12 stocks and you’re not being clever. You’re running a very high risk of missing the four that mattered.

It’s why I love low-cost index funds so much.

Buy an S&P 500 ETF (VOO, FXAIX, SPLG, pick one, they’re basically the same) and you own every single one of them, in their exact proportion, automatically.

The winners grow into a bigger share of your portfolio. The losers shrink out of it. You never have to be right about anything (…don’t tell my husband that).

This is good news by the way.

If you haven’t started, it isn’t that the correct strategy is too complicated for you.

It’s that you’ve been told the correct strategy is something it isn’t.

Simple. Boring. Effective.

#4: “I’ll start when I have more money.”

There are two levers you and I can pull when it comes to building wealth.

Time and the amount. That’s it.

Time first.

Two women.

Both earn 11% a year, a little more than the average of the S&P 500 over the last 100 years.

Sarah invests $10,000 one time at age 30 and never adds another dollar.

Diane waits until 55, then invests $1,000 a month for ten years. She puts in $120,000 total.

12X what Sarah did.

At 65 (contributions, compounded monthly):

• Diane has ~ $218,987

• Sarah has ~ $385,748

Sarah wins by $166,000 and she did it while sleeping and living her best 30’s-something life.

But that’s not a story about Diane failing.

She did a hard thing, late, and she still ended up with $219,000 she wouldn’t otherwise have had.

It’s a story about what 35 uninterrupted years does that no amount of money can replicate.

Now the amount.

Sarah’s $10,000 became $385,748 without adding a dime.

But say Sarah decided to put in $500/month for those same 35 years.

She’d finish with $2.87 million.

Same fund. Same market. Same 35 years.

The only difference is how much she put in.

Now, I know the voice in your head, because it used to be the voice in mine:

“$500 a month? Who has that?”

Maybe you don’t today. And I’m never going to pretend $500 falls out of the sky.

But I want you to notice how comfortable that sentence is.

As long as $500 is impossible, nothing has to change, and nothing is ever your fault.

I lived in that sentence for years. And I know how comfy it is in there.

Which brings us to the last conversation…

#5: “I’ll do it later.”

My husband Andrew’s family has farmed the same ground for three generations.

When he leaves for his annual hunting trip in the fall, I run the place alone.

Up at 4:30 instead of 5:15. Pigs, horses, dogs fed, cleaning pens, stacking hay.

None of it is ‘fun’ per se. Though for me the monotony is cathartic.

It’s the same tasks in the same order, every single day, and that repetition is the entire reason the farm keeps running.

Money’s no different.

It’s not glamorous, and it happens when nobody’s watching.

David Bach once said:

“If your money is interesting, you’re doing it wrong.”

How This Looks In Real Life

Step 1: Find the money that’s already yours that you’re giving away.

The subscriptions you forgot about.

The dinners out you didn’t enjoy.

The $9 charge from 2021 for a service you deleted.

Pull your last three statements and go look. I’d bet you find $200 to $300 in less than an hour.

Step 2: Redirect what’s already coming.

Your next raise. Your bonus. The car payment that ends in March.

You almost certainly don’t need a second job.

You need to stop letting lifestyle creep rob you of your comfortable future.

Take half of the next one and send it into the market before it ever touches checking.

Step 3: Leave it alone.

This is where it falls apart for most of us.

Finding the money is easy compared to not spending it.

Step 4: Automate so willpower never enters the picture.

The day you get paid, that money already has a job and it leaves.

Before you see it. Before you get a vote.

Because you don’t spend what you don’t see.

Your Action Plan This Week 🎯

1. Open the account. Fidelity, Vanguard, or Schwab. A Roth IRA if you’re under the income limit. Fifteen minutes. You can open it, put in $50, and change nothing else about your life (see my top picks here).

2. Set the automatic transfer. Payday, every one. $50 is fine. The amount matters far less than the fact that it happens without you thinking about it or having to push buttons.

3. Buy the boring fund. An S&P 500 index fund. VOO, FXAIX, SPLG. Check the expense ratio is under 0.10% and then stop researching and start buying.

4. Do the statement audit. Three months, line by line. Cancel what you don’t miss. Route it straight into step 2.

5. Stop looking at it. Check your account(s) quarterly at most. Twice a year is better. Watching it daily only tempts you into doing something you’ll regret 10 years from now.

5 conversations. 5 steps.

Not one of them requires you to be smart about the market.

Better yet, not one of them requires you to be right.

You’re not behind because you’re “bad” at this”.

You’re behind because nobody taught you, and because doing nothing always feels safer than doing something wrong.

I sat on $30,000 for years for those exact reasons.

But compounding doesn’t care that you started late. It cares that you started.

The best time was 20 years ago. The second best is Tuesday.

Your future self will thank you,

-Charlie

📌P.S. That $30,000 in my checking account? I finally moved it. Not all at once, and not confidently. I moved $1,000 first, just to see if the world ended. It didn’t. The next $5,000 was easier. Eight years later, every dollar of it has been working for me, and it has WAY out-earned the version of me who sat there being scared of it. You don’t have to be brave. You just have to be willing to move.

📌P.P.S. Hit reply and tell me which of the five you’ve been avoiding. I read every single one.

Not financial advice. Educational purposes only. Always do your own research before investing.

Founder/CEO: Building Quiet Wealth
Helping 18,000+ smart people learn purposeful investing
Advertise with me
Follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok

• Late 50s

• Sold a business

• Recently divorced

• Left a high-fee advisor

Super smart woman. Ran a department of 40 people for two decades.

And her portfolio looked like my kitchen junk drawer.

14 holdings. Three of them she didn’t remember buying. Two leftover funds from an old 401(k). A little crypto a nephew talked her into.

And the last line in her email?

“I have no idea if any of this is actually working.”

Here’s what I told her.

The Mistake That Quietly Costs You a Retirement

Most portfolios I see don’t fail because someone picked the wrong stock.

They fail because they got too complicated to hold.

17 positions. 5 accounts.

Funds that own the same companies 3X over, so you feel diversified while actually betting on Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia from four different directions.

That’s not diversification. That’s duplication wearing a Halloween costume.

And complexity has a BIG price tag most people ignore completely.

Fees.

The SEC ran the math on this:

Take $100,000, growing 4% a year for 20 years.

A fund charging 1% a year leaves you with about $179,000. A fund charging 0.25% leaves you with about $208,000.

Same money. Same market. Same 20 years.

The only difference is the fee, and it quietly ate nearly $30,000. (Source: SEC, How Fees and Expenses Affect Your Investment Portfolio)

That’s you getting to retire 6 months sooner. Or taking those dream vacations. Gone. Paid to a fund company for something you can do from your couch in your pajamas.

When I emailed the math back to this woman, showing the fees buried in her old advisor’s funds, she didn’t reply for a few days.

When I finally did hear back she said, “So I’ve been paying for a service I didn’t even know I was buying.”

Well…yes.

The three funds below charge 0.03%, 0.15%, and 0.06% respectively, and we’ll get there in just a sec.

The point for now: simple isn’t trendy.

Simple is the thing you can actually stick with for 30 years. And in investing, what you can hold beats what looks impressive on a screenshot every single time.

Three Funds. Three Jobs.

If I had to start over today, I wouldn’t build around predictions. I’d build around my portfolio having three jobs.

1. Own America’s top companies (the core)

2. Lean into long-term growth (the engine)

3. Add quality and income (the ballast)

One fund for each. Here’s how I’d weight them as a starting point:

• VOO, 50% (the core)

• QQQM, 30% (the engine)

• SCHD, 20% (the ballast)

Before you screenshot that and treats it like gospel: this is a starting framework, not necessarily your answer.

Your real split depends on your age, your timeline, your income, having a fully-funded emergency fund, and how likely you are to panic and sell when the market drops 20%.

A 35-year-old with 30 years to invest should not copy a 58-year-old who wants to slow down in five.

Personal finance is personal. But it doesn’t have to mean complicated.

Fund #1: VOO, the Core (50%)

VOO is Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF.

It owns the 500 top-performing companies in the United States in one fund.

Not one company. Not one CEO. Not whatever your brother-in-law swears is “about to pop off” (or whatever the kids say these days).

When you buy VOO, you’re saying:

“I don’t need to pick the one winning company. I’ll just own all of them.”

Some of those 500 will flop. Some will go sideways for years.

But the winners carry the whole basket forward, and you never had to guess which ones they’d be.

Personally, I’d make VOO the foundation of my portfolio. 50% of it.

It’s the steadiest, broadest, cheapest piece of the whole thing, charging just 0.03% a year. (Source: Morningstar: VOO) On $100,000, that’s $30/year. For ownership of corporate America.

This is the part of the portfolio that does the most work while making the least noise.

Which, if you know me, you know is exactly how I like it.

Fund #2: QQQM, the Engine (30%)

QQQM is Invesco’s NASDAQ 100 ETF.

It holds the 100 largest non-financial companies on the Nasdaq, and it leans hard into technology, roughly 58% of the fund. (Source: ETF Database: QQQM)

This is where your growth lives, and the fund charges an expense ratio of 0.15% per year.

Quick note on why QQQM and not QQQ: same companies, same index, lower share price, and a cheaper expense ratio. For most of us building share by share, QQQM is the smarter buy. Don’t own both. That’s the duplication trap again.

Now, real talk, because I’d rather you trust me than love me.

VOO and QQQM overlap. A lot.

The biggest tech names sit at the top of both funds, so stacking 30% QQQM on top of 50% VOO is not adding a brand-new flavor. It’s turning up the volume on growth and tech.

But that’s a choice, not an accident.

For me, as long as I know why something is in my portfolio, and what its purpose is, I’m good.

If you’re younger, have decades of investing ahead of you, and can stomach a rough year without bailing, that tilt has historically paid off.

If a 30% drop in your most volatile fund would make you sell at the bottom, dial QQQM down and VOO up.

Neither answer is wrong. They’re just solving different problems for different people.

The engine adds horsepower. It also adds bumps. Know which one you’re signing up for.

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Okay. Now that you can actually see the whole picture, let’s fill it in with the last of the three funds.

Fund #3: SCHD, the Ballast (20%)

SCHD is Schwab’s U.S. Dividend Equity ETF.

It tracks the Dow Jones U.S. Dividend 100, which screens for 100 quality companies with a real history of paying dividends. (Source: Schwab Asset Management: SCHD)

It charges 0.06% and currently yields around 3.3%. (Source: stockanalysis.com: SCHD)

Here’s why I’d add it.

SCHD is the one fund in this trio that doesn’t just pile back into the same 10-12 tech giants.

Its screen pushes it toward steadier, profitable, dividend-paying businesses, the kind that tend to hold up better when the high-flyers have a bad year. It does the real diversifying that VOO and QQQM can’t do for each other.

It’s the boring one. And boring is the point.

Nobody brags about their dividend fund at a dinner party. But SCHD isn’t here to be exciting. It’s here to smooth the ride so you don’t do something dumb in a scary market.

One tax note (because SCHD pays regular dividends) dividends are taxable in a regular brokerage account, every year, whether you reinvest them or not.

So if you can, hold SCHD inside a Roth IRA. The dividends reinvest and grow completely tax-free, forever.

20% is the sweet spot for me. Enough to matter. Not so much that it smothers the growth.

How To Choose Your Own Split

The 50/30/20 above is my starting point. But the better question isn’t “what’s the best portfolio?“

It’s “what portfolio can I actually hold through a down market?”

Because a 100% growth portfolio looks like a genius move in a spreadsheet.

Right up until stocks fall 30%, you panic, and you sell at the worst possible moment. Then it was the worst portfolio for you, no matter what the numbers said. So shift it to fit your real life.

Here’s some things to think about to get you started:

• Decades to invest, strong stomach: lean more VOO and QQQM, lighter SCHD.

• Closer to needing the money, or you know market drops keep you up at night: more SCHD, less QQQM.

The best allocation isn’t the most aggressive one. It’s the one you’ll still be holding when the headlines are ugly and your neighbor is panic-selling.

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What This Looks Like With Real Money

If you handed me $10,000 to invest today, here’s what I’d do:

• $5,000 into VOO

• $3,000 into QQQM

• $2,000 into SCHD

The numbers scale. The system stays exactly the same.

How to Actually Use It

The funds matter, but your behavior matters more.

Here’s the order of operations:

1. Fund your emergency fund first. Three to six months of expenses, in a high-yield savings account, not in stocks.

2. Grab your full employer 401(k) match if you have one. It’s the closest thing to free money you’ll ever get. Don’t leave it on the table.

3. Pick the right account: Roth IRA, traditional IRA, 401(k), or a taxable brokerage, based on your situation. (Remember, SCHD belongs in the Roth if you can swing it.)

4. Set your target split.

5. Automate your contributions so the decision is made once and never again.

6. Rebalance once or twice a year.

7. Then stop checking it every day. Seriously.

And money you’ll need in the next few years: a downpayment on a house, next April’s tax bill, doesn’t belong in any of these funds. That belongs in a HYSA, CD or money market account where you can easily pull it out with little to no penalty.

The One Rule That Makes the Whole Thing Work

Owning three funds is easy.

Holding them through a bad market is the hard part.

At some point, stocks will fall. The headlines will get loud. People around you will panic and “wait until things calm down.” That’s almost always the mistake.

This portfolio only works if you follow one rule:

Keep buying with your long-term dollars.

Not your emergency fund. Not next year’s money. The money meant for the version of you who’s 65.

The people who built real wealth after 2008 and 2020 weren’t the ones who timed the bottom (spoiler: nobody timed the bottom, not even Michael Burry). They were the ones who just kept buying while everyone else froze.

The Bottom Line

If I started over today, I wouldn’t try to be clever. I wouldn’t try to beat Wall Street.

I’d build something boring, diversified, and cheap. Something I could automate and explain in one breath:

50% U.S. core. 30% growth. 20% quality and income.

VOO. QQQM. SCHD.

Three funds. One portfolio.

Not because it’s the only thing that works, but because it’s simple enough to understand, flexible enough to make your own, and steady enough that you’ll actually stick with it.

And sticking with it is the entire game.

Your wealth hype girl,

-Charlie

📌P.S. If this cleared even a little of the fog, would you do me a favor and forward it to someone who’s been “meaning to figure out her investments” for years? That’s how this grows. 🙏

📌P.P.S. Want help mapping these three funds across your actual accounts (which one goes where, and how much)? You can book a 30-minute call with me HERE.

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

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And if you’re a dual income household, that number becomes closer to 200,000 hours.

You’re also going to make millions of dollars during that time. The question is…

Are you going to keep any of it?

Because when it comes to the economy, only one matters.

Your personal economy.

Because it’s the only one you can control.

You and I can’t control the U.S. economy. We can’t control the international one. We can’t control politicians, wars, natural disasters, geopolitical tensions…any of it.

But we can control the economy inside our own home.

Here’s how to do it (or do it better).

Who the Typical American Is Working For

Today more than ever, it feels like everyone wants a piece of your money.

And if we breakdown the typical American’s workday, here’s how your hourly pay gets split:

⏰ 9-11am → you’re working for the government.

Because unlike your financial advisor, they don’t ask you to budget in order to pay them. They take from you automatically in the form of taxes, Social Security etc.

Because they know if they don’t, you won’t have anything left to give them.

⏰ 11am - 1pm → you’re working for housing and food.

⏰ 1pm - 5pm → you’re working for everything else. Transportation, insurance, childcare, your Netflix subscription etc.

But the people who build wealth, they do something completely different.

Who the Wealthy Work For

The wealthy work for themselves.

And this doesn’t mean they’re all entrepreneurs or self-employed.

Most every day millionaires (including myself), have a regular 9-5, are considered middle to upper-middle class, and still clip coupons.

It means they take the first hour of their day, and they keep the income they make from it.

Said another way, this means whatever you earn, even if it’s minimum wage, the first hour of your income has to go to YOU. You’re the first person who gets paid. Even before Uncle Sam.

How do you do this?

You invest.

But you don’t just invest anywhere, or in single stocks, or speculative assets like crypto.

You invest into broad, low-cost index funds in your 401(k), solo 401(k)/SEP IRA if you’re self-employed, or IRA if your employer doesn’t offer a retirement plan.

Funds that track the U.S. stock market, and have an average 10.5% annual return over the last 100 years.

The Everyday Millionaire

Last year, Fidelity did a Q3 study and found that of people who have their 401(k)s at Fidelity, 654,000 Americans now have $1 million or more in it, the highest total on record.

The Wall Street Journal calls this group “moderate millionaires.” Most still live middle-class lifestyles.

Fidelity’s data on what separates them from the average saver isn’t complicated.

The average American worker contributes 7.7% of pay to their retirement (I’d argue it’s closer to 3-5%).

The average 401(k) millionaire contributes 17.6%, captures an average 9% employer match, and has been in the same plan for 26+ years.

