Doing My Taxes With Investments

I have long dreaded the tax situation that comes along with investing—mostly because it always seemed impossible to grasp what would be impacted. Ever since I started working, I’ve exclusively done my taxes through TurboTax for free. It was always so easy that I feared the day I began investing; I knew that simplicity would be taken from me, and I would possibly have to pay the government more money just to file my taxes!

Instead of letting the tax fear swallow me whole, I downloaded all of the necessary forms and did my taxes—exclusively for you (the government already knows every detail)! In addition to my W2, now that I have a brokerage account and three savings accounts, I have four different Form 1099s that declare the interest I made on those balances (the good kind). My Charles Schwab brokerage account form also has dividend income and foreign tax paid on a couple of the exchange-traded funds (ETFs) I own that contain some companies based in foreign countries. Since I didn’t sell any holdings in 2022, I have no capital gains to speak of.

I began my tax journey where I always do: TurboTax. With the fear of god and the government pulsing through my veins, I uploaded all of my Form 1099s separately. I had to upload my brokerage account form twice: once for interest income and once for dividend income. TurboTax fills out most of this information automatically, but I double-checked everything. Just when I thought I had reached the end, I was presented with the harrowing TurboTax upsell screen. Since I paid foreign tax on some of my investments, I needed to upgrade to the deluxe version for $39 in order to file with TurboTax.

Since I refuse to pay money to do something that is required by law, I searched around and tried some other platforms. First, I tried H&R Block, which always seems to be bragging about how much better it is than TurboTax (spoiler alert: it’s actually worse!). I didn’t get very far on H&R Block’s online tax filing platform before I had to give up. With a process as precise as filing taxes, I hoped H&R Block would mirror that precision. Instead, it was rounding all of the numbers to the nearest dollar. I uploaded my Schwab Form 1099 to capture the interest—all of $0.13—I accrued on the cash in my brokerage account. But the system kept rounding that interest down to $0, so when I tried to continue, I was told I didn’t have any interest to declare! Could you imagine me trying to explain this to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)? I would be immediately imprisoned for tax fraud 😂.

Exasperated, I ended up on Cash App Taxes. I had to create a Cash App account first, which required me to download the Cash App mobile app on my phone. Once I created the account on my phone, it allowed me to continue on the computer with no hassle. Cash App Taxes states that it has free filing no matter what, so I had high hopes that I wouldn’t get ripped off at the end. The downside is that there’s no option to upload PDFs of all the forms, so I had to do some manual entry by copying and pasting. Cash App requires a five-digit PIN for filing, so as a first-time filer with the platform I had to enter my 2021 adjusted gross income (AGI) for the IRS to identify me. After successfully filing with Cash App Taxes, I received two emails telling me that my state and federal tax returns were accepted!

Since I expected this process to be more complicated than usual, I felt more prepared to deal with the nonsense that is filing taxes in the U.S. Have you done your taxes yet this year, or are you still putting it off? If you’ve done your taxes with investments, how did that first time go for you?

Pros and Cons of Owning Property

The more I learn about money and the world, the more I realize that everything has a cost. You end up paying it in either time or money. When I first started working downtown at AAII, I weighed the cost of walking from the train to the office instead of taking the bus. Walking took longer but it was free. Taking the bus gave me more time to read and communicate with friends but it required spending more money than walking. Usually, my decision depended on the weather (if I was going to end up too sweaty to be in public by the time I got to the office) or if my book was really good and I needed another half hour with it.

I think of costs in the same way when it comes to owning property. When you own a piece of property, it becomes a long-term investment that takes up a lot of your time, but it keeps your monthly payments steady. When you rent where you live, it can be a short-term investment where all extraneous maintenance costs are handled by the building, but your monthly payments are usually only agreed upon for a year or two before they increase.

At this point in my life, I’ve only rented apartments in Chicago. I have a high-yield savings account designated for eventually buying property, but I have no solid plans for when or where this will occur. Every time I hear about an issue with a ventilation system, a water heater or a leaky roof, it makes me recoil from the very thought of home ownership! So, I decided to actually research the pros and cons of owning property to see where I stand.

A lot of the articles I found mention that the top positive thing about buying a house is “building equity.” This has to do with increasing the market value of the property minus what is owed, so by adding more equity to your property you are increasing its value and therefore its selling price. Something about this doesn’t seem real and gives off major money laundering vibes!

