This is a juicy post.

Instead of telling y’all what to do, I am sharing exactly what tools and services I personally use to run my entire financial life.

This includes the specific providers I use for:

As an added bonus, I’ve included some of the fun personal finance and travel “hacks” I’ve found over the years.

By reading this, you will understand how I manage my own finances — and if your situation has any similarities with mine, you may find a provider you like.

Full Disclosure: I'm writing this as myself, not as some investment adviser or broker-dealer representative. This is just educational stuff and my personal thoughts - not investment, legal, tax, or professional advice. While my startup Carry owns an investment advisor and broker dealer, this is not meant to be an advertisement and nothing here represents them. Financial decisions involve risk, including losing money. Taxes are complex. Please do your own research or talk to a licensed pro before acting on anything you read here.

Over the last few years, I’ve tried almost every single investing platform to figure out exactly what works for me.

As context, I highly recommend reading my post How to (Not) Invest Life-Changing Money — I break down how I iterated upon finding my ideal approach to investments.

Right now, here are exactly the platforms I use for investing today:

Most of the dollars I invest today go into direct indexing into the stock market.

I do not believe most investors should try and find “alpha” (aka differentiated performance) by making better investments.

Instead, we are better off indexing into the stock market which has historically returned an average of 8% every single year.

However, instead of buying an index fund or Vanguard ETF, I choose a “direct indexing" strategy where I buy every single stock individually.

Why do I do this?

Tax efficiency.

By owning every single stock, I benefit from increased volatility, and can potentially harvest up to 40% of my initial investment as a tax loss. This is very meaningful to me as this loss will offset other gains I may have across my portfolio.

The direct indexing provider I use is Frec.

I love them for a few different reasons:

Here is what my portfolio looks like on Frec:

I’ll soon share an even more detailed post breaking down exactly how I use Frec to automate most of my investing.

If you want to try Frec, you can use my referral link and receive a free $250 to invest.

This one is easy.

I use my own startup Carry for every single retirement dollar I have:

I’m biased but this is why using Carry is a no-brainer for me: (you know, aside from the fact that I run the company…)

My long term goal is to emulate what Peter Thiel was able to accomplish with his $5B Roth IRA.

My strategy is use my Solo 401k to get a lot of dollars into a Roth IRA, and then use the Roth to take the occasional bet on assets with asymmetric upside. No other platform will allow me to do this as elegantly as Carry.

I need to start simplifying my providers here because I use a little bit of everything right now.

But as of today, here are the brokerages I use:

One of the most painful parts of my personal finance setup is tracking the 100+ startup and fund positions I currently own.

This has led me to create a new rule for myself in the last few years:

If the investment cannot be made on a vehicle controlled by Angellist, I am simply not going to invest.

This rule is not as limiting as it may appear — I can still make the majority of startup investments via Angellist. These are typically either set up as:

The biggest benefit to me of investing via Angellist is a consolidated tax packet at the end of the year. Even though this generates hundreds of K-1’s, it has details on all my startup investments in a single place.

Without this, the madness of chasing every individual provider and investment to keep track of capital gains, losses and distributions is exhausting.

At the risk of sounding like hyperbole, I genuinely do not think any return I may make investing in deals personally or via bespoke fund solutions is worth the amount of time and stress to keep track of it.

Despite trying lots of neobanks and fancy new startups, I’ve settled on a very old school choice as my primary banking partner: JP Morgan Chase.

When I first moved to America, Bank of America was the only provider willing to set up a bank account for an international student.

A few years later, I migrated over to Chase which had a substantially better online experience and stuck with them.

After selling my business, I got invited to become a client of the JP Morgan Private Bank, and I’m a fan for several reasons:

If I know you personally, and you believe you’d be a good JPM Private Bank client, email me and I’ll try and get you a referral.

Mercury wins this and it isn’t particularly close.

I first used them for a consulting LLC I had setup, and when it came time to choose a primary banking provider for Carry, they were the very obvious choice.

They have the cleanest interface of any provider, make painful things like wires relatively straightforward and are led by an impressive founder constantly shipping new features.

If you want a free $250 from Mercury, you can use my referral link.

If you read my article on 7 Things I Wish I Knew About Money in 20s, you’ll know that I used to be against credit cards and any kind of debt for a very long time.