One participant described himself as a Boglehead. Someone who prescribes to Jack Bogle’s framework of investing in simple, low-cost index funds, and making minimal changes over time. Warren Buffett is also a big proponent of index fund investing.

Another said he often debated elaborate hedging strategies during volatility but for the most part did nothing.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

Some other stats from the study:

• 86% of Fidelity’s 401(k) millionaires are over 50.

• The median millionaire age is 59.

• The fastest-growing group reaching the milestone is now millennials, up from 1.8% to 3.7% of the total year over year.

In 2026, you can contribute up to $24,500 into your 401(k) or $7,500 into your IRA, if you’re under age 50. For workers 50 and older, you’re allowed what are called ‘catch-up’ contributions. For 2026, you can contribute up to $32,500 into your 401(k), or $8,600 into your IRA.

Workers aged 60 to 63 can contribute up to $35,750 under ‘super catch-up’ provisions.

The limitation worth naming here: $1 million in a 401(k) is pre-tax.

After federal and state income taxes on withdrawals, the effective spending power is lower.

A 22% federal bracket plus state taxes can reduce $1 million to roughly $720,000-$780,000 in purchasing power depending on state.

But the point I’m trying to make here is this:

If you’re contributing the bare minimum, or worse, nothing at all, to your retirement, you’re going to be short and have to keep working.

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Your Money Move This Week

If you’re going to spend 90,000 hours of your life working, you might as well benefit from it first right? Here’s exactly what you need to do:

If you don’t have a retirement plan ➡️ open one. It’s free and takes < 10 min. (I recommend Fidelity - this isn’t sponsored, but Fidelity if you want to, give me a shout! 😉)

If you have a retirement plan but don’t contribute to it ➡️ start. Today.

If you have a plan and are contributing to it ➡️ bump it up. Even 1% makes a difference over time.

This is how you pay yourself first, and how every day people like you and me can get off the hamster wheel, and spend more of the hours we’re given enjoying life instead of working for it.

Your wealth hype girl,

-Charlie

📌 P.S. When you’re ready, here’s how I can help: if you want to sit down together and map out your specific asset location strategy — which investments go where based on your exact accounts, income, and tax situation — that’s exactly what my 1:1 private strategy sessions are for.

No pressure, no pitch. Just your numbers and a clear plan.

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If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been asked this question this week, I could probably retire next month (anyone else want to ask?😂)

SpaceX (SPCX), Elon Musk’s newest company to go public, rang the Nasdaq bell on Friday. It jumped 19% on day one and closed at $161/share.

So why didn’t I buy a single one?

Here’s the part I think confuses most people:

I think SpaceX is going to be one of the biggest companies the world has ever seen. Maybe the biggest. Rockets, Starlink, the stuff they have lined up for the next 30 years. I’m not betting against any of it.

But I’m still not buying the IPO (initial public offering).

Now before you get defensive on Elon’s behalf (in full transparency, it’s safe to say I’m not the guy’s biggest fan), this isn’t a hit piece on SpaceX. It’s not even about SpaceX.

It’s about the difference between a great company and a good investment. Those are not the same thing. They’ve never been the same thing.

So here are the 5 reasons why I’m sitting this one out.

1️⃣ The Only People Who Priced It Get Paid to Sell It

The headline number was $1.75 trillion.

That’s the valuation SpaceX went public on. The highest IPO valuation in history. And do you know who came up with it?

The underwriters.

Goldman Sachs led the deal, with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citi, and JPMorgan along for the ride.

Here’s the thing about underwriters…

They get paid a percentage to sell the offering for as much as possible, as fast as possible. That’s the job.

So when the only people who valued the company are the same people earning a cut to sell it high, to me that’s not a valuation.

That’s a huge conflict of interest I’m not interested in playing the game on.

2️⃣ Morningstar Says It’s Worth Less Than Half

You don’t have to take my word that $1.75 trillion was rich. Take Morningstar’s.

Their analysts ran the numbers and landed on a fair market value of $780 billion. Less than half the IPO target.

One serious firm with no commission on the line said the company was worth $780 billion. The firms getting paid to sell it said $1.75 trillion.

That doesn’t sit well with me.

I’m not willing to buy something when the people with skin in the game can’t agree within a trillion dollars of each other. That’s not conviction. That’s a coin flip with my money on it.

3️⃣ You and I Get 5%. The Insiders Keep the Rest.

Only about 5% of SPCX is actually trading publicly. The other 95% stays locked up with insiders and early investors (_{Source: Reuters / SpaceX S-1, May 2026}).

Sit with what that means for a second.

If the IPO runs hot, it means the good shares were already spoken for. The institutions got there first. You and I were never getting a real allocation at the offering price.

And if you did manage to get a meaningful allocation? That means the big institutions looked at the same deal and said “no thanks“

Either way, you’re getting the leftovers.

The whole pitch of an IPO is “get in early before everyone else.”

But you’re not early. You’re last in a line that formed months ago in rooms you’ll never be invited into.

4️⃣ 6,000 IPOs Say ‘Sit Down’

This is the one people really don’t want to hear.

IPOs, as a group, are bad investments. Not “sometimes.” On average.

Don’t believe me?

Dimensional studied more than 6,000 U.S. IPOs from 1991 to 2018. As a group, they underperformed the market.

30 years. 6,000 tries.

And the average IPO couldn’t beat a simple S&P 500 index fund you could’ve bought from your couch in your pajamas.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not smarter than 6,000 data points.

When the hit rate is that ugly, the burden of proof isn’t on me to explain why I’m out. It’s on the IPO to explain why it’s the exception.

And sorry not sorry, but “because it’s Elon“ is not a financial model I ascribe to.

5️⃣ ‘Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy’

The best of all time to do it, Warren Buffett, said it best back in 2008, in the middle of the worst market panic most of us had ever seen:

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”

Now look at an IPO. Really look at it.

It’s basically a room full of suits, drinking the Kool-Aid, telling each other how great this is going to be.

The hype is the product. The excitement is manufactured on purpose, because excitement is what gets the price up on day one.

That’s not an opportunity.

That’s greed.

And when the whole room is greedy, Buffett’s rule says do the opposite. Sit on your hands. Let the noise pass. Then get in later when things calm down.

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What I’m Doing Instead

I follow Tom Nash’s thinking on this one, and it comes down to a single idea:

System over outcome.

I don’t pile into anything on Day 1 at a specific price because the crowd is hyped.

That’s not a system. That’s a feeling.

And like Tom always says, a feeling is what you get when you have to go to the bathroom. It’s not an investment strategy.

Instead, I dollar-cost average (DCA).

I buy good companies slowly, on a schedule, no matter if the market is going up, down or sideways.

A little every month. Boring. Mechanical. On purpose.

Here’s why that beats the IPO-day scramble:

If your whole plan is to build a position over 10 years, what does buying on day one actually get you?

One data point out of 120? One extra purchase at the most hyped, most expensive price you’ll ever see? So you can say you were there for history?

That’s not investing. That’s a souvenir.

This is the part my husband Andrew taught me without ever meaning to.

Andrew’s family has farmed the same land for three generations. His father, his grandfather.

When he’s away in Illinois every fall, the whole farm lands on me. Up at 4:30am instead of my regular 5:15am. All of it on my shoulders.

And not once, in 100+ years, has a single thing on that farm gotten built in a day.

You don’t sprint a harvest. You don’t rush a crop that grows on its own clock. You show up every morning, you do the boring work, and you trust time to do what time does.

That’s the whole game.

The market right now is loud.

Everything is expensive, everything is exciting, everybody’s got a hot take. SpaceX is just the loudest thing in a very noisy room.

I’m not going to sprint a marathon. There’s no prize for being first to a finish line that’s ten years out.

Your Move This Week

If you took anything from this, here’s how to actually implement it.

1. Notice when you feel rushed. “Buy now before it’s too late“ is a sales tactic, not a strategy. The urgency is the tell.

2. Pick a system and let it run. A fixed amount, on a fixed schedule, into investments you actually understand. The data shows us boring wins every time.

3. Separate “great company” from “good price.” SpaceX can be both incredible and the bad buy on any given day. Both things are true.

4. Wave at the hype as it passes by. The best opportunities are usually the quiet ones nobody’s posting about.

You don’t need the IPO. You don’t need the noise. You don’t need to be first.

You need a system you’ll still be running in ten years. That’s it.

Your wealth hype girl,

-Charlie

📌 P.S. When you’re ready, here’s how I can help:

If you want to sit down together and map out your specific asset location strategy — which investments go where based on your exact accounts, income, and tax situation — that’s exactly what my 1:1 private strategy sessions are for.

No pressure, no pitch. Just your numbers and a clear plan.

Leave a comment

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

On paper, she’s crushing it.

Fancy title, corner office, the kind of salary most people would kill for.

Last month she told me she feels broke.

“I make more than my parents ever did combined, so why does it feel like my money disappears before I even see it?”

I asked her one question:

“What’s in your accounts besides your 401(k) and your checking?”

Long pause.

“Nothing, really.”

Bingo, I told her. There’s your problem.

And it has nothing to do with how much she earns.

It has everything to do with which tax buckets her money lives in.

Because the wealthy don’t get rich by earning more.

They get rich by controlling when and whether their money gets taxed.

There are 3 ways your dollars get treated by the IRS, and almost everyone I meet has 95% of their financial life stuck in the worst one (and for awhile I did too. So no judgment here!).

Time to fix that.

The 3 Buckets

Every dollar you ever touch falls into one of 3 categories.

1️⃣ Tax Now: You earn it, the government takes its cut immediately, and you keep the rest. This is your W2 paycheck or what you pay yourself if you’re self-employed.

2️⃣ Tax Later: You set the dollar aside before paying taxes, it grows untouched for decades, and you pay the bill when you pull it out. This is your traditional 401(k) or IRA.

3️⃣ Tax Never: The dollar grows, you access it, and the IRS never gets a second bite. This is your Roth (after-tax money) and, for people who do it right, borrowing against assets you already own.

Unfortunately, most people have their entire financial life in bucket one.

They earn a W-2 paycheck, pay the highest rate the system charges, and wonder why a great salary doesn’t turn into wealth.

Here’s the truth: wealth gets built by slowly moving your dollars out of bucket 1 and into buckets 2 and 3.

Let’s look at how each one actually works so you can start moving your own money.

Bucket 1: TAX NOW (Your W-2 Paycheck)

This is where almost everyone’s money lives. Unfortunately, it’s the most expensive real estate in the entire United States tax code.

When you earn a salary, you don’t get to decide when you pay tax on it. The decision was made for you before the money ever hit your account.

Federal income tax comes out. State tax comes out (unless you’re lucky enough to live somewhere without it). Then Social Security takes 6.2% and Medicare takes another 1.45% as a cherry on top.

By the time you see your “take-home,” a high earner has often lost $0.30-40 on every $1.

And the worst part is, you have zero control over the timing.

You earned it this year, so you’re taxed this year, at this year’s rate, full stop.

My $280K friend?

Her effective tax bill is north of $90,000 a year. She never sees that money. It’s gone before her direct deposit clears.

That’s the trap of being a high W-2 earner.

You feel rich on the offer letter but broke in real life. Because the most heavily taxed dollar in America is the one you trade your time for.

A bigger salary alone doesn’t get you out. It just gives the ‘Tax Now’ bucket a bigger shovel.

Bucket 2: TAX LATER (Traditional 401(k) and IRA)

This is the first real escape hatch, and it’s the one most people already have access to without realizing what they hold.

When you contribute to a traditional 401(k) or IRA, you move that dollar before the tax man sees it. This causes your taxable income to drop today.

Then, your dollar grows untouched for decades. You only settle up when you withdraw it in retirement.

Let’s look at an example:

Say you earn $120,000/year and put $20,000 into a traditional 401(k). You’re now taxed as if you made $100,000. If you’re in the 24% bracket, you keep roughly $4,800 in your pocket this year that would have gone straight to the IRS.

But remember, the government becomes a silent partner in this account. They didn’t take their cut yet. They simply deferred it.

That deferral is the whole point.

You’re betting your tax rate in retirement will be lower than it is during your peak earning years. For a lot of high earners, that bet pays off.

Just make sure you understand what you signed up for.

You didn’t avoid the tax. You delayed it. Every dollar that comes out gets taxed as ordinary income at whatever rate applies to you then.

And at 73, the government stops waiting. Because Uncle Sam wants his money before you die. Sorry, but that’s the truth.

Required minimum distributions (RMDs) force you to start pulling money out of these accounts, and paying tax on it. Whether you need the cash or not.

A healthy traditional 401k/IRA balance can push you into a higher bracket in your 70s than you ever planned for, especially stacked on top of Social Security.

‘Tax Later’ is a good bucket. It beats ‘Tax Now’ for most working people. But the IRS still owns a piece of it. Essentially, you’re a tenant, not the landlord.

Bucket 3: TAX NEVER (Roth, and Borrowing Against What You Own)

Now we get to the bucket the wealthy actually use.

There are two doors into it.

Door 1️⃣: The Roth

You contribute money you’ve already paid tax on. So yes, technically it’s not entirely ‘tax never’, but hear me out…

No deduction today. The seed gets taxed, not the tree that grows from it.

The tree that grows from that seed? The decades of compounding, the dividends, and the gains? It comes out completely tax-free once you’re 59½ and the account has been open five years.

You paid tax on the seed. You keep the entire tree.

Unlike a traditional account, a Roth has no RMDs either. You’re never forced to touch it. You can let it compound, tax-free, for as long as you want, then pass it to your heirs tax-free.

The growth in a Roth is the closest thing to a free lunch the tax code offers ordinary people. That’s why it belongs in ‘Tax Never’.

Door 2️⃣: Borrow against your assets instead of selling them

Here’s the move you’ve heard rich people use but no one ever explained.

When you sell an appreciated investment (ie. an investment you made money on), you trigger what’s called capital gains tax. If you bought $40,000 worth of stock 20 years ago and it’s now worth $100,000, you owe tax on the $60,000 gain (depending on what account type it’s in).

So what do the wealthy do?

They simply don’t sell. They borrow against it.

How’s this work?

Your brokerage company or bank will lend you money using your portfolio as collateral, through what’s called a margin loan or a securities-backed line of credit (SBLOC). You get cash to live on, and you never sold a thing.

This is essentially what Elon Musk does with his Tesla stock, what Jeff Bezos does with his Amazon stock etc.

They live off the loan money and never pay tax on it. And according to tax laws in the U.S., it’s 100% legal. Because loan proceeds aren’t income, so the IRS doesn’t touch them.

Meanwhile your investments stay invested and keep compounding behind the loan.

The strategy has a nickname: buy, borrow, die.

You buy assets that increase in value over time, borrow against them for cash flow, and when you die, your heirs get a “step-up in cost basis.” The cost basis (your average price paid for the asset) resets to the value on the day you pass, and all those unrealized gains vanish for tax purposes under current law.

That’s how someone can live on millions and report almost nothing in taxable income.

Now the honest part, because this is where people who don’t understand this process get hurt.

Borrowing against your portfolio is NOT free money.

You pay interest, and right now that interest isn’t cheap. Borrow $80,000 at 6% and you’re paying $4,800 a year for the privilege.

This strategy also carries real risk.

If the market drops hard, the value of your collateral drops with it, and your lender can issue what’s called a margin call. That forces you to sell at the worst possible moment (when prices are low), locking in losses and triggering the exact tax bill you were trying to avoid.

Let me be very clear: this is a tool for a substantial, diversified portfolio, not for someone borrowing against $15,000 of stock to fund a vacation.

And it leans on current tax law, especially the step-up at death, which Congress could change.

But, used with discipline and scale, it’s how serious wealth funds a serious lifestyle without ever feeding the ‘Tax Now’ machine.

Used carelessly, it’s a fast way to blow everything you’ve worked hard for up.

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The Number That Changes Everything

Let’s say you need $80,000 to live on this year. Watch what each bucket costs you to deliver it.

From your W-2 (Tax Now): To net $80,000 after roughly a 30% combined federal, state, and payroll bite, you need to earn about $114,000 gross.

Cost of access: around $34,000 handed to the government.

From a traditional 401(k) (Tax Later): Pull $80,000 and it’s taxed as ordinary income. In the 22% bracket, that’s roughly $17,600 to the IRS.

Cost of access: $17,600.

From a Roth or a portfolio loan (Tax Never): Qualified Roth withdrawals are taxed at $0. A loan against appreciated assets is taxed at $0, though you’ll pay interest of around $4,800 on that $80,000 at 6%.

Same $80,000 in your pocket. Three wildly different costs to get it there.

$34,000 versus $17,600 versus next to nothing.

The person living out of bucket 3 isn’t smarter or harder-working than my high-earning friend stuck in bucket one. They’ve just spent years quietly moving their dollars into a bucket the IRS can’t reach.

