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The Sunday Best is a collection of articles I’ve curated from the furthest reaches of the internet for your reading pleasure.
Every week, I scan hundreds of headlines, read dozens of posts, and bring you the best of the best to save you time and mental energy.
Financial Independence (FI) is a primary focus, but it’s an awfully broad topic. I tend to approach FI and early retirement from a fatFIRE perspective and through the lens of a physician, so expect to see those biases in the selected articles.
Related topics that have become recurrent themes include early retirement, selective frugality, tax issues, travel, physician issues, and of course, investing.
For more great articles, take a peek at The Sunday Best Archives. Now let’s get to the best… The Sunday Best!
The Sunday Best
The couple behind Another Loonie visits Eat Sleep Breathe FI to talk about their spending budget. I’ve heard Vancouver can be crazy expensive. So, How Much Does it Cost to Live the FIRE Life Near Vancouver?
They’re under 40, worth a few million dollars, pay no tax, and still get a refund. A peek at taxes for the fatFIRE crowd from FI Heroes. Yes, they “pay” Negative Taxes.
Dr. David Graham, the FI Physician, plans to join the FIREd as he plans his exit strategy as an infectious disease doctor for what will hopefully be a post-COVID time. How I Picked My Retirement Date.
This 30-something former CEO who finds himself Accidentally Retired shares how he managed to have a life while leading a successful startup. How to Build a $15M Company Working 40 Hours or Less as a CEO.
Some days I feel like a fraud. Yes, I retired from medicine, but consisently publishing 4 to 5 blog posts a week takes work! Hence, the “from medicine.” His and Her Money Guide addresses a fair question. Is the FIRE Movement Disingenuous?
Like we did, the FI Heroes also had a worldwide “victory tour” planned to kick off their retirement, but the world had other plans. What 2020 Taught Me About the FIRE Movement and Myself.
As someone who’s been on the sidelines for cryptocurrency’s rise, has never traded options or bought a meme stock, I take solace in the fact that There Are No Called Strikes in This Business. That Warren Buffett is one sharp guy!
John Bogle was another intelligent investor. He was known to discuss the Cost Matters Hypothesis. Impersonal Finance learned this lesson the hard way.
- You’re Probably Getting Screwed By Edward Jones Fees
- A Closer Look At Those Rip-Off American Funds Load Fees
He learned from that mistake, and so did I. The IRA I started as a young man was with the E.D. Jones guy a few doors down from my Dad’s dental office. Yes, doctors do dumb things with money, as discussed on the Money Meets Medicine podcast. MMM 58: Stupid Mistakes Doctors Make.
What’s the opposite of owning bonds? Owning stocks? Nope, says The White Coat Investor. It’s having debt. It’s important to understand that Debt is a Negative Bond.
Boise is #3. Phoenix comes in at #10. Indianapolis takes 17th place. Did your nearest metro area make the list? From Crowdstreet, The Best Places for Real Estate Investing in 2021. See all 20 with a free account.
You can invest in real estate in an IRA or 401(k), but should you? From Jonathan at Parent Portfolio, How to Invest in Real Estate With a Self-Directed IRA: Is It The Best Option?
Commercial Real Estate Investing with Crowdstreet
After months of learning and lurking on their informative website, I made my first commercial real estate investment with Crowdstreet in late 2019. I have followed that up with a second investment in a new project in 2021.
When I used to hear commercial real estate (CRE), I envisioned retail and office space, but those are just two subsets of the space, and they’re not the areas that I’ve invested in.
Commercial real estate also includes residential properties with more than four units and mixed-use buildings with a mix of apartments and office, retail, or restaurant space. CRE can also be self-storage complexes, hotels, or medical buildings.
CrowdStreet’s 2021 Investment Thesis breaks down what kinds of opportunities their Investment team sees for each property type. For instance, rents fell as much as 20% in downtown San Francisco while they grew over 4% in Phoenix in 2020 as people moved. Their team explains how population growth rate can impact rents and be used to evaluate how successful a project might be.
I’ve chosen to make my investments in residential projects in Texas (no state income tax!), chosen from among many opportunities in a variety of projects that have been offered to those registered on the Crowdstreet platform. Several cities in Texas made CrowdStreet’s top 20 list of the aforementioned best places to invest in 2021. If you create an account, you can get a copy of their full report and see their favorite cities nationwide as well as by property type.
To learn more about how Crowdstreet works and what current investment offerings are available for accredited investors, click here to get started with a free account.
The State of Curation
I started curating interesting and insightful articles on personal finance, investing, and FIRE topics nearly five years ago, and I’ve published a Sunday Best every weekend since then. I got the idea from two other bloggers who featured me in their roundup posts (those series no longer exist), and I realized that curation was a great way to educate my readers while paying it forward with other bloggers by sharing my audience with them.
