Category: Economics

Strong preferences can severely limit your opportunities to save money, but a special form of this – perfectionism – has even greater power to limit these opportunities. I would not describe myself as a perfectionist, per se, but I have some “perfection-istic” dispositions, and one of those is in relation to my car. For the […]

When considering assets and capital, we tend to group things based on their general characteristics, and we name these groups by what we call “class”. So when talking about investments, we break them down into “asset classes”, often real estate, stocks, bonds, or commodities, and this makes it easier to talk about these things based […]

For the past year or so, it’s occurred to me that people at the lowest income levels are usually getting screwed by most policies. Not only is there very little money left over after expenses for things like contributions to a 401(k), but the tax incentives are almost nil for that anyway. Prices skew toward […]

I’m not yet ready to commit myself to any serious study of macroeconomics: it’s simply too large of a field, with too many interconnecting pieces. I don’t know that my interests will actually help me go very deep here. But I think thought games can do a great deal to help anybody think clearly about […]

As a kid, half my life was spent thirsting for the next toy or video game. I could occasionally save up my allowance to buy nice or expensive things, but I would often have to rely on the luck of Christmas or my birthday for the those much more expensive things, especially video game consoles. […]

A lot of effort goes into finding the most optimal paths for various aspects of life. My thoughts gravitate toward finding this on a regular basis, but the truth seems ever elusive. I get tired. I get frustrated. Recently, my car developed a thunk going over bumps, in conjunction with a slight creak whenever I […]

Several months ago, I had an interesting thought concerning the actual cost of working on my car. Back at my old apartment, I had the option to rent a garage for an additional $75/month on top of my rent for the apartment. I never took this option because I was too cheap for that sort […]

I’ve had a dozen things to write lately, and all of them have been worthless, but as I was thinking how best to categorize my own financial strategy as compared to other financial strategies, I remembered some loose ideas I’ve had over time about how our financial decisions don’t operate in a vacuum. Too much […]

Most car parts behave as a unit but consist of smaller parts inside. When these internal parts fail, the unit often requires replacement. If you do this yourself, you can save a lot of money, but you can save even more money if you diagnose which internal parts failed and change those rather than the […]