The other pros of owning a house include tax deductions, a good credit mix, privacy and control over your space, stable monthly payments and fulfilling the white-picket-fence American dream.

On the negative side, the upfront costs of buying property are the biggest pain point. In addition to the down payment, which is usually 20% of the purchase price, there are closing costs that can be 3% to 6% of the price. Another cost I see often on listings is the homeowners association (HOA) fee, which can range drastically from $100 to $1,000 per month depending on where you live. The HOA fee can be higher if it’s paying for some nice amenities, like a pool in a condominium. Not every house will have an HOA, so you can find areas without them if the cost is too much.

Additional cons of buying property are the costs of maintenance and repair, as well as property taxes. (These costs aren’t usually factored into how much a house has appreciated in value but they will impact the profit a homeowner makes when they sell.) There’s also the time it takes to actually build that home equity, the interest charged on the mortgage and the wild fluctuations in the housing market to consider. Once you buy a house, you’re stuck there with much less flexibility to move compared to a renter, so it’s best to make sure you really want to invest in the area you choose to live.

In an article by The Zebra, an insurance comparison site, a 2022 survey discovered that 47% of Americans do not feel the fear of missing out (FOMO) when it comes to buying a house. Only 17% have homebuyer FOMO.

While writing this, I’ve been daydreaming about a little artist’s adobe house somewhere in New Mexico where I can live out my Georgia O’Keeffe desert fantasy. But the reality is that it could cost me even more to own and maintain a house than it does to continue renting with my maintenance handled for no extra cost in the current housing market. There’s much more detailed math involved in this decision, but for now I’ll continue renting until I’m ready to commit more time (and possibly less money) to the place I live.

If you own a house or condo, leave me a comment about how the buying process went! If you’re a long-term renter, do you feel like you made the right decision or do you have homebuyer FOMO?

PRISM Step 2: Recognizing Your Risk Tolerance and Allocation

Before we dive into the deep end of what the big words in the title represent, if you missed my blog post about the first step of the AAII PRISM Wealth-Building Process, you can read it here.

PRISM is a five-step method for aligning my investment decisions with my goals, created by AAII Journal editor Charles Rotblut. The second step of PRISM contains nine lessons and three worksheets for discovering my risk tolerance for each of my investing goals and how I need to diversify my investments to correlate with the level of risk I can handle.

Charles discusses many types of risk, but the most important seem to be financial and psychological. How much money and sanity can you handle losing on your investments? But risk isn’t just about losing money, it can also lower the purchasing power of the money you already have. This was an argument I heavily relied on when I opened two high-yield savings accounts instead of letting thousands of dollars sit pretty in my joke of a regular savings account. The interest rate on regular savings accounts is far too low to keep up with inflation, so over time that money has less value.

Though risk sounds like a bad thing, Charles says that some risk can be an opportunity if you know how to use it right. For instance, when the market is down (like it was for most of last year) that lowers the price of investments, which in turn gives individual investors more options to buy stocks and funds at a discount.

The Assessing Your Risk Tolerance worksheet can be used for each of my investing goals that I outlined in my walkthrough of PRISM Step 1. For instance, my risk tolerance for retirement is high due to the long-term timing of the goal.

Allocation is the other big word in this step; it refers to how your portfolio is divided among different classes of investments. These include stocks, bonds and cash. AAII has three asset allocation models for different goal time horizons that correspond with how to diversify your investments for each goal.

With my retirement’s long investment horizon, it lands me in the aggressive investor column. This correlates with an allocation of 10% to fixed income, or bonds, and 90% to diversified stocks. My retirement portfolio is 100% invested in stocks, but I think it’s still too early in my investing journey to add bonds to the mix. I will need to do a lot more research before I feel comfortable investing in something I currently don’t understand.

I can apply these lessons to each of my investing goals to ensure that the allocation I have in place supports the investment’s time horizon and level of risk.

Follow along with me as I venture through the PRISM Wealth-Building Process and solidify my financial plan for the future!

