About RiversHedge
RiversHedge attempts to offer whatever it can discover about retirement finance as well as any related material about the markets, economy, society and capital, trading, etc. My personal goal is to use what's known of existing and emerging evidence-based financial theory to help me and my family; I'll try to pass along some of what I find or figure out even if I haven't totally figured it out yet.
I have been semi-retired since 2010 and an active private investor for more than 20 years. My baseline experience comes from management consulting for Fortune 500 companies in the area of technology, business process, and venture development. I have also been involved in a variety of personal entrepreneurial endeavors in the financial markets since then. For example, I have made a number of angel investments in early stage netsourcing ventures, participated in a hedge fund startup as a GP and LP, and am generally always involved in a variety of ongoing market-oriented projects. Plus I blog, if that is not self-evident. My main purpose, however, has always been -- and will remain for the foreseeable future -- caregiving for still-school-age children. In my spare time I mostly just do laundry, cook and cleans dishes for sometimes-lazy but beautiful, intelligent and gifted children. If there is spare time beyond that, I sleep. If I had a hill within a reasonable drive I might consider skiing again on a regular basis.
I hold an MBA from the Carlson School of Management University of Minnesota and a BA (in Religion! that's another story; it's all John Youngblood's fault.) from Carleton College in Northfield MN. Now living in Florida, I was born in MN and still have my head in MN as well as anything vaguely related to the Mountain Time Zone (the highest flat-ish hill in FL being about 4 hours drive-time and when you get there about 256 feet high). Put me anywhere west of Nebraska, east of the Pacific, south of Canada (actually I like Canada; I'm half Canadian, have traveled across more of low-latitude Canada than most Canadians, and I can speak Canadian too...) and north of Mexico and I am a pretty happy person.
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Note on RH:
After my semi-retirement in 2010 it took me quite a while to come to terms with the view of retirement finance that one can have from what I'll call "the other side." It's not just that one has lost the safety net of employment income it's that it becomes evident fairly quickly that "retirement finance" as we know it is not a crisp answer to a well defined problem…yet. It is, rather, a weird optimization problem with sometimes gnarly trade-offs that can -- with some luck and proper attention -- be finessed with a continuously adaptive process. Since I tend to read widely on this topic and have tried to focus some of my own minor-league quantitative horsepower on a few of the relevant issues my goal is to forward at least a little bit of what I see and what I learn (RetFin or otherwise) to you. If I can save someone somewhere even a minute of effort or trouble or open someone's eyes to something new then I'm probably doing the right thing because being in the middle of retirement finance -- i.e., not too underfunded (fail) and not too "overfunded" (who cares) -- is like walking a razor's edge…
"Like the sharp edge of a razor is that path, so the wise say—hard to tread and difficult to cross." - Katha Upanishad
[ post script March 2017 ] I wanted to be clear on my site that I am not really proficient in higher mathematics or statistics. Nor is this site intended to be an answer site like an encyclopedia. There are countless other people and places that can fill those roles. Here, I am only documenting my personal journey and reporting on what I find -- or at least how I am in the process of finding stuff -- along the way. Since I no longer have access to professors or staff or colleagues or assistants or whatever, if you know the math or economics better that what I am trying to do here then let me know and I'll either update what I have reported or I will entertain the idea of a guest blog post depending on the circumstances.