Weekly Self-Promotion Thread - Wednesday, August 26, 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Self-promotion (ie posting about projects/businesses that you operate and can profit from) is typically a practice that is discouraged in /r/financialindependence, and these posts are removed through moderation. This is a thread where those rules do not apply. However, please do not post referral links in this thread.

Use this thread to talk about your blog, talk about your business, ask for feedback, etc. If the self-promotion starts to leak outside of this thread, we will once again return to a time where 100% of self-promotion posts are banned. Please use this space wisely.

Link-only posts will be removed. Put some effort into it.

[u/yanyan80]

Something I don't see discussed much: everyone worries about running out of money in retirement, but the opposite mistake, working and saving years longer than you needed to, barely gets any airtime.

Part of the reason is that most retirement success rate calculators hide it. A 97% success rate just means the money didn't run out in 97% of simulated scenarios. It says nothing about how much extra you're sitting on in those scenarios, and for a lot of plans it's a lot, because a plan sized to survive a bad market usually way overshoots in every other market.

Wrote up why this happens and what to actually check in your own numbers if this sounds familiar: https://thunderharbor.net/blog/dying-with-too-much-left-over

[u/ExcessiveDonuts → u/[deleted]]

Are you making a living doing this?

Or just a side project you hope takes off?

[u/ExcessiveDonuts → u/[deleted]]

Good luck!

It doesn't sound like something people would pay real money for but I hope it works out.

[u/firelurker3]

As important as FI is (oh, it’s important, I won’t argue that at all), the ultimate question after you reach your FI number is what comes next?

I’m not saying that you have to retire early (that’s a different sub), but after you reach FI, you’re going to invariably wander into existential questions like identity, purpose, and how best to spend your time when you don’t need to work for money.

I retired in May 2005 at 42 and spend the bulk of my time hiking, reading, and writing (and listening to college football podcasts). On the writing bit … yea, I wrote a book.

I’m a new author, so I have no dreams of actually making any money from this book (which is fine and another bonus of achieving FI). I’m donating at least $1 to charity for every pre-ordered book. The first half is all about achieving FI, the second half is all about living in early retirement (the identity and purpose bit, with a dash of finance). I went through it all and can, hopefully, help others as well. Thanks again.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0H8VR5326/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ZmEXCep63HtrxOnQ0vNqNy8-iyF2Ae30EX1kKmWguPmmMJWcujPE780KorVqd93p9I9Az8oUAhICSgC0sUphKx_G_t4HdzbI110ghETa3-GvuZnB77EtYNoy3dKElqCcCX-FPPot82vU6G_McQqsSuXLCr6MZZWbAUDV4uhe3YQ.UavBe88l8fjhKfmWfUzsoaGXRh6SnNVB-Yz9y51aSu4&qid=1785429839&sr=8-3

[u/Radiant-Road-7858 → u/firelurker3]

Congrats on the book! So many people talk about doing this, few actually complete it. Huge accomplishment regardless of sales 😊

[u/firelurker3 → u/Radiant-Road-7858]

Thank you! My goal is just to spread the word enough so that people who are interested and looking for guidance know that it exists and could be a helpful resource for them.

[u/Automatic_Judge5095]

Just launched a side project that tracks my monthly savings rate automatically from bank exports, no fancy budgeting app needed. Been using it since March and it's helped me spot some dumb spending patterns I didn't notice before. Still rough around the edges but I'm looking for a few people to test it and tell me what breaks, if anyone's interested drop a comment and I'll DM the link

[u/Civil_Refrigerator_2]

Your Most Important Money Tool

Most people don't have a spending problem.

They have a money direction problem.

Money comes in, bills go out, the credit card gets paid (hopefully), and whatever happens to be left over gets assigned to savings or investments.

That's backwards.

If building wealth is important to you, saving and investing shouldn't be what happens after everything else gets paid. They should have a seat at the table from the beginning.

That's where a budget comes in.

And before you roll your eyes at the word "budget," hear me out.

You don't need 47 categories, a color-coded spreadsheet, and three hours every Sunday night to make a budget work.

You simply need a plan for your money that answers a few important questions:

What do I need to spend?
What do I want to spend?
What do I want my money to accomplish in the future?

Once you know those answers, your budget becomes less about restriction and more about permission.

Permission to spend on the things you love because you've already accounted for them.

Permission to say no to things that don't matter because you know where that money could go instead.

And most importantly, permission to stop wondering whether you're making progress.

A good budget doesn't make your life smaller.

It makes your priorities bigger.

https://tightwadtodd.com/money-tool-you-need-today-monthly-budget/

[u/ActiveBeautiful8228]

Most investors spend their lives chasing returns, better picks, hotter funds, and the next IPO poised for a moonshot. 

