For years, the big worry about 529 college-savings plans was “what if my kid doesn’t use all of it?” Pull the money out for anything but education and you’d owe tax plus a 10% penalty on the earnings. SECURE 2.0 changed that. Starting in 2024, you can convert a 529 to a Roth IRA for the same beneficiary — turning leftover college money into a tax-free head start on retirement. It’s a genuinely great feature, but the fine print is strict, so let’s walk through exactly how it works.
Continue reading “How to Convert a 529 to a Roth IRA (2026 Rules)”Blog
TSP Roth Conversion: What Changed in 2026
For years, federal employees who searched for a TSP Roth conversion hit the same wall: you couldn’t actually do one inside the Thrift Savings Plan. Your only path was to roll traditional TSP money out to a traditional IRA and convert it there. That changed on January 28, 2026. The TSP now lets you convert traditional balances to Roth right inside your account, and for a lot of feds chasing early retirement, it’s a big deal.
Continue reading “TSP Roth Conversion: What Changed in 2026”WordPress Security Hardening Without Touching Code
When Claude audited kindoflost.com, the security findings weren’t dramatic. There was no sign of an active breach, no malware, no obvious damage. But there were several open doors that bots probe automatically every day on every WordPress site on the internet — and all of them were unlocked. This post covers exactly what we found and what we did about it, none of which required editing a theme file or writing PHP.
Continue reading “WordPress Security Hardening Without Touching Code”How to Set Up Cloudflare Correctly for a WordPress Site
Cloudflare is one of the best free tools available for a small WordPress site. It sits between your visitors and your hosting server, handling caching, security, and DNS — all at once. But having Cloudflare installed is not the same as having it configured correctly. When I used Claude to audit kindoflost.com, we found that Cloudflare was active but had several misconfigurations that were silently causing problems — a duplicate DNS record, services being proxied that shouldn’t be, SSL running in a weaker mode than necessary, and no real caching rules in place.
Continue reading “How to Set Up Cloudflare Correctly for a WordPress Site”
My WordPress Site Was a Mess. Here’s How I Found Out.
If you run a small WordPress site and haven’t thought much about optimization, security, or caching — this series is for you. A few weeks ago I used Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic, to do a full technical review of this very site — the one you’re reading right now. Claude walked me through every problem it found and every fix in real time, while I made the changes directly in my dashboards. What we uncovered was not great — but the process turned out to be genuinely useful, so I’m documenting every step here so you can do the same thing on your own site.