One-Year Credit Card Update: Using Cash-Back Rewards

It has been almost exactly one year since I opened my first real adult credit card! Discover matched the cash back I accumulated throughout my first year, so it’s time to do a little shopping for rewards. Discover provided me with a year-end activity summary that shows how much money I spent broken down by category and how much I spent versus how much I paid down my balance on a monthly basis. The most popular category for my purchases was merchandise at 37%, followed by supermarkets (27%) and restaurants (13%). But my favorite metric was the interest accrued:


I successfully made it through my first year without collecting any interest! I’ve taken full advantage of having a credit card without falling victim to my nightmares of not having enough money to pay it off. Some months I can see my fear creep in, where I didn’t want to pay off my entire bill. I would chip away at it or pay it all off at the start of the next month.

My personal reward for not accruing any interest is that now I get to use my cash-back bonus for more than just paying off my credit card—I get to spend it on my favorite things! Discover has four options for redeeming cash back: cash (deposit or apply to bill), pay with rewards (available on Amazon and PayPal), gift cards (starting at $5) and charity. There were around 100 gift card options, including restaurants, health and beauty, department stores, entertainment and travel. Since Discover includes up to 10% added value with each gift card, I’m already getting a better deal than if I were to use my cash back to pay off my credit card. I thought about my immediate needs and landed on three gift cards to use the majority of my cash-back bonus on: $50 at Target, $85 at Barnes & Noble and $100 at Sephora. You can see below that I didn’t have to pay full price for these gift cards:

I still have some cash back left over, but I’m not sure if I want to apply it to my account or wait to accumulate more. I’m hoping to take even more advantage of my cash back now that I’ve made it through this first year unscathed. My strategy for paying off my credit card twice a month whenever my paycheck comes in still stands. That way, I only have to acknowledge my balance when necessary, and I can spend the rest of my free time doing my skincare and reading my books 😊.

New Year, New Investments, Same Strategy

It’s time for some more investing! I accumulated another lump sum of $2,000 to add to my Schwab brokerage account, but I’m not sure how to distribute it. I know I want to add some new investments, but should I sell some too?

During the first time I invested back in March 2021, I chose seven index exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that fit my personal environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. I started with AAII’s ETF Screener and filtered for socially responsible ETFs with low and below-average expense ratios in their category. From there, I added my investing ideas to AAII’s My Portfolio tracking tool and ran them through As You Sow’s screener, which grades funds based on their investments in stocks of companies that are profiting from the fossil fuel industry, deforestation, gender inequality, sales of guns and military weapons, the prison industrial complex and tobacco.

Unfortunately, the market took quite the fall last year, putting some of my klutziest moments to shame. Most of my initial investments have lost value since purchase, but I know that it’s not the end of the world. AAII taught me that bull markets last longer than bear markets, and by that logic there is hope!

This time, I started my search for new investments with a specific category in mind: vegan food. I found some vegan socially responsible ETFs through AAII’s ETF Screener but most of them had sky-high expense ratios. For instance, the VegTech Plant-Based Innovation & Climate ETF (EATV) has an expense ratio of 0.75%, giving it a category expense ratio grade of F. On As You Sow, it gets almost all A’s, with a B for gender equality. I’m looking for ETFs with expense ratios below 0.60%, but also with category grades of C or better. One vegan ETF that came close was the U.S. Vegan Climate ETF (VEGN)—it has a 0.60% expense ratio, putting it just above my limit, but it also has C grades for gender equality and the prison industrial complex on As You Sow, making it a less sustainable investment.

I decided to switch gears and use As You Sow’s screener to find sustainable investments at the source. I set the filters for grades of B or better for all categories except gender equality, since this is a common one that companies miss. I chose to go for C grades or better for gender equality since it’s something I’m willing to accept as long the grade doesn’t get worse.

This gave me a few more ideas to add to my index ETF list in the AAII My Portfolio tool: VanEck BioTech ETF (BBH), ClearBridge All Cap Growth ESG ETF (CACG), IQ Cleaner Transport ETF (CLNR), Global X Green Building ETF (GRNR), VanEck Morningstar ESG Moat ETF (MOTE) and Schwab U.S. REIT ETF (SCHH).

I recalled reading way back in Michele Cagan’s “Investing 101” that I shouldn’t have more than six or seven ETFs in my portfolio, because at that point there is likely to be some duplication that doesn’t do my portfolio any good. Since I currently hold seven ETFs, I will have to make a sell decision in order to add any new ones to my portfolio.

