My Silent Battle With Inflation
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…
Spend For Today or Save For Tomorrow
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,…
Do Higher Taxes Equal Greater Happiness?
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.…
It’s Not a Mistake Till It’s Poured
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…
Unicorns and Keynesian Economics
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…
Impatient Induced Frugality
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…
Are Your 401k Fees Worth The Tax Savings?
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…
Is There a Wrong Way To Invest In The Market?
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…
January Finances 2021: “Personal Finance Apprentice”
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;…
Flipping Coins
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…