Kind-of-Lost

Now We’re Working on SEO — Here’s What That Actually Looks Like

If you’ve been following the WordPress optimization series on this blog, you already know this site has been through some changes lately. We fixed security holes, set up Cloudflare properly, got caching working, cleaned up WooCommerce — the whole thing. That series documented every step of turning a quietly broken site into something that actually works the way it should.

This post isn’t part of that series. Think of it as what came after. Continue reading “Now We’re Working on SEO — Here’s What That Actually Looks Like”

How to Speed Up a WordPress and WooCommerce Site on Shared Hosting

Site speed matters more than most small site owners realize. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, which means a slow site is actively hurting your search visibility — not just annoying your visitors. For a WooCommerce site, it’s even more direct: a sluggish checkout experience costs real sales.

Continue reading “How to Speed Up a WordPress and WooCommerce Site on Shared Hosting”

The Best Time to Convert a 401(k) to a Roth IRA

If you’re asking what the best time to convert a 401(k) to a Roth IRA is, here’s the short answer: it’s not a date on the calendar, it’s a low-income year. A conversion is taxed at your marginal rate the year you do it, so the entire game is converting when that rate is as low as it will ever be. Get the timing right and you move money to the tax-free side cheaply; get it wrong and you hand the IRS more than you needed to.

In-Plan Roth Conversion: Convert Inside Your 401(k)

An in-plan Roth conversion lets you move pre-tax money in your workplace retirement account into the Roth side of that same account, without rolling it out to an IRA. You’ll also see it called a “Roth in-plan conversion” or, in IRS language, an in-plan Roth rollover. Whatever the name, the idea is the same: take traditional 401(k), 403(b), governmental 457(b), or TSP dollars, pay the tax now, and let them grow tax-free from here.

How to Convert a 529 to a Roth IRA (2026 Rules)

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.