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In no particular order, with no particular theme, here are a few random simplification tips. Each one of them were ideas I had for separate posts, but they never really gelled, except #2, which was one of my early, early posts. Hopefully taken as a whole they provide a few simple ways to simplify life…simply.

1. Learn to cook. You will be healthier (fewer health-related bills if you eat homemade healthy food than if you stop for takout every evening) and you will save money (unless you shop exclusively at Whole Paycheck, and even then it’s probably cheaper). Learn to cook healthy food, though. If you don’t cook, learning to cook will change your life for the better: it’s cheaper, healthier and better for your social life.
2. Consolidate accounts. I used to spend a lot of time worrying about ten different credit cards and five different brokerages and a half-dozen retirement accounts and three checking accounts… you get the picture. It got worse when I got married - but then we saw the light and consolidated our accounts. Now I can go to Yodlee (easily the best account consolidation site out there, bar none, which I get through our bank) and tell you my net worth within seconds, pay all of my outstanding bills in minutes (those that aren’t autopaid) and check up on all of my accounts immediately. Our financial “basics” take less than an hour each month to maintain, freeing us up to concentrate on other things.
3. Get married (and the corollary, don’t get divorced) or at least keep a stable monogamous relationship. If you get married, you’ll inevitably spend more money and save more money, have more time and less time - but I believe on balance being married means you have two brains to assault money problems (and opportunities) and we all know two brains are better than one.
4. Stop trading, start investing. One of the worst time-wasters in my life used to be trading. Trying to keep up with the markets was a losing battle. Sure, I won some and lost some but the amount of time I spent and the tiny net improvement over passive investing was not worth it. Make targeted investments in things you understand. If you understand real estate, invest in real estate. If you understand hedge funds, invest in hedge funds. If you don’t understand anything, invest in some books about finance.
5. Take public transportation if it’s available. I know you love your car, and I know the bus is a half mile away and crowded and doesn’t run on your schedule and blah blah blah blah. Public transportation is cheaper, better for the environment, better for your health (lots of walking and stairs). You don’t have to get train insurance, or fill up the subway with gas. You don’t have to take the bus in for repairs or buy new wipers for it. The bus is destroying the planet at a slightly smaller rate.
6. Don’t buy stuff. I’ve already written about this, but I am a firm believer that you should buy stuff you need and don’t buy stuff you don’t. That’s a simple concept but hard to execute for a lot of people.
7. Adapt to change. Trying to fight change in your life can waste money and make life more complicated than it needs to be. At every stage in my life I’ve found instances where I fought changing my habits - I didn’t want to cook at home (too lazy), to consolidate accounts (too much work), to get married (too busy with career), to invest instead of trading (I was smarter than the market, oh yeah), take the bus (I’m a busy international jet-setter, I have to take taxis!), or make do with what I’ve already got (this recipe calls for peppercorns ground by hand in a mortar and pestle, I couldn’t possibly find anything around the house to duplicate that action). Be willing to change your thinking and you’ll be ahead of 90% of the population of Planet Earth.

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photo credit: southtyrolean

I was at a street fair last summer when Little Buddy was first toddling along and knew how to dance just by wobbling back and forth and waving his arms. We were walking with my parents and came across one of the booths playing some music.

If you haven’t ever been to a New York street fair, they are tremendous fun. One of the North-South avenues is blocked off for 30 or 40 blocks and a variety of vendors fill up the streets and pedestrian traffic fills it up quickly. Everything is sold: sheets and bamboo mats, CDs and funnel cakes, high end purses and knockoffs of high end purses. Music blares from every corner, the smell of fried foods and kebabs and onions fill the air, and a good time is had by all.

So in the midst of this street fair Little Buddy tottered along with a protective father hovering over him. We came by a booth selling reggae CDs and blasting out reggae music (or faux reggae - UB40’s “Red Red Wine” - but it’s all good). He stopped and listened, entranced. Two guys who were either rastafarians or very accurate imitators of rastafari style were leaning against the booth, smoking. I am no expert (although I am not a complete naïf) but the smell of their smoke was not exactly cigarette smoke. Eh, no matter, it’s all-natural, after all. I was ready to pass on by with a wry smile, as I do.

But Little Buddy marched up to them and started to dance, beaming like the sun. He turned around in front of the two of them and danced. Everyone walking by laughed. He swayed and popped to the music. One of the two guys turned to me and said, “He is irie, mon, he is irie an’ he don’ care who know.” (That’s my poor written imitation of a Jamaican accent, and it sounds - to me, a fan of reggae music, the most positive, happy music I know - almost unbearably cool). It was a nice comment to make to a still-relatively-new father.

