About RefinedFI
The right map for every stage of your financial journey.
Why this exists
Recently, I sat down with a relative to review their retirement accounts. Smart person, decades of saving, working with a reputable advisor. And yet: no systematic framework for where the next dollar should go, no plan for what happens if the market drops 20% in year two of retirement, and no clear sense of whether the fees they were paying were buying anything useful.
Unfortunately, this is the norm.
Refined FI captures that conversation for anyone to use: the same frameworks, tools, and portfolios, without paying 1% for an annual review.
Who writes this
I bring more than two decades of professional experience in investment research, portfolio construction, and risk management to Refined FI.
Not consulting. Not on a career break. Not retired. This is the day job.
The families whose portfolios I work on professionally cannot afford catastrophic mistakes. They need income strategies that survive recessions, inflation spikes, rate cycles, and policy shocks, not just average-case projections.
The same frameworks I use for the families I serve professionally are the ones I publish here. The difference: here, they're translated for anyone who needs them.
Why anonymous
I publish anonymously because I still do this work professionally. Putting my name on Refined FI would mean giving it up, along with the institutional tools, data access, and real-time market perspective that make the analysis worth reading.
The tradeoff is anonymity for quality. I think it's worth it.
The engineer's perspective
Most retirement income advice works backward from a rule of thumb. Start with 4%, adjust for comfort, hope it holds. That's not analysis. It's a guess wearing a spreadsheet.
Most retirement advice is built around sales workflows, not first-principles portfolio engineering.
An engineer doesn't ask "will this bridge hold on a sunny day?" They ask "will it hold in a hurricane?"
My engineering training taught me to test retirement plans the same way: not against average returns, but against the worst plausible sequence of events. Then build the income strategy to survive it.
What you'll find here
- Precise frameworks for saving, investing, and retirement income.
- Account-location guidance for making investments more tax-efficient.
- Specific portfolios for each stage of the investing journey: building wealth, preparing for retirement, and generating durable retirement income.
- Professional tools that help answer nagging financial questions with clearer, more useful outputs.
- Continuous market-risk monitoring that turns raw signals into one clear instruction.
How the maps are built
Start with knowing where you are and your goals, not the product.
Every framework starts by identifying where you are, what your money needs to do next, and which risks matter at that stage. Only then do we evaluate the portfolio, tools, and playbook that fit the problem.
Built with professional-grade tools and analysis.
Institutional-level data, market structure observation, and real-world portfolio experience become practical frameworks for building wealth, preparing for retirement, and living off investments.
Independent by design.
No affiliate links. No sponsored content. No commissions for recommending a fund or product. The only incentive is building a map that helps you make better decisions.
How to follow the research
Free
Newsletter
New research delivered as it publishes. No spam, no upsells, unsubscribe anytime.
Gold+
Know where you stand. Know what to do next.
Automated retirement planning for investors who manage their own money: professional retirement calculators, stage-based Refined FI portfolios, and daily market-risk monitoring.