Compound Growth

Property tax bills keep climbing, a bill in Congress promises lower card fees while card companies warn that rewards could shrink, and everyone seems to be waiting for the AI bubble to burst. It’s hard to tell where the real costs and risks are coming from.

After kicking off Movember, Wheeler and Colin take on property taxes. Colin shares that his own bill is up 120% in seven years after his town’s new high school ran over budget. Wheeler makes the case that property taxes work like membership dues for your town and points to one big...

Homes cost about five times the typical household income, the average car payment has climbed by about a third in five years, and letters from the Treasury keep arriving with help that rarely adds up to much. It can feel like the basic markers of financial stability have moved out of reach.

Wheeler opens with a Halloween urban legend about a call coming from inside the house, and argues that's where the housing problem sits too. The postwar version of the American dream was built around a specific household and a much smaller home, roughly 1,000 to 1,200 square...

In the race of technology, is AI truly the fastest adopted innovation in history, or is it just a case of mass distribution?  If you’ve been questioning the impact of AI on the economy, your portfolio, or even just your daily life, this is a must-listen.  

Wheeler and Colin tackle a listener’s intriguing question about the economic ramifications of AI’s rapid integration into our lives. They explore critical distinctions between exposure, usage, and genuine adoption, challenging the conventional wisdom surrounding these terms. As they unpack the data, you'll discover the nuances of AI’s implementa...

Election ads everywhere, a new Apple product every few months, and maybe a stock in your portfolio that has done so well you're afraid to touch it. It's hard to tell which headlines matter for your money and which ones are noise.

Wheeler starts with seasonality and the four-year presidential cycle. Midterm elections tend to bring anxiety, but historically the October through April stretch of a midterm year has been the strongest seven-month window of the entire cycle, averaging about 18% compared with roughly 5.4% for a typical seven-month period. The hosts are clear that this isn't a prediction...

Mortgage rates near 7%, a Social Security fund that has started shrinking, and a new account for kids that most parents still haven't heard of. It's a lot to keep straight, and the headlines rarely explain how any of it affects your own plan.

It starts with an envelope from the US Department of the Treasury. Wheeler's family received a $1,500 refund tied to healthcare.gov marketplace fees, even though he estimates he paid only a few hundred dollars in fees over three years. The hosts explain how those fees reach families through higher premiums, why a flat refund...

When people talk about wealth in America, the conversation usually splits into two groups: the billionaires and everybody else. A new book from economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, argues there's a huge group in between. Wheeler and Colin dig into it this week.

The book focuses on "Main Street millionaires." These are households worth $10 million or more who got there by owning private businesses: HVAC companies, car dealerships, construction firms, roofers. Together, they hold far more wealth than the Forbes 400 combined. The...

Everyone seems to agree AI is a bubble that's about to burst. But what if everybody's wrong? This week starts with a contrarian column arguing that roughly $1 trillion in AI build-out since 2024 is only about 2% of GDP, while past build-outs like the railroads and telecom reached closer to 25% before they peaked. At today's pace, AI wouldn't get there until around 2030. The hosts test the comparison against the Panic of 1873. Railroad track roughly doubled in the years after the Civil War, and financier Jay Cooke's bank funded long-term railroad loans with short-term borrowing. When a crash in Vienna spread across...

This week opens with a genuinely funny mishap — one host asked Gemini to research video ideas and got rickrolled by the AI itself, complete with a self-aware "busted" when called out — before the show turns to a much bigger AI story: a wave of doomer warnings from Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and now Elon Musk, including a widely repeated claim that there's a 10% chance AI ends humanity by 2030. The hosts push back on the framing, walking through Musk's proposal that AI companies test each other's models instead of grading their own homework, and making the case that the loudest call...

This week Wheeler and Colin sit down with Dan Wilson, CoFi Advisors' newest financial planning associate and a CFP® candidate, to get his full story — after months of him quietly feeding the show's news segments from his own five-newsletter-a-day habit. Dan likes to work backward, so they start with how he landed at CoFi (a LinkedIn search for "para-planner near Amesbury" while he was two years into a banking job at Chase) and trace it back through a genuinely winding career: a commercial-bank credit analyst role, weekend serving shifts at what's now Treehouse Brewing, two years in fintech sales at...

Wheeler's Whoop sent him a pop-up after his first Rolfing session, checking in on how his body was feeling — which kicked off a bigger question the hosts have been circling for a while: is AI actually adding value, or is it just smoke and mirrors dressed up as a feature? Colin pushes back with a skeptic's case (a check-in doesn't move revenue, and everything these days claims an AI component the same way everything once claimed to be "turbo"), while Wheeler makes the counterpoint that a system paying attention, even imperfectly, is worth something — especially set against how hard it's...

