Knowledge.
Power.
Progress.
The future of personal finance is bright.
Our vision of tomorrow requires empowering people with better tools and information.
DIY Investing Basics
First, take the fundamentals to heart.
Be mindful of fees
Your advisor deserves to be paid.
You deserve to know what you’re paying for.
Mortgage Math
A Subject on Which Everyone Is Confidently Incorrect
Comparing the cost of your mortgage and the return on your investment portfolio is rather complicated.
Bond Math
Be cool.
Dividend Math
Relax. They’re not magical.
Investing Math
How to Lose $1 Million
Life Insurance Math
Hyper-Leveraged Insurance Retirement Plans?
Just Say No.
Curtis Ray, the founder of SunCor Financial, LLC (MPI Unlimited) challenged us to test the math behind his viral life insurance product.
Oops.
Withdrawal Rate Analysis
Simulating portfolio drawdowns with interest rates near all-time lows.
Stop assuming historical returns
“Arbitrarily basing Monte Carlo simulations on historical averages, as many retirement planning calculators do, may lead to overly optimistic results. Unfortunately, this is a detail that is not widely understood to this day.”
Insights & Commentary
Retirement “Probabilities” Are Nonsense
Calculating portfolio success “probabilities” is impossible.
Stochastic Modeling in Academia
A brief history of observations, controversies, and unknowns.
Favorite Books
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
John C. Bogle
The best book we know for demystifying personal investing and pulling back the curtain on industry nonsense. Bogle is the founder of Vanguard and the creator of the first index mutual fund.
Retirement Planning Guidebook
Wade D. Pfau
A comprehensive, self-contained, and easy-to-read reference on retirement planning. Pfau is Professor of Retirement Income in the PhD program at The American College of Financial Services.
Fooled by Randomness
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A masterpiece on the underappreciated role that randomness plays in life and investing. Taleb—a former options trader, statistician, and risk analyst—delivers a necessary education, albeit in a prickly manner.
No Affiliations or Conflicts of Interest
Book recommendations are made in good faith. Honest Math has no affiliation with the authors or publishers of books listed herein, and we receive no form of compensation for referrals.
Favorite Blogs
Kevin Bracker, PhD, CFA
A retired finance professor writing on investing, personal finance, and decision-making, among other topics. Dr. Bracker taught finance to our founder in college.
Resources
The following resources are published by the CFA Institute, a global not-for-profit organization that educates investment professionals and promotes the highest standards for ethical, educational and professional excellence in the investment industry. The CFA Institute administers the Chartered Financial Analyst® Program and awards to qualified finance professionals the CFA charterholder designation—the highest level of legal and regulatory recognition of finance-related qualifications in the world.
Alpha?
Active portfolio managers have a terrible track record.
Actively managed mutual funds and ETFs consistently underperform their respective benchmarks.
Nerds
White Papers
Take a deeper dive into some of the academic research that has inspired our approach to modeling asset returns.