This year I dumped my airline branded credit card. After waiting hours at TSA on a recent flight I decided I will be minimizing my flights and traveling by car, train or smaller airports to avoid TSA nightmare lines. Since most smaller airports don’t have lounges or other amenities, the card made little sense. Additionally,…
Category: Money Culture
What Are Key Financial Preparations For A Fiscal Crisis?
Yesterday, I wrote about Key Financial Warning Alarms and today I’m going to tell you some of the things I’ve been doing. Liquidity Protection What Should You Do? I have no idea, you and I don’t have the financial intimacy needed to give you any kind of advice but I do know that you should…
Boosting FICO Score By Timing Payments?
I pay off my credit card every month. I didn’t always do that and I recall 25+ years ago when my wife and I first got married that the interest charges on those cards exploded the balance when not paying the off immediately. It was a tough lesson to learn during those early years. Because…
All Financial Advice Is Wrong, AI May Be The Best Option For Right Advice
I gave up on offering people financial advice a long time ago. I also gave up on listening to financial advice from others a long time ago too. What do these two things have in common? The common denominator between the two things is financial intimacy. In order to truly help someone with financial advice,…
“Be First, Be Smarter or Cheat”
The title of this post is from a quote by Jeremy Irons in the movie Margin Call. In the scene (video below), Jeremy’s character, John Tuld, CEO of an investment bank sits at a conference room in the 2 am hours of the day trying to figure out what to do with a bond portfolio…
ETF Fight Club: SPY vs VOO
The general consensus on Reddit from many investing subreddits is to “just buy VOO” set it and forget it. I have long been troubled by that mindset but I’m a different kind of investor. To be fair though, I decided to ask AI and create this new ETF Fight Club. I asked AI to create…
My Sinister Water & Gas Bill
As I continue to declutter this year I came across some old water bills from the city and I was a bit shocked at what I found. My water bill has grown 115% over 8 years for the exact same amount of water although the “sewer” charge has grown and we have less people living…
Will Gold (Jewelry) Put You In Danger?
The current price of gold as I type this post is about $4500 an ounce (~$145/gram). A typical gold wedding band has about 3 grams of gold so if you’re walking around with your wedding band, you are flashing a small portable easily steal-able $435 object. Add in earrings, gold necklace and/or bracelet and you’re…
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…
Got My Deferred Compensation Funds
Well call it a triple whammy of blessings but I got my deferred compensation funds in one giant lump sum. I was dreading getting this money because it will push me into a higher tax bracket and I honestly don’t know what to do with all the cash anymore. The stock market is over-valued, housing…