Personal Finance Resources
Blogs, etc.
Paul Merriman’s site has a ton of great information for investing in passive mutual funds and ETFs. His fine tuning tables allow you to see hsow various stock/bond allocations have performed each year since 1970.
Kenneth French’s site. French is a finance professor at Dartmouth College. He and Eugene F. Fama are well known for their research into the value effect and the three-factor model, including articles such as “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns” and “Common Risk Factors in the Returns on Stocks and Bonds.”
Standard & Poors produces the SPIVA reports that compare the performance of active management funds against their benchmarks each year. The latest data as of year-end 2017 shows that 84% of large cap funds underperformed the S&P 500 over the last five years.
Big Ern over at the Early Retirement Now site is one smart dude! He has a Ph.D. in economics and is well known in the FIRE community for his outstanding Safe Withdrawal Rates series (which is up to 28 posts!).
I love reading the wit and wisdom of Warren Buffet and there’s no better place to read it than in his annual letters to shareholders.
Michael Kitces is a financial planner and writes the blog Nerd’s Eye View. His research in financial planning topics is very analytical and he has written extensively about retirement planning, safe withdrawal rates, and sequence of return risks. Among many others, I’ve found the below article to be especially insightful: The Portfolio Size Effect And Using A Bond Tent To Navigate The Retirement Danger Zone
The Oblivious Investor site by CPA Mike Piper has great content on taxes, accounting, investing, and social security.
Hack Your Wealth – Andrew Chen has excellent articles with detailed and specific advice. He also has a podcast.
Robert Shiller’s online data: http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm
Index Fund Advisors – tons of great information on mutual funds and investing.
The Hierarchy of Financial Needs – Great visual aid showing the stages of financial needs.
Tools
FIRECalc is the best retirement calculator that I’ve found online and is the one that I use when planning my retirement. It takes a bit to understand how it works, but it’s flexible and powerful. You can choose which assumptions you want to use to make it accurate for your situation.
YNAB is my favorite budgeting software. I’ve been using it since 2014 and cannot recommend it highly enough. The software is fantastic and they also teach you their method for zero-based budgeting. You’ll find tons of FREE resources on their site to help you learn and be successful. If you want to get out of debt and stop living paycheck to paycheck, purchase YNAB (referral link)!
Personal Capital is an awesome free tool for tracking wealth. You can see all your accounts and assets in one place. In particular, I like how you can view your overall asset allocation across multiple investment accounts. They also have a helpful retirement planning tool.