My Total Money Makeover

Years ago, flipping through the cable channels, I came upon Dave Ramsey giving out money advice. I didn't have to listen long to be impressed that someone was preaching what I eventually figured out—and what my family had practiced for generations—even if I took a detour along the way.

At age twenty-six I ended eight years of college life and got a real job, flat broke. I used my credit card to get myself some clothes and to furnish an apartment. In less than three years, I bought a new truck, lake property and a townhouse. All was financed. I only sort of qualified for the house loan.

No emergency fund. Some credit card debt. A contract for deed on the lake property. A vehicle loan. And a painful 12% mortgage. Money was one day at a time!

Three years later I refinanced my mortgage at a lower rate. I got a surprise pay increase. I was already saving in a 401(k).

I eventually got married. My wife and I had a shared goal to pay off all debt except our mortgage before our kids were born. Then we focused on paying off our mortgage, which we did by our 10th anniversary. We've been debt-free in our personal lives ever since.

Recently, I checked Dave Ramsey's book out of the library and read it. I smiled, surprised at nothing. I could have written that book.

Ramsey focuses heavily on a very conservative approach to money. He recognizes that debt is borrowing from your future to enjoy something today, paying someone else for the privilege while sacrificing your future income. In the long run, this privilege to have some instant gratification is much more expensive than people recognize.

One of his core principles is to eliminate debt. Essentially, by eliminating debt, you get ahead of the debt cycle, and instead of paying interest, you’re collecting it.

I acknowledge Ramsey’s advice but with my own twist. Let me explain. We have a family history of living within our means that goes back generations. My great-grandfather, grandfather, and father—all blue-collar workers—understood something about money that Ramsey has made a career teaching.

My great-grandfather bought a home in the late 19th century when my grandfather was young. My grandfather lived the rest of his life in that home, the home my dad grew up in. For the seventy years our family owned that home, as best I can tell, it never had a loan.

I grew up in a home my dad built after World War II, not far from the home he grew up in. The house is still in our family and has never had a loan on it.

Further, my wife's dad was a CPA and likewise eschewed debt. And although our kids all have mortgages, they don't like them and work hard to pay them down. Our two families’ long history of caution about debt has served us well.

Ramsey rants against debt: only buy cars you can pay cash for; never buy on installment or other consumer debt; never own a credit card—a debit card works just fine; pay the rest in cash.

Only get the higher education you can afford without debt. Private schools are rarely worth the risk that comes with education loans. And you can get a great education at a low cost using community schools and public colleges and universities.

Ramsey gives many tips and tricks for living on less money, emphasizing the overriding rule: Spend less than you earn. And if you stick with it long enough, you'll have more money than you'll know what to do with.

Debt isn't necessarily the problem, though. The problem is making commitments against future income without understanding the consequences or having the financial resources to manage them.

In general, there's little about Ramsey's advice I disagree with. You won’t go wrong with his approach. But rarely does one size fit all. As I've shared, I did run up some serious debt transitioning from college to career. Yes, I could have rented a room instead of an apartment. I didn't need a townhouse. Why borrow money for lake property?

But I took reasonable risks. I've enjoyed the homes I’ve lived in since college. My lake property became a good investment when I sold it years later. It was the beginning of a long investing career. Later, outside of our personal residence, I purchased several rental properties, all 100% financed. They turned out to be good investments, although I recognize that borrowing to invest carries risk Ramsey would rather avoid.

A few years ago, I walked into work, and after a short meeting with the owner, I left with my plants and without a job. Although there were clear warning signs, I still struggled with accepting my new reality. But I wasn't starting a brand-new financial experiment—I was just cashing in on a habit my great-grandfather started more than a century ago.

You don't have to follow every rule in Dave Ramsey's book to the letter, and you might even take a calculated risk or two along the way. But if you spend less than you earn and refuse to mortgage your future, you eventually buy the one thing money is actually good for: peace of mind.

The Sax-Zim Bog—A Birder's Paradise

I first visited Minnesota when I was nine. We stayed at my great uncle's modest home on a northern lake near the Iron Range. It was here that I had my first sauna, an affliction I've proudly never lost.

