About
Why Financial Interstate exists
This is a publication about the money decisions real life actually throws at you — and the ones I wish someone had walked me through earlier.
Most of us are handed money decisions with no map. We pick up scraps — a tip from a coworker, a half-remembered rule, a confident voice online — and hope it adds up. Then a real choice arrives: 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.
Financial Interstate is my attempt to do the opposite. I take a question I'm genuinely working through, lay out the tradeoff honestly, and show the point where the answer changes depending on the situation. It's the what I wish people were taught earlier version of money — the version I want my own kids to understand before the world teaches them the expensive way.
It blends personal and business finance on purpose, because life does too. The same person deciding which dividend ETF fits their goals might also be deciding how to pay themselves from a small business. Keeping those in separate universes never made sense to me.
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.
Follow along
If that approach resonates, the newsletter is where the work happens. Subscribe free.
Subscriptions are handled by Beehiiv at newsletter.financialinterstate.com.