To determine if I even have something to sell based on my investing strategy, I evaluated my current investments on how their As You Sow grades fared over the last 10 months. When I first invested in the seven ETFs, I made notes of their current As You Sow grades in the My Portfolio tool so I knew what made them attractive when I bought them. With this analysis, I found that two ETFs were potentially on the chopping block: Defiance Next Gen H2 ETF (HDRO) and Fidelity Clean Energy ETF (FRNW). When I bought it, Defiance Next Gen H2 didn’t have a meaningful gender equality grade, but it has since changed to F, and its fossil fuels grade fell from C to D. Fidelity Clean Energy’s fossil fuels grade fell from B to C and its gender equality grade remains at D. I’m mainly basing my analysis on the fossil fuels grades falling, since these grades are more important to my strategy and gender equality will likely be the biggest uphill battle of sustainable investing.

So, I have my crops to harvest, but what will I be replacing them with? From the list of index ETFs I found this time around, VanEck BioTech graded best with all A’s on As You Sow, and CleanBridge All Cap Growth ESG and IQ Cleaner Transport received all A’s and B’s. Schwab U.S. REIT is also a contender with just a grade of C for gender equality dragging it down. If I choose to remove the two ETFs that no longer fit my investing strategy, I will likely add two new ETFs to fill their spots. This means I have to narrow down my list of potential ETFs. But how?

It’s time to take a look at sector diversification. Right now, I have a lot of industrials exposure with a few Global X ETFs, so I don’t want to add any more investments in that category. This means IQ Cleaner Transport is off the table. From here, I chose the two ETFs with the lowest expense ratios and expense ratio grades of A: VanEck BioTech with a 0.35% expense ratio and Schwab U.S. REIT with 0.07%! These will add exposure to the health and real estate sectors and further diversify my portfolio.

Though I now have some sell rules in place for my investments, I don’t have a schedule for evaluating them. I’m currently operating on a roughly annual basis, but with the ESG investing landscape in flux, it might make more sense to review my portfolio midyear as well.

I’ll keep you updated on how my investments fare in 2023!

I read this so you don’t have to! The ESG Investing Handbook

Back in May after AAII Journal editor Charles Rotblut and I interviewed Larry Swedroe about environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, publisher Harriman House reached out to us with copies of “The ESG Investing Handbook,” edited by Becky O’Connor. The book features interviews with a variety of U.K.-based asset managers and provides an overview of the global ESG investing landscape.

The book covers investing for the three different components of ESG, the performance of ESG investments, different ESG strategies, regulations and ratings, grassroots and investor engagement and what the future holds for ESG investors.

While there are a variety of opinions shared in the book that sometimes contradict each other, the introduction begins with an air of urgency and uncertainty, saying that “the global crisis is now so critical that only positive impact investments focused on solutions will do. According to this view, we don’t have time to engage with the old-world fossil fuel companies and they must be left behind completely. But in building an approach that seeks to be ‘good only,’ we may also be in danger of creating another fallacy—that positive impact is 100% perfect.”

In one interview, the Baillie Gifford Global Stewardship team discusses how “it is tempting to only invest in companies and funds that already have a positive impact, but the world doesn’t work that way.” Of course, we know that investments are not all green or all brown, and ESG investments’ ratings can change throughout their existence. But personally, I still struggle with the idea that I should be investing in a company or fund because of the promise of more sustainability in the future. It’s like getting into a relationship with someone who says, “Give me like five years to get my shit together.” That doesn’t sound like a good use of my time or money!

My favorite parts of the book are the helpful lists of sustainable companies. I’ll be revisiting these investing ideas when I add more money to my brokerage account in the new year! Some companies include Beyond Meat Inc. (BYND) for reducing its land use and carbon dioxide emissions, HP Inc. (HPQ) for increasingly using recycled plastic in production and Enphase Energy Inc. (ENPH) for its development of renewable energy products. Though I won’t be investing in individual stocks, these examples give me some direction on what funds to look for.

The figure below shows the sustainable development goals that were presented by the United Nations (U.N.) in 2017. The different values show “which of the goals have attracted the most investment—and which goals asset managers have struggled to meet.”

This provides more ideas for sustainable investments, but also shows where we need to do better or are otherwise lacking.

