Tag: life

a follow-up, and links

I’ve come across a few good links this week, and a few of them actually tied together pretty closely. So look for a second post soon in which I reveal the socialist tendencies that lurk within my libertarian nature (how’s that for a tease) thanks to a few posts and articles that got my blood boiling….

how kids (can) make you poor

Raising a child can cost up to $250,000 - and that’s from a study done almost 20 years ago. That’s only the cost through high school - college is another problem entirely, unless you don’t plan on paying for your child’s education (and I don’t). Having a kid is expensive. Having a second is less expensive - hand-me-downs and shared costs can reduce the individual costs - but a larger family is going to cost a fortune. The simple fact is that you won’t become AS rich with kids.

I’ve seen the question of children play out a dozen different ways with friends and in my own life. My parents had kids (my brother and me) when they were barely out of their teenage years. I have friends who waited until they were almost 40 to have kids. One couple fervently and frequently insisted they would never have kids - and show no signs of changing their minds. In each case, the decision to have a child (or children) was deeply personal, and made for a number of reasons - but seldom considering the cost. The simple fact is that you’ll be better off financially without kids. Kids are expensive.

It’s a potentially sensitive topic … and most people don’t want to have that conversation. “Kids bring so much joy into your life!” “Kids are their own reward!” I’m biased - the cliches are all true. My son’s a supernova of energy, creative and amazingly verbal. My daughter’s charming and almost impossibly cheerful. They are joys. But to be realistic, I have to admit that because of them I will not be as wealthy as I could have been. I regret nothing, but I also understand that I’m going to have to work harder accumulating wealth than I would have without children.

So how do we plan to compensate? If you have kids, how can you avoid spending more than you need to? It’s not the nature of my blog to talk about ways to save money on Cheerios by buying the store brand - although you should. But I do have a few “big ideas”:

  1. I’m not paying for my kid’s PRIVATE college education. If Little Buddy or Pumpkin want to attend a private school, they’d better develop tennis skills or become world-class scholars. I’m not paying for Pumpkin to attend an Ivy. I’ll help, but if they can’t pay for a private college, they can go to a public university, just like Mama and Papa did. We did just fine.
  2. We will readjust our lives around their education early on, though. We moved to Florida to escape crappy public schools in Jersey, and made sure we landed in a school district considered one of the best in the state.
  3. I will strive to teach independence. This sounds stupid, but I have seen so many of my colleagues in corporate America talking about their mid-20 (or even mid-30) year old children living at home. I know I can talk big now, but I left home at 18 and my children will too. If they can’t afford a home, I’ll tell them to move to a cheaper locale. An unmarried 35-year-old living with their parents needs to experience life.
  4. We will resist consumerism. A couple of years ago, one of my neighbors bought one of those big car-battery powered cars - with a working FM radio - for their daughters. Little Buddy loved it. I was tempted to get him one. He didn’t, and doesn’t, need it. I have fallen victim again and again to the urge to buy toys. Sometimes it makes sense: I bought him a farm set that he plays with daily. Sometimes I fail: I have bought a half dozen balls (football, baseball, soccer) and he is utterly indifferent to all of them that don’t have Spiderman on them. But I see a sickness in most parents around me: the need to buy distractions. I struggle to remind myself that learning to pretend my wooden blocks were race cars taught me to IMAGINE things. My parents would have done me a disservice by buying me Leapfrog, or whatever the 70s equivalent was. Learning how to live with less - at least as far as toys - is a gift, not a burden.

But none of these cost-saving ideas can compensate for the fact that a childless couple (or a single person) will simply be much better off than a couple with kids. I won’t recommend one choice or the other, because it’s such a personal choice. But don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: in the short term, having kids is no big deal. You can afford formula, diapers, baby clothes. But in the long run, having kids will change your career choices, affect your ability to save and limit your choices about almost everything. Make sure you’re comfortable with the long-term cost before you take the leap.

teaching and being taught, and links

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this on this blog or not, but I spent a fair amount of time as a part-time schoolteacher for both middle school and college freshmen as a substitute teacher and later as a graduate assistant. I taught intro to calculus and accounting in grad school and substituted for math, gifted ed and other subjects when I was still chasing my starry-eyed dream of becoming a math professor. I was good. My students liked me and I don’t recall if I’ve ever had a negative review or bad experience teaching (I don’t think I have). I continued my teaching/training throughout my corporate career, leading new employee classes and training in software for over 15 years. I like training and teaching. Nowadays I do little of that as a corporate consultant - nobody wants me to train, they want me to DO. And now, if not yesterday.

