Why I publish this.

I didn't grow up with money. School lunches were subsidized. New clothes were out of the question. Eating out was something other families did.

That changed when my mom remarried and I met Grandpa George. He was the first person I knew personally who had money. He was a college professor with rental properties and an old boat we'd take out on the Puget Sound. He talked to me about money constantly. How it worked. Why it mattered. How it would shape my entire life.

At seven years old I became obsessed with retirement. It's a strange thing for a child to be obsessed with, but I was. I read every personal finance book I could find. College didn't feel like an option after high school. Neither of my parents went, and so I joined the Air Force. I spent fourteen years on active duty and rose through the ranks to Captain. In every spare moment I was studying investing, starting side hustles, and trying to grow my portfolio so I could retire as soon as possible.

I thought I had it figured out. I started making money buying and selling real estate. First it was quick and easy flips bringing in an extra few thousand here and there. Then I took on a renovation project that was too big for me.

It was a three-year lesson in Murphy's Law, where anything that could have gone wrong did. Contractors running away with deposits, failed permit inspections, the market turned, and repairs that piled up faster than I could pay for them. Meanwhile the property sat vacant, costing me money each month I didn't have to pay the loans. By the time I finally finished the property, my credit cards were maxed out and my savings were drained. But the nightmare wasn't over. Over the next several months, multiple purchase contracts fell through and inspections uncovered structural work that needed to be redone. It nearly broke me. It was one of the toughest periods of my life.

The crazy thing is, if you looked at my net worth on paper, I was still okay. I had equity in the house. But I was struggling financially and stressed out because I didn't have the income I needed to pay my bills.

No matter how big your portfolio is, the thing that actually matters in your day-to-day life is knowing that your bills are paid.

After that, I started buying income producing assets like rental properties. First a duplex where I rented out the other side, then a four-unit, and eventually a portfolio of more than two dozen rentals.

This was completely different. Instead of servicing the debt payments on a vacant house for three years, I had a surplus at the end of each month. It was still work being a landlord, but it was much less stressful than being underwater every month. Eventually I found notes, which brought in income with much less work. I'll cover those in the email course.

Once my income from my assets exceeded my expenses, I was able to leave my job. I had finally done what I set out to do at nine years old.

That experience changed how I think about retirement, and it is the reason I publish Income Over Wealth.

Most retirement advice is built around the framework I had to unlearn. It tells you to accumulate as much wealth as possible. Bigger portfolio number, better retirement. But the wealth-on-paper model is fragile when it's your primary income source. What you actually need in retirement isn't a bigger number on a brokerage statement. You need income that shows up, month after month, whether the market is up or down, whether you're working or not, whether you're 55 or 85.

That's what this publication is about: the strategies that produce stable, predictable income for the rest of your life. Not the stuff Wall Street sells, because Wall Street makes most of its money on accumulation products. Not the stuff your insurance agent pushes, because the commission incentives don't line up with what's actually best for you. The transparent version. Simple breakdowns. Real strategies. Real numbers. Real trade-offs.

I publish a free weekly letter, and every new subscriber gets a 5-day course called The Retirement Income Map, a transparent comparison of seven retirement income strategies, ranked by risk, return, and who they fit.

If you'd rather collect income than chase wealth, this is for you.

- Dan