A lot of problems can be solved with money, far more than people often want to believe. At the same time, the human mind isn’t naturally wired to handle money well, and all of history has been plagued with crooks who will take as much as they can get, either by force or through deception. […]
Voting With Your Dollars Doesn’t Always Work
A week or two ago, I discovered that Amazon no longer lets you search product reviews without logging in. On the one hand, these reviews are probably being scraped constantly by web crawlers, driving traffic costs up, and no doubt that may have something to do with the market for fake reviews. But let’s be […]
California Burning: Reflections on Insurance
As many people know, several suburban housing areas near Los Angeles have burnt down as fires tear through the area. This sucks for all of those people – and hopefully they are otherwise okay – but what is maybe a little less talked about is how several weeks or months ago, insurance companies stopped insuring […]
A Few Principles for Monthly Budgets
December was an absolute bloodbath of spending for me, not even considering the Christmas gifts I bought. It all started with a few ill-reasoned purchases of vintage mainframe manuals, which ate a $50 chunk out of my budget, and then progressed to numerous “I’ve wanted this for awhile” items, including a few otherwise very fun […]
Meta-Politics: Conspiracies
The hardest part about trying to be an objective thinker is that you often find yourself sandwiched between your own bias and the bias of another person. If you can acknowledge the biases in both of you, that seems like an intellectually honest thing to do, but then you often won’t project the air of […]
Affording Three Years of Unemployment
It’s been almost 3 years since I quit my job, and as time continues passing, people have started giving me stranger and stranger reactions to the subject. This was especially notable last week visiting family when, over breakfast with my parents, my Dad mentioned I must be doing pretty good to still have money, and […]
Small, Stupid Ways to Spend Money
Just as with my food budget, I give myself $400 every month for discretionary spending, which consists of everything from clothes, to books, to paper towels, to restaurants. Things like annual vehicle registration, gifts for my nieces, and expensive car parts are outside of this budget, but I’m still frustrated how I exceed this $400 […]
Good Success vs Bad Success: Competition, Self-Esteem, and Purpose
It might seem odd to label success as either good or bad, but I think there’s some value in recognizing the difference. But first off, some background. Lately, I’ve been thinking more about a question I had some time ago: how can you choose to reject something and not also condemn it? This is easy […]
Rejecting the Lies of Self-Help
I recently purchased a book on financial independence written by one of the FIRE couples whose blogs I used to read. I was a little shocked just how the lead author approached her life. Having grown up in abject poverty, her general contention was that this poverty had the positive side effect of teaching her […]
Saving Money on Groceries
I budget about $400 every month for groceries, and this seems to be a realistic target. But not all too many years ago, my goal was $200 every month, although I rarely achieved this, typically spending closer to $300. Then the pandemic happened, and everything has gone up since then. This still kind of shocks […]