A $1,000 stake in Starbucks at its 1992 IPO is worth over $400,000 today.

That is a 40,000% return.

Enough to fund a retirement. Buy a second house. Cover a decade of not caring what the market did that morning.

Wall Street almost missed it.

Starbucks priced at $17 a share in June 1992. Split-adjusted, that is about $0.27. The IPO was oversubscribed, but nothing about the pitch screamed 40,000%. Starbucks was a Seattle chain with 165 stores. The biggest coffee brand in America was still Folgers.

The investors who bought at $0.27 did not need to be geniuses.

They needed to be early.

A new coffee empire is being built in the same window right now.

Different country. Different model. Same window.

Green Coffee Company owns 45 coffee farms in Colombia. 10 million trees. 10,000+ acres. Vertically integrated from tree to shelf. Own the farm, own the mill, own the distribution.

They hold the exclusive US and Canadian grocery rights to Juan Valdez, Colombia's most iconic coffee brand and a 75-year heritage name. Ten-year commercial agreement, locked in.

The products are on the shelf at Target, Walgreens, Harris Teeter, and 3,000+ North American stores across 21 states.

Revenue grew from $1M in 2021 to $26M in 2025.

The company is still private. Reserved NASDAQ ticker. Reg A+ qualified. Open to all investors, no accreditation required.

Individual investors can buy in at $1.15, per interest.

Minimum $1,001. Up to 20% bonus shares.

P.S. Starbucks was a 1992 story. This one is still pre-IPO.

Your savings rate

Not the dollar amount. The percentage of what comes in that doesn't go back out.

It is the most powerful variable you control, and the only one that works no matter what markets do. Someone putting away 15% of their income with mediocre returns will usually finish ahead of someone putting away 5% with excellent ones, because the first is feeding the machine and the second is tuning it. Returns are borrowed from the world. A savings rate is manufactured at home. It is also the only number on this list you can change this month, by a decision rather than by waiting.

Where to find it — total contributions last year, divided by gross income. One division.

What a year of your life costs

Your actual annual spending. Not your income, not your budget — what genuinely left your accounts over the last twelve months.

Nearly everybody knows what they earn and guesses at what they spend, almost always low. The gap matters because this figure is the denominator underneath every retirement question worth asking. How much is enough? Enough for what? Until you can say what a year costs, "enough" has no definition and any target you pick is arbitrary. People guess low because the memorable spending is the monthly kind. What distorts the figure is the irregular stuff — the new roof, the insurance renewal, the wedding you flew to — and those are precisely what a twelve-month total catches and a budget does not.

Where to find it — twelve months of statements, total the outflows, subtract anything that went into savings.

Your cash buffer, in months

Months, not dollars — which means you need number two before this one means anything at all.

Thirty thousand in cash is either lavish or thin depending entirely on what a year costs you. Converted into months it stops being an abstraction and becomes a plain answer to a plain question: how long could I pay for my life with nothing coming in? That is what decides whether a bad market is a headline or an emergency, because someone with eight months of cash is never forced to sell at the wrong moment.

Where to find it — cash and savings balances, divided by one twelfth of number two.

Starting as soon as a few months from now, the United States government will make a sweeping change to bank accounts nationwide.

It will give them unprecedented powers to control your bank account.

They could closely track every transaction.

They could even freeze it.

Unless you protect yourself today. Fortunately, there are 4 simple steps you can take to safeguard your savings.

Discover these 4 simple steps here.

Your equity share

What percentage of your invested money sits in stocks. And more to the point: could you have said it before you looked?

Most people can't, and the answer has usually drifted. A portfolio set at 60% stocks years ago and never touched is not a 60% portfolio today — a long run in equities quietly makes you more aggressive than you ever agreed to be. Nobody chose that. It happened while they weren't looking, and it is the easiest of the five to fix.

Where to find it — add the stock and stock-fund balances, divide by the invested total. Leave cash out; that was number three.

Years covered

Now divide. Everything you have invested, divided by number two — what a year of your life costs.

The answer comes out in years, and it is the most honest single figure in personal finance. Not a balance, which tells you nothing by itself. Not a percentage, which tells you less. Years. A million dollars sounds like a great deal of money until you learn that a year of your life costs eighty thousand — at which point you have twelve and a half of them, before growth, pensions or social security do anything at all.

Most people have never done this division. It takes four seconds and it rearranges everything. It will tell you that you are short, or comfortable, or further ahead than you thought and quietly permitted to spend a little. All three of those answers are useful. Not knowing is the only bad outcome.