Well, I get glimpses of the past and flashbacks now that I have kids. I spent a couple of days at my children’s preschool/pre-K school where Little Buddy attends pre-K and Pumpkin goes to daycare (or preschool or whatever you’d like to call it). I do realize from time to time, when I self-analyze my abilities, that I do have one ability if nothing else: kids like me. I can engage them in learning and don’t make them nervous as some other parents do. I probably would have made a decent grade school or middle school teacher if I could have supported a family on that salary. That’s a sad observation, frankly, but one for another post.

I’ll make one other observation, too, unrelated to personal finance or careers: my children’s school concentrates heavily on play, and I like it. Not learning, but play - directed, but not with any intention towards teaching any specific subject. It’s interesting as a parent to process the conflicting emotions that arise from watching this: you want your kids to learn but I also (mentally) slap myself and say “Pumpkin’s not even 3 yet - she deserves play time.” I’m a firm believer in the concept that kids need play time - creative time, self-directed - to develop themselves. They’ll have plenty of time to be crammed into desks and forced to learn times tables later, I guess. Just my parental opinion, I guess.

MonaVie Blackmails Me?: Stunning that a company, or a rep for a company, would stoop this low. Read the article to see how low a supposedly ‘legitimate’ company can stoop. You can also read MonaVie: Multi-Level Marketing Gone Haywire for more idiocy. I can’t believe anyone falls for MonaVie’s crap after I’ve read stuff like this.

Blue Cash Rewards Increase: I’ve owned a Blue Cash card for years, so this is good news. I’ll take it…

Social Lending Arbitrage Beats Projections: I still think Lending Club is a good bet - if you’re interested in trying it they have a $25 signup bonus right now. I’d treat it like any other investment - it has its ups and downs, but it can serve as a reasonable diversification strategy versus the market.

Personal Finance the Krav Maga Way: Since I’ve seen all the Krav Maga signs up around my neighborhood, I thought this was an amusing - and timely - post.

Small but Alarming Indicator: This is unpleasant - but not unexpected - anecdotal news. On the other hand, Bubelah just attended a small business workshop where they barely had enough room for the interested attendees, and I remarked that it must have been all of the laid-off people thinking about launching small businesses (and good for them if they were)…

Life After Debt: What It’s Like in the Third Stage of Personal Finance: Just an interesting read, on many levels (fitness, travel, etc.)

and more…

  • The Downside of Owning REITs
  • Talking about Deflation
  • The Key to Effective Budgeting – Master The Yes/No Factor
  • Book Review of Leah Ingram’s Suddenly Frugal
  • How Much Mortgage Can I Afford?

how to develop good habits

A woman walked up to a little old man rocking in a chair on his porch.
“I couldn’t help noticing how happy you look,” she said. “What’s your secret for a long happy life?”
“I smoke three packs of cigarettes a day,” he said. “I also drink a case of whiskey a week, eat fatty foods, and never exercise.”
“That’s amazing,” the woman said. “How old are you?’
“Twenty-six,” he said.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that habits fall into two general categories: good habits and bad habits. A good habit is flossing every day. A bad habit is smoking. Some habits might fall somewhere in between, or depend on frequency. Flossing every day is a good habit. Flossing once per month isn’t a bad habit, exactly, but it’s not - strictly speaking - a good habit either. Eating a huge overcooked steak once a year is not a terribly bad habit. Eating one for breakfast every day is.

But let’s stick with good habits and bad habits, because most people can tell the difference and don’t need more distinction than that. Most of them can then be thrown into another three categories:

  1. habits you should break - debt, looking down on things, negativism
  2. habits you should take - wake up early, play outside, etc from when you were a kid
  3. habits you should make - positivity, frugality, love

We’ll call that break, take and make.

Break
In a sense, it is often a lot easier to identify a negative habit than a positive one. Overeating or smoking or playing too much Halo is usually a fairly easy pattern to spot. However, the habits that you need to break are often either very pleasurable (overeating for example), or arise from addiction (smoking), or are based on deeply ingrained behaviors (negative thinking). So how do you go about modifying bad habits? What are the methods for eliminating them from your life?