The book also provides some color on the fashion industry and its horrors. Not only do many of the top brands treat their employees like modern-day slaves—certainly not passing the social element of ESG—I learned that it takes “10,000 litres of water to make a pair of jeans” and “two billion people in the world live somewhere with inadequate water supply. The fashion industry relies on 98 million tonnes of non-renewable resources every year.” This is an egregious use of natural resources that are required for humanity to survive, and even more reason to shop second hand whenever possible.

Thankfully, “Regulations elsewhere are beginning to take root. In New York, the home of Sex and the City and Manolo Blahnik shoes, the Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act was presented in January 2022, which could make New York ‘the first state in the country to pass legislation that will effectively hold the biggest brands in fashion to account for their role in climate change.’” When I looked up the status of this act, I noticed that it had yet to be passed. Legislation like this is vital, but the government works so slowly that by the time this act becomes a law, it may already be too late to reverse the damage. Maybe Carrie Bradshaw could pull some strings? 😏

I found the most interesting chapter to be the one about governance, the G in ESG. Prior to reading, I didn’t have much information on what governance really meant for a company. Essentially, governance is what connects the E and S: “How well a company meets environmental and social targets will ultimately come down to the strength of the governance—the ‘glue’ between a business and its stakeholders.”

When asked about how to know when good governance is working, Federated Hermes Ltd. chief risk and compliance officer Keith Davies says, “Ultimately, the key to demonstrating good governance is the success of the firm and its ability to deliver an appropriate strategy effectively, safely and without major issues or events. This includes showing progress on key ESG objectives—with clear and consistent reporting against target milestones.” Governance grounds the ESG strategy in evidence, measurables and actual impact to hold companies accountable for their actions and audit their sustainable progress.

If you are interested in investing sustainably, this book provides a great place to start with your research. I will definitely be returning to it for guidance and inspiration whenever I feel frustrated about my lack of ESG investing options.

Happy holidays, I’ll check in with you in the new year!

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PRISM Step 1: Prioritizing Your Goals

Now that I have something of an investment strategy in place, it’s time to take a closer look at how my money will be allocated to my financial goals. The AAII PRISM Wealth-Building Process, created by AAII Journal editor Charles Rotblut, is a five-step method for aligning my investment decisions with my goals.

The first step of PRISM supplies seven lessons and three worksheets to help determine what my goals are, why to start with them, the key components of my goals—including the timing and wealth required to fulfill them—and the importance of prioritizing goals as a jumping off point for building wealth.

I learned that in order for a goal to have any standing, it has to be personal to me. Though it doesn’t need to be the highest priority in my life, it has to be something that I care about and am willing to achieve. Otherwise, I could spend the rest of my days in bed watching the sun go up and down (just kidding, there’s no sun now that it’s December!).

Once I define these goals, they will begin to drive the decisions I make with my money. Charles suggests starting with life stages. What do I want to do with my money at different stages of life? I have a mix of short-term and longer-term goals, but I’m not really sure about the intermediate term.

I’ll admit, some of the worksheets went a bit over my head, but the main Prioritizing Your Goals worksheet was the most helpful. Here I was able to enter my goals, the number of years away each goal is, the amount of time I will need to spend on the goals, their priority, estimated cost and any comments I have about these goals.

My goal that is most imminent is making another $2,000 lump-sum investment into my Schwab brokerage account. Since my plan is for this to occur on the first trading day of January 2023, this goal is my highest priority and will depend on me sticking to my savings schedule.

Next on my list is a little heritage tour of Europe I’ve wanted to go on for years. Germany, Hungary and a little village in what is now Poland where my great-grandfather grew up before he left for the U.S. are high on the list. It will probably also include eating my way through Italy—my true motherland even though I’m 0% Italian! I haven’t entirely planned out the trip, so my cost is super estimated here.

Buying a house or piece of property somewhere, somehow is my third goal. To be honest, I’m not even sure if I want to own property (blog post on that coming soon), but I know that I don’t necessarily want to pay an increasing amount of rent for the rest of my life either. After some very vague number crunching, I came up with an estimated cost of $35,000 for this goal—but it will depend a lot on inflation and the housing market’s status whenever this goal is realized.