But, ever since I discovered how powerful credit cards can be to travel in style for (almost) free, I’ve been a huge proponent.

To me, credit cards and travel are inextricably linked so I’m talking about both of them in the same section.

As with most things personal finance, I’m not a hyper optimizer — I enjoy the Pareto 80% of the results with 20% of the work.

Ironically, I only started getting into optimizing credit cards after making a reasonable amount of money. The more you spend, the more worth it it can be to figure out how to fly first class for free.

I use only two credit cards — both of which are paid and likely not the best option if you’re trying to keep a low annual burn, but I enjoy them both.

I use the:

For most people, either one of these options is likely good enough — but I personally enjoy having both for different reasons.

This is what I enjoy the American Express Platinum card for:

And the JP Morgan Reserve Card is good for pretty much everything the Amex doesn’t cover:

Having both cards also adds redundancy in case I need a higher credit limit or I lose a card — and gets you access to airlines lounges by both networks.

Ironically, I don’t particularly care for lounges or too many of the fringe benefits.

Having grown up in the Middle East, I was surprised by how much most airlines in America suck compared to those in Asia.

However, given my location (NYC), I decided to make Delta my primary US carrier since they have the best premium experience with Delta One.

With that said, when it comes to redeeming free travel, I almost never redeem my points on Delta since they offer you terrible value.

I typically use one of the following carriers for redemption:

Remember: you can typically get substantially better value for your point by transferring out to a partner vs using the credit card travel portal to book.

After recently running the numbers, I was shocked to see I spend 30+ nights in hotels every year (largely traveling with family).

For hotels, I like staying in nice places and typically book most of my hotels via the Amex Travel Portal since:

I am a member of both Marriott Bonvoy and the Hyatt Rewards Program, and these can be useful if there is a very specific place I want to stay at.

By my estimates, spending a small amount of time on credit card optimization, I earn about ~6 figures a year in annual, untaxed value.

Despite the fact that I run a startup to help people save money on taxes, you may find it reassuring that I dread doing my taxes just as much as you likely do.

I went from having incredibly straightforward taxes for the majority of my adult life to an immensely complicated situation in only a few years.

For most of my professional life, my approach to taxes went like this:

I would do absolutely nothing until April 14.

I would then panic and log on to Turbotax. I would hurriedly “do my taxes” and optimize for speed versus saving money.

But that was totally fine then as all my income was a single W-2 salary and a few 1099’s from random brokerages.

But, my life changed in 2020 after selling my startup.

I hired a big, flashy tax firm — Andersen Tax — to handle the big tax planning pieces around my sale, and they filed my returns over the next few years.

Eventually, I churned from them for a several different reasons, but the two big ones were:

So in 2024, I moved over to the custom tax practice we have inside Carry called Carry VIP.

You may think my own company would let me use the service for free, but sadly, I’m getting the full customer experience and paying full price!

My experience as a very biased Carry VIP customer so far has been extremely positive, but we’re still working on being able to ramp up capacity.

A couple of things I have enjoyed as an end customer:

If you also have a relatively complicated tax situation, and are looking for a program that could save you money on taxes, you can fill out the consult form on the Carry VIP website.

And maybe, if you mention you read the post by the guy who started the company, you could receive a 20% discount on your first year.

In addition to filing taxes as an individual, I set up two trusts before selling my company:

Each trust allowed me to multiply my $10M QSBS limit, while also helping move assets outside my estate.

While these trusts were historically painful to set up and operate, I’ve since started working with the team at Valur who handle the entire implementation and tax reporting for my CRUT.

They will soon be able to also support my Dynasty Trust, and I’ll eventually move that over as well.

If you are considering setting up trusts, you can use this link for a free consultation with Valur.

And, stay tuned soon for my deep dive on trusts and when to consider them a part of your estate planning strategy.

What questions do you have about my personal finance stack? If you leave a comment below, I’ll try my best to respond.

See you next week… I have a special announcement to share then!

Disclosures: This post is for informational and educational purposes only and solely reflects the personal views of the author. It is not investment, legal, tax, or professional advice. Any examples, experiences, or investment returns discussed do not guarantee future results. Laws and regulations discussed are subject to change and may not apply to your individual circumstances. Unless specifically stated, posts do not reflect the views or opinions of The Vibes Company Inc. or its affiliates.