Your Bucket Strategy, In Order

Here’s the hack to making this all work: you don’t move all your money at once. You build the buckets in sequence, lowest-hanging fruit first.

Step 1: Capture the free money.

Contribute to your 401(k) up to the full employer match (if they offer one). A 100% return beats every other move on this list.

Step 2: Fund the Tax Never bucket early.

Max out your Roth IRA ($7,500 in 2026, $8,600 if you’re >50). The younger you are, the more decades of tax-free growth you lock in. If your income is too high to contribute directly, look into a Backdoor Roth (a topic for another week).

Step 3: Fill the Tax Later bucket.

Go back to your 401(k) and contribute beyond the match, up to $24,500 in 2026 ($32,500 if you’re >50). This drops your taxable income now while your rate is high.

Step 4: Start and fund a taxable brokerage account.

This is the bucket you’ll one day borrow against.

Long-held, appreciated investments here become the collateral that funds a tax-efficient lifestyle later. The earlier you start, the bigger the asset base you’re working with.

Most people stop at step one and call it a plan. The ones who build quiet wealth work the whole list, every year, on autopilot.

Where to Start This Week

If everything you own is a paycheck and a checking account:

Open a Roth IRA. Fidelity, Vanguard, and Schwab all offer them free with no minimums. Set a $50 automatic monthly contribution and let it compound. You’ve now got a foot in the ‘Tax Never’ bucket.

If you’re a high earner feeling broke:

You’re over-leveraged on ‘Tax Now’. Pull up your last pay stub, find your retirement contributions, and ask whether you’re even capturing the full match. Then look at whether a taxable brokerage account belongs in your plan.

If your whole nest egg is in a traditional 401(k):

You’re a tenant in your own retirement. Start funneling new dollars toward Roth contributions so you own at least one bucket the IRS can’t tax on the way out.

If you’ve already got a sizable portfolio:

Learn how borrowing against assets works before you ever need to. Understand the interest cost and the margin risk now, while it’s theory, not when you’re under pressure and need cash.

~

The size of your paycheck decides how it feels to be you on payday.

The bucket(s) your money lives in decide whether you build real wealth.

Now you know all three and how they work.

Time to go take action — you got this!

Your wealth hype girl,

-Charlie

🔗 Links You’ll Love

🏦 The top 10 IRAs to consider opening in 2026 — If this week’s newsletter made you want to open a Roth IRA or consolidate old accounts, this is the best place to start. I went through this list myself before recommending it — no BS, no fluff.

💭 Weekly Wonderings…

🐷 On the farm: On Monday last week we hosted a local youth livestock judging team at our farm to help them learn how to judge breeding and market hogs. It was the first time having animals in the new barn! It was also the first time cleaning manure out of it too!😂 But we wouldn’t have it any other way.

📈 On the market: On Friday, the S&P 500 lost $1.8 trillion dollars, and the NASDAQ tallied its biggest drop on record. So what’s happening and what does it mean for your investments? Read this Morningstar article for one theory, and remember, how you handle your investments in times of market downturns matters a hell of a lot more than how you handle them when things are good. Don’t panic, stay invested, and if you can, buy more! This is when great companies are on sale.

📬 From the inbox: A new subscriber reached out asking if I had any followers or clients who are in their 60’s. She said she’d started off well, but hit a few snags with relationships and is starting over again. I told her I do actually have followers in their 60’s! In fact, one of the ladies who went through my last group investing cohort was 62, had never invested on her own before and by the end of working together she had opened her own account, funded and invested in it and even helped her daughter open her own Roth IRA! It was so amazing to see. Just goes to show it’s never too late to start (or start over).

💰 Quiet Wealth Move

You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

If your way of tracking your investments looks like my brother’s room growing up, it’s time to get your s$%^ together my friend!

My Stock Tracker & Portfolio Balancer does exactly that.

It’s a simple Google Sheet, fully customizable, and it costs less than 2 cups of ☕️.

Once you’ve got everything in one place, ask yourself: is my most tax-inefficient investment sitting in my most tax-protected account?

If not — you’ve just found some hidden money!

That’s it. 20 minutes. Could be worth $1,000s over the next decade.

When you’re ready, here’s how I can help:

If you want to sit down together and map out your specific asset location strategy — which investments go where based on your exact accounts, income, and tax situation — that’s exactly what my 1:1 private strategy sessions are for.

No pressure, no pitch. Just your numbers and a clear plan.

Leave a comment

A 37-year-old subscriber emailed me last week. She’s making $140,000, has no debt, and lives in a 900 square foot studio apartment because she’s saving 65% of her income.

Her goal?

Retire by 45. She’d found FIRE (financial independence retire early) two years ago and went all in.

Her question was practical: should she put more into her taxable brokerage or max out a second Roth to save on future taxes?

But the thing that got me wasn’t the question. It was the last sentence of her email:

“I don’t let myself spend on anything that won’t get me to my goal faster.”

Spoiler: I didn’t respond with a tax strategy.

I asked her when she’d last taken a trip. When she’d last spent money on something because she wanted to. When she’d last felt like a person instead of a savings rate.

She wrote back two days later.

She hadn’t taken a real trip in five years. She’d missed her best friend’s bachelorette in Scottsdale because flights were too expensive. She was eating the same five meals on rotation.

She said she didn’t love it, but the urge to not have to work until she’s in her 60’s is so strong.

Now before you get defensive, I completely understand the appeal of FIRE.

Financial independence sounds like freedom. Retiring in your 40s, before your body starts sending you physical memos? Sounds great on paper.

But I don’t follow it, and I don’t teach it.

And every time I see someone go all-in on FIRE, I get a little twitch in my eye.

Here’s why.

YOLO

You only live once.

I know how that sounds coming from a financially responsible millennial. Hear me out.

There’s a version of your life where you spend your most mentally and physically capable years eating ramen, skipping girls trips and spending your Friday nights balancing your budget.

Then you retire at 45 with a full portfolio and immediately throw your back out. Or your parents get sick. Or your kids still need things. Or you find you can’t do the things you were saving “freedom” to do.

This isn’t hypothetical. It’s real life.

I’ll turn 39 this year.

My husband Andrew and I live on a piece of his family’s farm in rural Pennsylvania. We raise show pigs, I have horses, and two barns to keep up with. We also both work full-time off the farm.

Each November, when Andrew leaves for his annual bow hunt in Illinois, I get up at 4:30am instead of 5:15 and run the whole thing myself. I know what my body does and doesn’t want to do now versus 10 years ago.

I’m not old (at least I don’t think of myself as old lol). But I’m different.

And the things I wanted to do at 29 are not the things I want at 39. Some of them I wouldn’t want to do now even if I could.

Extreme frugality during your prime years is a bet you’re making with your future self about what he/she will want. And they might not agree with you.

The Math Only Works If Nothing Goes Wrong

The backbone of FIRE is the 4% rule.

The idea: save 25X your annual expenses, withdraw 4% per year, and the math holds indefinitely.

There’s just one problem…

The 4% rule was designed for a 30-year retirement.

Retire at 42 and you’re funding a 40-year retirement. Maybe even 50.

That completely changes the math.

Retire at 42 with $1 million and your portfolio has to survive two financial crises, a pandemic, and a few things nobody’s thought of yet before you’d even qualify for Medicare.

The same $1 million retiring at 62 only has to cover 30 years.

One bad bear market in your first decade of retirement (2001, 2008, 2022, take your pick) and fixed inflation-adjusted withdrawals start depleting your nest egg before the market recovers.

That is a real, documented risk.

It even has a name: sequence of returns risk. And early retirees are uniquely exposed to it.

A 50-year sequence-of-returns is a whole different animal from a 30-year one.

Then add in health insurance.

Off your employer’s plan at 42. Not eligible for Medicare until 65. That’s 23 years of premiums.

A healthy 42-year-old pays $400-600/month for a decent plan. By 55, that might increase to $800-$1,200/month. Run that out over 20 years and you’re looking at ~$200,000 to $300,000 in insurance costs alone, before a single claim.

The math just got a whole lot messier.

The Scarcity Mindset Doesn’t Turn Off Once You Hit Your Freedom Number

FIRE requires years of conditioning yourself to spend as little as possible.

Saying no. Tracking every dollar. Treating purchases as enemies.

Then suddenly one day, you hit your number. You retire. You’re free!

And…you can’t spend the money.

Whomp. Whomp.

Not because it isn’t there.

Because your brain has been wired for deprivation for a decade, and that wiring doesn’t magically reset the day your portfolio hits $1.2 million.

People I know who followed FIRE tell me spending feels like failure.

Call me crazy, but that’s not something I want my money to make me feel.

There are entire subreddits full of FIRE adherents who hit their number and then worked “one more year to be safe,” then another, then found themselves at 55 still in the job they swore they’d leave at 40.

The freedom they chased became self-inflicted golden handcuffs.

Isn’t that what you’re trying to escape in the first place?

Subscribe now

Work Gives You More Than a Paycheck

I’ll be the first to tell someone, the sooner you can get out of a job you hate, the better.

Yet, ask anyone who’s completely retired. The first 3 months feel like a long vacation.

Then it’s month 4.

It’s a dangerous thing to follow FIRE solely for the purpose of ‘never having to work again’.

Work gives you structure. Identity. People. A reason to get dressed. A problem to solve. A place where you matter.

Strip all of that away at 43 with no clear plan for what comes next, and you get a lot of people who spiral. By their own accounts. Boredom becomes restlessness. Restlessness becomes anxiety. And the whole project they sacrificed years to achieve starts to feel hollow.

It definitely does not have to be a 9-5 working for someone else. In fact, I highly encourage it not to be. But it should be something.

Bottom line: a job that’s destroying you? Leave it.

But “retirement at all costs” is not the same thing as “a life well-lived.”

The FIRE Math Assumes You Earn Well Above Average

I don’t see a lot of FIRE promoters talking about this, but a 50-70% savings rate requires a very specific kind of income.

If you make $250,000, it’s uncomfortable but doable. If you make $70,000, you’re living on $21,000-35,000 a year.

In 2026 America, that is survival mode. Not investing mode.

The loudest FIRE voices are almost always high earners: software engineers, doctors, attorneys who did something demanding for a decade and then stopped.

And look, it’s a completely legitimate choice.

But it gets sold as a universal strategy to people for whom the math simply doesn’t work, which means they compensate by reaching for risk. Speculative passive income. Real estate flips. Individual stock bets.

Ironic, for a movement built around security.

What I Do Instead

I invest consistently, and increase my contributions anytime I can.

I live below my means, but not to the bone.

I still take the trip.

I said yes to the concert this summer.

Last weekend mom and I replaced the porch cushions because they were frayed and dry rotting.

I’m building wealth quietly over time without sacrificing the years I’m living right now to fund some theoretical future self who may or may not still want the same things.

Because who knows, I may never even get there.

~

Financial independence is absolutely worth building toward.

The freedom to choose your work, to walk away from what doesn’t bring you joy, to not need any single paycheck to live. That all matters.

That’s what I want for you. That’s what I’m building toward myself.

But retiring at 42 on a shoestring budget while spending your 30s miserable is not freedom. You’re not building a better mouse trap, you’re simply still trapped.

Quiet wealth looks different.

It looks like growing your portfolio while also celebrating your best friend’s 40th birthday weekend in NYC. It looks like booking the flight when the fare is actually reasonable. While also, yes, replacing the porch cushions.

Compounding doesn’t care you’re not on a 65% savings rate. It cares that you started.

Your wealth hype girl,

-Charlie

📌 P.S. Want to figure out what financial independence actually looks like on your terms? Book a 1:1 strategy session with me here. I’m currently offering a discount just for email subscribers.

🔗 Links You’ll Love

🏦 The hidden cost of paying taxes quarterly — and the strategy that fixes it. As someone who is always looking for the next (legal) loophole to keep more of my hard-earned money in my own pocket, I love Max Donovan’s “What Tax” newsletter.

📊 Will vacation inflation affect your summer travel plans? — here’s everything you need to know. Plus 11 questions on summer travel and airline outlooks.

🎥 What $100/month will get you in 30 years — in this video, I break down the real numbers behind investing just $100/month, and show you how small, consistent growth can turn into serious wealth over time. If you’ve ever felt like you don’t have ‘enough’ money to start, this just might change your life.

💭 Weekly Wonderings…

🐷 On the farm: the nephew and nieces had their first pig show of the year yesterday. While the weather was horrible (🎶 where are you summer!? 🎶 - sung to the tune of the “Where Are You Christmas?” from the Grinch), the kids learned a lot and the pigs had their first trip off the farm. Here’s hoping the next one the temps get above 50 and it’s not raining!

📈 On social media: I took the plunge and started an Instagram! Why? Because I needed something more to do. HA! But in all seriousness, since hitting over 100K followers on TikTok (🤯), I thought it time to branch out onto other platforms. It’s a steep learning curve, but I’m having fun. Would love to have you follow along!

📬 From my inbox: a subscriber was confused on tax implications of moving investments around in her Roth IRA. The beauty of the Roth is that you’ve already paid taxes on the money that’s in there. You can buy and sell investments within your account as often as you want without triggering a tax event. Just make sure you’re not actually pulling money out of the account completely. Unless it’s your contributions, you’ll pay a 10% penalty on that money if you’re not age 59 ½ and the account hasn’t been open for at least 5 years.

💰 Quiet Wealth Move

You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

If your way of tracking your investments looks like my brother’s room growing up, it’s time to get your s$%^ together my friend!

My Stock Tracker & Portfolio Balancer does exactly that.

It’s a simple Google Sheet, fully customizable, and it costs less than 2 cups of ☕️.

Once you’ve got everything in one place, ask yourself: is my most tax-inefficient investment sitting in my most tax-protected account?

If not — you’ve just found some hidden money!

That’s it. 20 minutes. Could be worth $1,000s over the next decade.

When you’re ready, here’s how I can help:

If you want to sit down together and map out your specific asset location strategy — which investments go where based on your exact accounts, income, and tax situation — that’s exactly what my 1:1 private strategy sessions are for.

No pressure, no pitch. Just your numbers and a clear plan.

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

Leave a comment

“I’m up 280% on a position. Should I sell and realize the gains? I don’t currently have another stock I’d want to put the money back into. How should I think about taking profits?”

Making money in the market is what we’re all after right?

So why when it actually happens do we panic and start questioning whether or not we should take it?

In my experience, there’s two main reasons for this. The first is valid. The second is our financial system’s fault.

First is taxes.

No one wants to pay Uncle Sam more than necessary.

Valid. 100% agree.

The second?

Fear and uncertainty.

Time to bust that.

Should You Take Profits?

The short answer — yes.

However, the mistake most people make when a stock is up big is that they don’t have a plan for what to do when it happens.

They bought it, it went up, and suddenly paralysis kicks in.

What typically happens:

• 50% of people hold forever because selling feels like giving up the gains

• 50% sell the whole position at once and then wonder where to put the money

But there is a better way.

My 25% rule:

When I’m up more than 50% on a position, I take 25% of my shares and sell them to lock in those gains. If/when the position climbs another 50%, I take another 25% off.

I keep doing this until I’ve pulled out all the money I originally put in.

Because at that point, I’m playing with the house’s money and not my own.

Every dollar I still have in that position is now pure profit. Every gain from that point forward is pure upside. And if the stock tanks tomorrow, I’ve already won.

This is how you stay in the game without triggering large tax bills, or losing profits to the next market downturn.

The Greed Trap

The biggest mistake I see investors make?

They’re up 100%+ on a stock and start to think they’re a genius.

So they keep buying, and simply hold.

And hold. And hold.

Then the stock pulls back 40%. Or 60%. Or it gives up all the gains it made.

Until they’re right back at square one.

Except now they’ve experienced what 100% gains feels like, and breaking even feels a lot like losing.

Take the example of META stock (Facebook) in 2022.

That year, the stock suffered a historic plunge, dropping roughly 64% and bottoming out at ~ $90/share in November.

This represented a staggering 76.7% decline from its September 2021 high of over $382/share.

This proves the market doesn’t care how smart you think you are.

It doesn’t care how much research you did or how ‘right’ your thesis was on the way up.

The investors who build real wealth are the ones who have a plan, follow it, and don’t negotiate with it no matter what the market is doing.

You don’t have to use my 25% rule. Feel free to create your own.

But please, have a plan for taking profits.

Now let’s talk about what to do with them.

What Should You Do With Profits?

Here’s where my strategy differs from a lot of other investors.

When I take profits from a single stock, I don’t look for the next single stock to put the money into.

I put it into my S&P 500 ETF.

Or QQQM. Sometimes both.

Here’s why:

The S&P 500 has averaged ~10-12% annually since the 1930s.

That’s not a guess. That’s based on 100+ years’ worth of data.

If I know I can reliably get that return in a broad, low-cost index fund over a long period of time, for me, that’s the baseline everything else gets measured against.

