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Welcome!

Thank you for visiting my little corner of the Internet. I hope I can help you navigate your personal finance journey to live your best live.

My philosophy for living the my best life is to ignore the “norms” of the American Dream, and focus on what is important. Part of that best life is having financial security. That is what I hope to help people with this website.

Please reach out to me through the contact page, with questions about personal finance concerns you might have.

Please know that I am not affiliated with any investment or insurance companies, so the information I provide is simply for the benefit of those who need help with financial their decisions.

Blog

Learned By Getting Burned: A Little Cabin on a Lake

In the final episode of this mini-series podcast, we hear from folks that have navigated their teaching career, and discuss their time investing during their career and the pitfalls of dealing with bad insurance options being offered by their district. Thankfully, there are many success stories for some districts, and as more teachers become aware …

Learned By Getting Burned: Why can’t we do this?

On this week’s episode of Learned By Getting Burned: Why can’t we do this? – We find that Insurance companies are actively fighting schools districts from pursuing low fee retirement investment options. Those same Insurance companies are required by law to provide their own employees retirement options that protect their employees. In plain English, the …

Ohio Pensions

If you are among the thousands of Ohioans’ actively contributing to or retired into OPERS, SERS, or STRS and want to better understand the benefits of your pension system, then I want to help you.

Book

TL;DR: Financial Literacy for Ohio Public School Teacher
Optimizing Financial Decisions Based On Your STRS Benefits

By Karl Fish and Sean Durkin

You know you need to learn more about personal finance in order to make important financial decisions, but you just find it too overwhelming, too intimidating, and too time consuming. This book was written for you, giving you the basics in an hour or two, and then directing you to further resources if you’d like to learn more.

This book isn’t about “getting rich quickly” (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but it’s about gaining knowledge and building your capacity in order to live a good life. What’s a “good life”? We don’t know, everyone’s definition is different. What’s important is that you take the time to define what a good life is for you, and then align your financial decisions with that.

The goal of this book is to help you think about your finances in such a way that you have the independence to lead the life you want to live; to give you as much control as possible over your financial situation so that your finances don’t prevent you from living the life you want.

Part 1 of this book is applicable to everyone, but Parts 2-4 are specifically for teachers in Ohio public schools. These parts take a medium dive into both your STRS and your school district benefits, and how you can optimize your finances based on those benefits. Most Ohio educators are not fully aware of their STRS benefits and how that should impact almost all of their other financial decisions throughout their adult lives. This book will help you make those decisions

So, about 130 pages. Maybe a couple of hours. Ready to get started? Future you will thank you.

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