• Garbage in garbage out

    Cable news channels, HGTV, and CNBC are all selling you something which costs more than you can afford, and which will prevent you from living in the real world in any purposeful way. If you keep your soul free from the distorted views of political parties, a strange feverish version of the American Dream, and

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  • No amount of money will make you generous. There’s no level of wealth you need to reach in order to make philanthropy important to you. This is not a math problem.

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  • My doctor recently remarked to me in an offhand sort of way that it’s amazing how many physical ailments can be cured or at least greatly improved by behavioral changes. Diet, exercise, sleep, therapy, time outside, time away from screens, etc. Sometimes drugs and surgeons have to get involved of course, but behavior is where

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  • If you give a person a raise, they may need to bump up their percentage of tax withholding. To offset the pain of higher taxes, the person may want to celebrate and spend the (net) raise on a vacation. The vacation may require some new clothes. The new clothes may require a bigger closet, and

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  • Five steps

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  • Time is not money, never was money, and never will be money. But the more hurried we are—the less time we have at the margins—the more likely we are to spend money on things that don’t matter. Because a lack of time means we will feel compelled to outsource as much as possible, buy convenience

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  • Cash has a place

    Sometimes the roof and the HVAC go out at the same time. Sometimes the market goes down at the exact moment you retire. Sometimes an incredible opportunity presents itself. Sometimes your parents might need your help, or a neighbor, or a single mom at your kid’s school. So, all the time, cash has a place.

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  • Please don’t connect

    Google is giving a local park $100k to build wi-fi connectivity into park benches. Screentime is a sickness. There is no sense in being diplomatic about it. The internet has some incredible uses, but like anything good, there is a time and a place. And while we have gotten to a point where it seems

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  • False dichotomies

    Making good decisions is hard enough. When we short-circuit the process by setting up choices that are rigged from the get-go, then good decisions go from being elusive to being nearly impossible.

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  • Mirror images

    The dissonance we can often feel when looking at photographs of ourselves is at least in part due to the fact that we form the mental image of ourselves over years of mirror usage. We internalize the mirror image instead of the actual image, and when faced with a photograph showing the “correct” orientation, it

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