  • Stop. Sometimes a bad habit just needs to cease. If you smoke, stop - get some nicotine gum instead. If you watch 6 hours of TV per day, disconnect your cable. If you gossip, turn the subject to sports or politics or movies. This method is hard, and frankly almost never works - but sometimes it’s worth a shot.
  • Modify. If you drink Coke, try switching to diet Coke, or diet Sprite, or ginger ale, or seltzericon - or cycle through them in that order. You do not have to immediately stop a habit. Take baby steps. If you don’t exercise, don’t imagine that you will run a marathon the week after you start taking a 20-minute walk; but DO imagine that you’ll take a 25 minute walk the next week, then a 45 minute walk, then a 20 minute jog and then - who knows? That marathon might not be so far away after all!
  • Inhibit. In another post I wrote about using a rubber band to help stop negative thoughts. You can use this extremely simple tool very effectively. The purpose is not to injure you or create a fear of an action, but merely to jolt your awareness. I think this is probably the easiest yet almost the most effective way to halt any bad habit. It is one of those exceptionally simple methods that most people scoff at until they try it. Give it a shot.
  • Journal. I have plenty of bad habits, but I have seldom seen one that can withstand a brutally honest journal. If your habit to break is sweets, keep an extremely detailed sweets journal. When, where, what, how many calories, why you ate it (sad? bored?) and almost inevitably you’ll notice a decrease. Writing things down will help solidify the habit in your mind, and make you think twice before engaging in it, knowing you’ll have to record that incident in your journal.

Take
When you were a child, you woke up full of energy and excitement on Saturdays. The cartoons were on, it was the day you were allowed to eat Lucky Charms instead of something good for you, and you didn’t have to go to school. You didn’t know it at the time, but waking up early was a good habit. It kept you from wasting half the day sleeping, making it harder to fall asleep Saturday night. It meant that on your weekends you accomplished “maximum fun” and really squeezed as much into the day as you could. Where did that habit go? Some of it left because you got older… because work beat you down … because you just NEED that sleep. You don’t have to leave this good habit behind you in childhood, though. Reach back into your past and take back these good habits. Take back the habits of playtime, of reading, of avoiding things that didn’t directly contribute to your health and happiness. These are habits which are just day-to-day simple tasks that improve the quality of your life. Examples could include:

  • Making time for play
  • Learning about things because you’re curious
  • Questioning “the way it’s always been done”
  • Never learning to sit still

Here are the first steps to doing this:

  • Identify those habits:
  • Remember how they felt
  • Ask yourself if there’s any reason you couldn’t still do that
  • With a nod to Prince: act your shoe size, not your age

Make
If you have seen The Secret, or read any similar self-help book, you’ll realize that the power of positive thinking is a hot topic right now. It has been a hot topic for hundreds of years, in fact, and there’s a reason for it. It works. Having a mental habit like positive thinking is a snowball habit. The more you do it, the more powerful it becomes and makes it easier and easier to maintain as a habit. There are other key “make” habits like this:

  • Eating a healthy, natural diet
  • Spending time with family and friends by actually being there; no Blackberries, no agendas, and no pressure
  • Making time for meditation
  • Daydreaming
  • Being kind

So how do you make these habits? I’ll refer back again to The Secret, but it could just as easily come from the works of Benjamin Franklin or any self-help individual in-between. You can control your thoughts. There is very little else in this world that you can control the way you can control your thoughts. Use that power to your advantage. Tell your mind “this is a habit, this will be a ritual and we will keep it.” Imagine you have already been doing this habit for years. Imagine that it has made you happier, more fit, richer, calmer - whatever it is that you want. You really have to visualize it, write it down, draw it or otherwise make it a real image in your mind. You will be amazed at how quickly your mind adapts to a “new reality” once you order it to. A habit is not a set of chains or a gun pointed at your head. It is 100% the result of your mind, so only you - as the person in control - can change your mind and therefore the habit.

personal mission statement, and links

I’ve been trying apply the Pareto Principle (discussed ad nauseum elsewhere) to my daily activities a bit - trying to focus on important things and let stuff that I might enjoy but don’t really advance my life goals go. It’s harder than you think: I like reading about sports and spending time tinkering with this blog, but neither activity moves me anywhere closer to where I want to go with my life. I did do one activity that was quite helpful: I am trying to use Stephen Covey’s suggestion, from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, to write a personal mission statement. It’s one of those typical self-help type things that sound somewhat goofy but it’s a surprisingly difficult exercise. I’m trying to limit it to about three lines and you can get a definite idea of where your values are when you’re forced to narrow down your personal priorities - which can encompass your family, friends, work, beliefs, and so on - down to about 2-3 sentences. Not that easy.

