Personal Finance Tips

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A short post of US personal finance tips which are not memetic-competitive

Credit Cards

You should generally use a credit card rather than debit card in order to receive least 2% back on everything you buy. I don’t participate in churning, but I do optimize for cashback.

Suggested cards:

Brokerage Accounts

Brokerage accounts are usually the best way to manage your money in the US. Brokerage accounts share feature sets with bank accounts (and are often merged with them) including ACH (standard withdrawals/deposits), wires, and checks.

Suggested options:

  • Charles Schwab: best serious trading software (ThinkOrSwim) and customer service (referral link provided for bonus)
  • Robinhood: user-friendly, lowest trading commissions, best paired credit card when it releases (gold card referral link provided for bonus)
  • E-Trade: easiest wire transfers to third-party bank accounts (use promo code REWARD24 if new)
  • Interactive Brokers: lowest lending rates for purchasing equities with margin
  • Vanguard: common for retirement accounts
  • Merrill Lynch: best paired credit card if >$100K AUM (see above: Bank of America Premium Rewards)
  • Fidelity: best paired credit card if no assets (see above: Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature)

Newsletters

My highest-ROI finance knowledge has come from niche tweets, conversations with friends and coworkers, and newsletters. Although these newsletters cover more than personal finance, I’m including them here due to their exceptional quality.

Suggested newsletters:

  • Money Stuff by Matt Levine: well-written and hilarious; generally focused on public markets, funny legal cases, private equity, and anything news-worthy
  • Bits About Money by Patrick McKenzie: great for learning about details of financial infrastructure (e.g. how do banks, CCs, payroll providers, etc, actually work)
  • Kalzemus by Patrick McKenzie: personal blog with non-finance content, but I’ve linked the most important post from it for a reason
  • The Diff by Byrne Hobart: in-depth company profiles, applied financial theory, macroeconomics
  • Capital Gains by Byrne Hobart: finance, economics, corporate strategy
  • Stratechery by Ben Thompson: tech-focused corporate finance and strategy, high-signal interviews

Investing

You shouldn’t need much more than one or two brokerage accounts (at least one of these being an IRA or Roth IRA). You should not need a wealth manager or financial advisor or private bank or anything fancy unless you are actively unwilling to learn basics (If you’re an exception to this you should know why).

You should generally never be making frequent trades unless you have a very good reason to do so. If you are checking your stocks daily or frequently buying options, this is often a bad sign, especially if you’re a young male as you’re then at the highest risk of gambling yet thinking you are not gambling (the market will find a way to trick you. the annual take from this is measured in billions and the literal causalities from it non-negligible). Most assets you purchase you should want to hold for many months, better years.

If you wish to make frequent trades regardless, at a minimum learn about your current tax brackets (long+short term; never over-optimize for time-of-sale to save mere pennies), wash sales (making a mistake here can be extremely costly), loss harvesting. pattern day trading requirements, hedging, and section 1256 contracts (which can be used to long/short the equivalent of e.g. QQQ/SPY but in a tax-efficient manner via futures like \NQ). If you want to become an expert in trading options I would strongly question whichever premise you used to decide this unless it is primarily for hedging.

Conclusion

This post is intended to be concise and higher signal; if you want much more knowledge than this there are much better resources out there. If you have corrections or additions to this post please email me (near at this domain) or message me on twitter!

Some topics excluded from this post: loan optimization, angel investing, leveraged index funds, ira/roth ira/401k conversions/backdoors/etc, margin rate negotiation (hint: just ask for it), tax deduction optimizations, anything that is obvious like that credit card debt is bad, many accounting tricks you don’t need yourself, and everything related to corporations even if it benefits you personally (this is a personal finance post, not a corporate finance post).

Thanks to Nikita Bier and Sheel Mohnot for two improvements to this page.