Blog

A while back, Nelson at (the now defunct) Financial Uproar recently posted about definitions of rich according to a variety of celebrities and polls.  I love posts about semantics, and the range of responses to this one shows that “rich” is a complex term. Chris Rock’s comedy routine about wealthy vs. rich is great.  In some versions of […]

Big Cajun Man (aka Alan Whitton aka the “Clown Prince of Personal Finance”) at Canadian Personal Finance Blog wrote a post a few years ago about universal advice that all personal finance blogs agree with.  I agree with all 6 of his statements, but in the interest of being contrarian, I thought I’d play the devil’s advocate and argue against […]

I only listen to podcasts while on road trips, but I love catching up on Freakanomics when I’m traveling.  A few years back they had a great episode called Should Kids Pay Back Their Parents for Raising Them?  The introduction dealt with a football player who got an NFL contract and, at the party to celebrate, […]

A few years ago Nelson Smith at the, sadly defunct, Financial Uproar posted a pretty funny review of Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Fisker called “I Read Early Retirement Extreme So You Don’t Have To”.  I read this book myself, and never wrote up my thoughts on the book, so I figured it’d be worth adding my $0.02 to […]

It’s interesting, especially after reading investing history, to live through a period of “irrational exuberance”.  I’ve been investing throughout the dot-com boom, the subprime meltdown, and the continued Canadian real estate bubble.  One enthusiasm, which seems to be limping towards an end, is the wild enthusiasm for dividends. What Is A Dividend? Equities – stock […]

There have been numerous posts about Sean Cooper’s feat a few years back of paying off his quarter-million-dollar mortgage in 3 years.  While this may or may not be interesting to people by itself, I think it’s a concrete example of a more abstract concept, namely delaying consumption. Everyone has the option between using resources they have in the present […]

Eliminating the middleman is never as simple as it sounds. ‘Bout 50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated. Malcolm Reynolds (Firefly) Doing business through an intermediary, a middleman, evokes strong feelings in people.  Most are passionately for it or against it.  In spite of these charged feelings, few people […]

I heard about “Never Split the Difference:  Negotiating As If Your Life Depends On It” by Chris Voss when he did a Reddit AMA. Chris Voss was the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator and having the possibility of people dying when he didn’t do a good job motivated him to improve his negotiation skills.  The FBI historically tried […]

The Beijing Olympics are set to begin on Friday, July 26, 2024. For every Olympic game, there is a fight by cities and countries around the world to host it.  The cities promise extensive municipal improvements along with the construction of appropriate facilities for the various events. Why Would Anyone WANT To Host The Olympics? The […]

A Reddit user asked an interesting question about an analytical method for calculating opportunity cost in a car transaction he made.  I felt like the commenters kind of blew it with their suggestions, often only offering “rules of thumb” or general principles in a situation that was quite tractable. What is Opportunity Cost? Opportunity cost is […]