Mine wasn’t the first personal finance site to do curation, and it’s clearly not the last. With the return of J. Money, formerly of the now-defunct Rockstar Finance curation site, now with Motley Fool’s All Star Money, now is a great time to take a look at the state of curation in this space.
Personal Finance Blogs
Personal Finance Blogs (PFB) features 3 blog posts per day Monday through Friday. The site is a collaboration between Kevin Ha of Financial Panther and Erik from Mastermind Within.
PFB also manages a blog directory with over 800 blogs listed and a Feeds page showing the latest from hundreds of bloggers.
Apex Money
Run by blogging veterans J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly and Jim Wang of Wallet Hacks, Apex Money showcases personal content from a wide variety of sources, including blogs, newspapers, magazines, and Youtube. Like PFB, they share content Monday through Friday.
All Star Money
A new entry this week is All Star Money, a Motley Fool site, led by J. Money and his long-time collaborator Nate St. Pierre. My “No Called Strikes” post made the cut the first week the site officially went live, which was exciting to see!
It appears that they’ll be regularly featuring three articles Monday through Friday. As more posts are featured, they will be organized by topic.
Camp FIRE Finance
Started by Ty Roberts but later acquired, I no longer know who runs Camp FIRE FInance, and it’s not clear how often posts are featured. I can tell you that as I write this Saturday evening, there are two posts listed as “Today’s Featured Posts.”
Camp FIRE has a blog directory featuring over 900 sites. They also have a feed page with hundreds of recently published articles.
Sovereign Quest
Sovereign Quest is a site featuring personal finance stories from around the world with a focus on finance sites outside of North America. They’ve also got a creator directory. Americans and Canadians need not apply.
Curation Series
While not dedicated curation sites, these are recurring series published by personal finance bloggers.
- Passive Income MD’s Journal Club
- Tread Lightly Retire Early’s Women’s Personal Finance Wednesdays
- Your Money Geek’s Your Money Geekly Update
- The Big Picture’s sporadic 10 Reads
- Monevator’s Weekend Reading
- Banker on FIRE’s Greatest Hits
- XRAYVSN’s Grand Rounds
- Financial Success MD’s Fawcett’s Favorites
- Physician on FIRE’s The Sunday Best
Former curators that have shifted away from regular curation include Women Who Money and Collecting Wisdom. If you know of other sites doing curation, please let me know in the comments section below.
PoF Returns to SLC
March 4th marks the 4th anniversary of the formation of the WCI Network, a partnership that was forged in my first trip to Salt Lake City earlier that winter.
March 4th, 2021 happens to be the first day of this year’s virtual Physician Wellness & Financial Literacy Conference put on by the White Coat Investor team. I’ll be among a handful of presenters present in-person for the 3-day CME event.
With the conference being online, it’s not too late to register. In fact, since all live and recorded talks are available during and after the conference, you can register right up until next Saturday, March 6th. Registrants will have the opportunity to earn up to 17 Category 1 CME credits or Dental CE credits.
Have an outstanding week!
-Physician on FIRE
25 thoughts on “The Sunday Best (2/28/2021)”
hi from Vik
Thanks for including Camp FIRE Finance! I acquired it in the fall of 2019 because I didn’t want to see it shut down 🙂
I feature two posts every Monday, Wednesday, & Friday, both on the home page and via the email list. As you mentioned, folks can have a directory listing as well. If someone has a directory listing and they were featured, they’ll get a permalink to that post on the listing. (I’m in the process of adding those.)
I enjoy your Sunday Best posts too! It’s always interesting to see what all the different curations sites choose to feature 🙂
Oh, that’s you!
Thanks for sharing, Jackie. I’ll update the post above.
Cheers!
-PoF
Thanks!
Thanks for the shout, dude!
Lots of great curators in the mix these days – SO GOOD for the community!
I read Is the FIRE Movement Disingenuous? with keen interest. FIRE isn’t easy and takes work. I give kudos to you and the rest of the WCI types who’ve found FI/RE. However, math is math. If you’re a general pediatrician making 130k in NYC it’s infinitesimally more difficult to FIRE than a highly paid specialist living in middle America. What’s funny to me is the disparity between the online world of MD personal finance and the real world around me. Seeing the posts and hearing the stories on the blogs are people making serious bank on path to FI/RE by their early 40s-50s. However, among my friends and colleagues (even the highly paid ones) I know of only a handful who are either downshifting or retiring early.
Thanks a lot for sharing my interview! Chrissy over at EatSleepBreatheFI did such a great job with the format and came up with some excellent questions. Glad you enjoyed it and hope your readers get something positive from it as well!