When I started my career job search, I was told that the Twin Cities was a great place to find a job. I didn't need more convincing. Eventually, my wife and I relocated north to Duluth, Minnesota. I still like northern Minnesota like nowhere else.

The winter of 2004-2005 brought an extraordinary northern-owl irruption. The owls were driven south by a food failure, probably helped by a near-collapse of vole populations in boreal Canada. This forced Northern Hawk and Great Gray Owls south into Minnesota in search of prey.

I read about this in the local papers, and twice set out in search of these owls. They mentioned the Sax-Zim Bog. I had never heard of it.

I was shocked! The Sax-Zim Bog is this flat, eerie and desolate bog of tamaracks and black spruce trees, as uninviting as a place can be—except for one thing. And that is owls. Huge owls. Great Gray Owls that sit quietly high on a barren tree limb, looking at you, a scene right out of Harry Potter. I've been an amateur birder since college but I had never seen anything like this.

I've been to the Sax-Zim Bog multiple times, and I’m never disappointed. Sax-Zim Bog is not a nature preserve or park system set-aside. Loosely, it's a roughly 300-square-mile expanse of land that includes the ghost towns of Sax and Zim, Minnesota, total population of about fifty.

About half of the land is county or state land, including several state Wildlife Management Areas and State Forests, a patchwork of governmental organizations that have recognized this area as significant for wildlife and nature. About a quarter of it is private land. The land also includes several rivers and lakes.

But its real distinction is that it is a unique birding area, one of the easiest places in the country to find boreal birds, such as hawks and owls, without traveling hundreds of miles into Canada.

Not to make this more unusual, the best birding is not in the spring or summer when it’s comfortable to be outside, but rather in late fall and winter when temperatures can easily drop below zero.

There are miles of roads to explore in search of birds, some unpassable in winter. Sitting in your car is probably the easiest way to find them. Along the roads, you will see remnants of these old towns—abandoned homes, farms, trailers and cars, an above-ground swimming pool that hasn’t been used in decades, and occasionally a working farm or a seasonal cabin. And then out of nowhere, you'll drive by a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses.

And you’ll see birds.

And you'll be warned to "please avoid birding the very north end of Stickney Road... this is not a birder-friendly location." 

There are bird feeders that attract birds, making it easier for you to find them. There are also walkways built into the bogs where you can get into the middle of good birding places.

You can now book week-long mid-winter birding tours of Sax-Zim Bog, some originating on both coasts. Just to see boreal birds like nowhere else.

How did this all happen? As I said, no one set up a Sax-Zim Bog nature preserve.

Over a hundred years ago, the towns of Sax and Zim were established, with a strong presence of Nordic immigrants, for the lumber industry that was logging this area. The towns together grew to about 400 people. The logging eventually died off, while mining to the north provided new employment. Although the towns themselves eventually died—neither is incorporated today and even a gas station is hard to find—residents could find jobs within commuting distances.

So many people just stayed. The area's population has been about the same for decades. Some of the land continues as family farms, with large pastures that themselves attract birds. One active farm goes back five generations.

In the past few decades, the area has developed a small tourism industry around its birding, an interest that was raised significantly after the 2004-2005 northern owl invasion. Soon, there were two significant non-profit organizations involved with the area, Friends of Sax-Zim Bog and The Conservation Fund.

Friends of Sax-Zim Bog was organized to stop new potential logging in the area that might threaten the habitat that makes the area so valuable to birds. This non-profit is now a $1-million-a-year operation with a Welcome Center, warming house and staff. 

In addition, they have purchased over 4,000 acres of land and have helped set aside thousands more. They organize regular activities. For example, they have an annual BRRRRdathon in early January, claiming to be the “World’s Coldest Birdathon,” providing detailed maps with information on how to find birds and a wonderful website. It all helps make the area truly a mecca for birders.

The Conservation Fund also got involved, but not to purchase property but to arrange land swaps, trading productive timberland outside the bog for valuable wetlands that are then placed under permanent conservation protection. They have helped conserve more than 42,000 acres within the Sax-Zim Bog.

