About
The money talk I wish someone had given me
I started writing this down for my kids, the financial things I had to learn the slow, expensive way and didn't want them to. It grew into this. If it reads like a parent explaining money at the kitchen table, that's exactly the idea.
Most of us get handed money decisions with no map. You pick up scraps along the way: a tip from a coworker, a half-remembered rule, some confident voice online, and you hope it all adds up. Then a real choice lands: how to invest, which card to carry, whether to elect S-Corp status, what a deduction is actually worth, how to keep business and personal money from blurring together. The stakes are real, and the guidance is thin. I learned most of it the hard way, a few costly mistakes at a time.
So I started writing it down the way I'd explain it to my own son and daughter. Pull up a question I'm genuinely working through. Lay out the tradeoff honestly. Point to the spot where the answer changes depending on your situation. No hype, no jargon to sound smart, no pretending it's simpler than it is. Just the version of money I wish someone had walked me through before the world taught me the expensive way.
It blends personal and business finance on purpose, because real life does too. The same person deciding which fund fits their goals is often also deciding how to pay themselves from a small business. Keeping those in separate universes never made sense to me, and it won't make sense to you either, once the money starts coming from more than one place.
Who's writing this
I'm Nate Corrieri. I caught the investing bug early, picking stocks at 16, and never really shook it. I studied real estate, finance, and insurance, and sold real estate to get through college. My junior and senior years, I was one of a handful of students chosen to help run the Husky Fund, St. Cloud State University's student-managed investment fund, picking stocks in the basic materials sector.
From there I worked in finance and appraisal review before striking out on my own in 2008. Since then I've built and sold companies in online marketing while investing heavily in both the stock market and the private sector. Plenty of what I know, I learned the hard way, by doing it wrong the first time. This site is where I try to pass along the right way, minus the tuition I paid to learn it.
One honest thing up front: I'm not a licensed financial advisor, and there's no syllabus here. I write things up as they come to me, in plain English, so you can make sharper calls with your money than I did with mine.
Editorial philosophy
- Practical over theoretical
- If it doesn't help with a real decision, it doesn't make the cut.
- Case studies over generic explainers
- Start from an actual question and follow it all the way through.
- Tradeoffs over one-size-fits-all
- Most honest answers are "it depends", so I show what it depends on.
- Plain English over jargon
- If a term needs decoding, I decode it instead of hiding behind it.
- Education, not advice
- I'm thinking out loud, not telling you what to do with your money.
To be clear about what this isn't: it's not stock picking, not get-rich-quick, and not personalized advice. Personal portfolio notes are examples, not recommendations. For anything specific to your situation, talk to a qualified professional.
Where to start
Not sure where to dive in? A few good entry points:
- Personal finance basics: saving, debt, credit, and investing, in the order they actually matter.
- Business finance: entity choices, paying yourself, and the tax calls that change once you work for yourself.
- The calculators: free, browser-based tools for the math behind these decisions.
Follow along
If that approach resonates, the newsletter is where the work happens. Subscribe free.