myShoggoth

Make Sure You Stay Broke

I love this consumerist post on tips to stay broke.

Using financial software like MS Money or Quicken is very important IMO.  If you know exactly what you have, where it is, and where it is going there's a feedback loop from your activities.  How much do you spend on bills?  How often do you use that landline vs. your cell phone, and how much does it cost?  Can you just get rid of it?

Having real solid numbers, being able to track where money is coming from and going to, these are the things that allow our brains to do what they do best: find patterns.  Once you understand the patterns of your financial life you can make good decisions.

The patterns people find from positions of ignorance seem to lead more often to bad decisions, reflected in that list.

Accounts You Need, Accounts You Don't

My wife and I have an informal agreement where there are some feeds I read she doesn't, and some feeds she reads that I don't.  We filter the contents for each other, only giving URLs for stuff that the other would find amusing or interesting.  One that she reads for us is Consumerist.

The conversation:

She says:

http://consumerist.com/consumer/finance/four-accounts-you-need-four-accounts-you-dont-278567.php
I think we have a bingo

I says:

YAHTZEE!

She says:

except for my insistence on keeping that extra checking account which I use for fleecing free checks

I says:

you're a known silly

She says:

with free checks

By the way, don't just stop at that article.  It links to (and talks about material from) http://www.bargaineering.com/articles/five-accounts-you-absolutely-must-have-and-four-you-dont.html, which is very good.

I'm not happy with the formatting on that IM conversation replay, need to figure out a better way to show those.

Good With Money

My wife just IMed me an interesting WSJ article called Seven Mistakes With Money.  Yes, she was in the house with me at the time.  She was upstairs and I was downstairs, what of it?  Besides, you're not going to stand next to someone and say H T T P COLON FORWARD SLASH DUBYA DUBYA...

Anyway.

I enjoyed it, I've been considering writing something up (maybe a series of somethings) on financials because it is such an important set of skills to have and yet it isn't really heavily valued in mainstream American culture.

One of the biggest mistakes I see is confused relative vs. objective wealth.