There are lots of ways people envision what it means to have wealth. Time freedom, excess cash flow, ultimate flexibility, low fixed costs, a sense of control and security/a lack of anxiety, especially around financial matters. You know what’s reliably incompatible with all those things on at least a semi-regular basis? Real estate.
The goal of retirement investing is not to have a pile of money on the day you retire. It is consistent income throughout your retirement. You can achieve this through a number of methods.
Retirees often wonder about handling their fixed income allocation in retirement. Some people would like to hold cash rather than bonds. Some people would like to know if keeping all of your money in stocks makes sense.
Investors tend to prefer what they know. They follow local companies, understand domestic politics, read news in their own language, and usually spend money in their home currency. That familiarity helps explain one of the most persistent behaviors in portfolio construction: home bias.
According to a 2023 AARP report, one in ten adults over age 50 lives alone and doesn’t have a partner or children. Different lifestyles and changing societal attitudes suggest these numbers will grow in the future. Plenty of people are single by choice. But the healthcare system is assuming older people have family to support them.
Baby boomers are set to pass trillions of dollars on to their heirs in the next two decades, but the huge transfer of riches will mostly benefit Gen X and millennial heirs who are already wealthy.
Every January, millions of us sit down and write our goals for the year. By March, most of them have been abandoned. So we set new ones in spring, and when September rolls around, we do it again. New season, fresh start, same cycle – and plenty of beating ourselves up along the way. Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead.
A growing number are asking AI about money, and some are getting burned. According to a 2025 survey of 2,000 U.S. adults by Pearl.com, a professional services platform, 19% said they lost more than $100 by following financial advice from an AI chatbot. Among Gen Z investors, that figure rose to 27%.
To some extent, we are all creatures of comparison. We cannot help but view the decisions and happenings of our loved ones as a mirror back onto the decisions and happenings in our own lives. We wrestle with why we have not, or could not, or would not. Maybe we would. Maybe we had never thought about it, until we saw them go first.
The rising cost of maintaining a social life has turned friend groups into informal credit markets. We already live in an economy where everyone feels like they’re getting nickel-and-dimed by every company, product, and service they interact with. We do not expect to feel the same way about the people we love. But increasingly, we do.
Argentina vs. Spain. My Prediction, and What It Means for Your Money.
Full disclosure: my team was Colombia. We got knocked out, I ate my feelings in arepas, and now
I’m watching Argentina and Spain in the final like a man with no horse in the race.
Which is almost true. Almost.
I’m picking Argentina. And I’ll tell you why.
They’ve come back from 1-0 deficits twice already in this tournament, both times when the easier thing would have been to fold. That’s not luck. A team that keeps clawing back when it should be done has something that doesn’t show up in possession stats, and it tends to show up right when you need it most. Add Messi, who at this stage of his career still does things that make you put your coffee down and stare at the television, and Argentina becomes a very hard team to bet against today.
Spain plays differently. Tiki-taka, if you want the shorthand: short passes, patient possession, almost boring in stretches until you realize they’ve been moving the ball toward the same goal the entire time without anyone noticing. Their 2010 World Cup run produced six wins, five of them by a single goal, and the whole thing looked almost effortless in hindsight. It wasn’t. Three decades of youth academy discipline built that. Nobody built it at a cocktail reception.
So here’s what’s interesting. For investors, I’d take Spain’s style every single time: own broad, low-cost index funds, rebalance once a year, ignore the noise. Keep your costs down, keep moving forward. That approach wins over 30 years at a rate that should embarrass anyone who’s been stock-picking since 2020.
The physicians who blow up their portfolios do it Argentina-style. They hear about a real estate syndication from a colleague between rounds and decide their clinical pattern recognition transfers cleanly to the deal memo. Sometimes it works and they tell that story at every dinner party for the next decade. More often, they’re picking up extra locum shifts two years later to recover.
Argentina may win today because they have Messi. Your portfolio doesn’t.
Colombia would have played it better, obviously. But I called my shot.
Thanks for stopping by!
Jorge Sanchez, MD
Naples, Florida
