“No one has ever become poor by giving.” — Anne Frank I came across Vanguard Charitable’s 2024 Why Giving Matters report while looking for a better way to organize our family’s charitable giving. I expected a technical discussion about donor-advised funds. Instead, the report was about behavior: what people do when a cause is already part of their plan,…
How We Manage Our Portfolio (And Why Most Of The Work Is Staying Out Of Our Own Way)
“An Investment in Knowledge Always Pays The Best Interest” – Benjamin Franklin March 2020. The portfolio was dropping hard week after week, headlines worse than the week before. I had cash I’d been planning to deploy for months. And I kept not deploying it, telling myself I was waiting for a better entry point. What…
The Retirement Conversation Nobody Is Actually Having
Part One: Take Stock — Know Where You Actually Stand 1. Pick a target retirement date, even a rough one. Not a day. A decade. Having a direction lets you reverse-engineer everything that needs to happen between now and then. Without it, saving feels vague. With it, saving feels like progress toward something specific. 2….
13 Years In: What The Numbers Actually Say
It was 2013. We had just come back from two and a half years in Europe – graduate school in Sweden, a stint in Lisbon, an adventure with very little money and even less certainty about what came next. We were leaner than we had ever been. We knew how to live on almost nothing….
Going All-In on VTSAX and VBTLX Admiral Shares
How a family of five simplified years of investing into just two funds and why we’re staying the course. A quick note before we dive in: this post is not financial advice. Everything here reflects the personal experience and investment decisions of our own family. All images and content were created exclusively by A Compact…
Where I’m From: A Love Letter to Aerodrom
Skopje, Macedonia — Through the Eyes of Those Who Lived It A Note From Me I’ve received quite a few messages over the past months asking the same question in different ways: “Where are you really from?” and “What was it like growing up there?” I’ve been meaning to answer that properly for a long…
We Sold The RV And Bought VTSAX
The End of the Road (For Now) The Dutch Star is gone. After nearly five years, tens of thousands of miles, countless campsites, border crossings, breakdowns, sunsets, snowstorms, national parks, Canadian backroads, glaciers and long conversations over vinyl dinettes, we sold it. The house-on-wheels that carried us across the United States and Canada – our…