tl;dr

• This site is meant to contain niche advice for people earning six figure incomes with their finances fully in hand.
• The content covers creating the optimal financial setup, saving money on the things you already do, and creative ways to earn some extra money.
• All content is intended make or save you a minimum of $200 / hour of effort.
• I’ll never pitch something I don’t believe is the best option for at least many readers, and I’ll never share a referral link unless it’s the best possible deal.

Who I Am, Who You Are

I’m a childless late-twenties Canadian living in New York City, earning a mid six-figure total compensation working as an Engineer for a tech company. I love optimizing my finances. I try to minimize taxes, save on large purchases, optimize my investments, and find creative ways to earn extra money.

I want this site to be widely useful and will do my best to keep it as generally applicable as possible, but, I’ll be writing what I know. The more similar you are to me, the more posts you’ll probably get value out of. At the very least, I’ll be writing with the general assumptions that my readers are:

• Earning >$150k
• Responsible with their finances, implying you:
  • can handle large amounts of credit
  • are diligent with paying debts
  • spend within your means
• Free of credit card or other short term debt

Content to Expect

I plan to cover pretty much everything money related (subject to the rules below), but here are the big buckets to expect:

• Optimal Financial Accounts and Actions
  • I’ll be covering the accounts that I think every (or many) readers should have, and the actions they should be taking. This will range from taking advantage of tax advantaged accounts (e.g. FSA, HSA, 401k), to utilizing obscure tax rules (e.g. “backdoor Roth IRA”, “mega backdoor Roth 401k”), to where you should keep your cash.
• Saving Money
  • Every time you spend money, you have an opportunity to save money. I’ll be covering my personal experiences finding ways to save hundreds, thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars on the transactions I’ve made in my life (e.g. buying a home, furniture, electronics).
• Making Money
  • My target audience shouldn’t exactly be hurting for cash, but sometimes it can be fun or satisfying to find clever ways to earn extra money. And having a higher compensation, spend, and net worth exposes plenty of interesting ways to earn sizable chunks of money (e.g. negotiating when changing jobs, earning credit card points, and getting bank and investment account bonuses)

The Rules

As you can tell from the previous section, I want to cover some wide ranging content, and I’ll be constantly growing the list as I remember or discover new things. No matter what I cover, however, I have a few rules I’m committing to follow:

• I won’t share anything that makes or saves you less than $200 / hour of effort required. Optimizing can be fun and rewarding, but it can also be a curse. Spending half an hour to get a free cup of coffee might be worth it to some, but I value your time and my time more highly than that.
• I won’t pick investments for you. I plan to cover plenty of content about investment accounts, and useful instruments for specific goals, but I can’t tell you the best place to put the biggest chunk of your net worth because frankly, I don’t know.
• If I ever post a referral link, it will be clearly labeled. Sometimes I’ll talk about credit cards, investment accounts, or other services that offer a referral link. If I happen to have one, I might share it with a clear indicator that it is a referral link.
• I’ll always prioritize the best deals for you over the best referrals for me. The reality is, if I make any money from this site, it’ll be a drop in the bucket relative to what I make from my day job. Additionally, many of the readers of this site will likely be people I know personally that I will share links with when I have some relevant advice for them. Those two factors combine to mean it’s simply not worth sacrificing my integrity to shill for something that might make me a couple of bucks. That means, if there is a better non-referral link for something I’ll always provide it. And when I do provide a referral link for something, it will always be something I use and believe is legitimately good for at least some readers. I know every blogger under the sun says something to this effect, but hopefully with this rationale you have a reason to actually believe it.

The Name

TC is short for “total compensation”, and is a widely used abbreviation in tech circles. It’s meant to encompass not only one’s salary, but other sources of income (e.g. incentive stock grants, annual bonuses) that can often end up making up the majority of one’s W2 income.

A tailwind is a wind blowing in the direction of an object’s travel. It doesn’t necessarily account for all or much of the object’s speed, but it does help speed the object along.

The goal of this site is to act as a tailwind to one’s existing TC. This site won’t help you earn a high TC, but for those who do have a high TC, it will give you a boost by helping you save more of it and earn a bit extra on the side.