Category: Money
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Can Marvel teach us to be more ordinary?
Here’s a link to the Wikipedia page which shows the list of live-action films that have come out of the Marvel Comics universe. From 1944 to 2001, there were seven films. From 2002 through this year there have been THIRTY-NINE. Another nine are already planned through 2019. There’s nothing wrong…
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Why giving matters
My wife works for the YMCA in downtown Raleigh, which is the greatest YMCA in all the land. (Yeah I’m biased; so are you.) Anyways, every year around this time the YMCA raises gobs and gobs of money to help to kids in Raleigh who generally don’t get much from their…
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When to change your mind
Information is everywhere. Some of it is good, some of it is bad, much of it is open to interpretation. And the hardest thing to do with all of this information is to intentionally gather it from a wide swath of reputable sources, consider it carefully, and be willing to…
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Why do we go to the dentist?
I sat in a dentist’s chair for well nigh an hour this afternoon, fearing that my jaw muscles were going to start cramping, and cursing whatever gene I got that makes my teeth highly sensitive to the cold water they insist on spraying directly on to my teeth every five…
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Don’t forget what you’re good at
You know what’s trash? Pretty much every piece of Apple software is trash. The Music app is unusable, and has been for some time. The new Mail app appears to be the result of trying to build the worst email app possible. And they apparently haven’t thought it necessary to make…
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Cars are stupid dangerous, for now. Investing works.
The two scariest moments of my life have happened in a car. Once I was driving and fell asleep at the wheel, ran off the road, woke up, overcorrected, spun around in the middle of a highway, and ended up on the other side without a scratch on my truck…
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and customer service
Look. I have a cell phone. It’s an iPhone. I don’t own it. It sometimes owns me. I’m not proud of the situation from top to bottom. Perhaps you can relate. But anyway, I think my wireless provider (who rhymes with Horizon) does own the phone, and they also own me,…
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Do less stupid things
When I started my career in public accounting, I had an obsessive tendency to believe that THE thing that would make me a better staff accountant would be to know more than other staff accountants. If I grasped the convoluted concepts in the Internal Revenue Code more quickly and more effectively…
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Stop leaving your job at work
I was recently with a bunch of attorneys at a fundraising event for JusticeMatters, a non-profit that “provides preventive and restorative direct legal services in humanitarian immigration law, family law, and other civil matters.” To be honest I’m still processing the evening, because on one hand it felt like my…
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Leaf season: Fasting and feasting for financial health
There are two twin maple trees near my office in Raleigh, beautiful old trees that greet me as I make the turn on to our street. And each year at just about this time, they start changing colors from top to bottom: dark green to greenish-yellow at first, and then…
Meaningful Returns 