Wheeler opens this week's headline discussion after a conversation with his partner Jess, who came away from an NPR Up First segment thinking that countries lending the U.S. money are charging higher interest rates because the U.S. looks riskier — and that the resulting interest payments now exceed the national defense budget. The hosts use it as a jumping-off point to explain how U.S. debt actually works: the government issues new Treasury bonds and notes to the open global market, and the market, not a handshake with any one country, sets the rate. A chart breaking down ow...

Moderna jumped roughly 130–137% in a single day this week on a major mRNA cancer breakthrough: a personalized cancer shot, built using AI to sequence a patient's own tumor, completed Phase 3 trials with strong results. The hosts trace it back to Keytruda, the immunotherapy drug that's driven much of Merck's revenue for about 14 years, which works by helping the immune system detect cancer that would otherwise hide from it. Moderna's shot goes a step further, tailoring treatment to each patient's specific tumor, first tested in melanoma and now expanding into bladder cancer. Tempus AI, which does the AI sequencing behind th...

The market keeps notching new record highs, and this one opens with the case for why: the S&P 500 is up roughly 13% year to date, 63% of the index has now reported Q2 earnings, and the beat rate sits at 86%, well above the 5-year average of 78% and the 10-year average of 76%, with reported results beating estimates by 31% on average. Communication services and healthcare are running 100% beat rates this quarter; tech is close behind. Against that, a client's text lists everything that's supposedly working against the market right now, inflation, oil, tariffs, a war affecting global oil transport, an election three...

A listener noticed something: when Wheeler and Colin talk about the market, they talk about it like it's alive. Like it knows things. Like it's learning. So this episode starts with that observation and goes somewhere genuinely surprising.

The stock market and artificial intelligence turn out to share more DNA than most people realize. Both process enormous amounts of data to generate an output. Both reflect collective intelligence at scale. Both are, in their own way, always learning. But the differences matter just as much — the market isn't trying to predict the next sentence. It's trying to ma...

Maddie Tudor has been part of our marketing team at CoFi Advisors for going on four years, and this week she sits down with Wheeler and Colin to make an argument she can't always sell to her own clients: going viral is often exactly the wrong thing to chase. Before founding Maddie Tudor Consulting, Maddie built the first-ever marketing department at a major TV and film production company, running campaigns for Million Dollar Listing and RuPaul's Drag Race, a Las Vegas residency, and HBO's Liberty: Mother of Exiles. Now she works mostly with small businesses that need one-to-one client...

A book about how people picture the future kicks off this one: close your eyes and imagine what's ahead, and it turns out most people picture something quiet and grounded, not the flying cars or dystopia a futurist might expect. From there the show moves into two dramatic single-stock stories, SpaceX down 40% from its highs (called on this show months in advance) and IBM's one-day $70 billion market cap wipeout following a 54% run-up in a matter of weeks that had nothing to do with earnings. That leads into the leveraged ETF boom, from $30 billion in total assets in 2020 to $200 billion...

Debit card users are quietly funding everyone else's credit card rewards. Wheeler and Colin trace the three ways credit card companies actually make money, interchange fees, net interest income, and annual fees, and land on why swiping a debit card doesn't opt you out of the cost, it just means someone else collects the reward. A client story backs it up: a couple who paid off $40,000 to $50,000 in credit card debt across five cards by switching to debit, now sitting on a new house, no debt, and $300,000 saved.

From there, a chart on rate hike expectations versus...

The personal savings rate sits at 2.6%, and Wheeler and Colin argue it tells you almost nothing. Someone making $100,000 who saves $10,000 is saving at 10%. Someone making $1,000,000 who saves the same $10,000 is saving at 1%. Both count exactly the same in that national number, which isn't weighted by income, doesn't separate working professionals from retirees on Social Security, and says nothing about your own household.

From there, a rabbit hole on GLP-1s and fertility. The US total fertility rate hit a record low of 1.6 in 2024, well below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to sustain the population. Immigration is the only...

June brought rotation, not direction. The Nasdaq finished down almost 3%, the S&P was flat, the Dow was up, and small caps led with the Russell 2000 up 3.6%. Taiwan's index is up 62% year to date, but it's essentially two stocks, and that same concentration shows up in the margin debt numbers. The US just hit $1.28 trillion in margin debt, an all-time high, while Taiwan's is up 160% year over year and past dot-com bubble levels.

Inflation is sticky (core PCE at 3.4%) even as wages stall, and Wheeler and Colin bet on the Fed doing nothing before year end. The...

Colin came in from fishing. Wheeler was trying to buy Olivia Rodrigo tickets mid-recording. They still got through a packed week.

The Road to Housing Act passed with bipartisan support — a bill to cut red tape on home construction and limit corporate ownership of residential properties. Then the president refused to sign it, tying it to a separate voter ID bill. Wheeler and Colin get into why builders are financially incentivized to build expensive homes over affordable ones, and how badly the math has shifted. A starting advisor ten years ago earned $50K with homes around $400K. To...