Years ago, I first heard the term "soft adventure." That's me, I told myself. I like adventure but I have no interest in climbing Mt. Everest. I enjoy exercise and exploration, but I don't care about risking my life.

It's what I like about Minnesota. There are lots of ways to experience soft adventure and still come home with all my body parts. That's the Sax-Zim Bog. It’s a great example of Minnesota adventure, a place that looks almost worthless, yet people from around the world will spend a lot to experience it.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I celebrated New Year’s Day by taking a drive to the Sax-Zim Bog. On our way, I wondered whether it would be quiet, as it often is on New Year’s Day, or busy.

Birders aren't ones to stay home! It was busy! On a barely plowed two-rut road far from anywhere, there were other cars, all enjoying the soft adventure—and birds—of the Sax-Zim Bog. The Welcome Center was open, a kind worker helped me identify a large hawk we had seen, and we bought ourselves a couple of great mugs.

Minnesota never lets me down.

AI Investing—Lessons From the Past

Hardly a day passes without another artificial-intelligence headline: a major acquisition, a sudden decline in an AI company’s stock, new breakthroughs overseas, security vulnerabilities, government initiatives, reports of “blistering” growth and profits. 

As of early September 2026, the four largest companies in the S&P 500 account for roughly a quarter of the index’s total market capitalization, and all have major investments in or exposure to AI: NVIDIA, Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft.

Some of the more recent AI developments are the expanding use of AI agents to handle workflow; "reasoning" models; processing images and photos; and the continuing use of AI to write software.

This isn't the first big change to happen to modern society. Railroads, electricity, computers and the internet, medicine and automobiles are just some of the huge changes that have occurred in recent history. And each of these changes has created big winners. But there are also losers along the way. 

A revolutionary technology can create huge economic growth while simultaneously destroying enormous amounts of invested capital—and the eventual stock market winners may be companies that weren't the original technological pioneers.

For example, Cornelius Vanderbilt and James J. Hill are names still known today who made massive fortunes in the railroad industry. But along the way, the panic of 1873 helped usher in a prolonged economic depression. During the ensuing depression, about 25% of hundreds of railroads went bankrupt.

The lesson is not that railroads were a bad technology. The lesson is that a good technology can attract too much capital, leaving investors with poor returns even as society benefits enormously. Ultimately, investors aren't buying technologies; they're buying claims on future cash flows at a particular price. 

The same was true of other huge advances, such as in automobiles. Henry Ford pioneered the use of an assembly line for mass automobile production with the Model T in the early 20th century. There is perhaps no single consumer product that has transformed American life more than the Model T.

Ford pioneered mass automobile production and made Henry Ford extraordinarily wealthy. But because the company was privately held by Mr. Ford, investors could not simply buy Ford stock during the crucial early years. Meanwhile, General Motors—built through acquisitions and diversification—became one of the era’s great public-company success stories.

At this same time, many of Ford's competitors lost fortunes. There were nearly 300 car companies prior to the Model T, and forty years later, there were only a handful of major car manufacturers remaining, several of which still produce cars today.

Many of us lived through the dot-com boom of 2000. It developed during the late 1990s, peaking early in 2000. The Nasdaq Composite rose roughly fivefold from 1995 to its peak in March 2000, and then fell about 78% by its October 2002 low.

Cisco, one of the largest IT companies at the time, briefly became the world’s most valuable company in late March 2000, before its stock collapsed, losing roughly 90% of its share price from its peak. Twenty-six years later, in March 2026, Cisco’s stock finally closed above its previous peak in 2000. Note that this does not include dividends paid along the way, nor does it account for 26 years of inflation. But it shows the devastating losses incurred in the dot-com bubble by even the largest IT companies. 

In retrospect, many made fortunes in the dot-com boom and many lost fortunes in the dot-com bust. Although the bubble destroyed enormous amounts of shareholder wealth, it also financed enormous amounts of Internet infrastructure and software that later became economically valuable. And some companies, such as Amazon, eBay, NVIDIA and Google, came to dominate their respective fields, all names well known today. Investment losses and social progress can occur at the same time.