On to the links:

3 Reasons Why Most People Will Never Earn More Money — And What You Can Do About It!: It’s a good point, and frankly one that I have been guilty of: I spend more time explaining why I can’t than trying to do it. I could make more than I do, but I don’t.

What Will Retirement Look Like for Younger Generations?: It’s a depressing thought. The future of retirement in the US is bleak. If anyone tells you otherwise, they are kidding themselves. Even in the public sector, things are looking worse. In the private sector? Forget about it. Tell me how you can retire at a reasonable age if you’re a middle-of-the-road wage earner in America and I’ll tell you how I can sell you a lovely bridge in Brooklyn.

Pay Off Your Mortgage vs Pay Down Your Mortgage: One of the huge questions in personal finance: I’ve always thought that it was stupid to pay off one’s mortgage (because it locks up your money) but now? Not so sure.

Sucked Back into Obsessive Couponing: Saving money is bad. No, really. No, really…it’s not. I wish I did it more than I do.

Should Unemployment Benefits Be Extended?: Listen, there has to be a limit. One year, maybe. I pushed seven months, myself, and had to relocate halfway across American to find a new job (admittedly by choice of a new locale). But I have never felt guilty about getting that money - don’t forget, it’s money paid INTO the system as “insurance” - your unemployment benefits are benefits being paid back to you because you paid that money into a fund for unemployment benefits. No shame it drawing on that account….

Lending Club Loan Investment Update: Lending Club has been a great investment for me and I may put more in soon; peer-to-peer lending is still a good way to diversify past Wall Street.
Are You a To-Do List Bottom-Feeder?: I am. I let small things keep me from big things all. the. time. It kills me that I recognize this and can’t correct it.

And more…

the passion of the hobbit

It’s a subject I waffle back and forth on – the idea that passion needs to rule your life. It seems obvious, of course, that you should have passion for your spouse, children… then maybe a bit less obvious but still reasonable to have the same passion for relatives, friends and interests. Even less obvious would be the very abstract things like country, career, sports teams and so on. If you’re passionate about something lower on the list like that – say, American Idol – reexamine your priorities. I was passionate about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I recognize that it wasn’t a good direction for my passions. I got a lot of entertainment out of it but my life is exactly 0.0% improved because of it.

But if you can’t focus on something, it’s a shortcoming. In my case, I don’t have a lot of passion for my work. I view it as a mechanical activity that provides food, shelter, clothing and Netflix for the family. I wouldn’t view this as ideal, although I realize at the same time that 99.99% of the human population wouldn’t view sitting in a quiet, air-conditioned cubicle for 8 hours a day for an income in the top 1% of the planet’s population as a hardship. Many of the “seize your passion” bloggers do – they assume that everyone can seize their internet business bliss – nobody has to make the computer, only to live off of them.

But that’s fine – of course some can and some can’t. Whether any of us choose to do so is of course a choice; if you love taking care of horses and instead choose to pursue a career as an account receivable manager, you’ve made a choice. Whether you can live with it or not is the problem - many can, and a few can’t. I’d guess that the time when all of this questioning really came into play was when the social contract that said companies would handle retirement broke down. If I worked for IBM for 25 years and knew they’d take care of me during those 25 years, and after, I’d be a lot more inclined to give up on the need for passion. But nowadays, that’s not true; just recently a colleague of mine got laid off from a company he’d worked for over 20 years without even a thank you. Your future is not secure.

I realized all of this tonight while reading to my son. For about a week we’ve been reading a few pages of “The Hobbit” by J. R. R. Tolkien every night. I’ve explained the general story to him – a little hobbit goes with a bunch of dwarves to steal back their gold from a dragon – but I don’t have many illusions about how well a four-year-old can follow Tolkien’s esoteric prose. It’s not exceptionally complicated, but it’s not Goodnight Moon.

But tonight when I asked him if he wanted to try something easier, he said no. I asked whether he understood most of it, and he said no. I asked then if he wanted to stop, and he said no. I asked why, if he couldn’t understand all of it, and he gave me an answer that should make things clear (to paraphrase): I’m excited about it because you’re excited about it, Papa. He liked listening to it because I liked reading it. Something was in my voice that wasn’t there when I was reading Goodnight Moon or I’m A Truck.

