Benefits Now!

We humans kind of suck at evaluating things that impact us far off in the future: retirement, our long term health, impacts to the environment, stuff like that.

If starting a small habit today will have big benefits to us decades from now, but is still minorly inconvenient, say, putting one additional percent of our salary into a 401k this month as Paula Pant suggests, we often will choose to indefinitely delay the inconvenience.

After all, we could die tomorrow. Who wants to be the sucker who denied himself a series of small benefits today for a tomorrow that never comes? Yolo, mofo.

Housing, Mobility, and Opportunity

My family has always been mobile. My mother moved here from the Philippines in the seventies with an associates degree from the lesser known MIT: Mapua Institute of Technology. My father took his mechanical engineering degree from Massachusetts to chase the jobs where they led him: South Africa, San Francisco (where he met my mother), Arizona (where I was born), Nevada, Montana, before finally settling our family in Pittsburgh, where the pay was pretty good and you could buy a big house in the suburbs with good schools on a single income.

Inside the Index

If you write about personal finance long enough, you find yourself walking some well-worn ground. After a while, it seems we all take a crack at the same tired problems that so many other writers have over the years.

We've all written about paying off consumer debt. And who hasn't had a hot take on a way to be just a little more frugal?

So with my apologies, today I'm writing about a subject that you've all heard about too much these days: genocide, and why it's not good.

Budget Porn: September 2017

They say that you never bury the lede, so here it is: September destroyed our budget.

We spent way above our long term monthly average, most of our spending was completely discretionary, and this month threw off our future financial independence projections pretty significantly.

We might have screwed up.

Let's dig into the details to see how.