This week Wheeler and Colin open with a conversation about inflation — what it actually costs to travel in Vegas and California right now, why broad inflation numbers don't tell the full story, and how the experience varies dramatically depending on income. It's a grounded setup for everything that follows.

From there they get into the week's biggest stories. Big tech collectively spent $630 billion on AI infrastructure in Q1 alone, and the build-out shows no signs of slowing — even as data centers face growing pushback from communities that don't want them nearby. New Hampshire is already seeing that tens...

In this episode of Compound Growth, Colin and Wheeler sit down with their colleague and the third leg of the stool — Shae Murray — for a candid, wide-ranging conversation about non-traditional career paths, what it really takes to build confidence in a new field, and why growth often looks nothing like you planned.

Shae shares her journey from early childhood education — working across Montessori schools, Head Start programs, and a childcare center for MGH doctors — to landing in the world of financial services completely by accident. What followed was a crash course in everything from the stock market to the S...

Did you know that in the United States, anyone can sign your tax return — no license required? Katrina Kowalski found that out the hard way when her husband got hit with a $50,000-plus IRS audit, courtesy of an unlicensed preparer who was a family friend. That moment set her on a path from mortgage industry burnout, to quitting a Big 5 accounting firm on the day after Christmas, to eventually building On Point Wealth and On Point Tax Services in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

In this conversation, Katrina joins Wheeler and Colin to talk about what business owners get wr...

Ferrari announced a $640,000 electric car with worse performance than a Tesla Model S — and screened the journalists who came to see it based on how they felt about EVs. It's a strange move for a brand built on confidence. It's also a pretty good lens for what's happening across a lot of big institutions right now.

The bigger conversation this month is the SpaceX IPO. One theory floating around is that it's a head fake entirely — that Tesla absorbs SpaceX instead, because the demand simply isn't there to support a deal that size. If the IPO does happ...

Buy now, pay later has gone from a niche checkout option to a fixture of how Americans spend — on everything from concert tickets to groceries to medical bills. The industry processed over $114 billion in transactions in 2024 alone, and the numbers are still growing. But the conversation around it rarely goes deeper than whether a specific purchase is worth it.

This episode does.

Wheeler and Colin break down how BNPL actually works, why it's grown so fast, and what separates a useful financial tool from a mechanism that quietly accelerates debt. They dig into the credit sc...

There's a gap between what the data says and how people feel — and right now, that gap is enormous. Wheeler and Colin sit down with Seth Buks, a market strategist and thought leader who has spent nearly two decades translating complex financial ideas into clear, actionable guidance for advisors and their clients. The conversation covers a lot of ground: where the economy actually stands on growth, inflation, and interest rates; why real wage growth over the past five years tells a very different story than the one most people believe; and what behavioral finance reveals about the decisions investors ma...

One year ago, Wheeler and Colin hit record on a podcast with no script, no audience, and no certainty it would go anywhere. This episode marks that anniversary — and uses it as a lens for the thing the show has always been about: what does it actually take to build something that compounds over time?

The conversation opens with a riff on jargon — why professionals in every field lose the ability to explain themselves to the people they care about most, and what that says about the gap between expertise and genuine communication. From there, it moves into...

April was one of the more eventful market months in recent memory, and Wheeler and Colin are breaking it all down. The S&P finished the month up 12%, the Nasdaq up 18%, and semiconductors — led by an almost impossible 116% single-month run in Intel — stole the show. But the real story underneath the numbers is earnings: more than 85% of companies that reported beat expectations, with average earnings growth hovering around 15%. That's not a sentiment rally. Companies are actually making more money.

Wheeler and Colin dig into what's driving the semiconductor surge, why Intel's chart looks like nothing either of them...

Most people think of an IPO as a news event. A company goes public, the ticker starts flashing, and you decide whether to buy in or not. But what's coming in the next 12 to 18 months isn't just a news event — it could be one of the most consequential reshufflings of capital in stock market history.

Wheeler and Colin use the story of Uber's IPO as a starting point: a company that was visionary, polarizing, massively hyped, and still managed to underperform the S&P 500 by nearly 20 points over six years. From there, they build the case for wh...

Ben Anderson didn't set out to build a community venue. He set out to buy a house near the seacoast and do more of the work he'd been doing his entire career — connecting people through music and live events. The Word Barn, located in Exeter, New Hampshire, happened almost by accident: a band needed a place to play, all the other venues were booked, and the energy that night made it clear something real was possible in a small, intimate space.

Thirteen years later, The Word Barn hosts over 115 events a year — concerts, poetry readings, theater camp, owl...

