September Round-Up

Yes, you read the title correctly. I decided to become *yet another* curation site. Okay, not really. Instead of being a dedicated curation site or running weekly round-ups, I wanted to post the best articles I’ve read and podcasts I listened to during the month. September included FinCon 2019 allowing me to meet many of these people in person.

Politics in Personal Finance

Speaking of Fincon, there was a trash fire of an article not even worthy of linking demanding *more politics* in personal finance and FinCon 2019. After a vocal minority rallied for *more politics* in personal finance, JD Roth wrote this eloquent response. I couldn’t agree more.

The Index Fund Debate

In other controversial statements this month, the Index Fund debate popped up again, this time courtesy of Michael Burry, the gentlemen who correctly called the housing market crash and invested against it as outlined in The Big Short.

This caused the originals to come out in full force to rebuke this claim. Mr. Money Mustache chimed in as well as the more active investor and financially independent type I follow with this rebuttal from Mr. Tako Escapes.

Personally I invest in a combination of passive mutual funds and individual stocks. One of the greatest things about our market system is the ability for shareholders to resolve incompetent and/or overpaid managers. These resolutions are usually led by activist investors and these activists are what make the passive investing system work. I usually own a couple of stocks in the middle of an activist investing campaign (today I own both AT&T and Armark) and have used this as a complimentary investing strategy outlined here: What if everyone went to passive investing? Profit from it!

September’s Market Excitement

Finishing up the discussion on investing, September was a wild month between the WeWork Failure, Peleton IPO, a move from growth to value investing, and some CEO turnover. Piggybacking on the “Is index investing dead”, Motley Fool Money disused the surprisingly short tenure of public CEOs and the state of the IPO market (and failures) last weekly episode of the month. I also had the super fan of the show moment getting to talk to Chris Hill about some of these issues at FinCon19.

This isn’t the best reason to listen though, fifteen minutes in the show interviews one of my favorite writers, Morgan Housel at the Collaborative Fund. Morgan talks about about personal finance, behavioral finance, and index verses active investing. Even if you’re not interested to the opening investing discussion, this Q&A is a must listen!

From the World of Financial Independence (and Early Retirement)

All three of these come from people I had the chance to meet at FinCon 2019.

Lisa at and I both quit our jobs at the same time as financially independent types. I had this big crescendo moment of surprising 400 people and using the word retirement and writing about it constantly. Lisa quietly quit her job and waited nearly six months to write this recap of burnout, leaving a professional identity, and people’s reactions to someone leaving a high powered law job. (side note – she also thought I was 60 before we met at FinCon thanks to my grumpy Twitter personality)

Kim at the Frugal Engineers made her debut interview on the FI Show discussing financial mistakes and her path to financial independence. It was impressive how she turned her side hustle into her main hustle, working as a consultant within a unique professional certification. You can also learn her strategy of judging a town by their Walmart!

Finally, we all have our “why” behind achieving financial financial independence. I’ll leave you with this powerful story from the FI Old Guys.

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