Category: Financial Independence

Risk Surface is a way of thinking about all the things that could go wrong. It’s a strategy for reducing present and future expenses, both perceived and theoretical. You can kind of put a dollar amount on it, but it’s also more involved than that. Risk Surface, in so far as it can be calculated, […]

For most of the working years of my life, I believe I have made reasonably good decisions with money. But this was all put to the test four years ago when I found myself out of a job for 3 months. I thought my emergency fund was fairly large, but it was scary just how […]

A lot of people are beginning to question the value of higher education. Much of this questioning is important, in my opinion, but it’s easy to read about these issues and crushing student loan debt elsewhere. Here, I really wanted to reflect on some of the more personal elements. Last night, out of sheer curiosity, […]

The economic value we bring to the world is heavily stressed from a young age. When we’re in first grade we’re already being asked what we want to do when we grow up, though we hardly have any idea what this even means. It’s not necessarily wrong to ask these questions, since you will be […]

Several weeks ago, I went metal detecting on my grandmother’s farm. I finally took the plunge on buying a detector because I didn’t want to miss that opportunity, and I knew that if only I could decode the legal rules around the hobby, it’s something I would love. Also, Uncle Sam basically paid for it, […]

How you write a program can have a dramatic impact on its performance. I once wrote a query against geospatial data that took several hours to complete. After searching extensively online for ways to speed it up, I discovered an optimizer hint, one tiny piece of code, that effectively reduced the time to complete from […]

My motivation to be diligent at work often depends on the level of interest I take in a project. Building something new, making it look great and function exactly as it should? Piece of cake: I’m engaged all day. Go back over this and fight an existing system, full of mysterious and hidden standards, to […]

I’m excited for 2020, in large part because I’m now working a job that pays more than my previous job and happens to also give me experience with the things I’d really like to do in software. Given the higher pay, it’s likely that I’ll achieve a 60% savings rate this year. Some of that […]

For all that I’ve written on this blog over the past few years, I really haven’t said much about home ownership. Frankly, it’s a tricky topic. Not the least because it’s one of America’s sacred cows, and to even suggest that buying a house might not always be the best decision is likely to attract […]