I was lucky enough to do my internal medicine internship and residency at the University of Chicago on the southside of Chicago. This was a fantastic training program for a number of reasons. It was a high-powered academic center with ample research power. The residency program directors were humane and resident focused. Education was stressed […]
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Sunshine and Lollipops
Do you have any friends who are a little bit too into their kids? You know the type, they constantly tell you amusing little stories about their kids brilliance and talent. They’re a bit too quick to whip out the iPhone in order to start showing you pictures of little Carleton with blueberries on his […]
Paradise Lost?
The miles game is not meant to be easy. It’s not a drive-through at a fast food joint where you handover a few crinkled bucks, and get back a neatly packaged, hermetically sealed, burger in a box. It’s more like foraging for morels in a burnt out urban forest. Some days it’s easy and you […]
Flowing Information
This post is really a reflection of the evolving nature of the Miles Game. This flowchart to has become woefully obsolete. (What with the death of Vanilla Reloads and the inability to load Vanilla Visa products onto your Serve/Bluebird accounts at Walmart.) So below you will find a more current flowchart. (Though I sadly recognize […]
Current Anatomy
The miles game continues to steam along month after month. There’ve been no dramatic changes to my approach of late but there’ve been some subtle changes that are worth reporting on. My current approach involves: $1000 “spent” in Amazon payments a month between me and my wife’s account. One Isis serve card for both me […]
Gravy
The miles game is not a discrete object. It cannot be looked at from multiple angles and judged to be a specific thing. Instead it is malleable and plastic. And so it can not help but become a reflection of the player who plays it. In my mind there are three categories of (serious) miles […]
Addition by Subtraction
Walmart. Yucko.I haven’t exactly made my feelings about Walmart secret.And let’s be honest, I open myself up to a lot of criticism with my anti-Walmart stance. (Most of it well-deserved.)Am I being elitist?Absolutely.I would definitely earn some Everyman points by nonchalantly walking by the recycle center, replete with meth addicts dumping crushed beer cans into […]
Manufactured Crisis
There are many interesting questions in personal-finance. And one of them is; how much cash does one need for an emergency fund? There are many schools of thought on this one. Conventional wisdom seems to be that you should have six months living expenses set aside in an FDIC bank account. Others argue that you […]
Pen Pals and payPal
The loyal3 experiment continues down a predictable path. When I first found out about this opportunity, my feeling was that it had to be a short-lived one. As I saw it, a financial/tech start up had decided to make a devil’s bargain along the lines of “We’ll allow you (read pay for you) to run […]
Better than Sliced Bread
Damn this is fun. Travel hacking in general, and manufactured spending specifically really hit a bunch of high points with me. There’s the illicit pleasure of doing something that you’re not supposed to do. It reminds me of raiding my parents’ liquor cabinet as a 13-year-old with my friends. Ahhh…. Manufactured spending plus geri curl […]
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