But that’s not the point - the point was that Little Buddy saw his happiness and grabbed it. Children have a way of doing this. They don’t think of consequence and they don’t think of fear or embarrassment. It’s not always a good thing - sometimes caution is necessary - but adults have definitely had this ability to seize happiness beaten out of us. We feel the need to be self-deniers, to SAVE forever for a retirement that may not come or a dream house that will have an empty room because we can’t afford furniture after making the mortgage payments.

If you read a lot about money on the internet, stop once in a while. Buy a latte. Eat lunch in the park. Live your life a bit. I know you need to scrimp and save and deny, deny, deny, but the moments when you can grab your happiness and wring it dry are few and far between. Your money problems will be there tomorrow. Today, be irie.

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“The joy of having a baby today can only be expressed in two words: tax deduction.”

- Anonymous, via About.com

By the time most of you read this post, I will probably be sitting and waiting. Whether I’m sitting and waiting hand and foot on my wife and daughter or still waiting for the doctors to catch up to their schedule remains to be seen. I feel somewhat superstitiously trepidation writing something like this in advance of the event, but today my wife’s C-section was scheduled and we were off to the hospital for our (ever so slightly early) 6:30 am appointment.

photo credit: mape_s

Preparing for a child is a funny exercise. We have been running around, cleaning, organizing, buying and returning for months now. Our son has been fed a steady diet of “I’m a Big Brother” books and given a baby girl doll to care for. We think we’re ready.

And of course you never are… I fully expect to be hit in the head with a brick just like I was when my son was born. The brick was the “wow, I’m a father! uh-oh, I’m a father!” brick. It was followed closely by the “can humans actually survive on this little sleep” brick, by the way.

Posts will still be appearing but forgive me if I’m a little slow replying to emails or comments for a few days! Actually the real chaos will begin early next week when Bubelah and the baby (gotta think of a nickname like Little Buddy has) come home!

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I ride the New Jersey PATH trains into Manhattan most weekdays.  If you aren’t familiar with New York, I can summarize by saying that it’s basically the “New Jersey subway.”  It connects three of the big Jersey cities - Hoboken, Newark and Jersey City - to midtown and lower Manhattan.  A lot of commuters will drive to the station, park and take the train from there rather than ride into the city (I take a bus).  It’s slightly cheaper than the New York subway and (in my opinion) better maintained.

The first stop in Manhattan is the Christopher Street station, in Greenwich Village.  Christopher Street and the immediate area is a charming little bit of Manhattan that summons up images (unfortunately) of Courtney Cox living in a multi-million dollar apartment on an unemployed cook’s earnings.  It’s a nice little area, but not a big center for business - it’s more of a shop-and-restaurant kind of area.  One of my favorite restaurants, Alfama, is nearby.

I never get off at Christopher Street during the work week.  I only exit there if Bubelah and I are going to dinner in the Village, which we haven’t done recently.  But during the work week there’s an odd little scene that goes on during the morning commute.  Two guys who appear to be station workers - I never really see their badges, but they have the general PATH worker getup - stand near the station exit.  And they yell.  A lot.

The funny thing is that they yell really funny, encouraging things to people.  “Looking great!”  “Go get ‘em, tiger!”  “You are the man!” are mixed with cheery waves, high fives and big grins.  These two guys look like they might’ve just finished the evening shift and just decided to hang around to cheer people up.

It’s a fun little scene to watch.  I get a smile from it every day.  And the good lesson is that I hope if someone asks those guys “What do you do?” when meeting them for the first time, they don’t say “I work for the PATH.”  I hope they say “I make people happy.”  It’s nice to see good people doing good things for nothing except the sake of doing good things.

photo credit: skunks… and yes, I know, it’s Hoboken’s PATH station… I couldn’t find a pic of Christopher Street!

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Physics tell us that one of the laws of the universe is this:

You can’t unscramble an egg.

Think about it. It can’t be done. You can freeze liquid water, then heat it and turn it to gas and back to water, but you can’t unscramble an egg. It just won’t unscramble. Hit it with gamma rays, do whatever you want and it won’t unscramble.

I like to think of this every time I feel like eating junk food these days. Sure, I can eventually lose the weight I gain from eating Ho-Hos, but those chemicals and those unneeded calories have passed through my body and there is no way to undo that. As you eat, you are either damaging or helping your body, and that damage - although possibly almost infinitely small - can’t be undone.

