Back in 1996, my family and I were evicted from our home…in 1997, I made so little money that we qualified well below the U.S. poverty line. If you had told me back then that I’d be where I am today, I would have called you crazy. But by tapping into the world’s booming e-book […]

Many years ago, when I was writing the Love & Money column for The Wall Street Journal, I interviewed a longtime friend, Melissa, about paying people to do household chores. She told me she hires people for lawn maintenance or housecleaning because she’d calculated that she earns far more money on an hourly basis than […]

Tim Dwyer was born and raised on a farm just outside the town of Stratford in Ontario, Canada. In some ways, he had a typical agricultural upbringing, learning to milk cows and birth pigs. But he was also shaped by the outsized cultural resources in his local community. Though a small town with a modest […]

Talk about bad timing… You and I approach retirement, or are already in retirement, having suffered three major financial crises in the last two decades. Retirement wealth we should have had…poof. Frankly, it’s getting more than a bit annoying. You live your life frugally—or relatively so. You save for tomorrow so that you’re not a […]

Anyone in a highly pressured situation can crack and make bad decisions. In 2008, when the stock market crashed and the S&P 500 dropped some 37%, I had a friend at Morgan Stanley who sold all his stocks after almost all of them had hit new lows. “I’ll never invest in the stock market again,” […]

All Americans, including those who live overseas, are required to file U.S. taxes, reporting their worldwide income. This is because U.S. taxes are based on citizenship rather than on residence.  Filing U.S. taxes from abroad is more complicated than doing it back home, as it typically involves more forms to file, currencies to convert, and […]

Interesting story from my backlog of reading…  We all clearly realize at this point that the coronavirus has not been kind to stock markets around the world, the global economy, jobs, various industries…not to mention health. As part of this mayhem, a story on CNBC.com notes that the pandemic “could wipe out what’s become known […]

Time. These days, we all have a lot more of it than we are accustomed to. The issue is how to use it effectively.  One excellent way to take advantage of this abundant at-home time is to take a good look over your finances and see how you can improve them. That could mean building […]

Never let a good crisis go to waste. I’m sure you’ve heard something along those lines at some point. Writers and commentators routinely trot it out in moments such as the one we’re currently living through. Apparently, the original dates to a 1976 headline atop a story in the journal Medical Economics:“Don’t Waste a Crisis—Your Patient’s […]

How many photos are sitting on your computer right now?  Hundreds? Thousands, even? If you’re like most people, you take photos on every vacation…at family events…whenever something beautiful happens…and maybe at every meal. Some of those photos could potentially be making you a nice side-income in online stock agencies. Have you ever heard of iStock?  […]

“This book has been in the making since the mid-1970s, when I was a 10-year-old traveling through Germany with my mom.” That’s the first sentence of my new e-book I just published this past week on Amazon’s Kindle service. It’s called Replay: Your Second Chance to Invest in the American Dream. I spent a couple of […]

On a sleepy tropical island paradise in the Andaman Sea of southern Thailand, I’m sitting on the open-sided verandah of my little wooden house. Cool breezes fan the sunny, sultry air as I listen to waves lapping the shore at high tide.  I’m lucky to have a passive income that allows me to travel when […]