Every individual stock I own has to clear that bar to earn its place in my portfolio.

I only hold a single stock if I have deep conviction that company is going to outperform the S&P over a specific timeframe, for a specific reason I can clearly state.

Not a ‘vibe’. An actual investment thesis.

If I’m taking profits from Google and I don’t have a new conviction play, the money goes into SPMO or QQQM. That’s where it was heading eventually anyway.

The mistake I see over and over?

Someone is up big on an individual stock, they sell all of it and put the whole thing into another single stock they think is going to the moon.

Except that new stock goes sideways. Then they panic, pull their money out and try and pick another one.

Then that one might do well for a little then start to tank.

They repeat this process over and over again. Each time losing a bit (or a lot) more money.

Remember the definition of insanity?

“Doing something over and over again and expecting a different result.”

That’s not investing. That’s trading.

The Data on Trading…OUCH.

I want to be direct about something.

Contrary to what people online will have you think, study after study shows the same thing: the overwhelming majority of traders lose money.

Not ‘some’ traders. Not ‘bad’ traders. Traders, as a category.

The ‘people’ on the other side of the successful trades you hear about?

They’re institutions with algorithms, decades of data, and zero emotion.

You trying to outperform them consistently, year after year, in my opinion is not a strategy. It’s a bet with terrible odds.

If you want to hold a portion of your portfolio in individual stocks you believe in, fine. I hold 5-6 in my own portfolio.

In all honesty, I think it can be a smart growth move, especially if you’re young and have a long runway ahead of you.

And sure, some people get lucky.

They pick a stock or couple of stocks (like $35 Sandisk) and think “I’m a genius”. “I’m better at this than everyone else”.

Next thing they know they’re eating a big ole’ piece of humble pie when the subsequent 2-3 stocks they pick do the complete opposite and tank. Eating up all those gains they just got done bragging about.

Before you buy any individual position, ask yourself:

“Do I genuinely believe this company is going to beat X number, over my investing horizon, for a reason I can defend out loud?”

If the answer is yes, buy it.

If the answer is “I think it might go up,“ put the money in the S&P or total U.S. stock market. You have a literal 100% guarantee that money is going to go up and to the right over 20 years.

That’s the opportunity cost.

Keep it as your North Star when you’re thinking about where to put profits.

This Week’s Action Step

Pick one individual stock in your portfolio and run the comparison.

Look up what day you purchased it. Then check what VOO, SPMO or VTI returned from that same date to today.

Finally, look at what your stock returned.

No judgment either way. Just know the number.

That’s what investing from a place of awareness looks like.

If this clicked, forward it to someone sitting on big gains with no plan for them. This might be exactly what they need.

Your wealth hype girl,

-Charlie

📌 P.S. If you haven’t seen the emails, enrollment for the next Quiet Wealth Academy ends tomorrow, May 19th. This is my signature, live, 4-week small group investing program to help get you unstuck and actually on a path to achieve your financial independence faster.

If you’ve been waiting for someone to hold your hand through the whole investing process and get you started on the right foot, or help you find fees and other hidden costs that would be costing you $1,000s, keep an eye on your inbox. I only open it to 30 people.

🔗 Links You’ll Love

🏦 How to build massive wealth by (legally) lowering your taxes — this book was my Bible when it came to learning the latest tax reforms and strategies to maximize tax savings and work towards my goal of an (almost) tax-free life.

📊 Here’s the inflation breakdown for April 2026 in one chart — due to the ongoing Iran war, it may be awhile until things stabilize. This breaks it all down by category so you can see what you’re actually paying the most for.

🎥 What $100/month will get you in 30 years — in this video, I break down the real numbers behind investing just $100/month, and show you how small, consistent growth can turn into serious wealth over time. If you’ve ever felt like you don’t have ‘enough’ money to start, this just might change your life.

💭 Weekly Wonderings…

🐷 On the farm: Our barn got concrete! This weekend we’re buying the lumber needed to start building out the horse stalls and pig pens, as well as the wash stall and tack/feed room. The only downside? Wiping concrete dust off the dogs’ feet 5X/day. 🤪

📈 On the market: One of my favorite finance YouTubers, Professor G, just did a video calling this the missing piece to the 3-fund portfolio. Watch this and consider adding it for even faster growth.

📬 From my inbox: A subscriber was confused on which 3 ETFs to put in her portfolio, and she pointed out, “you say something different in your video vs. email”. And that’s true, but it’s for a reason. I try my best to change up the investments I think people should look into and research on their own so they have options. If I only ever talked about VOO or VTI for example, people may think those are the only S&P 500 and total U.S. stock market funds out there. Personal finance is personal, and a fund that works for me, may not work as well for you. As they say, variety is the spice of life!

💰 Quiet Wealth Move

You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

If your way of tracking your investments looks like my brother’s room growing up, it’s time to get your s$%^ together my friend!

My Stock Tracker & Portfolio Balancer does exactly that.

It’s a simple Google Sheet, fully customizable, and it costs less than 2 cups of ☕️.

Once you’ve got everything in one place, ask yourself: is my most tax-inefficient investment sitting in my most tax-protected account?

If not — you’ve just found some hidden money!

That’s it. 20 minutes. Could be worth $1,000s over the next decade.

When you’re ready, here’s how I can help:

If you want to sit down together and map out your specific asset location strategy — which investments go where based on your exact accounts, income, and tax situation — that’s exactly what my 1:1 private strategy sessions are for.

No pressure, no pitch. Just your numbers and a clear plan.

Leave a comment

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

We’d just suffered our third and final miscarriage. I had gained a significant amount of weight due to infertility drugs. And I was once again denied a work request to travel and add experiences to my resume.

I remember spending every evening just sitting in the recliner staring at the tv (I couldn’t tell you what was on), thinking, “is this it? Is this all my life has amounted to?”.

I was 35 years old, yet it felt like the best years of my life had already been lived.

Then one day on my 1 hour commute to work, I stumbled upon a YouTube video about breaking stereotypes of ultra-successful women.

The narrator had interviewed hundreds of women who were making at least $775K per year, and asked them what was the most cold-blooded advice they’d received that changed the trajectory of their lives.

“If you can’t leave it, or let it go, it has you. You don’t have it.”

I nearly drove off the road.

That was a mic drop moment if I’d ever heard one. 🎤

In that moment, driving somewhere I didn’t want to be, doing something I didn’t want to do, for reasons I didn’t fully believe in anymore…

I realized my life had me, not the other way around.

That’s the exact day I started building my side hustle and prioritizing my mental and physical health again.

~

I’ve thought about that sentence almost every day since. And I’ve found it shows up in a lot of places.

Relationships. The friendship you’ve outgrown but can’t quite end because she’s known you since college and it feels like too much to untangle. The partner you’ve built an entire life around, even as that life stopped fitting. The one you’re still furious at in the shower, three years later, even though you’ve “moved on.”

Unforgiveness. Because unforgiveness is almost never about the other person. It’s about needing to stay in control of something that already happened. You’re still in the room, arguing with someone who left.

Plans. The version of your life you were certain you’d have by 45. The timeline you measure yourself against every January. The thing you thought you were going to do, or believed you absolutely had to do, and couldn’t adjust when reality moved the goal post.

If you’re gripping something you can’t release, it’s gripping you back.

So how do you apply it to your money?

What “Having” Your Money Actually Means

A number in a savings account and having real financial options are not the same thing.

Plenty of people have savings.

Money sitting in a checking or savings account paying 0.2% interest? Technically it’s there, but doing almost nothing.

It might feel like it, but that’s not freedom. That’s a number that shrinks a little every month against inflation that runs 2.5-3%/year.

That gap between 3% and 0.2% isn’t a rounding error.

But how do you close it?

Investing.

Specifically, investing in low-cost index funds inside tax-advantaged accounts is how you build the kind of wealth that gives you options.

The option to leave a job that’s crushing you. The option to say no to things that don’t fit your dream life. The option to stop negotiating from a position of need.

That’s what quiet wealth is. Not a number for its own sake.

It’s options.

Your Freedom Number

Your freedom number isn’t a savings goal, and it’s not a retirement target.

It’s the amount you need invested to make leaving an option.

So how do you decide what your number is, and how to achieve it?

Here’s the formula:

Step 1: Calculate your annual expenses

Step 2: Multiply that number by 25. This is how much you need invested.

Step 3: Multiply the result of step 2 by 4%. That’s how much you can withdraw from your portfolio per year and, historically, never run out of money.

Researchers call it the 4% rule.

I call it the number that changes what “having“ your money actually means.

Annual expenses of $60,000?

Your Freedom Number is $1,500,000.

Annual expenses of $80,000?

It’s $2,000,000.

Annual expenses of $50,000?

It’s $1,250,000.

That is the number at which earning more income becomes optional.

I know. That sounds like a lot of money. And it is.

But you don’t need to hit it to start getting your life back. You just need to be moving toward it.

For example, a $200,000 portfolio invested in VOO, left alone, returning an average of 10% per year…grows to over $2.1M in 25 years without a single additional contribution.

Add in 10% of that promotion you recently got? A portion of last year’s Christmas bonus? That $35/month you saved from cancelling that TV subscription?

You get there faster.

Every dollar you invest is a dollar closer to your exit.

To choose. To have your life, instead of your life having you.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Action Step

Calculate your Freedom Number.

Take your monthly expenses, multiply by 12, then multiply by 25. Write it down.

Don’t panic at the number. Just know it.

If you don’t have a portfolio yet: open a Roth IRA at Fidelity this week. It takes 20 minutes and you don’t need to fund it right away. Just open it, so the option exists.

If you already have one: log in and see where you are relative to your Freedom Number. Not to stress. Just to know.

You can’t move towards something you’ve never acknowledged.

What ‘Has’ You?

Money should never be the end goal. At the end of the day, it’s just a tool.

Your endgame should be one thing: having options.

The option to leave something (or someone) that has you.

The option to stay somewhere, or do something that brings you joy.

The option to say yes to what fires you up, and no to anything that doesn’t.

That’s what a portfolio builds. Not just returns.

And you won’t get there by watching inflation quietly take your savings account apart.

🙏 If this landed, share it with one woman who needs to hear it. You probably know who she is. Forward this email. Drop the link. You might not know exactly what she’s carrying, but this might be the thing that tips her toward starting.

Your wealth hype girl,

-Charlie

📌 P.S. If you haven’t seen the emails, enrollment for the next Quiet Wealth Academy is opening on May 15th. This is my signature, live, 4-week small group investing program to help get you unstuck and actually on a path to achieve your Freedom Number faster.

If you’ve been waiting for someone to hold your hand through the whole investing process and get you started on the right foot, or help you find fees and other hidden costs that would be costing you $1,000s, keep an eye on your inbox. I only open it to 30 people, and newsletter subscribers get first dibs.

🔗 Links You’ll Love

🏦 The top 10 IRAs to consider opening in 2026 — If this week’s newsletter made you want to open a Roth IRA or consolidate old accounts, this is the best place to start. I went through this list myself before recommending it — no BS, no fluff.

📊 The stock market is doing something for only the 4th time in the past 156 years — this Motley Fool article outlines how the market is doing something it’s done only 3 other times in 156 years. Before you panic, read this — especially the last paragraph.

📖 The books I’ve been (re)reading: When I Start My Business I’ll Be Happy by Sam Vander Wielen. I met Sam through a newsletter cohort I was apart of and we’re working on some exciting collab articles for later this year. Her book is a practical, no-BS guide to successful online entrepreneurship. It pretty much lives on my desk.

💭 Weekly Wonderings…

🐷 On the farm: Our barn is (finally) getting concrete this week! This is a huge step in being able to move our pigs (and eventually my horses) to our place. This has been 6 years in the making, but hard work and patience pays off!

📈 On the market: SanDisk (SNDK) has been a top performer in my portfolio this year. I’m up 155% since February. I also hold shares of Micron (MU) which I’m up over 100% in just the last 30 days. This past week I took some profits from each and will continue to do so if the run continues. If you’re interested in how I take profits from my investments let me know, and I can do a future article on my strategy.

📬 From the inbox: I heard from a few of you this week that the job market continues to be a real struggle. Having graduated college during The Great Recession, I feel you! My advice if you have a job right now: hang onto it for dear life. If you want to make a move, start a side hustle or find a way to make extra income, and only exit when you’ve doubled your monthly take-home pay for at least 6 consecutive months.

💰 Quiet Wealth Move

You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

If your way of tracking your investments looks like my brother’s room growing up, it’s time to get your s$%^ together my friend!

My Stock Tracker & Portfolio Balancer does exactly that.

It’s a simple Google Sheet, fully customizable, and it costs less than 2 cups of ☕️.

Once you’ve got everything in one place, ask yourself: is my most tax-inefficient investment sitting in my most tax-protected account?

If not — you’ve just found some hidden money!

That’s it. 20 minutes. Could be worth $1,000s over the next decade.

When you’re ready, here’s how I can help:

If you want to sit down together and map out your specific asset location strategy — which investments go where based on your exact accounts, income, and tax situation — that’s exactly what my 1:1 private strategy sessions are for.

No pressure, no pitch. Just your numbers and a clear plan.

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

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Not because I didn’t have the money → I did.

Not because I forgot the account existed → I opened it. I even logged in regularly.

I read every online help article my HR department suggested. I watched YouTube videos at 10pm on a Tuesday. Bookmarked comparison guides of the different fund options.

On paper, I understood the major index fund categories. I knew what an expense ratio was, what a target-date fund was, why the S&P 500 has historically returned roughly 10% annually before inflation and about 7% after.

And then I did nothing.

For a full year.

Because I was waiting until I understood it perfectly.

Quick note: this one’s for the girls. So guys reading, don’t be offended. Next week’s newsletter will be back to an all-inclusive.😉

Why Smart Women Don’t Invest

I want to speak plainly on this, because I don’t think it gets said enough.

The reason most women (especially smart, capable, successful women) don’t invest isn’t because we’re bad with money.

The research shows that on average, women are actually better than men when it comes to finances. We take less risks and save more over our lifetimes.

It’s because the financial world was not built to welcome us.

For a long time, the stock market and investing in it was presented to us as:

• Complicated (it mostly isn’t)

• Risky (it depends entirely on what you’re doing)

• Something men in suits on Wall Street did using terms no one would explain

So we as women learned to be careful.

To wait until we were sure. To not make a move until we had all the information.

It’s not a character flaw. It’s what you do when you’ve been told, in a 1,000 subtle ways, that the room isn’t for you.

The cruel irony?

Waiting feels responsible. Waiting feels like the smart thing to do. Waiting feels like you are almost there.

Except time, and compounding — the keys to building real wealth — wait for no one.

Here’s What My ‘Nothing Year’ Actually Cost Me

Let me show you the math, because your retirement account only cares about numbers, not your feelings.

In that lost year, I was 26.

I could have invested $200/month from my paycheck — $2,400 for the year, into a simple S&P 500 index fund.

Let’s use a very conservative 7% average annual return, which is the inflation-adjusted historical average for the S&P 500.

Over the next 30 years, that $2,400, invested consistently and left alone, would have grown to approximately $24,000.

Not because I made a brilliant move. Because of 1 year of consistent action, plus time.

Except, I didn’t invest it.

So that $24,000 doesn’t exist.

That doesn’t even take into account any money I would’ve earned on that $24,000 that also could’ve been compounding over 30 years. It’s honestly sickening to think about.

Here’s what makes it harder: most people don’t lose one year.

They lose 3, 5, sometimes 10 or more.

A 10-year delay at $200/month — say ages 32 to 42 — doesn’t just cost you $24,000. At 7% over 20 years, you’ve missed roughly $129,000 in growth you’ll never get back.

Not because the market tanked. Not because you picked wrong.

Because you were still reading and thinking about it. Scared that if you jumped in, you’d make the wrong move and lose it all.

The Investors Who Retire With Real Money

Here’s the truth I’ve watched play out over 16+ years of doing this:

The investors who retire with real money aren’t the ones who made the smartest picks. They’re not the ones who timed the market correctly. They didn’t have the most complex strategy.

They’re the most consistent ones.

They’re the ones putting in $200 a month into a low-cost S&P 500 index fund — something like VOO (Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, 0.03% expense ratio) or FXAIX (Fidelity S&P 500, 0% expense ratio), every single month, regardless of what the market does, regardless of how they ‘feel’ about the economy that week.

That’s the whole plan.

Not because it’s the only right plan. Because it’s a plan that actually works and that you will actually do.

A B+ plan executed consistently beats an A+ plan you never start. Every time.

The Permission Nobody Gave You

Here’s what I think now about that year I spent researching instead of investing.

The finance world profits from your confusion.

❌ A confused investor hires an advisor.
❌ An intimidated investor buys products they don’t need.
❌ A hesitant investor sits in a savings account earning 1% while inflation runs at 3%.

