Go from burnt out to FIREd up.
The math of wealth is based on earning, saving and investing. The art of feeling wealthy is about the stealthy accumulation of marginal gains, disciplined spending habits based on parsimony, and relishing the weight in your pocket of those small figurative and literal coins others will not deign to pick up. Someone tried to shame me at the beach yesterday …
You never step in the same river twice The saying above is one of my favorites from Gasem, a gadfly, friend and frequent guest-poster. As a post college graduation gift, armed with an airline ticket gifted by an uncle who was generous with stockpiled frequent flier miles and a Eurail pass from my parents, I took my inaugural trip to …
Jerome Groopman, a Harvard Professor of Medicine, recently wrote in his capacity as staff writer for the New Yorker about using science to change habits. The piece provided insights and support from the literature about why certain strategies (from financial to healthy living) work while others fail. One fascinating aspect was a new understanding of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. …
We’re baa-aack! This summer’s big trip (vacation is a term my wife and I reserve for travel without children; trip refers to travel with children) was to Spain. I thought it might be worthwhile to share the tips and tricks that made this one wonderful, as well as the fails that we’ll learn from going forward. We had just under …
A newbie undergoing his inaugural financial literacy conversion experience is disheartened a few years out of residency. His taxable account reads like a sloppy record of investing mistakes, littered with individual stocks and actively managed, high expense ratio funds. Like many of us, he made his share of mistakes trying to beat the market before realizing that high active management …
Maintenance is a requirement and not a luxury by definition. Proper maintenance reduces the rate of depreciation of an asset like real estate by slowing the approach of entropy. Dilapidation is delayed if undeterred. Increasing control over my time has better enabled me to address the long-deferred maintenance of my health in a number of ways. I am not making …
A reader, Carla, inquired if I might provide some closure to the malpractice lawsuit I’ve referred to previously (see here and here for the original posts). In addition to wanting to know the ending, there’s value in reflecting on where I am now, where I was then, and how I bridged the gap. Legal Conclusion The case dragged on for …
The title of the post comes from correspondence from Danny Kahneman to Amos Tversky regarding insights into irrational human decision-making processes. It was during their collaboration in elucidating the concept of loss aversion. Regret minimization is a related but distinct concept. Given dual-choice gambles where a rational actor should choose the option with greater statistical odds of benefit according to …
At the time of writing, I’m deep into Michael Lewis’ latest book, The Undoing Project. It’s a profile of the unlikely friendship and rich academic collaboration between two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose interest in the systematic flaws of human decision-making gave rise to the field of behavioral economics. A result cited from their studies felt particularly relevant …
I heard a sermon last weekend based on the concept of sacred fear, explained through the analogy of standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon as a simultaneously beautiful and terrifying experience. On the one hand, you are filled with a sense of the sublime in tandem with a rare perspective of your insignificance in the greater world. At …