Category: family
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Model memes
Imitation and rivalry and two sides of the same coin, which is why kids so often end up in either the same financial patterns as their parents or their opposite. When those kids get married to people coming from other households, then, there is all sorts of opportunity for the…
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Control is not a virtue
There is a pretty strong body of evidence pointing toward the idea that the reduction in independent play in children has been instrumental in the rise of anxiety and depression in children and teens in the U.S. As a parent, this makes intuitive sense on some level, but then again,…
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They’re always listening
It now appears that Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents engaged in the same sort of fraudulent activity as their son, which is perhaps as unsurprising as the fraud itself turned out to be. Maybe you and I won’t raise the next Sam Bankman-Fried. I hope not. But children and adolescents and young…
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The ultra splurge
I suppose these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but I wonder what would happen if we stopped framing “splurging on our family” so much in terms of extravagant trips and more in terms of “I took a pay cut so I could be less harried and more present.”
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Vulnerability and money
Here’s a story from my marriage: But let me back up: I hate watching movies at home in the dark. Like, who decided that when we sit down to put a movie on in the living room we have to go around turning all the lamps off? Oh, is it…
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The trouble with being rich
The trouble with being rich is that since you can solve with your checkbook virtually all of the practical problems that bedevil ordinary people, you are left in your leisure with nothing but the great human problems to contend with: how to be happy, how to love and be loved,…
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Giving Tuesday
I grew up in a home where generosity was such an integral part of our reality that it was hard to identify on its own. What I mean is, if my family was a soup, and you asked me to strain out the generosity in the soup, I couldn’t. It was…
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Thankfulness is financially savvy
Here’s a reminder that being thankful–choosing to be thankful–is supremely helpful in getting you to a state of contentment. Like, just look at something around you right now and find it in yourself to be thankful for it. Do it. Then do it a couple more times. The more you do…
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Stop talking about the stock market
“One time I came home from college for a vacation, and my sister was sort of unhappy, almost crying. The Girl Scouts were having a father-daughter banquet, but our father was out on the road, selling uniforms. So I said I would take her, being the brother (I’m nine years…
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The problem with one-time advice
I wrote awhile back about my ten-year gap between doctor visits (I have since been to the doctor, thank you). But you know, going to the doctor for a checkup gets increasingly less useful the further you get past that visit. You got a clean bill of health when you went…
Meaningful Returns 