"Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one." –Marcus Aurelius
The Stock Market is designed to transfer money from the Active to the Patient. –Warren Buffett There is a lot of anxiety in the FIRE community about the stock market dropping. It has dropped faster than it has in generations and as more information becomes available about the effects of the virus and the measures…
A lot of Americans don’t have any savings, and many more don’t have any real investments. Remember, your home is never an investment <link>. But if you’ve been working to gain financial literacy and turn your situation around, you might start to have savings. And you might then start to wonder, how should I invest…
In the budget series, we discussed housing as an item. Let’s revisit the housing discussion. It’s not clear a house is always better but this time we are assuming you have decided to buy a house. Let’s further assume you are a young couple (or individual). What kind of house should you buy? I’m going…
There are a lot of people you’ll interact with when you make purchasing decisions who will try to influence your decision. Mostly it’s easy to understand where they are coming from. Your friends and family want what’s best for you, but that may be influenced by their own preferences or desire to have you be…
Let’s talk insurance again – this time, life insurance. How does it work, and who should have it? Life insurance is, of course, something you get because you are betting that you will die soon (or your wife wants to make that bet…). Just kidding. It is still based on life and death. Like all…
In a previous article, we talked about knowing your cash flow and how its possible variations might affect you. One way to mitigate the risk of needing a lot more money than usual in one month is to have an emergency fund. This shouldn’t be news – I know of no school of thought in…
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.” –Charles Dickens Your cash flow is simply the amount going in, and the amount going out. When we spend less than we have coming in, we can save, invest, or pay off…
If you’ve spent too much time around economists like I have, you know that the word arbitrage means ‘to take advantage of a difference in price that does not reflect a difference in value’. Geographic arbitrage, in the financial independence and related spheres, means taking advantage of the fact that the ratio of salary to…
And now we come to the last main article in the Budget Series – housing. I saved this for last because it is the biggest thing in almost anyone’s budget and the hardest to change. It’s best to have a more disciplined approach to money before making decisions about this. And there are a lot…
Welcome back to our Budget Series. The topic today is transportation. The US is still a car country, and probably will be until fleets of self-driving robot cars make car ownership unnecessary, simply because of the geographic realities. It is hard to get around on public transportation in most of North America (as well as…