Caitlin's Corner If It's So Passive, Why All the Drama? Iāve always believed that real estate can be one of the most powerful paths to financial freedom. But the part that most people donāt talk about is that itās not usually passive. A few weeks ago, Ryan and I got word that a resident in one of our Denver properties had been arrested. Not long after, neighbors began reporting strangers coming and going from that same unit, at all hours of the night. There were loud arguments, sketchy...
13 days agoĀ ā¢Ā 3 min read
Susan's Scoop The Great Investment Dilemma: When to Hold, When to Let Go Iāve been facing a decision lately that many investors (and homeowners) can probably relate to: Should I sell my property at a loss or keep holding on? Our short-term rental cabin sits just outside Pigeon Forge, in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. We bought it during the pandemic-era boom when vacation rentals were selling like hotcakes and vacation rentals were the fad of the moment. Since then, the market has cooled,...
20 days agoĀ ā¢Ā 3 min read
Caitlin's Corner Are We 'Helicopter Financing'? Last month I was tossing and turning after learning about an experience my daughter was having on her flag football team. I had shown up to help out at her practices and, for the first time, I saw how she was being treated by her all-male teammates. These are third and fourth grade boys- kids I know to be kind on their own. But together, they banded against her: picking on, criticizing, and effectively shutting her out. It was one of those...
27 days agoĀ ā¢Ā 3 min read
Susan's Scoop A Hedge Against Risky Bets Caitlin and I generally encourage setting up a buy-and-hold portfolio of diversified low-cost index funds. And yes, sometimes this can often seem āboringā. So what do you do if you want the excitement of investing a small amount of your money in riskier stocks, such as start-ups, but donāt have the risk tolerance to lose it all? This is where stop losses come in. A stop loss is an automatic sell order you can set on a stock through your brokerage. You...
about 1 month agoĀ ā¢Ā 2 min read
Caitlin's Corner The Peach Problem: Why Your "Diversified" Portfolio Might Be Riper for Risk Than You Think Over the weekend, I participated in my town's fall equinox festival- a celebration centered around giving thanks to the fall harvest. Since I no longer have a garden, my family's "harvest" comes from the farmer's market, grocery store, and occasional orchard trips. Our recent orchard adventure sparked a realization about what's happening in the US stock market that every investor should...
about 1 month agoĀ ā¢Ā 3 min read
Susan's Scoop Falling Vaccine Rates Could Collapse our Economy š Back when I was in high school, I dreamed of becoming an epidemiologist and chasing down Ebola in Africa, Hantavirus in the Southwest US, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in the UK. I had big plans to attend Emory University and train at the CDC just steps away, but although I was accepted, there was no way I could afford the tuition. Alas, I had to go to a much smaller school with a bigger scholarship, but with no Public Health...
about 2 months agoĀ ā¢Ā 3 min read
Caitlin's Corner When Hundreds of Millions $ Is Not Enough I'll be honest- I only recently warmed up to the idea that billionaires are bad. And even that is tough for me to type, because I don't believe that billionaires are inherently bad, but here's what I 100% believe: it is bad for someone to have billions of dollars. It used to be easy to see what billionaires wanted: the biggest yachts, rarest art, and sprawling estates etched with architectural excess. This is relatable, to some...
about 2 months agoĀ ā¢Ā 5 min read
Susan's Scoop My $400,000 Mistake Something that we all have in common is that our financial lives consist of a combination of good decisions, bad decisions, and luck. And fundamentally our ideal outcome is to have the āgood decisionsā and āgood luckā outweigh the ābad decisionsā and ābad luckā. In my workshops I often talk about how we need to set up our entire financial portfolio from the position of the House at a casino ā there will be individual winners and losers in our investments, but...
2 months agoĀ ā¢Ā 3 min read
Caitlin's Corner Our Lack of Mobility is Stagnating Our Economy, and Our Personal Growth Iāve made some big moves in my life, and not just geographically. Each time, Iāve had to make the hard choice of leaving behind a āperfectly fineā housing situation, with a mortgage payment that made financial sense on paper, in order to step into something bigger. In 2013, my husband and I left behind a 2.6% mortgage rate for a new home with a 4.1% rate. In 2024, we left a nearly paid-off home and...
2 months agoĀ ā¢Ā 3 min read