I remember the peak of the dot-com boom like it was yesterday. For the first—and last—time, I paid a Certified Financial Planner to review my investments. Like seemingly everyone else at the time, she was mortified that I had 20% of my investments in bonds, a figure that had been commonly recommended for years. But at that time, no one recommended buying bonds. Contrary to my instincts, I sold them, buying into a grossly overpriced equities market. It was a terrible investment.

Around the same time, I had an outing with my youngest son at McDonald's playland. After crawling around the tubes for a while, I got us some food and then read that day's Wall Street Journal while he continued playing. I read a fascinating article about Julian Robertson, founder of Tiger Management, an early hedge fund opened in 1980. A quarter of the money was his own, invested together with his clients.

Near the peak of the dot-com boom, with his value fund struggling, he announced that he would return his clients’ money. He couldn't make sense of the IT boom and couldn't justify investing other people’s money in a market that “I frankly do not understand.”

Even with these late losses, he had an extraordinary long-term investing record, returning about 25% annually, after fees, with losses in only 4 of 21 years. At that time, it was one of the best long-term track records in the investment world. And over the next eight years, his personal fortune, which he continued to manage, returned 404%.

His decision to walk away just before the Nasdaq collapsed became legendary. He died in 2022. I remembered that article—and the bonds I sadly sold—while the market slowly and steadily declined over the next two and a half years.

That experience has shaped how I think about today’s AI boom. AI is approaching—and in some areas exceeding—human capabilities in remarkable ways, but I remain skeptical of predictions that computers will simply replace human intelligence. After all, computers are mostly fairly stupid machines: powerful but not inherently intelligent.

The human brain is an extraordinarily complex system, and we still understand surprisingly little about how subjective consciousness, judgment, creativity and common sense emerge from it. Today's AI systems are amazingly powerful, but they are also capable of making spectacular mistakes, with little “knowledge” of what they are doing.

The question is not whether AI will matter. It almost certainly will. The harder question is whether the companies attracting the most capital will capture the resulting economic value.

I'm not pretending to know how this will end. History suggests that in the coming decades things will be vastly different in the AI world than what is predicted, both good and bad. Forecasting the future is a dubious science, and neither humans nor AI are particularly good at it.

AI may become one of the most important technologies in history. That does not tell us which companies will earn the profits, how long those profits will last, or what investors will pay for them. The safest conclusion is not that today’s AI leaders will fail, but that technological importance alone is not a sufficient investment thesis. Caution, diversification and humility may go a long way in protecting investors from trouble.
 

Why I Fired My Broker Redux: Lessons From the Great Recession

Nearly two decades ago, in the midst of the horrors of the Great Recession, Jeffrey Goldberg, now editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, wrote what is probably the best personal finance article I’ve ever read: Why I Fired My Broker (The Atlantic, May, 2009).

Andy Kane

The stock market has produced extraordinary returns since this article was written, and many investors have never experienced a prolonged bear market. Here’s a look at Mr. Goldberg’s article plus my own experience with the Great Recession, with some ideas on how to keep yourself prepared for financial surprises.

The Grim Reality of 2008

The Great Recession was the most severe economic and financial meltdown since the Great Depression. It began in the United States with the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007, and eventually spread throughout the world. Here’s the common joke during the housing peak:

“I've always wanted to live in a million-dollar house. I just didn't think it would be this house.”

During the Great Recession, gross domestic product (GDP) declined significantly and unemployment doubled. Millions of people lost their homes, jobs and savings. The S&P 500 index fell by 57%, down to levels in 1997. Many people nearing retirement suddenly found themselves working much longer than they had planned.

For years, almost daily I could find an article on the latest personal finance disaster.

• A once successful father now living in his in-laws’ basement with his wife and children, wondering what happened.
• Millions of homes in foreclosure, with some courts—known as rocket dockets—processing cases in minutes.
• A man who lost his house, his job and his wife, spending a winter in a van in North Dakota with his son and his son’s girlfriend.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street 

Mr. Goldberg had invested carefully, following much of the standard advice still given today. Then he woke up to discover that he had taken "a random walk down Wall Street and got hit by a bus." As his 401(k) shrank, advisors responded with familiar explanations about time, diversification and risk. To which Goldberg quotes Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead."