The “safe” choice — waiting, researching, staying in cash — is actually the risky one.

$1 sitting still loses on average, roughly 3% of its purchasing power every year. Not in a dramatic crash. But rather quietly, every year, without you noticing.

The system never told you that.

It also never told you that the simplest investment strategy — buy a low-cost index fund, add to it every month, don’t touch it — has beaten 80–90% of professional fund managers over 20+ year periods.

Don’t believe me? Research it for yourself.

You weren’t bad with money. You were never given the clear, simple plan and told it was for you.

This is that plan.

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What I’d Tell 26-Year-Old Me

1. Stop reading about the perfect fund and go pick one.

Any low-cost, broad-market index fund will work. Make sure the expense ratio is < 0.10%. That’s your only criteria right now.

2. Open a Roth IRA.

Open this free account with a reputable brokerage like Fidelity (my preference) Vanguard, or Charles Schwab.

The Roth is where your money grows tax-free. Not tax-deferred. Tax-free. You pay taxes on the money before it goes in, and you never pay taxes on the growth, ever.

Tax-free forever.

That phrase should live rent-free in your head.

3. Fund it with whatever you have.

$100. $500. $1,000.

Whatever you can do right now. You can always increase it later.

4. Buy 1 fund.

At Fidelity: FXAIX (0% expense ratio, no minimum).
At Vanguard: VTSAX or VTI.
At Schwab: SCHB or SCHD if you want dividends.

Don’t research this for more than 10 minutes. Any of these options will make you wealthy if you contribute consistently for 20+ years. Pick one and move on.

5. Set up a monthly automatic contribution for whatever amount is realistic.

$50 counts. $100 counts. $200 is meaningful.

The 2026 Roth IRA contribution limit is $7,500 ($8,600 if you’re 50 or older). Max it if you can, or start somewhere if you can’t.

6. Put your phone down and go do something else.

This is the part nobody talks about.

Investing isn’t supposed to feel exciting. You’re not supposed to watch the app every day. That’s trading. Trading is a different thing, and most people lose at it.

Investing is supposed to feel a little boring. The boredom is the feature. It means it’s working.

What To Do This Week

Take 1 of the 6 action steps above.

If you’re starting at No. 1 great! If you’ve been stuck at No. 3 for two years, do that so next week you can move to No. 4.

Compounding doesn’t care you started late. It cares that you started.

Your future self will thank you,

-Charlie

📌 P.S. The year I finally started investing, the market dropped almost immediately after I bought. I bought more. That drop is one of the best financial decisions of my life. Stay the course.

📌 P.P.S. Reply to this email with any questions about opening a Roth IRA or choosing your first fund. I read every one.

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Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

As I was feeding the pigs the other evening — Fresca in one hand, feed scoop in the other — my mind started wandering to the (yet unpaid) real estate tax bill sitting on our kitchen counter.

(I know. I’m a Type A nerd. Go ahead and judge.)

As I argued with myself for the ump-teenth time over how stupid I think it is to have to pay taxes simply for the privilege to live on real estate you already own…

Another thought popped in my head…

Most investors spend tons of time and energy trying to pick the right stocks and ETFs.

They obsess over expense ratios. Dividend yields. Growth rates.

And yet they just dump everything into whatever account is most convenient.

Their Roth IRA. Their 401(k). Their taxable brokerage.

Doesn’t matter. Same investments everywhere.

In doing so, they quietly hand thousands of dollars back to the IRS every single year.

For no reason!

So this week I want to chat with you about asset location — and why getting it right might be the easiest money you ever make as an investor.

Not to be confused with asset allocation (what you own).

Asset location is all about where you own it.

Same investments. Different accounts. Dramatically different tax bills.

Let’s get into it👇🏼.

The Problem In Plain English

You probably have more than one type of investment account.

• Maybe a 401(k) through work.

• A Roth IRA you opened a few years ago.

• A taxable brokerage account where you invest extra savings.

Yet what a lot of people don’t realize is that each of these accounts has completely different tax rules.

Your 401(k) and Traditional IRA — every dollar of growth gets taxed as ordinary income when you withdraw.

Could be 12%. Could be 22%. Could be 32%.

Depends on your federal income tax bracket.

Your Roth IRA — completely tax-free. Every dividend. Every gain. Forever.

Your taxable brokerage — you pay taxes every year on dividends and interest, and capital gains tax when you sell an investment for a profit.

On paper, most people I ask say they know this.

But when I talk to them in my 1:1 consults, they aren’t using this knowledge to decide where to put each investment.

And that’s where the real money is hiding.

One Simple Rule:

• Put your least tax-efficient investments in your most tax-protected accounts.

• Put your most tax-efficient investments in your taxable accounts.

That’s it. That’s the whole framework.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

In your Roth IRA/401k — put your highest-growth, most tax-inefficient assets.

Your Roth is your most powerful tax shelter.

Growth is tax-free. Dividends are tax-free. Forever.

This is where you want the investments that would otherwise generate your biggest tax bills to go.

Think:

• SCHD (Schwab US Dividend Equity ETF) — pays a growing dividend every quarter. Every dollar of that dividend inside your Roth compounds tax-free instead of triggering an annual tax bill.

• VNQ (Vanguard Real Estate ETF) — REITs are required by law to distribute 90% of their income to shareholders. That’s a lot of taxable income in a regular account. Inside a Roth? Zero tax. Ever.

• QQQM (Invesco Nasdaq-100 ETF) — high-growth, high-return potential. The bigger the gains, the more valuable the tax-free shelter becomes. Let your most aggressive growers live here.

• Actively managed funds with high portfolio turnover — funds that buy and sell frequently generate short-term capital gains that get taxed at your highest ordinary income rate. Shield them inside your Roth and that problem disappears entirely.

The rule of thumb: if an investment throws off a lot of income or has serious growth potential — it belongs in your Roth first.

In your Traditional 401(k) or IRA — put your bond funds and income-generating assets.

Your Traditional accounts give you tax-deferral — meaning nothing gets taxed until you withdraw in retirement.

That makes them the perfect home for investments that generate regular, heavily-taxed income right now.

Think:

• BND (Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF) — bonds pay interest income regularly. In a taxable account, that interest gets taxed as ordinary income every single year — your highest possible rate. Inside a Traditional 401(k), that interest compounds untouched for decades. You defer the tax bill until retirement when you may be in a lower bracket.

• VCIT (Vanguard Intermediate-Term Corporate Bond ETF) — same principle. Corporate bonds generate consistent interest income that you don’t want sitting in a taxable account getting hit annually.

• Dividend-paying international funds — international ETFs often come with foreign tax complications that are actually easier to manage inside a tax-deferred account.

• High-yield bond funds — these pay generous income, which makes them extremely tax-inefficient in a taxable account. Let them compound inside your 401(k) instead.

The rule of thumb: if an investment pays regular interest or income that would otherwise be taxed at your ordinary income rate — it belongs in your Traditional 401(k) or IRA.

In your taxable brokerage — put your most tax-efficient assets.

Your taxable brokerage is your least tax-protected account.

So you want investments here that naturally generate the smallest tax footprint — ie. assets that grow quietly in the background without throwing off taxable income along the way.

Think:

• VOO (Vanguard S&P 500 ETF) — extremely low turnover, minimal dividend distributions, and most of its return comes from long-term price appreciation. You only pay capital gains tax when you actually sell — and if you hold longer than a year, that rate is 0%, 15%, or 20% depending on your income. Not ordinary income rates of 22-37%.

• VTI (Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF) — same story. Broad, diversified, low-cost, tax-efficient. Perfectly suited for a taxable account.

• VUG (Vanguard Growth ETF) — growth-focused stocks pay minimal dividends and instead appreciate over time. That appreciation isn’t taxed until you sell. A natural fit for taxable accounts.

• Individual stocks you plan to hold long-term — buying and holding individual companies for years generates almost no taxable events until you decide to sell. Berkshire Hathaway, for example, pays zero dividends entirely by design — making it one of the most tax-efficient individual stock holdings available.

The rule of thumb: if an investment grows primarily through price appreciation rather than income distributions — and you plan to hold it for years — it belongs in your taxable brokerage.

~

The way to remember all three:

Roth → your most aggressive growers and highest income producers. Tax-free forever.

Traditional 401(k)/IRA → your bonds and interest-generating income. Tax-deferred until retirement.

Taxable brokerage → your quiet, low-turnover index funds. Tax-efficient by design.

~

Let me show you what this actually looks like with real numbers.

Say you have $500,000 invested and $50,000 of that is in a high-dividend ETF like SCHD yielding 3.5%.

That’s $1,750 in annual dividends.

Scenario A — SCHD in your taxable brokerage:

You pay taxes on $1,750 every year. At a 22% qualified dividend rate, that’s $385/year.

Over 20 years, that’s $7,700 in taxes paid — before accounting for the growth you lost on that money.

Scenario B — SCHD in your Roth IRA:

You pay $0 in taxes on those dividends. Every year. The full $1,750 stays invested and compounds.

Over 20 years at 8% returns, that $7,700 in tax savings compounds to over $16,000 in additional wealth.

Same ETF. Same amount invested. Same market returns.

Just in a different account.

$16,000 difference.

And that’s just one holding.

Most investors have 5, 10, sometimes 20+ positions that could be optimized this way.

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The Quick-Check Checklist.

I know this can feel overwhelming, so here’s a step-by-step guide to help you start:

✅ Step 1: Write down every investment account you have and its tax type (Roth, Traditional, or Taxable).

✅ Step 2: List every ETF, mutual fund or individual company you own and ask — does this generate a lot of taxable income? (High dividends, bond interest, or high turnover = tax-inefficient = belongs in your Roth or 401k.)

✅ Step 3: Move tax-inefficient investments into your Roth IRA first. This is your most powerful shelter.

✅ Step 4: Fill your taxable brokerage with broad index funds like VOO or VTI that grow quietly with minimal tax drag.

✅ Step 5: Put bond funds and income-generating fixed income inside your Traditional 401(k) or IRA where the interest compounds tax-deferred.

One important note:

If moving investments between accounts means selling in a taxable account, check your capital gains situation first.

Inside a Roth or 401(k)? Move freely — no tax consequences.

That’s all for this week.

As always — hit Reply and tell me:

What questions do you have about asset location? Did this newsletter give you food for thought on relocating any of your investments?

I read every single reply.

And unlike the algorithms, I actually write back.

Talk soon,

-Charlie

🔗 Links You’ll Love

🏦 The top 10 IRAs to consider opening in 2026 — If this week’s newsletter made you want to open a Roth IRA or consolidate old accounts, this is the best place to start. I went through this list myself before recommending it — straightforward comparison, no fluff.

📊 How asset location can lower your taxes — Vanguard’s own research on the exact strategy we covered this week. Their data shows it can mean up to $74,000 less in taxes over 30 years. Worth a bookmark.

📖 The books I’ve been (re)reading: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. If you haven’t read it yet — stop what you’re doing. It’s one of the best investing book I’ve ever read and it has almost nothing to do with picking stocks.

💭 Weekly Wonderings…

🐷 On the farm: We’re heading into one of my favorite times of year — late spring. The weather is (finally) staying warmer, the show pigs are learning how to strut their stuff with daily walks, and our new horse/pig barn is (almost) ready for concrete! It’s the time of year that makes me extra grateful for country life. I hope you’ve got something like that in your week too!

📈 On the market: A lot of you have been emailing me asking whether to keep investing given all the uncertainty and noise in the headlines right now. My answer is always the same: zoom out. The investors who won through every crash in history weren’t the ones who predicted the bottom. They were the ones who kept going.

📬 From the inbox: Got a great question this week from a subscriber asking whether asset location still matters if you only have one type of account. Honest answer — not yet. But it’s a great reason to open a Roth IRA if you don’t have one. Which leads me to this week’s…

💰 Quiet Wealth Move

This week, log into every investment account you have. Write down what’s in each one.

If you’ve been meaning to get your portfolio organized and actually want to see where all your investments are, what they’re returning, and whether your allocation is where it needs to be — my Stock Tracker & Portfolio Balancer does exactly that.

It’s a simple Google Sheet, fully customizable, and it costs less than 2 cups of ☕️.

Once you’ve got everything in one place, ask yourself: is my most tax-inefficient investment sitting in my most tax-protected account?

If not — you’ve just found some hidden money!

That’s it. 20 minutes. Could be worth $1,000s over the next decade.

When you’re ready, here’s how I can help:

If you want to sit down together and map out your specific asset location strategy — which investments go where based on your exact accounts, income, and tax situation — that’s exactly what my 1:1 private strategy sessions are for.

No pressure, no pitch. Just your numbers and a clear plan.

Leave a comment

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

Six months ago I hired a new employee straight outta college.

Per usual, HR had given her a stack of onboarding forms 3” thick. And also per usual, the only guidance they gave her when it came to her retirement accounts was: “pick either a Roth 401(k) or a traditional 401(k) by Friday.”

She had no idea what either one meant, nor which one was better for her situation.

“Just tell me which box to check,” she said.

I told her flat out:

“This is not a small decision. What box you pick, may cost you $200K+ over the life of your career.”

Most people give more thought to what they’re having for dinners this week than what type of retirement account will benefit them most.

They pick based on whatever their coworkers did. Or whatever their parents did. Or the ole’ eeny-meeny-miney-mo method.

But pick wrong and you might be eating Ramen from age 65-85 vs. a nice steak dinner twice a month.

But because you’re reading this, you’re smarter than that.

Let’s run through 4 different scenarios to show you exactly how to make the right decision with data instead of guesswork.

But First — What’s the Difference?

Before we get into which one wins in your situation, you need to understand what you’re actually choosing between.

What’s the Same:

• Both IRA and 401k accounts are geared towards making sure you have money to retire on — so you don’t have to work the rest of your life.

• Both account types let your investments grow completely tax-free while the money is inside them.

The biggest difference is when you pay taxes.

Traditional IRA/401k — Pay Taxes LATER

You contribute pre-tax dollars. Meaning every dollar you put in, you’ve not yet paid income taxes on. This reduces your taxable income today.

Ex. Contribute $7,500 to a traditional IRA in 2026 — your taxable income drops by $7,500 this year. If your taxable income before contributions was $65,000, you’d now only be taxed on $57,500 when you file your taxes in April 2027.

If you’re in the 22% federal tax bracket, that $7,500 deduction puts approximately $1,650 back in your pocket this year — money you can spend, save, or invest elsewhere right now.

But when you withdraw from the account in retirement?

Every dollar comes out as ordinary income — taxed at whatever rate applies to you then.

The government gave you a break today. They’ll collect later.

Roth IRA/401k — Pay Taxes NOW

You contribute after-tax dollars. Meaning the money that goes in, you’ve already paid income tax on.

No deduction today. No tax break this year.

But when you withdraw in retirement?

Every single dollar — contributions AND decades of compound growth — comes out completely tax-free.

Forever.

The government gets their cut now. Then they leave you alone.

That’s the trade-off.

Pay taxes now. Or pay taxes later.

Sounds simple right?

The Only Question You Need To Answer…

Forget the jargon for a moment.

There’s really only 1 question you need to answer:

Will your tax rate be higher now — or higher in retirement?

• If your tax rate will be higher in retirement than it is today — pay taxes now. Choose the Roth.

• If your tax rate will be lower in retirement than it is today — defer the taxes. Choose the Traditional.

That’s the whole game.

Everything else is just helping you figure out which scenario applies to you.

The 4 Scenarios — And Which Account Wins

Scenario 1: You’re Early in Your Career Earning <$50,000

Winner: Roth. It’s not even close.

Early in your career, your income — and therefore your tax rate — is almost certainly at its lowest point. You’re likely in the 10% or 12% federal bracket.

Paying taxes now at 12% to get tax-free growth for 30-40 years is one of the best financial decisions a young person can make.

Think about what happens if you invest consistently and build a $1M+ portfolio by retirement.

When you withdraw a traditional IRA/401k, every dollar of that $1M gets taxed as ordinary income.

If you’re pulling $60,000-$80,000 per year in retirement — which puts you in the 22% bracket — you’re handing the government $13,200-$17,600 every single year.

Sorry Uncle Sam, but I worked too hard for that money just to give it away to you.

With a Roth IRA?

You paid 12% on the way in.

Everything that came after — the decades of compound growth, the dividends, the market returns — comes out completely tax-free.

You paid 12% on $7,500 per year. You got $1,000,000 tax-free.

That’s the Roth’s superpower.

And it’s most powerful when you’re young and your tax rate is lowest.

Real-life example:

25-year-old Ana makes $50K/year and contributes $7,500/year to her Roth IRA for 40 years. At 8% annual returns, by age 65 her portfolio is worth approx. $2,060,000.

Every dollar of that — contributions and growth — is completely tax-free.

Ryan, also 25 years old, has a traditional IRA — same $2M+ account balance.

