My mother had a saying when I was growing up and now it’s stuck with me like any good saying does when repeated over and over during one’s formative years. The saying is this: “Lazy people work twice.” It doesn’t take much imaginative work to guess that I probably wasn’t working as hard as I should have been as a youth to have been told this over and over again. Usually, household chores were the culprit. A half-ass job sweeping…
Last week I logged onto Vanguard and tinkered with my investments. I didn’t sell or buy anything–nothing that I would call bad investing practice–but I did reduce the amount of money being shoveled into my beloved VTSAX each week by half. This reduction in after-tax cash going into the markets wasn’t driven by any emotion, though I did have an emotional wave of guilt wash over me when clicking the edit button on my auto-investments. It’s always the same internal…
While sitting in my backyard on an early Saturday morning reading the news, I came across another one of those silly happiest countries on earth reports. I find them silly anyway. Trying to determine an entire country’s happiness and then ranking them against one another seems to be a waste of time at first glance. But the silliness and the thought of hundreds, maybe thousands of hours spent making this report piqued my interest, and so I decided to dig…
Losing money isn’t fun. It’s even worse when you lose someone else’s money. When I look back over my 17-year career in construction, I think I may have lost somewhere in the range of $100k of my employer’s money by making mistakes or less than ideal decisions. It’s tough to think about it. Even writing it down right now and doing the math is difficult. I want to see myself as having gained all my professional experience and wisdom by…
My youngest daughter is four and still a bit scared of the dark, so she likes to keep a stuffed unicorn named Corny Corny with her when it’s time for bed. It’s a big round tie-dye pillow like blob with a unicorn horn and two stiched on happy eyes (see featured image). Corny Corny gives her security when it’s time to go to bed because she can grasp onto this soft unicorn when she looks out at her shadow ridden…
We went this past weekend to buy a fire pit for our backyard. After browsing online through Amazon to get an idea of pricing and styles, we thought it might be nice to see a few in real life. So we went to Lowe’s where we found a decent one, albeit one we hadn’t previously looked at. It was in our price range. And after looking over their stock we told one of their workers that we’d like to purchase…
Now that we’re in the thick of tax season, I figured it might be nice to have a post related to tax savings; specifically what we pay in 401k fees vs the tax saving benefits. I just paid my federal and state taxes and I’m getting ready to pay my property taxes. Part of my decision making strategy when I refinanced, was forgoing escrow so that I could use a credit card to pay my property tax. It lets me…
Recently I’ve started purchasing individual stocks again after taking a few years off. And in addition to that, I’ve started to invest in small cap index fund shares. Now that I’m buying individual stocks again, I’ve been asking myself why I stopped picking stocks in the first place. A few questions bubble up to the top of my mind as I ask myself this. Is there a wrong way to invest money? Well, that’s a loaded question. This is like…
In January we didn’t have a mortgage to worry about and we took a spur of the moment trip to the Sierra Nevada for a weekend getaway for the MLK holiday weekend. While I usually dislike spur of the moment money spending, this trip to the snow was exactly what we needed as a family; just a few days out of our house in new surroundings doing absolutely nothing. Somehow we managed to stay in the black this month despite…
The construction industry is unique in that we purposefully and dutifully work ourselves out of a job as fast as we can. That’s the goal. When a job is complete, the project team disperses across the company and new teams are formed. This constant churning allows me to become somewhat accustomed to change, not that the same nervous feeling ever goes away when it’s time to walk into a new office and meet my new team. I just know the…