Most people spend more time comparing cars than they do evaluating their financial advisor. Wheeler and Colin dig into one of the most important — and most avoided — conversations in personal finance: how to know when the advisory relationship you're in isn't working, what it actually costs you to stay, and what to look for when you're ready to make a move.

They cover the difference between a fiduciary and a non-fiduciary advisor, how fee structures affect incentives, the real questions to ask when shopping for someone new, and the green flags that signal a genuinely good fit. They...

March was a rough month for markets — and it came with a lot of noise. Tariffs, geopolitical tension, and a sharp sell-off in tech had a lot of investors watching their portfolios and wondering what to do.

In this episode, Wheeler and Colin walk through exactly what happened in March 2026: where markets landed, which sectors got hit hardest, and why the headlines you were reading probably weren't the real story. They dig into the relationship between AI infrastructure spending and the tech correction, what historical parallels actually tell us about moments like this, and why permanent loss of...

Most people want to talk about investing. Stock picks, portfolio allocation, whether they're positioned right. Those are real questions — but they're the wrong starting point if the foundation underneath isn't solid.

In this episode, Wheeler and Colin go back to basics: knowing what you actually spend, building reserves that can absorb the unexpected, and protecting your income against the things you're least likely to plan for. The conversation is anchored around three questions every household should be able to answer — what happens if you lose your job, what happens if you lose your health, and what happens if y...

The economy looks fine on paper. But if you're young and trying to build a life in America right now, it doesn't feel that way. Bryce Gill, economist at First Trust, joins Wheeler and Colin to explain why both things are true at the same time.

Bryce breaks down the structural forces quietly reshaping who gets ahead in this economy and who gets left behind. The conversation covers the widening gap between asset owners and everyone else, why the wealth divide is less about capital versus labor and more about age, how AI is actually changing the...

Have you ever looked at a job offer and felt overwhelmed by the alphabet soup of RSUs, ESPPs, and vesting schedules? In this episode of Compound Growth, Colin and Wheeler break down the complex world of equity compensation — moving beyond the raw numbers to explore how these benefits actually impact your long-term financial freedom.

Using real-world examples from Google and Amazon, they pull back the curtain on how golden handcuffs are designed and how you can negotiate a package that aligns with your life goals. They dive into the mechanics of RSUs and the crucial differences between fr...

The way we build wealth is shifting — and the speed of that shift is unlike anything we've seen before. In this episode, Colin and Wheeler tackle the idea that we may be living through the last great window of traditional wealth-building, and what that actually means for the average person.

They draw a direct line between today's AI and robotics boom and the original Gilded Age, when Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan owned everything, and the gap between the haves and have-nots felt permanent. Tesla shutting down its most expensive car lines to build humanoid robots, xAI's expanding fo...

February's markets told a story of contradictions. US stocks sat mostly flat while energy names surged 30%, Nvidia posted 73% year-over-year growth and still couldn't please the market, and software stocks got crushed on AI fears. Wheeler and Colin unpack why — and whether the selling is justified.

They also dig into Blue Owl and the private credit unraveling that Jamie Dimon warned about, the reality of AI's data ceiling and whether AGI is closer or further than we think, and close with a candid conversation about James Van Der Beek's passing — and the financial planning lessons it quietly raises abou...

In this episode, Colin and Wheeler take a hard look at the FIRE movement—Financial Independence, Retire Early—and ask if its rigid rules still make sense in today's world. We revisit the movement's origins in the 2008 financial crisis and the influence of figures like Mr. Money Mustache. We break down the different "flavors" of FIRE, from the extreme frugality of "Lean FIRE" to the more flexible "Barista FIRE" and "Coast FIRE," where the goal is to cover your lifestyle rather than fully punching out.

The conversation goes beyond the math to explore the human side of fina...

In this episode, Colin and Wheeler break down the buzz surrounding the newly proposed Trump Accounts. We cut through the political noise to examine the core of the proposal: a government-seeded investment account for every child born in America between 2025–2028. We discuss the profound impact of compounding from birth and how these accounts could fundamentally shift the way families approach generational wealth for the next generation.

Beyond the legislation, we tackle the challenge of maintaining an optimistic outlook in a world of "eternal dross." Wheeler shares his recent journey of cleaning up his newsfeed—swapping worthless rubbish for...

In this episode, Colin and Wheeler sit down with Dr. Daryl Appleton, a renowned psychotherapist and executive coach, to explore the complex psychology of high performers. We dive into a paradoxical truth: the very traits that propel us to the top—grit, perfectionism, and relentless ambition—can often become the biggest barriers to long-term fulfillment. Dr. Daryl Appleton explains how to recognize when your "strengths" have begun to work against you and how to navigate the difficult transition from a life of constant "doing" to one of meaningful "being."

The conversation shifts to the critical concept of an "...