separate or joint accounts?

Moontower #287

Oct 05, 2025

Friends,

If you read nothing else in today’s letter, hear me now: THANK YOU.

Thank you from me. Thank you from my good friend Jamie’s entire family. Words cannot rise to the occasion.

You will recall a March issue titled Moontower Unite:

I got a distressing text on Tuesday. A close friend I grew up with informed me that her younger brother’s daughter, Rachel, was just diagnosed with AML, a rare aggressive leukemia. Rachel turned 10 this week.

I just sat there. What is there to say? How can I help?

Her little bro Jeff was like my own little bro and now he’s living a nightmare. Not to mention having an 11-year-old daughter who is being passed around the relatives in NJ as the parents will be posted up at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia for the next 5 months for what is just the preliminary stage of treatment. Daily in-patient chemo.

I went to Twitter and found that the follower community there is amazingly generous and I promised to put this in the letter as well. There’s no pressure.

Jamie texts me again a few days ago with a link to her Facebook:

After admitting she’s been sobbing for 2 straight days, Jamie followed up to send a thank you to all you readers and followers.

I didn’t share the prognosis at the time. Nobody would want to write those words.

So if you responded to either the gofundme or even my later plea for bone marrow donors treat yourself today. To borrow one of my wife’s favorite quotes — you may not be able to change the world, but you can change a world.

And you did.

Exchange Students

For the second time in three years, we participated in a program to host Japanese exchange students for a week.

We do it through local org that brings students a few times a year. Our guests were 2 16-year-old boys, Yuki and Haruto.

Here’s how it works:

After some vetting, the org matches you with 2 students and gives you $700.
We pick up the boys on Sunday evening. In this program, there was a total of 40 students.
We bring them to BART each morning so they can join the rest of the students on a day-long excursion. Some examples included seeing a museum and GG bridge, and visiting Stanford & Cal. We pick them up from BART around 5pm.
They leave the following Saturday morning.

Effectively, you hang out with them for 6 evenings. It’s not a big commitment, still we make it a hectic week. We take them out to dinner (burger night, bbq night, taco night, take-out night where we get pizzas from multiple places for a taste test), go bowling, host gatherings with Japanese-speaking friends (we did that on 2 separate nights). We take them shopping as they always want to buy gear. The Dick’s Sporting Goods excursion has never failed.

Navigating the language barrier is part of the adventure. The upside of this is the bonding. It is remarkable how memorable both Yinh and I and our boys find this. They still refer to Mihiro and Tomonuri who we hosted in 2023. In fact, the boys stay in touch Yinh via IG and even reached out when we posted the photos of our latest guests.

There’s a ritual where the students give gifts from Japan and share the notes their parents send. This is one of my favorite things…to read what someone says about their babies that they send over. Neither of our guests had ever left Japan until this trip. Imagine writing that note.

We send them home with lots of swag and notes back to their parents telling them how well-mannered their sons are (which is impossible to exaggerate). It’s delightful to hear about their families, upbringing, what they want to study or do when they grow up. And of course, to see the questions and thoughts it prompts in our own kids. After the 2023 visit our boys wanted to learn a foreign language because when they saw their Japanese friends talking to our visitors, it looked like a superpower. Since then, they have been enthusiastic students of Vietnamese and now have a secret language with mom and grandma that daddy doesn’t understand.

I could go on, but it’s one of those things that you either think sounds cool or doesn’t, I just want to remind you that it exists. I think it’s great for families with kids, but I also noticed that there’s a lot of empty-nesters at the pickup. Not a bad way to bring the sound of voices back into a house that’s too big for a couple.

Oh and a fun thing I just learned yesterday as we were chatting about our guests with good friends who live in Texas, who also had a memorable bond with their Japanese students: this summer when visiting Japan for their son’s baseball tourney, their students’ whole family flew to see them and watch the games!

Money Angle

My wife has a pet project that involves very candid conversations about money matters with other women.

Think of today as a PSA born from a bit of advice she gives surprisingly too often:

Do not have meaningful amounts cash sitting idly in a bank account.

Outside of the cash you leave in your checking account for covering regular ebbs and flows in receipts and expenses, keep any extra cash you don’t want to invest in T-bills. Especially, if you live in NY, CA, NJ, etc.

T-bills are state-tax exempt, but high-yield savings account are not.

You can buy T-bills through most brokerages (I’ve taught so many people in my extended family how to do this) .

Alternatively, you can buy short-term T-bill ETFs like BIL, VBIL, or SGOV. You can buy ETFs just like you buy stocks — through your brokerage as well. The interest is paid via monthly dividends and it’s still state-tax exempt.

A woman told my wife this week — “I think talking to you just made me like $10,000.”

The wife’s project reminds me how many false assumptions I have about what is common knowledge around money.

Money Angle For Masochists

Ilia Bouchev ran oil trading for Koch for over 20 years. I’ve traded oil and related derivatives more than anything else in my career. This interview with Rory Johnston is terrific. Ilia is giving the straight scoop, so you should just listen if you are at all curious about oil trading.

Just one brief comment from me:

Ilia talks of fundamentals still mattering, but you are mostly trading the “reaction function”. I think this is a great way to understand equities trading. It feels like it’s all flows and reaction function because the realized fundamentals are so far in the future, beyond the horizon of useful feedback loops if you are trying to trade on fundamentals.