The same principle applies to finance. If you spend an hour of your life earning $20, then you spend that $20 on a CD, it’s gone. Your life is gone. If you spend two hours getting a listing ready on eBay and you make a profit of $1.34 selling a CD, that time is gone, too. Was it worth that $1.34? Was the initial purchase of the CD worth $20?

And similarly, every time you watch TV you lose a piece of your life. I know it may sound like an obsessive focus on money, but that is time you could have been working on your education, or coming up with money-saving ideas, or studying investments. Everyone needs to relax, but you have to choose how to spend your life. Watching an episode of Gilligan’s Island for the third time is not what Benjamin Franklin would have done. Tony Robbins has a good bit about watching reruns of programs: he says we have two driving forces in our life, the desire for surprise and the desire for consistency, which are constantly at war. We want to watch a funny TV show for the second time because we know it’s funny; but we also hope something new will happen or we’ll see something we missed before. The chances of both of those desires being met decreases each time you see the same show in reruns. As he says, if you ever watch any TV show or movie more than once - get a life.

And trust me, I do this all the time. I have seen The Matrix and The Russia House so many times I can practically recite them - but I do know it’s time wasted.

So the next time you think about buying that CD or wasting time “making money” on eBay or seeing “that great episode where Gilligan breaks the Professor’s coconut-powered radio” just ask yourself if you really want to scramble that egg. Time is short, and it always - always - moves forward.

photo credit: swanksalot

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Do you ever think what the world would be like without monkeys?  Probably not.  Do we need monkeys?  We don’t eat them, or use them to plow our fields.  They don’t spend money so they don’t help the economy, and the outside possibility always exists that they will develop intelligence and turn all of us into zoo entertainment until Charlton Heston saves us.

But there is no real ‘reason’ for monkeys.  My son sure does like making monkey noises.  He likes seeing pictures of monkeys.  I’m not too proud to admit that the kid in me still gets a thrill seeing a big gorilla in the zoo.  Some of them are quite intelligent, and that’s amazing - I have seen documentary footage of a monkey using a blade of grass to stick in a hole to pull out ants.  That may not seem like much, but that’s using a tool and that’s a sign of rudimentary intelligence.

I don’t think the world would miss monkeys, exactly, if they all disappeared tomorrow.  I’m assuming there wouldn’t be a big upset in the local monkey-area ecosystems or anything of that nature.  Much in the same way that I don’t miss the presence of passenger pigeons, I don’t think my grandchildren would someday worry too much about the lack of monkeys.  They could still watch King Kong the way I watch Jurassic Park - wow, check out the effects on that critter!

Children born today will never know a pre-9/11 world.  They will never know what it’s like not to have a massive, constant onslaught of information (unless they have Luddites for parents, and even then they can’t escape everything).  At least for Americans born in the 21st century, it will be hard to imagine a time when people overseas were excited (in a good way) to meet Americans.  It will be hard for my son to imagine a world without the Web, or where you had to be home to get a phone call.

I think it’s sad, in a way, but it’s a good example of how weak the human mind can be.  I have no trouble with the concept of a man on the moon, but 20 years before that happened a rocket that could travel from Germany to London was an astonishing technical achievement.  Four generations ago heavier-than-air flight was as kooky an idea as telepathy, but now nobody would blink an eye at an airplane.  100 years ago I doubt anyone thought there was any possibility whatsoever that humans could ever have an impact on the atmosphere of the earth.  Obviously even short-term trends can’t be predicted:  I don’t remember reading much in 2005 about the housing crash.  Analysts were saying Bear Stearns was a good investment 24 hours before it collapsed.  People thought Alan Greenspan was a genius.  I thought Lending Club was a decent investment.

I can’t imagine a world without monkeys, but with the way the world is going that day will come.  It’s a sad thought.  Each generation gets more and more information and exciting scientific discoveries and more and better foodstuffs (shrimp-flavored GMO corn!) but each generation loses something in exchange, too.  Maybe it doesn’t seem like much that we’ve piled garbage all over huge sections of the earth, or that another species of whale has disappeared.  

Probably in the larger sense it doesn’t matter - I believe humans will adapt and overcome climate change or whatever challenges lie in wait.  But the earth is a zero-sum environment.  Every time you pick up a cell phone, it represents pollution and toxic chemicals and radiation and life clutter and money spent.  And every time a monkey goes to heaven, or some other non-essential part of the world is shoved aside for “progress”, another few moments of life - what most of us seem to value when we look back on our happiest times - are made a little more gray.

(editor’s note:  I know there might be substantial upsets to the ecosystem if monkeys disappeared - I am making a hypothetical argument saying “let’s assume that there would not be an effect)

photo credit: suneko, and yes, I am referencing this song

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