My longest-term goal is also my lowest priority: retirement. The upside-down smiley emoji attached to it means that this is probably an unachievable goal, but it’s on there anyway! I did some calculations involving inflation to figure out how much I would possibly need in the year 2062 when I might retire (that’s not a real year!). Charles discusses how some of these goals will be more realistic and others more aspirational. Retirement is a fever dream at this point for millennials and younger generations, but AAII’s lessons always keep it in the back of my mind. One thing that lessened the pain of just how aspirational retirement is for me was when Charles noted that even long-term goals don’t need to be fully funded by the time they are met. Retirement is an example of a goal where I could still be in the accumulation stage of building savings but be able to retire with what I have at the time.

Follow along with me as I venture through the PRISM Wealth-Building Process and solidify my financial plan for the future!

The Carrie Finances: Dragging My Savings Habits

Last time I reviewed my budget, my rent had just gone up and summer was in full swing. I had started contributing to my retirement account and was already looking forward to fall—and the fall in price of my energy bill!

Though I’ve been using the percentage budget for most of this year, I certainly haven’t been following it as closely as I would like. I haven’t been saving enough, so right before sitting down to write this I forced myself to transfer 20% of my monthly income, $560, from my checking account to my regular savings account.

I promise I haven’t been spending exorbitant amounts of money on fancy shoes in the traditional Carrie Bradshaw fashion. My main struggle with saving has been waiting until the end of the month to make the transfer, and after my rent went up it got even harder to pull the trigger. Unlike Carrie, I’m calling myself out on my bullshit because no one else will! (Feel free to bully me into saving better, every bit of encouragement helps!)

I’m hoping that transferring my savings at the beginning of the month (right after the first paycheck hits) will hold me more accountable to stick to the budget outlined below:

Another way I’m tricking my brain into wanting to save more is by setting more aggressive goals for my high-yield savings accounts. I’m more motivated to save and meet those goals now that I put them in writing. In order to meet my goal of investing another $2,000 in the new year, I have to stick to saving no less than $560 every month and make more regular transfers to my high-yield savings accounts when my emergency savings are in excess of $10,000.

Most of my recent behavioral block from saving can also be attributed to my general misunderstanding of numbers (the letters of math!) and a fear of not having enough money. But I know that with the budget I’ve created, it’s possible for my money to do all of the things I want it to. I just have to face that reality and allow the numbers to mean little else than their value. As AAII has taught me, having these rules in place means that there’s no room for my emotions in these decisions.

My goal is to get to the point with my budget where I don’t have to think about it. Since I only started budgeting at the beginning of this year, I’ve given myself some wiggle room to start. But now we’re getting serious 😎 so stay tuned to see if I can stay true to my word!

I watched this so you don’t have to! Damon Dominique’s Finance Masterclass

“Some people are so poor, all they have is money.”
—Damon Dominique

Back in May, one of my favorite YouTubers Damon Dominique released a video titled, “A Finance Masterclass for Smart People Who Aren’t Interested in Money & Finance.” Instead of indulging in it immediately, I put it on my “Watch Later” playlist and let it sit there for five months with the intention of watching it, taking notes and sharing my thoughts with you all. At long last, I finally watched the video!

Damon is an American living in Paris, France, and is self-employed with a few different streams of income. He set up his own business so that he could write things off on his taxes as business expenses—like his laptop and his fancy pen. In this hour-long video, Damon discusses his “beef with finance,” working with accountants, the pros and cons of being self-employed, inflation, taxes, how rich people use money, brokerage accounts, capital gains, investment simulations, stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), retirement accounts, lump-sum investing versus dollar-cost averaging, real estate, cryptocurrency, being an American living abroad, financial mindset and the philosophy of money.

Damon sees finance as a “topic that’s rather gatekeepery” and berates the U.S. public school system for not teaching us about taxes. I agree—why don’t we learn about taxes in school when that public education is funded by taxes? One thing I hadn’t realized is that when I eventually take money out of an investment, it gets taxed at a lower rate than income does.

Despite his sentiments around finance, Damon learned about it because it stressed him out and he wanted the “peace of mind” that comes when you understand money. He says, “Once you know how money works, you don’t have to worry about it anymore, because you can always make more.”

