Worksheets & downloads
Work through it on paper.
Worksheet · PDF
The Deciding Variable Worksheet
One page per major debate: the question, where the experts land, and the honest self-assessment that tells you which camp you're actually in.
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Worksheet · PDF
Pay It Off vs. Invest It — Run Your Numbers
The mortgage-payoff math with your rate, your balance, and your honest answer to the behavior question. No advice, just your inputs.
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Checklist · PDF
The Emergency Fund Sizing Checklist
From Sabatier's lean one month to Orman's twelve — a ten-question checklist that maps your job stability and sleep-at-night factor to a range.
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Downloads are free for newsletter readers — each week's issue includes the worksheet for that week's debate.
The bookshelf
The primary sources.
Every position on the map traces back to a published source. These are the ones we reach for most — start with any of them and you'll understand half the map.
Investing · Bogle
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
The index-fund case, from the man who invented the index fund. The left pole of half our debates.
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Behavior · Housel
The Psychology of Money
Why the deciding variable is almost always you. The closest thing this site has to a founding text.
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Debt · Ramsey
The Total Money Makeover
The strongest version of the anti-debt position. Read it even if you disagree — especially if you disagree.
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FIRE · Collins
The Simple Path to Wealth
The whole simple-path philosophy in one book: spend less than you earn, invest the surplus, hold forever.
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Leverage · Kiyosaki
Rich Dad Poor Dad
The right pole of the leverage debates. Polarizing, influential, and worth understanding on its own terms.
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Meaning · Robin
Your Money or Your Life
Money as life energy. The book that asks the question every other book on this shelf assumes an answer to.
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Disclosure: book links may become affiliate links, which would earn us a small commission at no cost to you. We only list sources we actually cite on the map.
Glossary
The terms, in plain English.
- The 4% rule
- A retirement guideline from William Bengen's 1994 research: withdraw 4% of your portfolio in year one, adjust for inflation annually, and a diversified portfolio historically survived every 30-year retirement. Whether it holds for 50-year early retirements is a mapped debate.
- Asset allocation
- How your money is divided between stocks, bonds, real estate, cash, and everything else. Most academics consider this — not stock picking — the biggest driver of your results.
- Consensus meter
- Our 0–100 read on how much the mapped voices actually agree on a question. High consensus (like market timing) means the disagreement is at the edges; low consensus (like rent vs. buy) means the experts are genuinely split.
- The deciding variable
- The single fact about you — behavior, time horizon, edge, temperament — that determines which expert's answer applies to your situation. Every debate on the map names one.
- Dollar-cost averaging
- Investing a fixed amount on a fixed schedule regardless of price, so you buy more shares when prices are low and fewer when they're high — and never have to guess the right moment.
- FIRE
- Financial Independence, Retire Early: saving a high fraction of income and investing it so work becomes optional decades ahead of schedule. Comes in flavors — lean, fat, coast, barista — that disagree with each other constantly.
- Index fund
- A fund that owns every stock in a market index rather than trying to pick winners. Costs almost nothing, beats most professionals over time, and started roughly a third of the arguments on this site.
- Leverage
- Using borrowed money to control a bigger asset — most commonly a mortgage on a rental property. Multiplies gains and losses alike, which is why the map splits so hard on it.
- Margin of safety
- Benjamin Graham's rule: only buy when the price is comfortably below your estimate of value, so being somewhat wrong doesn't ruin you.
- Roth vs. Traditional
- Two tax treatments for retirement accounts. Roth: pay tax now, withdraw tax-free later. Traditional: deduct now, pay tax on withdrawal. The right answer is a bet on your future tax rate — mapped here.
- Sequence-of-returns risk
- The danger that a market crash early in retirement — while you're withdrawing — permanently damages a portfolio that would have survived the same crash later. The hidden villain of most withdrawal-rate debates.
- Three-fund portfolio
- Total US stock market + total international + total bond market. The Bogleheads' default answer to almost everything, and Rick Ferri's answer to nearly everything else.