Category: Money
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Finish the last lap
You can do lots of work with (and pay a not insignificant amount of money to) an estate attorney in order to plan for how your assets will pass to heirs, but most of the time that involves a very simple and final step of updating account beneficiaries. If you…
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Legacy is overrated
I’m convinced that what we do today exists on and will impact an eternal story arc, which is precisely why “legacy” as it’s often discussed is not worth thinking much about. If money will be worth giving away from your estate, give it away now. Don’t wait until you sell…
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It’s called paying attention for a reason
It’s much easier to pay attention to the things we buy with our money—especially the symbols of status that fill our houses, garages, and social media—than the actual money that we traded for those things. Much less the things we could have bought but didn’t, or the opportunities we passed…
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No lies about the leaps
There are no leaps and bounds, not really. The leaps and bounds we see in technology or medicine or design are not actually leaps and bounds at all, but an accumulation of small steps that reach some tipping point of general consciousness after the fact. When you think about your…
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Do a little dance
There is no trick to solving the tension between your present self and your future self. Researchers have found that asking a person to consider an AI-aged photo of themselves as elderly prior to making some decision will the slightly move the needle in favor of the future self, but…
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The firehose is not for drinking
I read an article today in the Wall Street Journal about a woman who found out she had breast cancer from an automated email generated from some testing she had done. She was the one calling her doctor about the results rather than vice versa, simply because the flow of…
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Signals and noise
After a certain point, so much of what we spend our money is just signaling, and I don’t know that there’s anything we can do to prevent that. But what exactly are we signaling? What does the spending past our basic needs communicate to ourselves, our kids, our communities? What…
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Donuts and convenience
My vehicle is due for a regular oil change, but I’m not going to change it. My dad taught me how to change the oil in a car when I was 17, but I’m still not going to. Why? Because it would take me a lot more time than it…
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Apple $1 Trillion and Valuing the Invaluable
The business headline in today’s Wall Street Journal reads: “Apple Value Surges to $1 Trillion.” And “What does it mean,” wrote Matt Levine today, “that Apple is worth a trillion dollars? I think there are two possibilities: The consensus expected future cash flows to Apple shareholders have a present value…
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FOMO and Facebook: Why Diversification Matters
A couple of interesting things happened this week that led to this blog, but before I get to them, I want to start elsewhere. I did a very bad thing before I sat down to write this, which was to get on Redfin and look at homes for sale in…
Meaningful Returns 