At age 65 he starts withdrawing $82,000/year at a 22% tax rate. He ends up paying roughly $18,040 per year in taxes on the withdrawals.

Over a 25-year retirement that’s over $451,000 paid in taxes alone — on money that could have been completely tax-free with a Roth.

Scenario 2: You’re a High Earner in Your Peak Years

Winner: Traditional. Usually.

Here’s the flip side.

If you’re earning $150,000, $200,000, or more — you’re likely in the 24%, 32%, or 35% federal bracket right now.

Paying 32% in taxes today to avoid taxes in retirement — when you might be in the 22% bracket — is a losing trade.

Take the deduction now. Reduce your taxable income. Invest the tax savings. And plan to pay the lower rate later.

The traditional IRA/401k is essentially the government offering you a $0.32 discount on every $1 you invest today.

That’s a tough deal to turn down.

But there’s an important nuance here…

If you’re a high earner, you may not be able to deduct traditional IRA contributions at all — depending on whether you have access to a workplace retirement plan.

And if your income exceeds the Roth IRA contribution limits — $153,000 for single filers, $242,000 for married filing jointly in 2026 — you can’t contribute to a Roth directly.

This is where the Backdoor Roth comes in — but that’s a topic for a future newsletter.

Real-life example:

Grant is 45 years old earning $180,000, which puts him in the 32% bracket. He contributes $7,500 to a traditional IRA.

The ability to reduce his taxable income by $7,500 saves him $2,400 in taxes this year. He invests those savings.

When he retires at age 65, he starts withdrawing $70,000/year and pays an effective tax rate of ~18%. Grant saves around $0.14 on every $1 compared to what he would’ve paid upfront.

On a $500,000 traditional IRA, that tax rate differential represents roughly $70,000 in lifetime tax savings.

Scenario 3: You Have No Idea What Your Tax Rate Will Be in Retirement

Winner: Split the difference.

This is the most honest answer for most people in their 30s and 40s.

Why?

Because nobody actually knows what tax rates will look like in 20 or 30 years.

The current tax brackets are historically low by modern standards — but they’re also not guaranteed to stay that way.

If you genuinely can’t predict whether your future rate will be higher or lower, the smartest move is to hedge.

Ie. Contribute to both.

Max out your Roth IRA/401k:

If your employer offers a traditional 401(k) with a match — take the match first, then split contributions between traditional and Roth.

You end up with two buckets in retirement: one that’s taxed on the way out (traditional) and one that’s completely tax-free (Roth).

That gives you the flexibility to strategically manage your tax rate in retirement — pulling from whichever account is most tax-efficient in any given year.

This is what most financial planners mean when they talk about “tax diversification.”

Spoiler — it’s criminally underrated.

Real-life example:

38-year-old Kelly contributes $7,500/year to a Roth IRA and $10,000/year to a traditional 401(k) through her job.

By 65, she has approximately $960,000 in her Roth and $1,280,000 in traditional.

In retirement, she splits her living expenses equally between both accounts: $40,000 tax-free from the Roth and $40,000 from the traditional. This allows her to keep her total taxable income in a lower bracket.

This alone saves her $15,000-$25,000+ per year in taxes compared to having everything in a single account type.

Scenario 4: You’re Within 10 Years of Retirement

Winner: It depends — but lean Roth if you can.

This one always surprises people.

Conventional wisdom says: you’re close to retirement, your income is high, take the traditional deduction.

But here’s what conventional wisdom misses:

A Roth has no required minimum distributions (RMDs).

A traditional IRA/401k forces you to start withdrawing — and paying taxes — at age 73 whether you need the money or not.

If you retire with a healthy traditional balance, the government is going to make you take withdrawals that could push you into a higher bracket than you planned — especially if you have Social Security income, pension income, or other retirement income on top of it.

A Roth IRA/401K gives you a tax-free bucket you can leave untouched and growing — potentially for another 10, 20, even 30 years. Or pass to your heirs completely tax-free.

The closer you get to retirement, the more valuable that flexibility becomes.

Real-life example:

Max is 58 years old with $800,000 in a traditional 401k.

When he hits age 73, he faces RMDs of approximately $31,000 in the first year — going up every year after.

Combined with his $30,000 in Social Security income, his total taxable income is $61,000 — pushing him solidly into the 22% bracket and potentially triggering higher Medicare premiums (IRMAA surcharges).

Had Max started moving some of that traditional balance into a Roth in his late 50s and early 60s (known as a Roth conversion) — he could have dramatically reduced those forced withdrawals. And his tax bill.

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The Number That Changes Everything

Here’s the comparison I want you to consider:

• Two investors

• Same age

• Same contributions

• Same market returns

• Same discipline and consistency

Only difference? Account type.

Investor A — Traditional IRA

• Contributes $7,500/year for 30 years

• Earns 8% annual returns

• Portfolio at retirement: $915,000

• Pays 22% tax on withdrawals

After-tax value over 25-year retirement: $714,000 kept

Investor B — Roth IRA

• Contributes $7,500/year for 30 years

• Earns 8% annual returns

• Portfolio at retirement: $915,000

• Pays $0 tax on withdrawals

After-tax value over 25-year retirement: $915,000 kept

~

Same portfolio. Same contributions. Same market.

Difference: $201,000.

Kept by Investor B. Not because they invested better. Not because they earned more.

Because they paid their taxes at the right time.

That’s the decision sitting in front of you right now.

📌 Not sure whether a Roth or traditional makes more sense for your specific income, timeline, and goals? This is exactly the kind of thing we work through together on a personalized 1:1 financial strategy call.

30 minutes. Your numbers. A clear answer.

Book now — spots are limited.

The Simple Decision Framework

If you’re still not sure which account is right for you, run through these four questions:

Q1: What tax bracket are you in right now?

• 10% or 12% → Strong lean toward Roth

• 22% → Could go either way — consider splitting

• 24%+ → Strong lean toward Traditional

Q2: Do you expect your income to grow significantly?

• Yes → Roth now while your rate is lower

• No → Traditional if you’re already at peak earnings

Q3: Do you want flexibility in retirement?

• Yes → Roth (no RMDs, tax-free withdrawals, pass to heirs tax-free)

• No strong preference → Either works

Q4: Can you afford to pay taxes now?

• Yes → Roth. Pay the smaller bill today, avoid the larger bill later.

• No → Traditional. Take the deduction now, deal with taxes later.

Answer these four questions honestly and the right account almost always becomes obvious.

One More Thing Before You Decide…

There’s a question I get constantly from my readers:

“Can I have both a Roth IRA and a traditional IRA?”

Yes. Absolutely.

You can contribute to both in the same year — as long as your total contributions across both accounts don’t exceed the annual limit ($7,500 in 2026, $8,600 if you’re 50 or older).

And if you have a 401(k) at work, that’s completely separate.

You can max out a Roth IRA and still contribute to your 401(k) simultaneously — up to $24,500 in 2026.

The accounts don’t compete with each other. They complement each other.

And if you’re not sure which one to prioritize — contribute to whichever one first gets you the employer match (always take the free money first) → then fund your Roth IRA to the max → then go back to the 401(k) for additional contributions.

That order works for most people in most situations.

The box you check matters more than most people realize.

Now you know exactly how to pick the right one.

Your Action Plan This Week:

If you’re in the 10-12% bracket: Open a Roth IRA today if you don’t already have one. Fidelity, Vanguard, and Charles Schwab all offer them for free with no minimums. Set up an automatic monthly contribution — even $50/month compounds into something big with enough time.

If you’re in the 22%+ bracket: Review your current retirement account mix. If everything is in pre-tax accounts, consider whether adding Roth contributions — even partially — gives you better tax flexibility in retirement.

If you’re unsure: Start with the Roth. For most beginner investors, paying a modest tax rate today to protect decades of compound growth is the right default. You can always adjust as your income grows.

If you have an old 401(k) sitting at a previous employer: Consider whether a Roth conversion makes sense — especially if you’re in a lower-income year. Moving pre-tax money into a Roth during a low-income window is one of the most powerful tax moves available to ordinary investors.

That’s how you build quiet wealth.

— Charlie

📌 P.S. — Once you’ve opened the right account, you need to track it properly. My Stock Tracker & Portfolio Balancer is a fully customizable template that tracks all your holdings, automatically calculates your gains and losses, and shows you exactly how much to buy or sell to stay balanced — all for less than two cups of coffee. If you don’t know your numbers, your future is always uncertain.

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Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

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That was the thought running through my head two weeks ago during a 1:1 call I had with a woman named Lori who wanted me to review her portfolio.

She had about $300,000 invested with a financial advisor. She’d been with him for years. She trusted him. She liked him personally.

But after our phone call, something started nagging at her.

So she did what I always tell people to do…

She asked her advisor three specific questions.

And sent me his responses.

I’m going to share them with you — word for word — because what happened next is something every single person who has a 401k, IRA, and/or brokerage account needs to see.

Q1: “What am I actually paying in fees?”

His answer:

“Currently 0.90% to me and 0.30% strategy fee. I do typically charge 1.2% on accounts below $500K. National averages are near 1.75% all in fee on a $300K account. So in my opinion, even being in the 1.2-1.5% range isn’t bad at all.”

In plain English:

Lori is paying 1.2% total on a $300,000 portfolio.

That’s $3,600 per year. Every year. Automatically deducted.

And his defense?

“National averages are near 1.75% — so 1.2% isn’t bad.”

That’s like a restaurant charging you $18 for a burger and justifying it by saying the place down the street charges $22.

The benchmark isn’t what other advisors charge.

The benchmark is what this is actually costing you over time.

Here’s the math he didn’t show her:

At $3,600 per year in fees, compounded at the opportunity cost of 8% annual returns, Lori is giving up roughly $175,000 over 20 years — just in advisory fees alone, before we even touch the strategy fee or the fund expense ratios underneath.

$175,000!!

For a service she could largely replicate herself with a simple three-fund portfolio and a 30-minute annual rebalance.

Q 2: “What am I actually getting for that fee?”

His answer:

“I am using buffered ETFs to limit your downside exposure while letting you benefit on certain levels of gains. Last year the S&P 500 was +17.88% and your account was +10.60%. The S&P is currently -4.25% since Jan 1 and your account is -1.92%.”

This one is more nuanced — and more dangerous. Because it sounds compelling.

He’s essentially saying:

“You give up some upside, but we protect you on the downside.”

That’s the pitch for buffered ETFs. And on the surface it sounds reasonable.

But let’s look at what it actually cost Lori:

Last year the S&P 500 returned +17.88%.

Lori’s account returned +10.60%.

That’s a 7.28% gap — on a $300,000 portfolio — meaning she missed out on approximately $21,840 in gains in a single year.

In exchange for what?

A buffer on the downside. In a year when the market went up nearly 18%.

She paid $3,600 in fees. She gave up $21,840 in gains.

That’s a $25,440 cost in a single year — for protection she didn’t need in a year the market crushed it.

~

Now here’s where it gets really interesting.

He points out the S&P is currently down 4.25% and her account is only down 1.92%. He frames this as a win.

And mathematically, in this exact moment, he’s right.

But here’s what he’s not telling her:

Over any rolling 20-year period in stock market history, the S&P 500 has never produced a negative return. Not ONCE.

The “protection” she’s paying for is protection against short-term volatility in an account she doesn’t need to touch for decades.

She’s paying a premium for an umbrella — in a climate that’s sunny 90% of the time.

And in the 10% of rainy years? The umbrella helps.

But the sunny years — the compounding years, the recovery years, the bull market years — she’s sitting on the sideline watching the S&P grow without her.

That gap compounds too.

It just compounds against her instead of for her.

Q3: “Why shouldn’t I just invest in low-cost index funds instead?”

His defense:

“National averages are near 1.75% all in on a $300K account — so 1.2-1.5% isn’t bad at all.”

I want to be direct with you here.

Comparing yourself to an expensive industry average is not a defense. It’s a distraction.

The relevant comparison isn’t what other advisors charge.

It’s what Lori could be paying instead.

A simple three-fund portfolio at Fidelity or Vanguard — covering US stocks, international stocks, and bonds — costs between 0.03% and 0.07% in total expense ratios.

No advisory fee. No strategy fee. No buffered ETF premium.

Total annual cost on a $300,000 portfolio: roughly $90 to $210 per year.

Versus $3,600.

That’s a difference of $3,390 to $3,510 per year — money that stays invested, compounds at 8% annually, and over 20 years becomes approximately $165,000 to $170,000 in additional wealth.

Not because Lori picked better stocks.

Not because she timed the market.

Just because she stopped paying for something she didn’t need.

What I Told Lori

Here’s the thing about Lori’s advisor.

He’s not a bad person. And I feel confident he’s not running a scam.

He genuinely believes in what he’s selling. He’s polite, responsive, and clearly cares about his clients.

But caring about your clients, and being the optimal solution for your clients are two very different things.

The advisor who charges 1.2% and puts you in buffered ETFs that cap your upside is solving for your emotional comfort — not your long-term wealth.

And emotional comfort has a price tag.

In Lori’s case, that price tag is potentially $175,000 over 20 years.

Here’s what I told her to consider:

If she needs downside protection because market volatility genuinely keeps her up at night — that’s a legitimate need.

But the solution isn’t expensive buffered ETFs.

It’s building an asset allocation with the right mix of stocks and bonds that she can hold through volatility without panicking. That costs almost nothing and accomplishes the same goal.

If she needs professional guidance — tax planning, estate coordination, a comprehensive financial plan — a fee-only fiduciary advisor charges a flat fee for that service.

NOT a percentage of her assets forever.

She gets the guidance. She keeps the compounding.

If she’s comfortable managing a simple three-fund portfolio herself — she could be paying $90 a year instead of $3,600. With better long-term results. And zero conflict of interest.

None of those options require paying 1.2% annually to an advisor running buffered ETFs in a bull market.

Lori’s situation is not unique. It is everywhere.

That’s why I created the “30-Min. Fee Audit”.

And why taking just half an hour of your life, might be the most valuable time you spend on your finances all year.

Here it is:

That conversation with Lori is exactly what my 1:1 portfolio review strategy calls are designed for.

You share your current holdings, your fee structure, and what you’re trying to build. I go through it with you — line by line — the same way I did with Lori.

No judgment. No jargon.

Just an honest look at what your portfolio is actually costing you and what a simpler, cheaper strategy could look like instead.

If you’ve been wondering whether your fees are quietly working against you — the answer is probably yes. And the only way to know for sure is to actually look.

Book your private portfolio review call here →

Now let’s make sure you have the tools to find your own leaks — starting in the next 30 minutes.

The 30-Min. Fee Audit — Do This Today!

⚡ Step 1: Investment Fees Check (Time: 10 min.)

Log in to your brokerage account.

Find your current holdings. For every fund or ETF you own, search the ticker symbol followed by “expense ratio.”

Write each one down. Add them up.

If any single fund is above 0.50% — flag it immediately.

If your weighted average across all funds is above 0.25% — you have work to do.

Five minutes. Could be worth six-figures over your investing lifetime.

⚡ Step 2: The 401(k) Audit (Time: 5 min.)

Send this exact email to your HR department today:

“Hi — can you send me the fee disclosure document for our 401(k) plan? I want to review the expense ratios on the available funds.”

They are legally required to provide it.

While you wait, log into your 401(k) portal and look at what funds you’re currently invested in.

Most plans offer at least one low-cost index fund — often an S&P 500 fund with an expense ratio under 0.10%.

If you’re sitting in an actively managed fund charging 0.75% and there’s a comparable index fund available at 0.05%, switching takes three clicks and could save you $10,000+ over your career.

⚡ Step 3: Advisory Fee Review (Time: 10 min.)

If you work with a financial advisor, pull up your last statement.

Find the advisory fee line.

Then ask yourself — and if necessary, ask them directly — these 3 questions:

“What specific services am I receiving for this fee?”

“Has my portfolio outperformed a simple index fund after your fee is deducted?”

“What would it cost me to replicate this myself?”

A good advisor answers these confidently and completely.

They show you exactly what value they’re adding beyond fund selection — tax planning, estate coordination, behavioral coaching, comprehensive financial planning.

An advisor who gets defensive or vague?

That’s your answer.

⚡ Step 4: The Fund Swap (Time: 5 min.)

If your audit reveals high-cost, actively managed mutual funds, here’s your replacement playbook:

Instead of this...

Consider this...

These four funds cover virtually every major asset class at a fraction of the cost of their actively managed equivalents.

• Log in

• Sell the expensive fund

• Buy the low-cost replacement

Done.

One note: if the funds are in a taxable brokerage account, check for capital gains before selling (ie. did you make a profit on the position or lose money, and how long have you held it?) Inside a Roth IRA or 401(k)? Switch freely. No tax consequences.

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⚡ BONUS: The Old 401(k) Rescue

Raise your hand if you have a forgotten 401(k) sitting at an old employer.