[One can invest on fundamentals, meaning underwriting some far future of the world, but not with the signal-to-noise you can verify from high turnover trading strategies.]

From My Actual Life

While our exchange students bid us farewell yesterday, this week, much of my east coast fam is visiting to celebrate a cousin’s wedding in Napa. It’s a nice season to get married. In fact, Yinh and I celebrated 16 years on October 2nd :-)

I mentioned my wife’s pet project about money matters. As you can imagine, how couples deal with money, joint accounts, budgets is one of the main themes.

I’ll share a little about our approach to finance in no particular order.

Do we have a prenup?

Nope.

We both started with nothing but college debt. Neither of us is in line for a meaningful inheritance and in fact both provide financial support to at least some of our parents. We met on the day I turned 25 and she is a few years younger. We didn’t have an imbalance in career prospects like me being a trader and her being a teacher. We both had real upside. I say that as a backdrop for why we wouldn’t even have considered a prenup. We felt like we were in similar situations. But this left-brain explanation is secondary to just — being against the idea. Classic YMMV situation.

Do we have separate accounts?

No. There is literally no concept of mine vs hers. That even goes for spending. I ordered a $300 guitar pedal yesterday and told her because I feel compelled to tell her anytime I spend say more than $100 on something that is only for me. Her reaction every time I do that is, “If I told you every time I spent a few hundred bucks on something for myself, you’d be upset”.

Which brings me to…

Do we have a budget?

Wellllll…it’s more like guidelines.

7 or 8 years ago I did an exercise…I reviewed all our spending for a year. Yinh called it The Audit. I wanted to understand what it cost to wake up in the morning the way we were living. We looked at where we were spending to decide if it was in line with our priorities both in the consumption sense (was X dollars on travel acceptable) and in terms of our savings rate (or what I think of as giving our future selves a say in our current spending).

The value of the exercise was mostly understanding where our money was going so that in the future we can know if and how much creep we were allowing. The knowledge was useful because it was a chance to “sign off” on how things were going. We deemed the pressure it put on us acceptable with regard to our wider financial picture, prospects, and ambitions.

The exercise also had an unanticipated benefit. It stopped me from caring about any single transaction. If you don’t do the exercise it’s hard to put the splurge in context of how much it moves your annual nut. If Yinh’s self-care expenditures dwarf the cash that I spend on myself, but we’re already ok with the composition of our overall spending then why should I care? We’re on track.

It’s changed my entire neurosis about money. I quote Walter all the time: “I’m shomer shabbos…I don’t handle money”. As long as I feel like my spending habits are in line to what they’ve been, I don’t think about day-to-day money. Yinh is the one who looks at bank balances and credit cards regularly (part of this is admittedly good hygiene — catching errors etc, but part of it is to satisfy her money neuroses).

I only review everything during tax prep season. This gives me the chance to see if my “feeling that my spending habits” are constant is well-calibrated. Instead of giving money daily mindshare I give it a dedicated time for review.

Who manages our investment portfolio?

I handle the general portfolio allocation. I track the running portfolio vol and correlations for public/liquid investments. About 2 weeks after each quarter end, I update the marks on any private funds, and record all bank balances. It serves as a quarterly net worth check-in.

[For angel investments, I don’t update marks unless there’s a downward revision. Marks are at cost. Never up.]

“Taking the pulse” every quarter is more of a Yinh-requirement than mine. I’d be fine with every 6-months and very likely just every tax season. However, I think you can spot red flags in private funds if you look quarterly, so it’s easy to agree with her without feeling like I’m just patronizing her neurosis.

Investment ideas can come from either of us. I just manage the asset allocation around whatever we add/subtract.

For investments that represent less 1% of assets we don’t really need to discuss them, but we usually do anyway. We’re both curious about investing generally which is probably not going to be the case if 1 or zero partners is in finance.

Who is more spendy?

For ordinary matters, Yinh by far. With my family coming this week she wanted to rent a mechanical bull and tequila donkey or something for a backyard party. I’m the circuit breaker. I put the kabash on that. Instead, she bought Tornado foosball table off FB marketplace. Facepalm.

She’s definitely the minister of fun on regular life. The Japanese exchange program was even her idea.

My wiring is too ascetic. On an intellectual level, I think that wiring is faulty, so I appreciate that she’s this way. I push back, we land somewhere in the middle, both finding an acceptable mix of responsibility and joy.

When it comes to big-ticket items, I’m the spendier one. I was way more comfortable with budget for our new house. I pushed for a larger budget for the wedding. We are already going over budget on the ADU design and Yinh is the one imposing discipline.

I don’t have any convincing hypothesis for the difference in our biases.

(For mine, I’d guess there’s some sense that spending big on non-recurring items feels like less of a lifestyle-creep risk than frequent, smaller splurges. I’m not even convinced by that logic though.)

Microcosm of marriage

Differences abound. If your relationship is worth it, you make them manageable. Disagreeing on that fact is the only difference that cannot be managed.

Seeing your partnership from the facet of money is a reminder that you didn’t marry yourself. And that, my friends, is worth celebrating.

16 years from this day…

I get this…

That’s me and my 9-year-old playing on a stage together for the first time.

There’s no mystery about what I’m supposed to do in life. Resolve to deserve what I have. I’ll never be ever to get there, but that’s the type of goal that keeps me alive.

Stay groovy

☮️

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