Some of my fondest memories from childhood are of my father reading The Hobbit to me from the same book at a slightly older age. I remember being a little confused by the language and the complex plot, but loving the fact that my dad thought I was ready for something so amazing. That passion translates easily, and makes reading something like The Hobbit far simpler than struggling through Goodnight Moon for the 100th time. Sitting down at the desk in the corporate office for the 100th time is much like that; coming up with new ideas, starting new jobs or developing new ideas is much like picking up The Hobbit.

I don’t like to think that work – and through that, life – is bleak without purpose. It’s not; other things should put life in balance even if there isn’t purpose in one’s work. But work and parenthood and friendship and one’s relationship with parents, community, school and whatever else are, in fact, intimately tied up with passion. Without the passion to pursue something – church, charity, community, work, parenthood, etc. – life is going to be a little less exciting. Excitement is its own reward.

infant swimming

People have certain basic skills they need to acquire. The ability to feed yourself, clean yourself and shelter yourself are obvious. Past this come a whole list of “really ought to acquire” skills: understanding money, literacy and so on. However, living in New York for more than a decade I noticed that two skills were often never acquired by many city people: driving and swimming. The driving is easy enough to understand: if you’ve ever visited New York or a similar big city you’d know that driving your own car is more expensive (parking, tolls, insurance) and public transportation makes it very easy to get anywhere without driving. Swimming can just be attributed to the cold weather and the lack of nearby pools for learning to swim.

But starting from an early age, Bubelah and I have taken pains to make sure that both of our children are not only able to swim for recreational purposes, but able to “rescue” themselves if they fall in water unexpectedly. With Little Buddy we started when he was less than 1 year old, and with Pumpkin we started just after she was 1. The necessity for the training moved from a mild concern to an urgent one when we moved to Florida. You can’t go 100 feet without seeing a pond or a pool or some other body of water - let alone the fact that we’re in an oceanfront town.

We signed both of our kids up for the Infant Swimming Resource, and to get an idea of what that was like, watch this video (if you’re a parent, it’s fairly amazing).

You might think that’s some kind of trick, but my son (a little older than 3 when he took the course) and daughter (a little more than 1 year old at the time) could do exactly the same, even in full clothes with shoes on. It’s a shocking thing to observe - in a good way. I still wouldn’t trust either of them to spend even 1 minute unattended around a pond, but it does give me the confidence that they wouldn’t panic if they did fall in water someday, which - in the minute it might take me to reach them - they wouldn’t do something that would result in drowning.

No parent (or spouse or friend or anything else) wants to contemplate the mortality of their loved ones. Jan commented on my post about making time for details about my lack of a will:

No WILLLLLLL?????? and you have children? This is really bad. Just jump on line and go to a simple legal site and download one. In fact- write one yourself and take it to your next party. Line up four people to sign that they saw you sign it. Do the details later. Appoint guardianship! Do it- TODAY!

Jan was of course right. Just like it was difficult to talk about why a survival swimming course for our children was necessary (because we don’t want them to drown), it was difficult to talk about how our children’s lives should be handled if we died before they were at least young adults. After I had written about not having a will, though, I realized it was time for us to answer the ugly questions finally - it was irresponsible parenting to teach children to swim but not worry about what would happen if they were thrown in the water, figuratively speaking, by their parents’ deaths.

Infant swimming is a good metaphor for many of the life skills we want for those we love to acquire, and for many of the actions we can take on their behalf to give them the ability to react in a crisis. We teach kids to recite their names and address from the time they can talk in case they are lost. We teach them to survive falling in a pond. We set up wills to protect them (frankly) against the system. So many of these actions are small, but they require asking yourself “what’s the worst that can happen” - and being honest with yourself about the answers.

Note: This month, ISR has been selected to compete in the Pepsi® Refresh Project. ISR needs daily votes for FLOAT during the month of August to “Help Eliminate Childhood Drowning” at this link www.refresheverything.com/InfantSwim.

Voting opened Sunday, August 1st, and is open for just one month! ISR supporters can vote daily to help provide ISR lessons to families in need. The Pepsi projects with the most votes receive the grants. If you feel so inclined, please vote to help a worthy cause: stopping childhood drowning.

try something new, and links

I’ve been working on something with my son. It’s “try something new”. I have made an effort to convince him that he should try something new, and if he likes it, great, if not, fine. I’m mostly applying this concept to food but it’s relevant to things like trying new sports or ideas or so on. I realized this morning - while I was talking to him about the concept of trying something new - that it should apply to all of us. None of us should ever settle for stopping learning, trying, tasting, etc. But it’s easy to do. I quit REALLY trying new things years ago. Hopefully I can shake myself out of that pattern soon…

Here are a few of my favorite reads this week:

A Frugal Daughter’s Guide to Back to School Shopping: Always interesting to get a different perspective - like a daughter’s, for example.

