On the morning Apple opened its first stores, Ron Johnson called Steve Jobs to apologize. Thirty minutes before the doors opened in Glendale, California, only about 50 people were in line, and Ron was sure he’d blown it. Steve’s reply (“have faith, they’ll come”) said a lot about the Steve Jobs leadership style Ron had…
On the morning of the Lehman Brothers collapse, Jared Dillian, who ran the firm’s ETF trading desk, walked past TV trucks and a crowd of reporters to get to the trading floor. He looked around at the chaos, took off his tie, and figured he wouldn’t be needing it anymore. That week, about half a…
Rob Berger started writing about personal finance in 2007, just months before the Great Recession hit. His retirement planning strategy through the crash was almost comically simple: keep contributing to his 401(k), don’t sell anything, and otherwise do nothing. Nearly 20 years later, the list of worries looks different. AI is upending which skills and…
“You have this golden opportunity during these low-income years.” That’s what I told a listener who’s heading into a one-to-two-year career break with $80,000 in cash and a paid-off home. Is that enough? It depends on the one number she didn’t give us: how much she plans to spend. So Joe and I walk through…
In New York City, a 24-unit apartment building is listed for sale at $1.3 million, which works out to about $54,000 per apartment. Kenny Burgos represents the owners of buildings like that one, and his advice is simple: don’t buy it. The reason comes down to rent stabilization. Kenny grew up in the Bronx, raised…
“Sometimes you might make the ‘right’ decision for the wrong reason.” That’s what I told Nieves, a listener who’s deciding whether to sell rental property she bought back in 2021, a St. Louis duplex that’s gotten a lot harder to manage since she moved to Madrid for her MBA. Her tenants have started paying late….
Marisa Franco built her career studying friendship and belonging. Her latest research pulled her somewhere unexpected: the connection between self-worth and net worth. In her data, people with high self-worth and high SAT scores earned close to double the income of people with low SAT scores. People with low self-worth showed no such pattern —…
Your S&P 500 index fund looks diversified — but Alec Litowitz says its concentration in AI stocks makes it one giant bet in disguise. Alec Litowitz joined a hedge fund with $100 million in assets and six employees. He had never made a trade in his life. That fund was Citadel, in its earliest days,…
On September 11, 2001, Michael Hingson was on the 78th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower with his guide dog, Roselle, when the first plane hit. Over the next hour, they walked down 78 flights of stairs together, calm the entire way. Michael later wrote about that day in Thunder Dog, a New…
“So to me, this is not a money management question.” That’s what I told Jamie, a 42-year-old PA with $686,000 saved, right after she described her plan: quit the job she loves and take her husband and kids on a family gap year while they’re still young enough to remember it. She wasn’t asking if…