Category: Money
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Go with the grain
At the recommendation of a friend I’m reading Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons, which is a wonderful little book distilling some of the legendary golfer’s most fundamental thoughts about the game with laymen like me. Well, within about five minutes of starting the book I came across one of those thoughts that…
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It’s all relative
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you may have seen the term “lifestyle creep” come up a few times. It’s a fascinating concept with an equally emotive name, and it has all sorts of implications in the practice of long-term financial planning. Lifestyle creep is, more or…
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Golf and the importance of sometimes not keeping score
I played golf on Sunday with a couple buddies at an old public course ten or fifteen miles east of Raleigh. I didn’t keep score for myself. Now, before you call me a communist or worse, let me say I’m a firm believer that “keeping score” is generally an important part of…
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Gas lines
People in Raleigh are going absolutely crazy about the gas shortage that I warned people about yesterday (and which was known to be coming last week). Reminder number 561,783,991 that too often we don’t do important things until they become terribly urgent. And even then, we often don’t do them as well…
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“And 15 carries gasoline.”
My son’s favorite word–and it’s not particularly close, though to be fair he only knows about three–is “truck.” He knows exactly what a truck is, that his dad drives one, that they make loud noises, and that many things can be called “truck” that aren’t trucks. Apparently. Well, we got…
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An emergency fund is for more than emergencies
The first rule of personal finance is probably, “Spend less than you make.” But a close second, if not a tie for first is, “Have an emergency fund.” It’s the second one which makes poverty so devastating and tropes about bootstrapping so generally unhelpful. Because it is very possible to…
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Are your DIY projects making you less happy?
Have you heard of this channel on cable called HGTV? It’s a very strange channel. Like, don’t ever let an adult with cable tell you they don’t watch cartoons anymore, because HGTV is just cartoons for adults. It’s the kind of channel that you can watch and suddenly have a…
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Why are you working so much?
I used to work for the premier accounting firm in the world. That’s a subjective statement, but so is “Dook basketball is the worst.” But you know something about that place? Besides being the best at what we did, and besides having incredibly talented people there that were, for lack…
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Don’t move to California for the weather
Though I claim the Old North State as my own, I was actually born in Southern California, which is something I used to think made me really cool to girls in middle school, probably. California is, and I mean this as non-pejoratively as I can, a strange magical land.…
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Going to the doctor
I have not been to a doctor for a checkup since the summer before my senior year in high school. I’m not saying this because I’m proud, but because it’s the truth. My wife and I have discussed slash yelled about this truth a number of times, and this has…
Meaningful Returns 