Late Bloomer Wealth

Financial Education/Literacy

2023 Financial Retirement Year Review! A GREAT YEAR!

Before you scroll down to my tables that reflect 2023 portfolio return as a whole, needless to say, 2023 turned out to be an outstanding stock and bond year! Everything went up! But the year started slow for three quarters and finished in the 4th quarter with nine straight weeks of gains for all five …

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Steve’s LAUSD’s 457(b) “Modest Proposal” Update!

  My Latest Good News on My “Modest Proposal.” By Steve Schullo Member-at-Large, LAUSD Retirement Investment Advisory Committee (RIAC) If you read my previous post just published the other day, you read my thinking, analyses, and my purpose for undertaking a major revamping. Let me be clear, the current plan is a great plan. While …

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Please Comment on the Introduction of New Book

Revising and Updating my 2013 Late Bloomer Millionaires book.  Hi Readers, I will be publishing Introduction to the 2nd Edison of my first book, Late Bloomer Millionaires, published nine years ago. I am requesting you to read this short introduction and provide some feedback. I am doing this because the Introduction to any book is …

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Underachiever’s Successful Wealth Building

I am a proud underachiever and late bloomer. However, it was not like that in my youth and young adulthood. It took years of painful growth, earning three college degrees after age 30, learning from financial mistakes, and my Buddhist spiritual practice to get to this positive status. Here is my academic underachiever list: missed …

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Financial Shark Series: 67 Repellents to Protect Yourself

The next 67 posts are human shark attacks euphemistically called sales pitches.
This series on how to recognize the difference between conflict-loaded financial advice (aka sales pitches) versus conflict-free objective advice (from a genuine fee-only fiduciary financial adviser). While this series focuses on K12 teachers where most shark attacks occur, everybody will discover how to protect yourself from conflicted advice.
You will not only recognize the difference between a nonfiduciary financial professional and a fiduciary, this series of 67 posts (one tip per day for the next two months), will clear up the distractions of the financial language needed to monitor your current financial adviser, find a new one, or just take matters into your hands and evolve into a DIYer (do-it-yourself). Once you are exposed to the basics spelled out in this series, you will discover that the financial world is not complicated or intimidating.
One Important Exception: Fee-only financial advisors who charge an out-of-pocket hourly fee and sign a fiduciary oath are NOT sharks.

Book Review: “A Simple Path to Wealth” by JL Collins

3.5 years ago, I wrote and posted a review of this excellent book. This review is worth a repeat here.

This post is a repeat of my 5-star previous review that I published on Amazon in 2016. At the time, I did not know the author, but when any book has Mr. Money Mustache in the forward, that’s a must-read book.
Some of you might wonder why I would review and recommend another book when I wrote two books myself. Instead, wouldn’t I encourage people to read my books? Of course! But my only purpose for writing this blog and my two books is for readers to educate themselves on personal finance.

I pick out the most objective and unbiased personal financial books that reflect my values and thinking for my teacher colleagues, and others to know. When I read a great book that has the same philosophy of investing as I do, heck yes, I recommend that you buy and thoroughly read somebody else’s book and download my two books for FREE.

Since then 568 people liked my review. For Amazon, that’s many “likes” and I am enormously proud. It is one of my best reviews primarily because “The Simple Path to Wealth” is “simply” a great book, while the author’s philosophy, values and knowledge are similar to mine.

Ok folks are you ready to walk “The Simple Path?”

Rare 403(b) and 457(b) Issues and Education Meeting in Los Angeles!

Los Angeles Teachers and all of southern California educators, MARK YOUR CALENDARS! The U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission California office officials read the 5-series New York Times articles three years ago. As a result of reading just how pathetic and expensive the 403(b) was with public K12 school districts, they reached out to us …

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Book Review: “TEACH and Retire RICH”

Teachers. Are you wary of the bureaucratic and top-down interference with no end in sight? If you are like me, I did a good job for my students for 24 years, but I was FINISHED at 61 years old. I wanted to get out of Los Angeles, live in a retirement community and do the usual and unusual activities that most retirees do: travel, volunteer, donate to worthy causes and write financial books and this review. It’s not that I retired from life and work, it’s that at 61 I was financially independent with only 49% of my salary covered by my teachers’ pension. I opted to do something else. That’s what Daniel Otter’s wonderful book is all about with his title TEACH and Retire RICH.
The word RETIREMENT is beginning to get phased out of the English language. I have not taught for ten years but I am super busy doing what I want to do right here with my blog, writing informational posts on three investment forums, my two books, all to help you become financially independent too. That’s the new buzzword, FI means financial independence.
Daniel Otter is a good friend and my review of his book is bias, but the financial information he provides in his book TEACH and Retire RICH is not. The objective information he provides rarely makes it to our colleagues, the hard-working teachers in the classrooms across America. Why? The volunteer retirement world (403(b) and 457(b)) with public K-12 school districts is mysteriously secretive and very strange world. It is a long and sometimes sad story of why the potentially powerful benefit plan is hardly ever discussed publicly within the education profession. Dan’s book is full of objective information that begins to make this secretive world transparent and will work for you as it worked for me.

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