Who writes this site
Hi,I’m Ken!. I’ve spent 20 years as an enterprise software architect, designing systems where being approximately right isn’t good enough. I bring the same habit here.
I’m not a financial advisor, and this isn’t a career pivot into becoming one. I write about money because I’ve spent years making these decisions with my own, and because most of what’s published about them is written by people who haven’t.
What I actually have experience with, and what you’ll find reflected in what I write:
- Rental property. I own residential real estate. The depreciation schedules, the Section 121 timing questions, the HELOC-versus-refinance math — I’ve worked those out on my own property, with my own money at stake, before writing about them.
- Active investing. I trade options and equities. That gives me a working understanding of risk and position sizing — and, more usefully, a healthy respect for how often confident analysis turns out wrong.
- Building AI systems for financial research. I’ve built multi-agent research pipelines that analyze equities, and evaluated the major language models against real market questions. That’s why I can tell you where these tools genuinely help and where they quietly fail — I’ve watched mine fail.
What this site is for
Most personal finance content answers the question “what should I do?” with a confident recommendation and no arithmetic. This site tries to answer “what do the numbers actually say, including the parts that are unflattering?”
That means you’ll find things here that other sites leave out. That 20% down on a property means a 10% price decline cuts your equity in half. That the instant-cashout fee on a delivery app can cost you $700 a year for money you’d have received in 72 hours anyway. That even the most bullish published Bitcoin forecast no longer has $1 million as its base case.
None of that is what you want to hear. All of it is what you’d want to know.
What this site is not
I am not a licensed financial advisor, accountant, or attorney. I hold no CFP, CFA, CPA, or securities licenses. Nothing here is personalized financial, tax, or legal advice, and nothing here should be acted on as though it were.
What I can offer is analysis, sourced arithmetic, and honest framing of trade-offs. What I can’t offer is advice about your situation, which I don’t know. For that, hire a professional — and this site will regularly tell you exactly when that’s the right move.
How this content gets written
These are the rules I hold myself to. They exist because earlier versions of this site didn’t meet them.
- Every number is verified at the time of writing, against a primary source — IRS, HUD, CFPB, SEC, the Federal Reserve, or a company’s own filings. Not from memory, and not from another blog quoting a blog.
- If a claim can’t be verified, it gets hedged as a range or cut entirely. No invented statistics. No plausible-sounding figures attributed to real organizations that never published them.
- Time-sensitive numbers carry a date. Every article states when it was last updated and what was checked. A price or a rate without a date is worthless.
- Corrections are published, not quietly deleted. Several articles here carry a “what we removed and why” section documenting where an earlier version was wrong. Being wrong is unavoidable. Hiding it is a choice.
- Risk is stated plainly. If a strategy can lose you money, that appears in the same breath as the upside — not in a disclaimer at the bottom.
How this site makes money
FinanceGrub might earn revenue through affliate links(so far I haven’t made a single dime) . When you click certain links and make a purchase, this site may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Full details are in our privacy policy.
What that money might not do is decide what appears here. Nothing on this site is recommended because it pays a commission — and several articles specifically argue against products and tactics that would have paid me if I’d endorsed them. This site’s guide to weekly-pay side hustles calls out survey and affiliate-marketing content as optimizing for commissions rather than for the reader. Its identity theft guide tells you the free credit freeze protects you better than the paid monitoring services do. Its Bitcoin article talks most people out of buying Bitcoin.
If a recommendation here ever reads like it was bought, tell me. That’s a bug, not a business model.
FinanceGrub publishes general information about personal finance, investing, and real estate. It is not investment, tax, or legal advice. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Consult a qualified professional about your specific circumstances before acting on anything you read here.