Author: Mark Trautman

The Financial Basics – Where to Start

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In my last post – What is Your Why? – I discussed a systematic approach to discover the root reason driving each of us to strive toward improving our financial lives. What will be the guiding principal to focus on while traveling the path toward achieving financial goals? In today’s post we will take the first step on the path to gaining full control over our finances. First, we must determine our present location – where are we starting from? Continue Reading →

What Is Your Why?

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As you may have gathered from my previous blog posts, I am passionate about teaching financial literacy to others – particularly the next generation, which includes my daughter. One of my outlets for this is teaching a financial literacy class to high school seniors at our local public high school. We cover many key topics including tracking spending, calculating and monitoring net worth, discussing various assets and liabilities, understanding interest and compounding, appropriate insurance coverage, personal income taxes, etc. It Continue Reading →

Market Volatility – Friend or Foe?

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You may have noticed some scary headlines recently… Dow Plummets 700+ Points – Stocks Post Largest One-Day Loss in 2019 U.S. Trade War with China Intensifies Inverted Yield Curve Predicts a Recession …and you may also have noticed the resulting increase in stock market volatility. Does this make you nervous? Should you alter your investment portfolio? What is an investor to do? I am here to tell you to take a deep breath. It is important to understand that market Continue Reading →

Paying It Forward – An Early Retiree Case Study

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I was recently asked to write a guest post for the Can I Retire Yet? blog about my journey to financial independence and what I have done since my early retirement at the end of 2015. This post required a lot of personal self-reflection where I discuss my early Money Mindset, some major inflection points in my financial journey, enlightenment from an unlikely source, and ultimately finding my path to financial independence. Post retirement, I did not have any specific Continue Reading →