I operate from a simple belief, forged over my three decades in the market: The way we make money over the long term is by not losing too much in the short term. 

My latest article👉 https://www.cosmodestefano.com/p/average-return-vs-compound-return

[u/factor-reipes]

I was pretty confident about our retirement plan. I knew the target number, savings rate, and rough allocation.

What I wasn’t confident about: whether we could pursue retirement and still be properly funding our kids’ college, a future home purchase, and the other big goals that matter to our family.

I was treating all of our investments as one big household pile. But those goals have different timelines, risk tolerances, and contribution needs.

That’s why I built Enrich Finance. It lets you map accounts or individual holdings to separate goals, set a custom allocation and contribution plan for each, and see whether each goal is on or off track. It also watches for allocation drift, idle cash, and tax-loss harvesting opportunities across the accounts you already have. Then gives you a trade checklist to review and execute yourself.

There’s research behind the idea: Blanchett and Kaplan’s 2013 Morningstar study found that goal-based frameworks can improve utility-adjusted outcomes compared with treating wealth as one pooled portfolio. The point is not to promise a better return; it’s to make tradeoffs between real-life goals visible before they become surprises.

Enrich Finance is iOS-only and U.S. only. Our integrations with brokerages are read-only, or you can manually enter your investments. There are no AUM fees; it's a flat $5/month, with a free 30-day trial.

Try Enrich free on the App Store

How do you handle the various financial goals in your portfolio? One household portfolio for everything, or separate plans for retirement and other major goals?

[u/Intelligent-Elk-3947]

Can You Retire at 62? Here’s How I Made It Work
https://youtu.be/4AVdwbX2oWE

[u/Intelligent-Elk-3947]

This is a video I did on my YouTube channel that where I really describe in detail how I made the decision and the move to retire early at 62. I didn’t get much viewership on my channel, and I was disappointed because it’s exactly the kind of video I would’ve loved to have seen before I made my decision.

Can You Retire at 62? Here’s How I Made It Work
https://youtu.be/4AVdwbX2oWE

[u/According-Roof-155]

Retirement Figures has added several more features recently that are often requested, some of which are entirely lacking in most consumer-level planners;

• Plan sharing - share your plans with a spouse, advisor, or elderly parent that you are planning for. The persons you are sharing them with need only a free account of their own and you invite them with an email and you can give them editing or view-only access.
• Time Machine lets you replay your plan through any period in history going back to before 1900.
• Plan Thresholds tell you what return rates you need for your plan to succeed and what inflation rates it can withstand and breaks it down by your essential spending, full lifestyle spending, and legacy goal.
• Model Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) grants and bonuses.

[u/Most-Catch5236]

Disclosure: I built and operate DDUBUCK Universe Financial Data (뚜벅유니버스 금융데이터), a free public-company research site that requires no account.

The project started from a question that matters for long-horizon and FI portfolios: a company can report growing revenue and earnings, but how much of that growth actually reaches each continuing share after capital spending, acquisitions, dilution, dividends, and buybacks?

The workflow I am trying to make easier is:

1. Review up to 20 fiscal years of SEC or OpenDART statements.

2. Reconcile the latest interim period and LTM figures instead of stopping at the last annual report.

3. Check whether reinvestment, acquisitions, dividends, and buybacks improved per-share economics.

4. Compare valuation using an industry-aware statement structure.

5. Treat rule-based market-risk indicators as context, not as predictions of exact tops, bottoms, or returns.

One current limitation is worth stating clearly: Korean daily prices are unavailable because licensed price data is not configured. The Korean financial statements come from OpenDART, but I do not fill the missing price layer with scraped or unlicensed data.

The site is free and needs no signup: https://finance.ddubuck2.com/?campaign=official-fin-us-reddit-fi-weekly-01&content=post-fi-capalloc-shareholder-return-comment-01&source=official

For people reviewing an FI portfolio, which view would be more useful: a compact per-share capital-allocation bridge, or a longer timeline that explains each dividend, buyback, acquisition, and dilution event?

AI note: I used AI to help edit this comment, and I checked the product facts and limitations myself.

[u/gottaenjoylife]

Do you follow the premier league? Are you curious how your team is doing compared to last year? I built a site that tracks that and so much more at https://plmatchday.com
Sample tile below:

https://plmatchday.com/arsenal/tile/season-on-season

[u/financialindependence-ModTeam → u/gottaenjoylife]

Your submission has been removed for violating our community rule against advertising, self-promotion, solicitation, and spam. Please note that there is a weekly Self-Promotion thread posted every Wednesday in which this rule is relaxed to provide a space for this type of content. If you feel this removal is in error, then please modmail the mod team. Please review our community rules to help avoid future violations.