Agreed—thank you for sharing Another Loonie’s interview on my blog, POF. It’s an honour to be featured. 🙏
I LOVE that J. Money is back! He’s done so much for the personal finance blogging space and even much more for his readers.
I liked Accidentally Retired’s post. It was interesting, great to have him featured.
Thanks David!!
Going to make sure right now that we’re tracking your blog for future curation 😉
You might want to reconsider touting CrowdStreet or doing business with them. On your recommendation and others, in July of 2019, I signed up with CrowdStreet and put in a modest sum to their Blended Portfolio. Three problems: (1) CS advertised that the tax reporting would be consolidated to eliminate the need to file in every state the portfolio had a position, which, after the investment was closed, they recanted. Worst case, this means filing a state tax return in every state in which the portfolio has a position. (2) No income distributions for 18 months. Dead money. Effectively a negative return when considering the opportunity cost compared to having my money virtually anywhere else. (3) They were investigated by the SEC and required to alter the structure and operation of their portfolio investments. This has resulted in an accelerated and premature shutdown of the funds. This is actually ‘good’ in the sense that we who were foolish to put our trust in CrowdStreet might be able to exit sooner than later.
From my experience and those that also invested in the CS blended portfolios, they are a bust.
Thank you for the feedback, Steven. I’m bummed you had a bad experience with their Blended Portfolio — I’m not familiar with those, but maybe someone from their team can weigh in. Did you end up with a 0% return in total (with full return of capital)?
Any investment that requires me to be an accredited investor is an investment that I assume can drop to zero. There’s a reason you need to have a good income or high net worth to make these investments. The idea is that you’ll be rewarded, on average, for taking on excess risk by getting excess returns overall. Any individual investment can turn out to be subpar or worse.
I think you were smart to go with a product that was supposed to give you some diversification. You can also diversify by investing in different types of deals (core, core-plus, value-add, ground-up, debt, etc…) and by investing on different platforms. I’ve done both.
I’ve made about a dozen different investments in crowdfunded RE and RE funds, and 3 have gone full-circle (soon to be 4). My returns (as measured by IRR) have been 6.98%, 8.54%, and 50.45%. I’ll be publishing a post on my experiences sometime in April after this fourth deal is done and quarterly payments have been made.
Cheers!
-PoF
The fund is still active. Motivated by the SEC action, CS returned uninvested capital. Invested capital has yet to post any income, though “real soon now” has been the story for a while. I too have done other investments with other crowdsourced real estate platforms (RealtyMogul, Fundrise, Alpha Investing) and those have turned out fine. My point is that CrowdStreet’s Blended Portfolio has been a disappointment and since this blog speaks glowingly of CrowdStreet, you and your readers should be aware that they are not without their stinkers.
Excellent points, and thank you for the clarification. Any platform that does more than a few deals can be expected to have some deals that return nothing or produce a negative return, and there is the occasional total loss. It hasn’t happened to me, but 1 of the 44 fully realized deals on Crowdstreet has been a total loss — that’s not unique to them, but a real risk when leverage is used to potentially boost returns.
I’ll be publishing a post next month detailing all of the RE investments I’ve made on various platforms.
Cheers!
-PoF
Fawcett’s Favorites? https://financialsuccessmd.com/category/blog/
Wow, thanks for inclusion here, PoF! I love the Sunday Best and am incredibly honored and appreciative! Keep up the awesome content!
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SovereignQuest dot com is a relatively new curation site for UK-based personal finance content and creators, from the author of an engrossing site called indeedably dot com. I highly recommend both sites.
Thank you — I’ve added Sovereign Quest to the list.
Cheers!
-PoF
I have a “Grand Rounds” series on my blog that highlights 5 posts on a particular topic from various content creators I follow (a few of your posts have been featured too).
Of course you do. I knew that.
Added to the list above.
Cheers!
-PoF
Thank you very much for the shoutout Leif!
You’re welcome. Thank you for all the times you guys have featured my work!
Best,
-PoF
Thanks for the feature Leif!
Digging The Sunday Best. It’s a great way to discover new content and share the love.
After following a handful of FI sites over the years he’s nice to expand and digest more varied points of view!
Great set of links as always Leif. And yes, very much enjoying J Money’s return to the personal finance game.
Two more curation links for you from across the pond:
Monevator runs an ever-excellent “Weekend Reading” thread. Here’s the latest from yesterday:
https://monevator.com/weekend-reading-a-rocky-week-monevator-email-is-changing-and-were-up-for-an-award/
And yours truly has a bi-weekly curation post called “Greatest Hits”. You’ll be pleased to know that PoF makes an honourable appearance ever so often 🙂
https://bankeronfire.com/greatest-hits-volume-5-jumbo-edition
Cheers,
Damian
I’ve added both, Damian. Thank you for reminding me!
Cheers!
-PoF