If you have moved abroad to start a business or teach English then you might be tempted to forget about all the bureaucracy in the US and not file your taxes. While this probably won’t matter much in the short term, in the long term your unfiled taxes could come back to haunt you.

You have two ways to get access to Index Funds with Schwab, either through their Mutual funds or ETFs. Both have their pros and cons but ultimately I chose to use mutual funds because they allow automatic investing and you can also buy a set amount (e.g. $100.00).

I started out by investing in low cost ETFs with Charles Schwab. I wanted to learn more about investing and thought that I could manage it myself and I also had fun doing in (while the market was going up). I quickly realized that I wasn’t able to look at my investments objectively…