He learned that even highly paid financial professionals rarely know where markets are headed. Many are far better at selling financial products than predicting the future.

The Illusion of "Chuck"

At the time, Charles Schwab was running its famous "Talk to Chuck" advertising campaign. Goldberg hoped Chuck could help him understand what had happened to his financial plan.

Instead, he discovered that brokers, wealth managers and television experts were no more capable of forecasting the crisis than anyone else. As Warren Buffett put it:

"Wall Street is a place where whatever can be sold will be sold."

Mr. Goldberg's conclusion was simple: brokerage firms are businesses first. Their interests do not always align with yours.

My View From the North Woods

I have followed markets forever. I remember the disaster my parents experienced in the 1973-74 market crash, one they never truly recovered from. I also remember the 1982 market bottom that launched one of the greatest bull markets in history, running nearly uninterrupted until the dot-com crash in 2000. The Dow Jones rose from a low of 777 to a high of nearly 12,000.

I remember reading a wild forecast in 1982 that the Dow could one day hit 3000. The Dow had barely moved since the 1960s. It’s now approaching 50,000.

And then I remember 2008. We personally lost 56% of our equities, high to low. I had recently taken a new job working for a small firm in a small town in Northern Minnesota. We had recently completed a major remodeling of our hundred-year-old home. We had just sent our oldest twin sons off to an expensive private college. I was stunned.

Mr. Goldberg wisely fired his broker. Actually, his broker fired him. He just stopped calling, and Mr. Goldberg got the message. They weren't much help because they didn't know what to do any more than Mr. Goldberg did. 

The Great Recession did end. By the time Mr. Goldberg was writing his article, the markets were already on a tear, although it was hard to see that through the carnage. While many sold all they had, never to trust markets or capitalism again, the U.S. stock market climbed from 2009 to 2020 when COVID hit, one of the longest running bull markets ever. The S&P 500 rose over four times.

Today the S&P 500 is roughly ten times its 2009 low.

The Survival Playbook

Fortunately, I had rarely trusted any financial advice, even from Charles Schwab (who is still about as good as it gets).

Here’s how my own recovery from the Great Recession went. I never lost my job. Although we lost a lot, year over year we lost a third of our net worth. Not great but not the disaster that it originally felt like.

• I never made any net sales from my depressed equities. I continued to make regular contributions to my 401(k), investing in now under-priced equities.
• We had paid off our house before the Great Recession. That wasn’t an accident. I grew up in a new home that never carried a mortgage, and before 1900, my great-grandfather purchased the house my grandfather and dad grew up in—also mortgage free. This has always been good advice for surviving a market crash. 
• The kids were safe at college. We saved that money over nearly twenty years and moved most of it into short-term fixed income investments before the crash. I had known that you shouldn’t invest any money you need in the next five years.

Without doing much, in less than five years we recovered all our losses.

The lesson I took from the Great Recession wasn't how to predict crashes. It was that crashes cannot be predicted reliably. The next crisis will look different from the last, but it will arrive. The goal isn't to avoid the downturn—it's to build a financial life that can survive it.

Michigamme Highlands: The Place I Never Really Left

My first introduction to the Michigamme Highlands was walking with my dad and sister through the remains of an old mine to a deep tunnel bored into the earth. I was very young and a little afraid of falling into a hole—or a bear coming out of the cave. But this is the Michigamme Highlands: rugged, remote and undeveloped.

The Michigamme Highlands is a vast wilderness near the center of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (U.P.), a land half the size of Rhode Island that time mostly forgot.

I grew up near here, a third-generation Nordic American, part of a wave of immigrants who came for mining jobs. The house my dad built is still in our family. We also had a cabin in Michigamme, a small mining town with a ghostly feel—a place that refuses to die.

Since I was very young, I have roamed vast portions of the Michigamme Highlands, primarily fishing and camping. I spent countless days riding its mostly seasonal gravel and two-rut roads in a beat-up pickup with my uncle, searching for elusive brook trout in small, remote streams.

I remember walking along railroad tracks down to an abandoned bridge, perfect for fishing. I’ve followed roads along the remains of an old railroad blasted through its roughest terrain—the Huron Mountains—built in the 19th century but never moved a pound of freight before it was scrapped.

