The past couple of weeks I’ve had some strange interactions with people. First, the person pretends that everything is fine when we both know they are financially struggling. The second person knows the first person’s situation but doesn’t want to make a thing out of it so they keep quiet. The two people depart and…
Category: Financial Odyssey
The Best Investment I Ever Made Didn’t Cost Much
The best and most important investment I ever made didn’t cost much in relative terms. What was that investment? It was investing time in educating myself. During our youth, we all are forced to spend time in school. We start in kindergarten, then 1st thru 6th grades, then 7th-8th and then four more years of…
AI And I Agree, Humans Are Stupid
I have been in a world of mental anguish the past few days. It started with setting up my home lab for developing my own apps. So far I have had tremendous success building apps with Gemini and ChatGPT so I decided to take it a step further and build a more robust platform to…
Final Thoughts For 2025
It’s been a wonderful year for me and as I reflect back on my posts for the year I realize there are a few themes at play. Travel My first post for 2025 was a bit of a rant about over tourism in Europe. That post foreshadowed a key them of 2025 for me, international…
Inflation Is The #1 Killer of Quality of Life
On of my “secrets” to eating out cheaply has been to visit overlooked ethnic restaurants in my city. I am blessed to have access to many different types of cultural restaurants and one of the place recently visited is one in which I keep detailed receipts because what we order is not actually on the…
AI: What Are My Stupid Financial Mistakes?
After using AI to test some portfolios for ETF income, covered call ETF income and inflation, I decided to ask about the most common things that can derail and investment portfolio. The response was interesting and surprising because I saw my own actions and behaviors in the list. And that’s the great thing about AI,…
How To Prepare For A War Economy?
We’re in a whole new environment now after the recent actions taken by the U.S. against Iran. I won’t get into the politics of that decision and situation since this is a personal finance blog so the prudent thing to talk about here is how to prepare for a war economy. With the help of…
Got My Severance Payment
I got my severance package payment today. It actually came a bit faster than I was expecting but I’m not going to complain. It came at the perfect time, I’m getting ready to head out for the summer on holiday. This reminds me that I may not be posting frequently given I will be visiting…
Unemployment Benefits
Now that I’m unemployed, I signed up for unemployment benefits and it’s an interesting experience. First, there are many hoops to jump through to get started but after going through the gauntlet I finally got my benefit statement. It seems the state makes it as hard as possible to collect benefits. Evidently I am entitled…
I Got Laid Off
Well today was my last day at work but don’t feel sorry for me as I got a generous severance package. And it came at the perfect time, right before summer so I can take a very long vacation traveling South America where it’s nice and cool. It’s strange but the three times I’ve been…