It’s ok. Most people do.

And those old plans are almost always loaded with limited, high-cost fund options — plus administrative fees you’re still paying even though you haven’t worked there in years.

Rolling an old 401(k) into a Roth IRA at Fidelity, Vanguard, or Schwab takes about 30 minutes of paperwork.

Immediately after, you get access to the entire universe of low-cost index funds.

Zero administrative fees. Full control.

One phone call. 30 minutes. Potentially $1,000’s saved every single year going forward.

I guarantee this is the highest-ROI 30 minutes you’ll spend on your finances this year.

Your 4-Step Action Plan

If your audit revealed you’re overpaying — and statistically, most people are — here’s exactly what to do next:

Step 1: Replace any fund with an expense ratio above 0.50% with a low-cost index fund alternative. Use the swap table above as your guide.

Step 2: If your total fee burden exceeds 1% annually, have a direct conversation with your advisor about what you’re receiving for that fee. If the answer doesn’t satisfy you — explore a fee-only fiduciary or start doing it yourself.

Step 3: Roll any old 401(k)s from previous employers into a low-cost IRA where you control the investment selection.

Step 4: Set a calendar reminder to repeat this audit every 12 months. Fee creep is real — especially as your portfolio grows and percentage-based fees take bigger and bigger bites.

The Bottom Line

❌ You cannot control the market.

❌ You cannot predict returns.

❌ You cannot eliminate volatility.

✅ But you can control your fees.

In 30 minutes or less.

Reducing your total fee burden from 1.5% to 0.15% is the equivalent of giving yourself a guaranteed 1.35% annual return boost — forever.

On a $500,000 portfolio, that’s an extra $308,000 over 20 years.

You didn’t need a better stock pick.

You didn’t need a market rally.

You just needed to stop the leak.

Nobody showed Lori for 15 years.

I’m showing you right now.

Building wealth isn’t about what you earn. It’s about what you keep.

Stop the leak. Keep more. Build faster.

That’s quiet wealth.

-Charlie

📌 P.S. — Want me to help you audit your specific portfolio and build a low-cost, high-efficiency investing strategy tailored to your situation? Book a private 1:1 strategy session with me and let’s find your leaks and fix them together.

📌 P.P.S. — Once you’ve cleaned up your fees, you need one place to track everything clearly. My Stock Tracker & Portfolio Balancer is a fully customizable Google Sheets template that tracks all your holdings, automatically calculates gains and losses, and shows you exactly how much to buy or sell to stay balanced — all for just $9.99. Because knowing your numbers is the first step to protecting them.

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

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The way we’re taught how money is made is 100% wrong.

❌ Better job. Higher salary. Bigger bonus.

❌ Work harder, get paid more, repeat until rich.

That’s the story most of us were sold.

It wasn’t until I started investing, and paying attention to how the (truly) wealthy (not the flashy, in-your-face internet wealthy) think about money, that I realized how backwards I had it.

They don’t just make more money. They build money differently.

A doctor earning $800,000 a year can still be broke at 60. A Texas pig farmer with the right system can die leaving millions behind.

Nobody taught us this. And that’s why most of us, including high-earners stay broke.

But you subscribe to this newsletter, so you’re not going to be one of those anymore.

Here’s 9 rules I’ve compiled after spending 15 years studying the ultra-wealthy. And not one of them is “work harder”. 🙅🏽‍♀️

Rule 1: The Asset Pays for Itself

The wealthy don’t buy just any investments. They buy self-funding machines.

Most people think investing means sacrificing money today for a return “someday” in the future. The wealthy think differently.

They find assets that generate enough income to cover their own cost — and then some.

In the stock market, this looks like dividend-paying stocks and ETFs that throw off regular cash payments just for holding them.

You buy the asset. The asset pays you. You use those payments to buy more of the asset.

You’re not funding the machine. The machine funds itself.

Tactical example: You invest $50,000 in SCHD — the Schwab US Dividend Equity ETF — which currently yields around 3.5% annually. That’s roughly $1,750 per year in dividends hitting your account — automatically, without you doing anything.

You turn on dividend reinvestment (DRIP) and those dividends buy more shares → more shares generate more dividends → more dividends buy more shares. The asset is now paying for its own growth.

You just had to show up once to plant the seed.

Rule 2: Debt Is the Engine, Not the Enemy

Every time someone tells you debt is bad, ask them one question:

“Who pays the debt — the asset or you?”

That’s the only distinction that matters.

❌ Bad debt drags your wealth down.

Credit card balances. Car payments on depreciating vehicles. Personal loans funding a lifestyle you can’t afford. You pay it every month out of your own pocket.

✅ Good debt moves your wealth forward.

A mortgage on a cash-flowing rental. A business loan that generates more revenue than it costs. Borrowing strategically to acquire appreciating, income-generating assets. Debt that the asset services — not you.

In the investing world this shows up as what is called margin. But ONLY when used smartly. Margin is basically a loan against your existing holdings. Said another way — it means taking out a loan secured by the assets in your brokerage account as collateral.

The mistake to avoid here is NEVER over-leverage!

If you’re going to use margin borrowing on your investments you must:

• ensure your account holds the minimum equity to cover a trade before you place it

• if the equity in your account is not sufficient, or your brokerage believes the risk is too great, they can liquidate (call) the loan (ie. sell your assets) at any time

The wealthy don’t avoid debt. They just never let it cost them anything out of pocket.

Tactical example: A securities-backed line of credit (SBLOC) lets you borrow against your investment portfolio — typically at 1-3% interest — without selling a single share.

If your portfolio is generating 8% annual returns and you’re borrowing at 2% to fund a new investment, your cost of capital is 2% and your asset is growing at 8%. The spread between those two numbers is your engine. The wealthy use this constantly.

You keep your investments. You get access to more cash. The asset pays the freight.

Rule 3: Someone Else Is Erasing Your Cost Basis Every Single Month

In real estate, tenants pay down your mortgage. In the stock market, the equivalent is even more powerful — because companies do it automatically, invisibly, and at scale.

Every profitable company in your portfolio is generating earnings. Those earnings reduce debt on the company’s balance sheet, fund buybacks that shrink the share count, and (some) pay dividends that return cash to you.

You didn’t do the work. The company did.

Every month you hold a quality business* in your portfolio, that business is working on your behalf — paying its own obligations, growing its own value, and sending you a cut of the profits.

You’re just the owner.

Tactical example: Apple has bought back over $700 billion of its own stock over the past decade.

Every buyback shrinks the total share count — which means your slice of the company gets bigger without you buying a single additional share. If Apple had 10 billion shares outstanding and buys back 500 million, your 100 shares now represent a slightly larger ownership percentage of the entire business.

You didn’t write a check. You didn’t buy more stock. You earned more simply by holding the stock.

*Notice I said quality businesses. This is why as a retail investor you shouldn’t invest in penny/meme stocks, IPOs (initial public offerings - ie. startups), crypto, or anything you don’t understand how the business actually makes money.

Rule 4: Equity Is Stored Power

If you’ve ever played action-based video games, you know your character usually has a bank of energy, special skill or power that builds up over time. The strategy is — you save as much of that power as you can until you have to battle the Big Boss. Then you deploy it all at once to take the enemy down and win the game.

In investing, equity isn’t just the value of what you own. It’s your power bank.

Every month your portfolio grows — through price appreciation (ie. share price going up), dividend reinvestment, and compound returns — your stored power increases. Until one day you pull the trigger and deploy it into the next opportunity.

Most people passively watch their brokerage balance go up and think, “huh, that’s nice.”

The wealthy watch their brokerage balance go up and ask: “What can I buy next?”

Equity (ownership) sitting idle is potential. The wealthy know how to convert potential into the next position — without ever touching their principal.

Tactical example: You’ve built a $200,000 portfolio over 8 years. The market pulls back 20% and a high-quality stock you’ve been watching drops to a price you’ve never seen. Because you’ve been consistently setting aside some cash in a high-yield savings account or your brokerage’s money market fund (ex. Fidelity’s SPAXX), you don’t have to scramble to find the funds to “buy the dip”.

You simply make the trade from say SPAXX, and use it to buy the high-quality stock you’ve been watching at a discount.

✅ Your original portfolio stays intact and keeps compounding
✅ You added a significant position at a generational price

You used stored equity as a power bank. No selling. No disruption. Just deployment.

Rule 5: Never Sell the Asset (Or Sell Only After One Year)

This is where most investors get it completely wrong.

They buy a stock. It goes up 30% in eight months. They sell it. They feel smart.

Then the tax bill arrives.😱

Here’s what they didn’t account for:

The IRS treats your investments very differently depending on how long you held them. And the difference in what you keep versus what you hand over to the government is staggering!

Short-term capital gains — anything held less than one year — are taxed as ordinary income. Depending on your bracket, that’s typically anywhere from 12% to 37%. You made 30% on your investment and gave a third of it back before you ever saw it.

Long-term capital gains — anything held longer than one year — are taxed at 0%, 15%, or 20% depending on your income. For most middle-class investors, that’s 15%.

The difference between those two numbers isn’t peanuts.

It’s the difference between keeping $0.63 of every $1 you made versus keeping $0.85.

On a $50,000 gain, that’s a $11,000 swing — just by waiting 12 months.

The wealthy don’t trade in and out of positions. They buy quality assets, hold them long enough to cross the one-year threshold (or never sell), and let the tax code reward their patience.

They don’t work the market harder. They let time work for them.

Tactical example: You invest $20,000 in VOO in January. By October it’s worth $26,000 — a $6,000 gain. You’re tempted to sell and lock in the profit. If you do, that $6,000 is taxed as ordinary income — say 24%, meaning you owe $1,440 to the IRS.

Instead you hold until January — just three more months. Now that same $6,000 gain is a long-term capital gain taxed at 15%. You owe $900 instead of $1,440. You kept an extra $540 by doing absolutely nothing except waiting.

Scale that across a portfolio of $200,000 with $60,000 in gains and the difference becomes $5,400 saved — in a single year — just by being patient.

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Rule 6: Deal 1 Funds Deal 2

Here’s the myth most investors believe:

“I need to save more before I can invest more.”

The wealthy don’t go back to their savings account for the next investment.

The first position generates the returns → the returns become the new cash → the new cash funds the next position.

And the flywheel keeps going — and each cycle builds on the last.

This is how portfolios compound from 5-figures to 6 to 7.

Not by saving more. By letting each layer of wealth fund the next layer.

Tactical example: You invest $10,000 in a dividend growth ETF. Over 4 years, between the share price going up and reinvested dividends, that position grows to $16,000. You take $6,000 in gains — and buy a new ETF in a different asset class (ex. REITs, commodities or precious metals).

Now you have two positions compounding simultaneously.

Position 1 keeps growing. Position 2 starts building. Neither required you to add new money from your paycheck.

Deal 1 seeded Deal 2. You just kept going.

Rule 7: Every Investment Gets Easier

Your first investment is always the hardest.

You don’t know what you don’t know. The terminology sounds like alphabet soup. Every decision feels like it could be catastrophically wrong. The stakes feel enormous even when the dollar amounts are small.

But here’s what happens after you survive the first one…

You have experience. A track record. Proof — to yourself and to the market — that you can do this.

Your second investment comes with more confidence.

Better decisions. Lower emotional cost. Your third comes faster than your second. Your fourth faster than your third, and so on.

The wealthy didn’t start fearless. They started anyway. And the process got easier every time.

Tactical example: Your first $1,000 investment felt terrifying. You checked the price daily. You panicked during every dip. You almost sold three times. But you held. And it grew.

Your second $1,000 investment? You barely checked it. You knew what a dip felt like. You knew how to hold.

By your fifth investment, you’re deploying capital calmly and systematically — not because the market got less volatile, but because you got more confident and more experienced.

The learning compounds just like the money does.

There’s a consistent pattern I see when I talk to readers 1-on-1.

Logically, they understand these rules. They nod along like they get it.

But when it comes to applying them to their own specific situation — their income, their current portfolio, their goals — they freeze.

That’s exactly what my private 1:1 strategy sessions are designed for.

We take these 9 rules and build your personal roadmap around them. Your numbers. Your timeline. Your next move.

If you’re ready to stop nodding and start building — book a private strategy session with me here. Let’s map out your flywheel together.

Rule 8: The Flywheel Never Stops

This is the rule that honestly blows my mind, even 15 years after learning it.🤯

Asset generates returns → returns get reinvested → reinvestment grows the base → larger base generates larger returns → larger returns buy new assets.

Loop. Repeat. Forever.

This is the investing flywheel.

And once it’s spinning — once your portfolio is large enough that the returns on your returns are meaningful — it funds itself indefinitely.

You don’t need another raise. You don’t need to work more hours. You don’t need to save harder.

The system simply runs.

Tactical example: At $10,000 invested, an 8% annual return generates $800. Meaningful but modest.

At $100,000, that same 8% generates $8,000 — enough to fund a significant new position every year without touching your paycheck.

At $500,000, it generates $40,000 annually — more than some people earn at their 9-5.

At $1,000,000, it generates $80,000.

The flywheel isn’t spinning faster. The base just got bigger. And a bigger base means more fuel for the next revolution.

You stopped being the engine a long time ago. Now, you’re just the person who keeps it oiled.

Rule 9: Cash Flow Is Oxygen

Everything above — every rule, every strategy, every flywheel — dies without this one.

In life, in business, in investing — cash flow is king.

In investing, cash flow is the dividend income, interest payments, and distributions your portfolio generates regularly. It’s the lifeblood that keeps the machine running between market downturns and growth cycles.

Without it, you’re 100% dependent on price appreciation. And price appreciation is unpredictable, cyclical, and sometimes brutally slow.

Cash flow gives you options.

• It means you never have to sell in a down market to fund your life.

• It means your portfolio can survive recessions, corrections, and bear markets without you panic-selling at the worst possible moment.

Cash flow is what lets you hold forever. And holding forever is how the wealthy win.

Tactical example: Before you build a position in any stock or ETF, stress test the cash flow. Ask: “does this asset pay me to hold it — through dividends, distributions, or yields — or am I 100% dependent on its price going up?”

A portfolio built entirely on individual tech stocks with zero broad, diverse index funds or dividend income is completely dependent on price appreciation of a few companies. One bad decade and you’re selling principal to live.

A portfolio with a healthy chunk invested in consistent, stable indices like the S&P 500 or total U.S. stock market, or one with even a 3-4% dividend yield on a $500,000 base generates $15,000-$20,000 per year in cash regardless of what the market does.

That cash is your oxygen. It keeps you in the game when everyone else is being forced out.

The Bottom Line

You could be earning $300,000 a year and still be broke at 60.

Plenty of people are.

High income without these rules is just an expensive treadmill. A golden cage.

You work more, spend more, and never actually get ahead. Because income without assets is just a job — and jobs end.

The ultra-wealthy aren’t smarter than you. They don’t work harder than you. In fact, I’d argue that after the first few years, they work a lot less than you.

They just learned these 9 rules — and then built a system around them that runs whether they show up or not.

And the good news is this system is available to anyone willing to understand it.

Every week in this newsletter you get exactly that — one data-backed wealth-building technique you don’t need an MBA to understand, plus actionable ways to apply it to your own financial life so you can start building differently instead of just earning more.

This is how the wealthy think.

Now you think this way too.

That’s quiet wealth.

-Charlie

📌 P.S. — Want to walk through how these 9 rules could apply specifically to your financial situation and portfolio? Book a private 1:1 strategy session with me and let’s map out your personal wealth-building flywheel together.

📌 P.P.S. — If you’re serious about putting these rules into action, you need to know exactly where your money is at all times. That’s why I built the Stock Tracker & Portfolio Balancer — a fully customizable Google Sheets template that tracks all your investments in one place, automatically calculates your gains and losses, shows you exactly how much to buy or sell to stay balanced, and visualizes your current vs. target allocation with charts. The investors who win long-term aren’t just following the right rules — they’re tracking the right numbers. Get instant access.

Building Quiet Wealth
Helping 9,000+ smart people learn purposeful investing
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Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

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There’s a moment in every investor’s journey that nobody warns you about.

You’re doing everything right.

Contributing every month. Watching your balance creep upward. Making sacrifices to fund your future.

And it still feels like nothing is happening.

Your portfolio looks basically the same as it did six months ago.

The market goes up a little, down a little. Your contributions feel like they’re disappearing into a black hole.

So you start to wonder: Is this even working?

Here’s the brutal truth nobody tells you at the beginning:

In the early stages, YOU are doing all the work. Your money isn’t pulling its weight yet.

But that changes. Dramatically. At three very specific numbers.

Miss these milestones and you’ll never understand why some people seem to build wealth effortlessly while others grind forever and never get ahead.

Hit them — and stay invested long enough to hit all three — and your money eventually starts making more than you do at your actual job.

