Category: Money
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Taking things too far
Debt can be a useful tool and it can also destroy you, and going from useful to destructive is much easier than we like to admit. Cash can be a source of freedom and it can also be a crutch, and there’s not a brightly lit sign anywhere telling you…
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Charlie Munger and the circle of competence
Charlie Munger died yesterday, just a few days shy of 100 years old. His life was full of the sort of wisdom and common sense that so often seems to evade Wall Street Types™ and those who blindly follow them, and I’m grateful much of that wisdom and common sense…
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Slippery slope de minimis
There is a certain brand of financial media that would like to convince you that a $4 coffee from Starbucks is all that’s standing between you and financial freedom. If only you had the discipline–so the line of thinking goes–to stop that habit, and instead invest that money at unreasonably…
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The income game
My kids get these magazines with puzzles and interesting nature facts in them, and sometimes the puzzles involve looking at a picture and circling the things that don’t belong. You can play a similar game with the following picture: That comes from a Wall Street Journal article entitled “The Pay…
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Demon uncovered
“Hidden Demon Uncovered in 18th-Century Painting” is the title of an article in the Wall Street Journal this week. And I suppose a healthy part of our lives out to be the regular restoration of ourselves, so to speak, so we can uncover our own demons while we are still…
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Don’t ever let a clock tell you what you’ve got time for
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…
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Which sort of maze are you in?
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…
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Buying and renting
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…
Meaningful Returns 