My thesis, both from my own life experience and from multiple authors I’ll cite later in this post, is that focusing on systems, your craft, or what you need to get done – how you do things – rather than a grand “dream” is a more productive way to accomplish what you want in life […]
Work as Insurance During Early Retirement
On an old blog that I’ve shut down, a reader named JD left a comment on my when can I retire post that I thought was interesting and worth revisiting. Ideas like the 4% rule assume that we commit to a particular strategy, slavishly follow it, and never deviate or make any course corrections. It would be impossible to model all […]
Negotiating After A Job Offer Has Been Made
As part of any successful job hunt, eventually, the company will contact you and make a job offer. This may be a formal written offer, a verbal offer, or a verbal offer with the details to be written up and sent to you upon acceptance. Some job candidates get stressed out at this point and […]
Managing a Contractor
My wife and I finished a home renovation years ago. I hired contractors for the bulk of the work. I’d heard all the horror stories, so I carefully prepared and thought I had myself covered. In the end, the last $3,000 of work was abandoned (out of a $20,000 job) after stretching from an initial […]
Breaks During Your Working Life
This was originally a guest post at Boomer and Echo. Thanks so much for posting it Robb! A number of times in my life I’ve found myself between jobs. Usually, this is a euphemism for unemployment, which at times it was for me, but typically it was a natural break between activities. An example of this was I […]
Book Review: How to Sell Your Home in 5 Days
I came across Bill Effros’ How To Sell Your Home in 5 Days years ago at a bookstore. I read about half the book, was hooked, bought it, and have re-read it a number of times since. It’s large print, written in a casual style and most people could read the whole thing in a couple of […]
Needs versus Wants
When I was younger I felt there was a clear division between needs and wants. Spend money on your needs, food and shelter for example, and control your spending as much as you could with wants like video games or alcohol. One day I encountered a persuasive article arguing this was a false dichotomy. Consider […]
The Economy As A Pie
It’s interesting how people make decisions and form beliefs. An argument could be made that people rarely think about the facts and come to a rational decision – instead, they make an emotional decision then come up with rationalizations for it after the fact. Even if we pretend people do make decisions based on the […]
What Are Options?
It’s common in newspaper articles to read references to writing calls, buying puts, and tech companies offering lucrative stock options to employees. It’s easy to get bogged down in the terminology and be left scratching your head. Options are an advanced topic and not something you want to recklessly get involved in. It’s very worthwhile […]
Amateur Landlords
Nelson at the now sadly defunct Financial Uproar recently had a great post called Don’t Rent From An Amateur Landlord. The basic idea was that if you’re renting from someone who is new to real estate, they will be a pain as a landlord. They’ll be so nervous about having the bulk of their investment capital tied up […]