Should You Refinance Your Mortgage? Rates Are Low, But It Is Still a Tough Decision: I’m leaning towards doing a refi. I’ve got a good rate but the rates are so low now that the benefits to refinancing seem almost too good to believe.

To mini-retire or not to mini-retire? Escaping the Mundane: Great tips on how to break out from the “ordinary” life.

New UK Kindle a tax on literature?: Interesting take on the Kindle. My Dad LOVES his Kindle. I plan to get one soon - basically once the WiFi version hits $100.

7 Habits of Highly Frugal People: I’m working my way through this book for the second time (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). I didn’t like it so much the first time I went through but now I appreciate it more.

Why 99% Of Financial Advisors Should Be Shot Out Of A Cannon Need Extra Cash? There Are Only 4 Ways To Get It: The fours ways to make money are: * Start a business * Work more * Passive income * Spend less This is a great summary to clarify your thinking. Alternative income won’t just materialize. YOU have to DO something.

And a few more links that are worth reading:

making time for the details

A couple of years ago my car’s air conditioner had some problems and stopped working. To be more exact, the fan quit working except on the 5 (high) setting. I could have the A/C off, or blowing like a hurricane. I didn’t think about it too much - or rather I did, but decided I was far too busy to attend to a problem like this.

Some other things broke down a few months later and I decided to take the car in for an overhaul. The mechanics were mystified by the fan problem, and ended up keeping the car for an extra day. When I picked it up, I found out that a non-standard part had been substituted at some point in the car’s repair history and the result had been that the fan had shorted out not only itself, but a lot of the wiring in my ignition. I didn’t follow all of the technical details, but the mechanic summed it up this way: “you were lucky the steering column didn’t burst into flame when you turned the car on.” I let out a “whew” and decided that in the future I would try not to let “little” repairs go too long without checking them out.

The same is true for most aspects of your life. Think about all the areas where you need to check out the “little things” to make sure the “big problems” aren’t lurking:

  1. Your health. Going to a doctor once a year is a must, but if you’re lucky enough to have insurance, that insurance probably also covers vision, dermatology, podiatry, etc. Make an effort to work visits to specialists in occasionally to make sure that no problems are lurking (for example, getting a glaucoma test once a year from an optometrist or checking out that new mole that might be the warning sign for skin cancer).
  2. Your financial future. Check on your insurance policies and your will. I am up-to-date on insurance, but Bubelah and I still don’t have a will. I wonder how I can really offer much financial advice when I haven’t gotten that one piece of critical financial planning done myself, but do as I say, not as I do in this case. Put money away in savings somewhere. Don’t waste too much time worrying about Roth IRAs versus 401(k)s, for example - just start doing it.
  3. Your family future. Make sure you check on the little things with your family. Understand what’s going wrong with your relatives, your spouse or your kids before it becomes a bigger issue. This could be health, school, social life, finances, etc. Anyone you feel responsible for needs a “checkup” from you once in a while.
  4. Your home. If you own, making sure your home is in good shape is no small exercise. From alarm systems to air systems maintenance to just checking out the drafty places around the window, fixing little problems now can prevent big problems tomorrow.
  5. Your political future. I know people get more excited about presidential politics in America, but let’s face it - your Senators and Representatives (both federal and state) and even your local officials have more day-to-day influence on your life than the President does. I know worrying about who gets elected to the state senate isn’t as “big a deal” as presidential politics, but it matters. The people who sit on your local school board probably have more influence over your daily life than you imagine, even if you don’t have kids.
  6. Your life, the universe and everything. Little things that bother you today can become a bigger problem tomorrow. If you’re unhappy about something today, don’t let it fester. Even if you can’t fix it today, take one tiny step toward correcting it.