When discussing investing, he notes that even after learning about it he still sees it as gambling. However, he sees pretty much anything to do with money as a risk: “Which risk are you more comfortable with: Risking your money in a bank account, losing value to inflation” or losing it in the stock market? Either way, there’s a risk. It’s all about which risk you want to take.

My favorite segment was when Damon differentiated between stocks and ETFs with two different examples. The first is that he thinks vegan and plant-based food will “take off in the next 15 years.” But he doesn’t necessarily think one company will do better than the other (e.g., Beyond Meat will soar while Impossible Foods will tank); he thinks “the whole idea is gonna take off.” In comes the ETF, full of stocks and properly diversified to avoid one stock ruining his returns. The second example is an ETF as a box of vitamins. Damon says, “Maybe this one will make me throw up, but this one will make me feel really good!” As someone who has recently had multiple incidents with multivitamins making me vomit, this gave me a much-needed laugh! (I’m OK, but I will be leaving a bad review 😂)

Damon also offered a positive aspect of cryptocurrency that I hadn’t thought of—international payments. Since he lives in France but pays people from all over the world, he has run into issues with fees and taxes. Cryptocurrency as a potentially global currency would enable people to be “global citizens” and live and work from anywhere in the world without being tied to a specific place of residency.

While setting up his individual retirement account (IRA), Damon felt existential anxiety about how finance requires that we make these lifelong decisions about our money when we might not be ready or know what our lives will actually look like. Any plan is just a wild guess that we—and the planet—will be around and able to retire when the time comes. Though this is something that could give me more anxiety about money, the flip side is that since we have no control over what’s going to happen, it’s not worth staying up at night thinking about it!

One of Damon’s final points is to “prioritize the big wins” like using your great credit score to get a better loan from the bank when you want to buy a house instead of thinking about how much money you would save over time by not buying that $5 latte today. This is where so much press around millennials and avocado toast could be immediately squashed. Wealth ultimately isn’t about all of the things we didn’t buy so that we could save more, it’s about that balance between our lived experiences and the risks we take to live them.

One Year Closer to Maturity: Happy Birthday, My Investing Discoveries!

As of October 7, My Investing Discoveries has been in existence for an entire year! To celebrate, I went through all my blog posts so far and updated them with links to posts and categories that didn’t exist when I wrote them. Now, all posts are self-referential to help you find the related information you need from the links within each post.

In addition, I created a Categories page so that you can more easily find exactly what you’re looking for when you come to My Investing Discoveries. The list includes links to my specific series on Hereditary Financial Habits, The Carrie Finances and book reviews, as well as personal finance and investing topics like budgeting, saving, retirement and sustainable investing. Some of these categories only have one post in them, while others are more fleshed out. Let me know the topics you want more posts about in the comments below!

There’s also a new section on the Resources page with financial resources specifically for women. When I started researching whether financial literacy should be gendered, I found through “Clever Girl Finance” by Bola Sokunbi that women are still paid less than men despite women living longer than men. For these compounding reasons, women—particularly marginalized women—are more in need of financial advice tailored to them. Since women were kept from even participating in the economy for centuries, there’s quite a bit of catching up to do. See the Women in Finance category for more!

Speaking of Sokunbi, I decided to go back through some of her helpful “Take Action” sections and try one out. The first one that caught my eye was on calculating net worth:


To perform this exercise, I opened every single one of my financial accounts: my Fifth Third bank account, which contains my checking account and regular savings account; my Discover credit card account; my Schwab brokerage account; my SmartyPig and LendingClub high-yield savings accounts; and my Vanguard retirement account.

I wrote down the value of each account and added them up to find my total assets. I included my latest credit card payment that had yet to go through, my current credit card balance with pending transactions and an approximation of my tab at the dentist under the “total liabilities” section. When I subtracted my liabilities from my assets to find my net worth, I was happy to see the number didn’t dwindle too much.

Sokunbi recommends calculating net worth every quarter, but I recalled that Erin Lowry in “Broke Millennial” mentioned doing so on a monthly basis. I think a quarterly review will work best for me, but even annually would be fine. Monthly net worth updates would be too often, and I would likely feel that I wasn’t making enough progress month to month. I’ll start with doing this quarterly and see how it goes!

For the next year of My Investing Discoveries, I have exciting things in store—including going through each step of the AAII PRISM Wealth-Building Process. Stay tuned for more!