It’s not luck. It’s not magic.

It’s math. And it works. Every. Single. Time.

Why Wealth Feels Impossibly Slow at the Start

Before we get to the milestones, you need to understand why the beginning feels so discouraging.

When you first start investing, almost all of your progress comes from your own contributions — not your returns.

Let me show you what that looks like with real numbers👇🏼:

Say you invest $200 a month and earn 8% annually — roughly what a broad S&P 500 index fund has historically delivered after inflation.

After 3 years you’ve put in $7,200 of your own money. Your investment growth on top of that? A few hundred dollars. A blip on the chart.

This is the phase where most people quit.

And honestly? It makes sense emotionally.

You’re making real sacrifices — skipping dinners out, driving the older car, saying no to things everyone else is saying yes to — and your portfolio looks almost identical to what you put in.

But here’s what’s happening underneath the surface that you can’t see yet:

Your returns are generating their own returns.

Quietly. Invisibly. Building momentum like a flywheel that’s just starting to spin.

The technical term is compounding. But the practical reality is this:

The growth you can’t see today is the foundation for the growth that will eventually shock you.

And it accelerates at three very specific milestones.

Milestone #1: $10,000

What it proves: You can build wealth.

The first $10,000 is the hardest money you will ever make as an investor.

Why?

But because at this stage, almost every dollar of that balance came from YOU — your discipline, your consistency, your willingness to keep going when it didn’t feel like anything was working.

Investing $200 a month at 8% annually, you’ll hit $10,000 in about 3.5 years.

Now here’s where it gets interesting…

Let’s say you hit $10,000 and then completely stop. No more contributions. Ever. You just leave it alone.

At 8% annual growth, that $10,000 becomes $46,600 in 20 years — without you doing a single thing.

That’s $36,600 in gains you didn’t have to work for.

Not enough to retire on. But proof of something powerful:

Your money is now capable of making money on its own.

And the psychological shift that happens when you see five-figures in your investment account for the first time?

It’s real. Something clicks. You stop feeling like investing is a sacrifice and start feeling like it’s a system that’s working for you.

The first $10,000 proves you can stick to a plan. That you can build capital. That you can make investing a habit when most people around you aren’t even trying.

How to get there faster:

If your employer offers a 401(k) match, this is your single fastest path to $10,000.

If you contribute $200/month and your employer matches it dollar for dollar, you’re effectively investing $400/month and hitting that first milestone in roughly half the time — without increasing your actual out-of-pocket contribution by a single cent.

Never leave that match on the table! It’s a 100% return that no investment can compete with.

Action step: Log into your 401(k) portal this week. Find your employer match percentage. Increase your contribution to capture every dollar of that match. That one move could cut your timeline to $10,000 in half.

~

And if you’re at the stage where you want to go deeper — to actually understand how compounding, index funds, and tax-advantaged accounts work before you put real money in — these are the exact books and resources I personally used when I was learning.

No fluff. No courses trying to sell you something. Just the tools that actually moved the needle for me.

Milestone #2: $100,000

What it proves: Your money can build wealth for you.

This is the milestone that changes the entire game.

Not because $100,000 is enough to retire on (it isn’t).

But because at $100,000, compounding stops being a concept you read about and starts being something you can actually see and feel in real time.

Here’s the math:

At 8% annual returns, $100,000 generates $8,000 in investment growth in year one alone.

That’s $667 per month — without contributing a single new dollar.

Think about that.

Your portfolio is now generating the equivalent of a part-time job’s worth of income just by existing.

At $10,000, your money was whispering. At $100,000, it starts talking.

But here’s the number that really makes people sit up and pay attention:

If you invest $100,000 by age 35 and never contribute another dollar — that money grows to over $1,000,000 by age 65 at 8% returns.

Wait another 10 years to age 75?

Over $2,000,000.

This strategy even has a name: Coast FIRE.

The idea is that if you front-load your investments early enough, time does all the heavy lifting — and you can ease off the gas long before you retire without sacrificing the outcome.

Now, I’m not saying everyone can hit $100,000 by 35. Life doesn’t play that nicely for all of us. But the point isn’t to follow that script perfectly.

The point is to understand how dramatically the math shifts once you cross that six-figure threshold.

Each additional $100,000 after your first takes less time than the one before it — because you now have a larger base generating returns on your behalf.

The first $100K is the hardest. Every one after that comes faster.

How to get there:

Contributing $500/month at 8% returns gets you to $100,000 in approximately 11 years.

Can’t do $500?

Start with $200. It takes longer — but the time will pass either way. You may as well let it pass with your money working for you.

Action step: Calculate exactly how far you are from $100,000 right now. If you’re at $0, your number is $100,000. If you’re at $34,000, your number is $66,000.

Write it down. Give it a timeline. Make it a target, not an abstraction.

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Milestone #3: $1,000,000

What it proves: Work becomes optional.

This is the one that changes everything.

At $1,000,000 invested — assuming the same 8% average annual return — your portfolio generates $80,000 in year one.

Year 2: $86,400.

Year 10: nearly $160,000 — in a single year, from a portfolio you may not have added a single dollar to.

At this point, for most people, the income their investments generate begins to compete with — and eventually overtake — what they earn at their actual job.

Work doesn’t disappear. But it becomes a choice.

This is what financial independence actually means. Not never working again.

But having the option.

The 4% Rule — what $1,000,000 actually gets you:

There’s a well-researched guideline in retirement planning called the 4% rule. It works like this:

If you withdraw 4% of your portfolio balance per year — adjusted for inflation going forward — your money should last at least 30 years.

With $1,000,000 invested, that’s $40,000 per year in withdrawals. The remaining $960,000 stays invested and keeps growing. Over time, that growth offsets both your withdrawals and inflation.

This isn’t a perfect formula for everyone.

Your expenses, your timeline, and your investment mix all matter. But it gives you a framework for understanding what a million dollars actually buys you in real life.

For many people: it buys the ability to work less, choose more, and stop making financial decisions from a place of fear.

How to get there:

Honestly? By hitting milestones one and two first.

The investors who reach $1,000,000 aren’t the ones who found a secret shortcut (legally).

They’re the ones who started early, contributed consistently, and refused to quit during the long, boring, middle section where it felt like nothing was happening.

That’s exactly why I started this newsletter. To help you do this.

This is that framework. Now let’s make it practical.

Your Milestone Roadmap: The Exact Numbers

Here’s what the journey looks like investing $500/month at 8% annual returns:

$10,000 → Reached in approximately 3.5 years. Proof you can build the habit. Your money starts compounding.

$100,000 → Reached in approximately 11 years. Compounding becomes visible. Your money earns $8,000/year on its own.

$1,000,000 → Reached in approximately 30 years. Work becomes optional. Your portfolio generates $80,000/year.

Can’t do $500/month yet? Start with $100 (or whatever you can). The milestones take longer but the math still works.

The only version of this that fails is the one where you never start.

The One Thing Most People Get Wrong

People don’t get off-track because of the market.

Or the economy.

Not even because of falling interest rates, recessions or fear-mongering headlines.

The reason they get derailed is because they quit during the long, slow, boring stretch between $0 and $100,000 — when you’re doing all the work and your money hasn’t started pulling its weight yet.

That stretch is where 90% of people give up.

The ones who don’t?

They eventually wake up one morning and realize their portfolio made more last month than they did at work.

And then they understand — at a gut level — why every single month of consistency in the early years was worth it.

Don’t quit before the curve bends.

That’s quiet wealth.

-Charlie

📌 P.S. — Want to figure out exactly which milestone you’re closest to — and build a personalized plan to hit it? Book a private 1:1 strategy session with me and let’s map out your exact path to $10K, $100K, and beyond.

Building Quiet Wealth
Helping 9,000+ smart people learn purposeful investing
Advertise with me
Follow me on YouTube & TikTok

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.

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Every morning before work I’m usually covered in mud, straw, and feed dust.

Because, fun fact: my husband and I raise pigs.

We’ve been breeding, raising and selling pigs for kids to show in local 4H and FFA livestock exhibitions for going on 20 years.

Last Sunday morning, somewhere between stacking feed buckets and spring vaccinations, I started thinking about how much investing is like farming.

Specifically, about why so many smart people make investing so much harder than it needs to be.

Raising pigs this long, I know one thing for certain:

You can’t rush life.

You breed a pig. You wait for her to farrow (give birth - for pigs, a pregnancy lasts exactly 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days). You wait for the piglets to grow up to see which ones will make the show pen and which ones won’t.

You don’t check the piglets every day to see if they’ve reached maturity within their first month of life. You don’t panic when they look gangly and skinny going through their “teenage” growth spurt.

You trust the process. And you let time do the heavy lifting.

Investing in the stock market works exactly the same way.

And nobody understood that better than a hog farmer from Baytown, Texas named Mr. Womack (first name lost to posterity).

The Man in Overalls at the Merrill Lynch Office

It’s the late 1950s. Houston, Texas.

A frustrated drilling-rig businessman named Melvid Hogan walks into a Merrill Lynch office, defeated.

He’d been trying everything to win in the market — technical analysis, fundamental analysis, hot tips, clever trades. And every single year, without fail, he ended the year with a net loss.

That day, a broker pulled him aside.

“There’s someone you need to meet. But you’d better hurry. He only comes in here once every few years — except when he’s buying.”

Hogan looked across the crowded office.

Sitting in the corner, in overalls, was a rice and pig farmer from down in Baytown.

His name was Mr. Womack.

Hogan walked over and introduced himself. The two men talked about farming. About duck hunting. And gradually, the conversation turned to stocks.

Mr. Womack reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a handwritten list of tickers — scrawled in pencil on a folded piece of yellowed notebook paper.

Hogan looked at the list.

He couldn’t believe his eyes.

This farmer had made over 50% long-term capital gains on the entire group.

Individual positions were up 100%. 200%. One had gone up 500%!

Over 40 years of investing, Mr. Womack had never had a loss on balance.

Hogan was so moved by the encounter that he wrote it all down and sent it to a financial writer named John Train, who published the story in Fortune Magazine in 1978 under the title “How Mr. Womack Made a Killing.”

It became one of the most passed-around investing stories in history.

No Bloomberg terminal. No financial advisor. No MBA.

Just a farmer in overalls with a pencil and a philosophy that cut through every Wall Street myth ever invented.

The 5 Rules That Built A Farmer’s Fortune

Rule 1: There’s a Planting Season and a Harvest Season

I get this one in my bones.

You don’t plant corn in December. You don’t harvest in March. Every season has its purpose — and trying to force the timeline destroys the crop.

Mr. Womack treated the stock market the same way.

❌ He wasn’t buying and selling every week
❌ He wasn’t reacting to earnings reports, Fed announcements or whatever the talking heads were screaming about that morning

He’d buy a basket of stocks. Go back to the farm. And not return to Houston until the season had completely turned — sometimes one year later, sometimes four.

He said it best:

“You can’t make money buying stocks every day, week, or month of the year, any more than you could plant rice every day, week, or month and make a crop.”

Most investors lose money not because they pick bad stocks.

They lose money because they can’t leave well enough alone.

They plant seeds. Then dig them up to check on them. Then replant. Then panic when it storms. Then sell everything before the harvest.

Do this instead: Pick a quarterly review date. Put it in your calendar. Everything between now and that date is noise. Let the crop grow.

Rule 2: The Best Time to Buy Is When Everyone Else is Selling

This is where Mr. Womack separated himself from 99.9% of investors.

He didn’t just tolerate bad news.

He waited for it.

When headlines screamed that the market was hitting new lows. When experts predicted another 200-point drop in the Dow. When retail investors were dumping everything they owned —

That’s when Mr. Womack drove into Houston.

Before leaving, he’d sit down with a Standard & Poor’s Stock Guide and select around 30 stocks that had fallen below $10 per share — solid, profitable, dividend-paying companies that nobody on Wall Street was talking about.

Pecan growers. Home furnishings. Machine makers.

He’d write them down. Drive to the broker’s office. Buy $25,000 worth.

Then go back to the farm.

As a pig farmer, this instantly clicked for me.

When pork prices collapse, you don’t sell your herd in a panic. You buy more — cheap — and wait for the cycle to turn. The lower your cost, the higher your profit when the market comes back around.

Mr. Womack said it himself: he’d rather buy stocks than pigs in a down market.

“At least stocks pay dividends. Pigs just eat your feed.”

Do this instead: The next time markets drop 20% and your gut says sell — remember Mr. Womack. Open your brokerage. Buy more of what you already own. Then go back to the “farm”.

Rule 3: Buy What You Can Explain To A 5-Year Old

Mr. Womack followed the KISS strategy: Keep It Simple Stupid.

No derivatives. No leveraged ETFs. No hot IPOs promising to revolutionize an industry.

He bought boring, profitable businesses he understood. Companies that had survived downturns before and paid their shareholders along the way.

This wasn’t a lack of intelligence or sophistication on his part.

This was wisdom that Warren Buffett built a $130 billion fortune on.

Buffett’s famous rule:

“Never invest in a business you can’t explain to a five-year-old.”

Mr. Womack never heard of Warren Buffett.

He just naturally thought like him.

~

One of the best ways to invest in a simple, diversified basket of proven companies is through a well-structured IRA — the same tax-advantaged account that quietly compounds wealth in the background while you go about your life.

If you’re looking for the right account to start or optimize your investing strategy, here’s a list of the top 10 IRAs for 2026.

~

Do this instead: Can you explain how a company you want to invest in makes money in one sentence? To a 5-year old? If yes, consider owning it. If no, don’t touch it.

The most boring investments almost always win over time.

Rule 4: Don’t Chase the Top or the Bottom — “Close” Wins

Here’s the mistake that keeps most investors permanently on the sidelines.

They’re waiting for the perfect moment.

The exact bottom. The ideal entry point. The bat signal that says “BUY NOW.”

I hate to break it to you, but that signal never comes. And if it does, the time to make massive profits from it is already over.

Mr. Womack never tried to nail the bottom.

He was happy to buy anywhere in the bottom range. Never tried to nail the top either — he sold somewhere near the top, collected his gains, and went home.

His reasoning was airtight:

“If you can get a cost position in a stock’s bottom price range, it will forgive a multitude of misjudgments later.”

Buy cheap enough and you can sell too early and still make money.

A good entry price is the ultimate margin of safety.

Do this instead: Stop waiting for “the right time.“ If the market is meaningfully down from its highs, that’s close enough. Buy.

You don’t need to catch the exact bottom to build real wealth.

Rule 5: When the Price Drops — Buy More

This one breaks every instinct most people have.

When a stock drops after they buy it, most investors panic.

They sell to “cut their losses.” They swear off investing. They wait on the sidelines until everything feels safe again.

Mr. Womack did the exact opposite.

When prices dropped further after his initial purchase, he drove back into Houston and bought more.

In 1970, when the market plummeted further than he’d expected — he added another $25,000 to his existing positions.

The result?

He made what John Train called “a virtual killing on the whole package.”

Buying more at lower prices does two powerful things simultaneously:

• It lowers your average cost and..

• It increases your dividend yield

Both dramatically improve your odds of a significant profit when the cycle eventually turns.

This isn’t reckless. This is the disciplined, unemotional behavior that separates wealth-builders from everyone else.

Do this instead: When markets (or a particular stock you own/are watching) drop 20% or more, increase your regular contribution — even if it’s only by 1%. If you normally invest $500/month, push it to $700.

You’re not catching a falling knife. You’re buying the same quality companies at a discount.

The Lesson That Ties It All Together

Mr. Womack wasn’t a genius.

He didn’t have a team of analysts, eight computer monitors or a corner office overlooking Manhattan.

He had mud on his boots. Calluses on his hands. And a clarity of thinking that most investors spend their entire lives chasing and never find.

He understood something that sounds simple but is almost impossibly hard to actually practice:

The market is not a casino. It’s a farm.

There are seasons. There are cycles. There’s a time to plant and a time to harvest.

And in-between those two — you wait. You tend. You trust the process.

The investors who treat it like a casino — trading in and out, reacting to every headline, chasing every hot tip — almost always end up with less than they started with.

The farmers?

The ones who buy when everyone else is running. Who hold through the noise. Who collect their dividends quietly while the world panics around them. Who sell when the headlines are euphoric and everyone thinks stocks only go up?

They build quiet, lasting wealth.

Every single time.

— Charlie

📌 P.S. — If market volatility has you second-guessing your investment strategy and you want help building a plan you can actually stick to, book a private 1:1 strategy session with me. Let’s build something that works in bull markets and bear markets alike.

Building Quiet Wealth
Helping 8,000+ smart people learn purposeful investing
Advertise with me
Follow me on YouTube & TikTok

Disclaimer: this content is for educational and informational purposes only, and is not legal, financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before investing, and consult a licensed professional. Charlie and OJD LLC are not responsible for any losses or decisions made based on this content.