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It’s hard to keep the goalposts of your life and lifestyle from moving at all, but limiting the movement to intentional, incremental steps rather than upheaval that “just happens” will make contentment easier to choose. Goalposts that move for no other reason than they can will keep moving and are not likely to slow down
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How long will the Fed keep rates where they are? Is there another rate hike coming, or will rates start to come down again? In the meantime what’s in store for my portfolio? The answer or course—to these and many other important questions—is “No one knows.” That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask the questions, shouldn’t
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Hustle is not a virtue. Hustle in the context of a virtuous activity is good. Hustle outside of that context is just…window dressing at best, and detrimental at worst. The reason this is important is that too often hustling is just a form of hiding. We can rush and bustle around with all sorts of
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When you complete a two-dimensional maze on a piece of paper, you can solve it as you go, allowing your eyes to go ahead of your pencil and working from beginning to end without too much back-tracking. When you walk through a three-dimensional maze where the walls are higher than your head, there is no
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There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal this week entitled “There’s Never Been a Worse Time to Buy Instead of Rent,” and the content drives home the point of the headline with gusto. But do you know something? Even before the economic case for renting looked this good–before interest rates skyrocketed and housing prices
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“I could do with less.” Less income, less stuff, less in the portfolio, less alcohol, less junk food, less screen time…… “I could do with less” is a way to build resilience and margin against hard things: Job loss, bear markets, illness. But it’s also simply a better way to live. If you can live
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The Polish-American Jacob Mikanowski makes the case that in Poland, during the Holocaust, “the people who end up protecting the [Jewish] people they protect the longest, hold out the longest, hold out to the end, are usually people who live on the absolute margins: widows, outcasts, people with no money, people in terrible shape, people
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I tend to think an orientation around processes is more useful than an orientation around goals, but the processes still need a telos, an end, a desired fruit. Sometimes in financial planning the analogy of growing trees is used: it takes time, it starts from a small seed, it grows even when you can’t see
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That was the title from a WSJ article earlier this week, and I am sympathetic to the fact that Taylor Swift concert tickets are exorbitantly high, Disney is more expensive than it used to be, and a San Diego Zoo membership ain’t cheap. But of course, it has to be said that these are not
Meaningful Returns 