I am often more worried about the long-term, big-picture issues and grand questions about life and history and whether the Jets will win a Super Bowl in my lifetime, but little things like avoiding a fiery steering wheel column through dumb luck remind me that I need to pay attention to the details in life, too. Don’t wait until the little problems become big problems; I don’t know of many problems that disappear on their own.

photo credit: swambo

<a href=”http://www.bripblap.com/what-is-better-from-a-tax-perspective-a-roth-ira-or-a-401k/”>What Is Better from a Tax Perspective: A Roth IRA or a 401k?</a>

heat and links

Just in - it’s hot. The whole eastern US is hot. It’s interesting how extreme heat and extreme cold both have the same general effect on a family with small children - both extremes tend to make you stay indoors. We made it to the pool every day this week but one, but Saturday was hot enough that even the pool was unbearable. Good times.

So due to the heat, another one of my fairly abbreviated link roundups. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a “what I’m reading online” box over on the lower right hand side of the front page of the blog that’s updated throughout the week. I consider that a bit of an add-on to this weekly post. Plus my “thoughts” tumblr blog and my twitter account usually have a few more links, too.

  • BlogCrafted — build the blog you want!: A good consulting service if you need help building a blog.
  • Download My Free eBook: Invest Like a Pro: A good eBook for investors from Generation X Finance - worth checking out if you’re interested in learning more about investing.

    • » The secret of education: An excellent and thorough breakdown of the value of higher education that makes reference to a post I wrote way back when, attacking the humanities and praising a practical education in the sciences (read both Jacob’s post and mine before you bash me, incidentally).

And more…

welcome to the real world

Trinity: Please just listen. I know why you’re here. I know what you’ve been doing… why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night, you sit by your computer. You’re looking for him. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. And when I found him, he told me I wasn’t really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It’s the question that drives us. It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question, reader, just as I did.

What is the secret to financial freedom?

If you are deeply in debt, or spending more than you earn to acquire stuff, you are living in a world that is less than what it could be. Corporations and consumer society have constructed an elaborate world that is filled with shiny things and toys and useless items. In this world, you are told that true happiness comes with the acquisition of things, that your attention should be focused on today, that tomorrow will take care of itself. In this Matrix, it’s always Black Friday and it’s always the Presidents’ Day Sale.

Morpheus: What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

But just maybe, while making a call on your iPhone, driving your leased car wearing your latest fall fashions on your way to the mall on your one day off from your crushing commute and your boring job, you had a sudden thought. Maybe the world isn’t supposed to be like this. Maybe we weren’t all meant to be shopping units in the corporate world’s vast consumer Matrix. Maybe our happiness doesn’t come from owning CDs, or watching American Idol, or buying a Wii. Maybe there is another world - the real world - where your work and your life are one and the same because you love them both, where you can do what you want, when you want, where you have time to give to people and experiences, not just to commuting and working for a faceless employer. No, it’s not possible. Your neighbors look like they are doing fine, and they have lots of stuff, right? This is how it has to be. This is how it has always been.

Morpheus: I’m trying to free your mind. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it. There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

Maybe you’ve started reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad or Dave Ramsey or Your Money or Your Life. Other people are trying to show you the way out. The trouble is, you set down the book and remember “I need a new belt! I want to see “Avatar” 8 times!” Only you will start the journey out of the Matrix, and it will be difficult - there will be roadblocks everywhere: pricey restaurants, bigger homes, newer cars, fancier cell phones. The Matrix will do everything it can to keep you, because its existence depends on your continued function as a shopping unit. Without shopping units to generate power, the consumer Matrix will weaken. You have to stop, today. Put down your credit card. Stay away from the store. Cook a meal at home. Turn off the TV. Try to earn income a different way.

Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You’ve never used them before.


When you finally leave the consumer world, you’ll notice that your old behavior is now awful to consider. You’ll see credit card debt, still-functioning cell phones gathering dust in cabinet drawers, barely-worn clothes in the back of the closet, half-empty rooms never used in your house. Your eyes will hurt looking at all of this STUFF that you valued so much, because you never really SAW before.

Morpheus: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

The dream is the 9-to-5 world. The dream is a 3000 square foot home for a family of 4. The dream is a $400 per month car lease. The dream is an iPhone, a Wii, digital cable, the latest fashions. And the dream is a nightmare. You have to wake from that dream and realize that in the real world there is VERY little you need other than shelter, food, friends, family and basic clothing and entertainment. In the dream you have no time - but you can have all the time in the (real) world if you just wake up.

Neo: I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid… afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

(with many thanks to The Matrix)

Originally posted back in 2007 or so - just thought I would run it for those who haven’t read it before. I know the Matrix references are already very dated, but hopefully everyone’s seen it.

1 2 3 4 … 38