I feel a little bit like a fundamentalist preacher who woke up one morning and realized he did not believe in God. Or not so much that he didn’t believe in god, more that he found he also believed in a larger, cooler, non Judeo-Christian god. Up until this point I’ve done a pretty decent […]
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Born to (not) Lose
The field of behavioral economics is an interesting one. One of its central tenets is that there is a so called “behavior gap.” This behavior gap describes how much less individual investors earn, on average when compared to the sum of their investments. And the reason for this behavior gap is that in many ways […]
What I Talk About When I Talk About Bonds
Warning: this will not be a particularly well researched or philosophical post. I’ve read my fair share on the subject I’m about talk about, but I’m certainly no expert. The reason I’m writing this post is just to communicate the simple model that I have in my head when I think and talk about bonds. […]
Thought Experiments
One of the absolute best things about having this blog is interacting with my readers. There is something about this format that brings together people with similar interests and perspectives and allows for the mixing of ideas and experiences in unusual ways. And on this blog, if there were to be an MVR award (for […]
Diversions
Smart investing is boring, plain-vanilla, milquetoast. One need only invest in well diversified portfolio of low-cost, passive index stock funds, and just enough bonds to match their own risk tolerance. (And rebalance once every year or two.) And yet here I am several hundred posts into my blog, still writing about investing. And the reason […]
Systemic Conflict
I’m in the middle of a terrific book by Daniel Kahneman entitled Thinking Fast And Slow. This book was given to me by my good friend Keiki, and for good reason. It’s changing the way I think about consciousness. It also provides hard evidence for something that I’ve suspected for a long time. Namely that my […]
Your Fears Are Naked
It’s easy to imagine that reading this blog, a reader might become confused. Since I spend so much bandwidth writing about money, and how to save it, and how to avoid paying taxes on it, and how to spend it wisely, the natural tendency might be to assume that I am inherently inclined to be […]
Page Turner
The main tension in my pursuit of early retirement is quite simple (and enviable I’ll concede.) I love my job. And it’s not just that I like what I do during the day. (I get a kick out of shooting the breeze with my patients and getting to know them and finding out what’s troubling […]
Measuring Stick
One of the reasons that economics is so interesting is that it really gets at what makes us tick as human beings.As far as I can tell, this science is the study of human incentive. Now I am not saying that human beings are motivated only by money . We are motivated by sex, and […]
Brush with Greatness
Last Thursday I had a tremendous opportunity. Mr. Money Mustache himself was on his West Coast swing, and had planned a get together with a couple of other blogs and blog groupies (guilty as charged) at a local park in Portland. And I just couldn’t resist the urge to go. You see it is not […]
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