Category: Money
-
Home buying: an unpopular opinion
“One in four homeowners in the Las Vegas area owes more to the bank than his or her home is worth.” The colloquial term for this unfortunate reality is “underwater,” and while it is certainly pronounced in Las Vegas (and Akron and Cleveland, apparently) in the wake of the housing…
-
Stolen credit cards and strange decisions
Recently someone tried to use my credit card information to eat a meal at Chili’s and book a hotel room in some random town in Virginia. This, to me, is a strange way to go about spending money from stolen credit card information, but then again, who am I to…
-
Your Amazon order history
My wife and I are Amazon Prime members, because it is an elite club of millions and millions of people who pay to be two-day shippers of innumerable items, for free. I mean, technically we pay for the free two-day shipping, but it doesn’t cost anything. And also to lease the rights…
-
The unified theory of money
A great dish hits you like a Whip-It: There’s momentary elation, a brief ripple of pure pleasure in the spacetime continuum. That’s what I was chasing, that split second when someone tastes something so delicious that their conversation suddenly derails and they blurt out something guttural like they stubbed their…
-
Time isn’t money
Benjamin Franklin, apparently, is who we have to thank for the delightful cliché, TIME IS MONEY. Whenever I hear or read that phrase my mind immediately goes Caps Lock ON and I imagine yelling by someone strongly resembling Donald Trump. It’s not just a dumb cliche; it’s a cosmic lie. Don’t…
-
Completely Avoidable Complication That You Don’t Avoid
I’m not old, but I’m older than I used to be, and life as a result is more complicated. As far as I can tell, this is a universal axiom. There are, to be sure, physicists and philosophers who have very different ideas about Time and whether it exists on…
-
Impress the right people, save money
An experiment I have for you to conduct is this: Instead of trying to impress everyone except the people closest to you, why not impress them first and foremost? Report back your results, but my working hypothesis is that the way you go about impressing those closest to you differs markedly from the…
-
How to lose money and make others rich
Bear with me. When I was in college my mom worked at JC Penney, and once she copped me a pair of khaki shorts made by a company called “American Living.” They were on sale. I still own the shorts, they’re nice and comfy, they’re khaki, I put them on one leg…
-
Don’t expect a trophy
So many parents complain about “participation trophies” and how spoiled kids are and how this will teach them that no matter what happens they will always be the best. But you know what? It’s the parents who not only pay for those trophies, but would actually make a huge fuss if their…
Meaningful Returns 