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Jesse Cramer

I help busy professionals and retirees avoid costly mistakes and grow lasting wealth through retirement. I write a blog, produce a podcast, and create this free weekly newsletter to an audience of 25,000+ monthly members. Subscribe and learn!

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Featured Post

Should You Tax-Gain Harvest *Before* Social Security & RMDs ↪️

Happy December! We have holiday snowfall in Rochester. I hope all is well in your world. Thank you for reading The Best Interest And listening to my podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors From the blog... I’m pretty good with numbers, so you can please spell out (in some detail?) an example of how tax-gain harvesting works in practice? -MV Let’s do it. Let’s provide the nuts-and-bolts numbers behind tax-gain harvesting. Why Tax-Gain Harvest In the First Place? Tax-gain harvesting...

a blurry photo of a light in the dark

Hello! Jesse Cramer here. Thank you for reading The Best Interest And listening to my podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors From the blog... With all this ink being spilled over the 50-year mortgage proposal, we’re reaching an asymptote. Seriously. An asymptote is “a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it at any distance.” Technically speaking, the blue line below never touches the red one, but the gap between them gets infinitesimally small,...

a hand holding two black cards with the words buy and sell written on them

Hello! Jesse Cramer here. Thank you for reading The Best Interest And listening to my podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors From the blog... The topic du jour in finanical media seems to be the "AI bubble." Maybe they're onto something? I'm simply not sure. Some people are seeing cracks. Both Oracle and Meta have lost 20%+ of their value since Halloween. But... But for retirees, the critical question is, "Should you be doing anything about this?" Do you need to take action in some...

person slicing a meat on brown wooden board

Hello! Jesse Cramer here. Thank you for reading The Best Interest And listening to my podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors From the blog... When is a "free" steak actually frighteningly expensive? Reader “C” wrote in to share: The short version of the story is that I went to a lovely free dinner sponsored by a financial investment company who would like to take my traditional IRA and convert it to Roth via a Fixed Indexed Annuity. They would pay a 17% bonus for my ~$580k...

white and brown food on white ceramic plate

ubiquitousHello! Jesse Cramer here. Thank you for reading The Best Interest And listening to my podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors From the blog... Target. Starbucks. Chipotle. Some brands are ubiqitous in society. You see them every day. You love their products. You spend money there. So it must be a great stock, right? Wrong. These instincts fall under a few overlapping biases and fallacies: Familiarity bias. We prefer what we recognize. If you see Chipotle every day, you...

blue bubble

Hello! Jesse Cramer here. Thank you for reading The Best Interest And listening to my podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors From the blog... Today's articles are all about the AI bubble (?!) and what you should (or shouldn't) do about it. I want you to walk away from this first article with two wonderfully human - though perhaps contradictory - ideas. These two ideas shed essential light on how manias and bubbles work. When I first wrote this post, the concept of an "AI Bubble"...

assorted-color lear hanging decor

Hello! Jesse Cramer here. Thank you for reading The Best Interest And listening to my podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors From the blog... Reader Lisa wrote in this week, Jesse – my understanding is that both stock prices and stock valuations matter for long-term returns. So…with both pretty high like you mentioned last month, what are your returns expectations going forward? Is it something different than 10% per year? That’s what I’m using in my spreadsheet. Is there a...

man in blue crew neck shirt covering his face

Hello! Jesse Cramer here. Thank you for reading The Best Interest blog, And listening to my podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors. From the blog... Reader Brent wrote in last week: I probably need to read Bill Bengen’s book but I have a question about the 4% (or now 4.7%) Withdrawal Rule. Seems to be that a pretty conservative investment could get you a Return Rate of 4% (or even 4.7%) so is it correct in thinking that you are really only digging into the principal of your...

human hand

Hello! Jesse Cramer here. Thank you for reading The Best Interest blog, And listening to my podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors. New podcast cover art?! Your eyes don't deceive you. When you next see Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors in your favorite podcast player, you'll find the new cover art below. From the blog... Reader Liz writes in: Hi Jesse. We’re a 40-year old couple with two kids, earning about $200K a year, and saving what we can. We both have a parent who ran...

greyscale photo of men playing board game

Hello! Jesse Cramer here. Thank you for reading The Best Interest blog, And listening to my podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors. New podcast cover art?! Your eyes don't deceive you. When you next see Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors in your favorite podcast player, you'll find the new cover art below. From the blog... Last weekend, the fantastic Rob Berger shared one of my Social Security articles with his audience. I received some awesome questions from you guys and...