If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!DW and I were talking about how personal finance can be easy in theory and hard in practice. I think the reason is that theory, like language, occurs in two steps. Passive and active. Understanding and speaking. Passively, yes, [...]

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Consumers are widely recommended to contribute around 15% of their paycheck to a retirement plan. The question whether to pick a ROTH IRA or a traditional IRA does not have a definite answer. For instance, it depends on whether one’s future [retirement] income is expected to in a higher tax bracket (ROTH) or a lower [...]

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Coming from the mindset of an earlier post about passion, I am speaking of the values that optimizes the successful triad of health, wealth, and wisdom (all part of financial independence) rather than more typical choice of comfortable or exciting escapism (all part of the rat race?) which to me suggests a lack of fulfillment [...]

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Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are “known knowns”; there are things we know we know. We also know there are “known unknowns”; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also “unknown unknowns” — [...]

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This week I got interviewed by KimC over at frugalhacks.com. If you want to know some more details about the motivations for this site and my background head on over and read the interview. Moving on … paperbackswap.com is really working for me. I already got two books waiting for me that I would otherwise [...]

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I just did my tax returns for my prosper loans and here’s how I did it. It has been very difficult, nay, impossible to find complete instructions online other than the in principle complete but to me useless suggestion to “consult a tax professional”(*). It does not make a lot of sense to me [...]

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I have a problem with books. My problem is that I like to read books that are typically hard to get at your local library. I also like to occasionally be able to quickly reference something I read, because I usually remember where I read something (down to the location on the page), but I [...]

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The American health care system is broken. The reason is not that employer group plans makes insurance more expensive for those who don’t have an employer. No, the reason that the American health care system is broken is because Americans universally tend to believe that

Technology can solve all problems.
If you spend enough, you can get [...]

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This year I figured I wanted to save the 30+ hours I spent last year doing my taxes. I have heard a lot of good things about various tax preparation programs that can fill out taxes and thus obviate the need for an accountant. After all if individuals need to hire experts merely to comply [...]

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Recently Trent at The Simple Dollar posted his schedule. I think it’s quite interesting to see what goes on behind the curtains because even when everybody mostly live in the same types of houses, drive the same kinds of cars, buy the same stuff and have jobs, we are all quite different when it [...]

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