After I got married, I introduced these backwoods to my wife. As we slowly worked her new Jeep Cherokee along a two-rut road, I realized we were driving along a leaky beaver dam, water rushing across the road ahead of us.

The Land Itself

The Michigamme Highlands is home to hundreds of lakes, rivers and streams, and many animals, including wolves, moose and an occasional mountain lion.

It has large tracts of old-growth and mature northern hardwood/hemlock and pine-oak forests, one of the Upper Midwest’s most undisturbed forest remnants. It includes the highest elevations in Michigan, including Mount Arvon and Mount Curwood. 

The weather matches the terrain, with higher elevations receiving up to 200 inches of snow a year, snow that covers some parts of this area continuously for nearly seven months a year.

Lake Michigamme, where the town of Michigamme sits, remains a grand lake, one of the largest in the U.P. It is the natural center of the Michigamme Highlands.

The town still has an occasional train come through, although the roundhouse I remember is long gone. Indian Trails still provides a daily connection to the rest of the U.S. “Mt. Shasta,” the local eatery used in the filming of Anatomy of a Murder, is still open, and looks much like I remember it from when I was young.

The name Michigamme Highlands is a new term from the past couple of decades. It is used by the government and larger organizations to recognize the ecological value of this area. It’s not a single entity but rather a patchwork of national, state and private land that is largely available for anyone to use for outdoor activities.

Places to Explore

The most notable set-aside in the Michigamme Highlands is McCormick Wilderness, a huge square tract, with over a dozen lakes and the headwaters of four river systems. It was once a private lodge for the McCormick Family of Chicago.

An aunt and uncle of mine lived there for several years, working to maintain this elaborate lodge. It is now a wilderness area owned by the U.S. National Forest.

Another protected area is Craig Lake State Park, smaller but just as remote. The Nature Conservancy has purchased thousands of acres of land abutting this park, setting it aside forever as wilderness.

There is also a more hospitable state park on Lake Michigamme, plus some Michigan State Forest campgrounds, all great places to set up camp. One of the more dramatic landscapes here is the Sturgeon River Gorge Wilderness, a harrowing mountain canyon where the river cuts through cliffs, waterfalls, and boulder fields in a deep forest.

The North Country National Scenic Trail stretches 4,800 miles from New York State to North Dakota. It follows the full length of the U.P., including through the heart of the Michigamme Highlands. It’s easily accessible at multiple places, including McCormick Wilderness and Craig Lake State Park.

A notable section to check out is Trap Hills, just a bit west. It is another trail through steep ridges, with challenging climbs and sweeping views. It’s widely considered one of the toughest yet most rewarding hikes in the Midwest—and one of the best sections of the North Country Trail in the U.P.

More Good News

There's also some encouraging recent news. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources has purchased a permanent wildlife easement of 73,000 acres within the Michigamme Highlands. This keeps a large forest privately owned but permanently protected from development. It guarantees public access and sustainable logging while preventing subdivision or fragmentation of the land.

If you're in moderately good shape and enjoy outdoor soft adventure—whether day hikes, birding, fishing, hunting, backpacking, car camping or an Airbnb—you may want to consider an off-grid trip into the Michigamme Highlands.

Here’s some additional information to help with a visit:

• Best seasons to visit: July - September, although May, June and October can all be very nice.
• Contact Ottawa National Forest for information on McCormick Wilderness and Sturgeon River Gorge Wilderness at www.fs.usda.gov/r09/ottawa.
• Contact the State of Michigan for information on Michigan State Parks and State Campgrounds: www.michigan.gov/dnr/
  
  
• Nearby towns with services: Ishpeming and Marquette. 
• Maps/trailheads: Michigamme Highlands Map, Trap Hills/North Country Trail

I’ve spent decades returning to the Michigamme Highlands, and each time I’m reminded of a few things. First, not all investments are for physical security. Some are for the soul—and nature may be the best investment of all.

Second, in a world where most assets are constantly traded, upgraded or optimized, places like this are a reminder that preservation can be its own form of return.

And in the Michigamme Highlands, that return still looks a lot like it did when I first walked into that old mine.