Welcome to Affluent Notes

If you have been a subscriber of this newsletter for any length of time, you may have noticed things look a little different. That is because they are. Millionaire Habits has a new name and new ownership. We have rebranded as Affluent Notes, and we are genuinely excited to introduce ourselves and share everything we have planned for this community going forward.

This is not a cosmetic change. New ownership means a new editorial direction, a new voice, and a fundamentally different approach to what gets published here. We acquired this newsletter because we believe there is a real and persistent gap in the investing content space. Most financial newsletters fall into one of two categories: surface-level noise produced by people who have never managed real money, or thinly disguised marketing vehicles dressed up as independent research. We intend to be neither.

Our goal is straightforward. We want to produce honest, thoughtful, high-quality content for investors who are serious about understanding markets, allocating capital intelligently, and developing the kind of analytical foundation that actually leads to long-term results. We will not pretend to have every answer. But we have spent careers in this business, and what we write will reflect that.

We are grateful for every reader who has followed this newsletter and we look forward to earning your continued attention under this new chapter.

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About Me

I am keeping my identity private for now, and I will explain why in a future issue. But I want to give you a real, substantive sense of who is writing to you, because context matters when you are deciding whose investment thinking is worth your time.

I spent ten years working on the buyside. My area of focus was small and microcap value stocks, a corner of the market that most institutional investors ignore entirely, either because position sizing constraints make it impractical or because it requires more work than following analyst coverage on large cap names. That institutional neglect is precisely what makes the space interesting. When capital cannot or will not flow into an asset, you tend to find prices that have no relationship to underlying value, and that is where the opportunity lives.

Over the course of that career I developed a firm command of capital markets, financial statement analysis, and the discipline required to identify and purchase assets that other people do not want. That last part sounds simple but it is genuinely difficult in practice. Buying something when the market consensus is negative, when the story is broken, when the sector is out of favor, or when the company is too small for anyone to care about requires a specific kind of intellectual and emotional fortitude. It also requires a rigorous analytical process so that you are distinguishing genuine mispricing from value traps. I learned both.

I retired early. I now manage my own capital full time, which means every investment decision I make is personal. There is no institutional mandate constraining me, no benchmark I have to explain myself against, and no committee I need to convince. I can go wherever the value is, hold for as long or as short as the situation warrants, and size positions based on conviction rather than career risk.

Over the years I have deployed capital across many different industries and asset classes. Real estate has been a meaningful part of that, and I have bought assets in industrial, residential, and commercial categories. The common thread across everything I have owned is the same: I buy good assets at cheap prices, particularly when the selling pressure is driven by fear, institutional constraints, narrative collapse, or simple indifference rather than any deterioration in the underlying asset itself.

What to Expect from Affluent Notes

We want to be transparent about how this newsletter will work, because we think the structure matters and we want you to understand exactly what you are getting and why.

The newsletter will operate on two tiers. Here is what each one contains and the thinking behind them.

FREE

Process & Education

• How we underwrite stocks
• Valuation frameworks we use
• How we find interesting ideas
• Mental models for capital allocation
• Reading financial statements well
• Thinking about risk and position sizing

PAID

Ideas & Full Analysis

• Specific stocks we are buying
• Full underwriting on each position
• Industries we are focused on now
• What we think assets are worth
• Why the market is mispricing them
• Our ongoing portfolio thinking

The free newsletter will focus on process and education. We will write about how we actually underwrite stocks, the frameworks we use to think about valuation, the methods we use to surface interesting ideas before they become crowded, and the mental models that have served us well across a long career of managing money. This is not going to be generic finance content. We will be specific about our actual process, the way we read financial statements, how we think about capital structure, what we look for in management, and how we assess whether a discount to intrinsic value is real or illusory.

If you want to become a meaningfully better investor and understand how serious, experienced capital allocators actually think about buying businesses, the free tier is where we will lay that out in plain language with no agenda attached.

The paid tier is where we get specific. Subscribers will receive access to the actual ideas we are looking at, the stocks we are buying or considering, and the full analytical work behind each position. We will walk through how we underwrite each name, what we believe the business is worth and why, what the path to value realization looks like, and what could go wrong. We will also share which industries and pockets of the market we are currently focused on and why the setup there looks interesting to us right now.

We are deep value investors. That means we are spending our time in places most people are not. We are buying things that are out of favor, misunderstood, thinly covered by Wall Street, or temporarily impaired by something that we believe is either fixable or already being fixed without the market noticing. We are not chasing momentum, following consensus recommendations, or buying companies because they are well known. We are doing the work to find assets trading at a meaningful discount to what they are worth and building conviction positions when no one else wants to own them. That orientation defines everything we do.

We have bought businesses in industries ranging from basic materials to financial services to niche industrials to consumer companies nobody follows. We have owned real estate. We have purchased things that had no sell-side coverage, no institutional ownership, and no near-term catalyst. Some of our best investments have been in companies most investors could not have named. That is not accidental. The less attention an asset gets, the more likely it is that the price reflects something other than what the asset is actually worth.

We are glad you are here. This is going to be worth your time.