Speaking of unfortunate expenditures, that unofficial Apple policy of one free screen replacement on an iPad? Don't count on it -- I paid, and it wasn't cheap.
I am fascinated by the staff in Apple stores, though. They're such appealing kids: do they have some killer training process to make them all warmly charming like that, or is it selection in the hiring process?
That dude's definition of frugality is very different from mine. Even when I was earning a lot I didn't manage to spend as much as he does on a budget, I don't think. His license was suspended so he bought a $1200 road bike to commute on for a few months?!
That's just what using a Mac does to you. If they spent all their time fielding technical questions about Windows they'd have a harder edge.
Also, I haven't read the setup posts, but does his plan actually make fiscal sense? How high can the interest rate on student debt be?
I think the road-bike purchase was pre-frugality. His frugal budget looks fairly sanely tight to me, although not like anything that would hurt badly at all.
1: The time I went into an Apple store it gave me the creeps, like a futurological nightmare. I would have been happy to meet a grumpy clerk.
I believe that they're sincere, well-programmed true-believing zombies, with no distance between the indoctrination and the true self.
4: If the rate on student loans is higher than he could get with a safe investment, it's sensible. And what kind of rate can you get on a safe investment this year?
Also, there's a psychological element to what's fiscally sensible: even if he could get a better return on his money by keeping the student loans, saving the same amount, and investing it at a higher rate, being seriously frugal to build up an investment fund while you still have debt is psychologically difficult for lots of people. I'd say that what he's doing is more sensible than making regular payments on his debt and spending the rest of what he makes, which is what I think the realistic other option would have been.
After browsing a handful of posts, I'm having a hard time sympathizing with this guy. I'm sure it's objectively hard to write about voluntarily living below your means without sounding like a dick about the things you used to take for granted, but I'm finding myself unable to get over the 'christ, what an asshole' reaction.
It's weird. He probably believes he's being frugal, but I think what his experiment shows is that it's easy to be frugal if you have a good income-to-expense ratio.
I think that dude just sort of baffles me. If you find the idea of retiring at 32 so compelling, maybe you need a more interesting job? Also the whole thing about how not dropping a grand on cocktails every month made him realize it's important to have a personality. I mean, the honesty is commendable, I guess. But he seems to inhabit a very different world from mine.
During his scuzzy days my brother knew a stripper who saved $3,000/ month. That's less than half this guy's rate, but she didn't have to go to Harvard.
He sounds like a douche, but he's doing a great job of paying that debt. I've got a little more than half of his debt, and seeing those statements every month telling me I'll be paying it off for 20 years makes me sick. I've started paying it off early (while I have a job that pays a living wage--next year I may be unemployed) at twice the suggested rate, but still it's going to be ten years of my life. Horrible.
I am fascinated by the staff in Apple stores, though. They're such appealing kids: do they have some killer training process to make them all warmly charming like that, or is it selection in the hiring process?
Depends on the store--I've encountered some super-condescending "geniuses" that I'd like to stomp with a boot.
Actually, once I pay my credit card off (been doing $1000/mo), I could theoretically pay 2000/mo on debt. That would require me to stay at the same salary level, which will not happen even if I do get a job next year.
I have a hard time taking his plan seriously. I'm glad he'll clear the debt, but it boggles the mind that he thinks he's frugal because he is doing things like fixing his own toilet or not spending more than my monthly housing expenses on entertainment. I mean, good for you, but... if you're making a six-figure salary and you have to get a second job to pay off your loans, maybe you're not that good at budgeting.
I know someone who works at an Apple Store. They're transgendered, which doesn't really matter, and cute, which does, but they also have a very brusque, no-bullshit personality. I've never seen them at work, but I have a hard time imagining them turning on the charm to get people to buy a new iPad or whatever.
15: He does appear to be, um, not culturally someone I'm inclined to sympathize with. But this:
if you're making a six-figure salary and you have to get a second job to pay off your loans, maybe you're not that good at budgeting.
is offbase. He wasn't having trouble paying down his loans at a reasonable rate -- paying about $100K off in ten months is a very different proposition than doing it over ten or fifteen years.
6: The people seem fine. The store seems to have been designed by somebody who saw various movies about totalitarian futuristic distopias and said "That's what I like."
And the interesting thing is how hard it is to live outside the norms for your social group. The budget he's living on wouldn't have been remotely difficult for me in my twenties. It'd be more complicated now what with family dynamics, but if I had buy-in from Buck and managed not to feel bad about not indulging the kids, it wouldn't be tough now (adjusting for the extra mouths to feed). But it's heavy weather for him, because he's in a free-spending high-income social group.
1, 13: The people in the NYC stores have always been super helpful and nice. The closest I came to being annoyed by a "genius" was when my Time Capsule died (they were giving me a new one and I didn't lose anything) and I made a snarky comment about how Hey! Mine failed at 18 mos! Just like everyone else's is failing at 18 mos! And she got very serious and explained to me, "All drives fail. There is no drive that won't fail eventually. You have to face that fact. All drives fail eventually." Yes, but this one was advertised as "archival-grade memory" or whatever, and they are all dying at 18 mos! Her earnest defense prompted an eyeroll from me, but nothing more.
Also the whole thing about how not dropping a grand on cocktails every month made him realize it's important to have a personality. I mean, the honesty is commendable, I guess.
That completely cracked me up. It's like, maybe after a while Pinocchio will wake up and realize he's turned into a real boy!
I can replace the toilet innards because I have those pliers. I can also put in a whole new toilet. Toilets are the bunny slope of DIY plumbing.
I have to start getting out of work earlier to cook dinner more
You have a spouse, right? Who even works at home, if I recall. Why is this entirely your responsibility?
(I'm kind of fighting this from the opposite front - I do 99% of the home cooking - or even home-frozen-thing reheating - and am kind of tired of the timing of dinner always being so dependent on my planning and work hours)
I have a coworker who wants to go back to school for her MSW. She owes about 3k to her undergrad institution which means that she can't get her transcript.
If she scrimped more she could probably save the money in a couple of years, but she bought a new Honda Civic with help from her Dad because her VW Bug was always breaking down. She goes to therap 2 times a week, and our insurance co-pays aren't cheap. She did go home for Christmas. And she and her roommate probably go out to a bar on a weekly basis, though they try to drink at home too.
She goes out with her roommate, because she hates the job which is stressful and stupid. She rarely went out before. Being sensible would get her the money in a couple of years, but being sensible in that situation is hard.
Based on the comments here, I don't think I want to read the linked posts -- it sounds like it will make me grind my teeth, even if I do think that what he's doing is basically good.
It is interesting how much spending habits get socialized by one's peer group and how "reasonable expenses" can easy vary by 50-100% for people in basically the same lifestyle (and, obviously, much more than that for people with different lifestyles).
I was thinking about the dot com boom recently (which I personally missed completely) and the younger brother of a friend of mine who got a decent paying computer job straight out of high school, and just wondering what that would do to one's sense of "disposable income" to go straight to making (say) $40K without spending several years making $18K first.
I remember being 24 and thinking that it was hard to imagine ever "needing" to make more than $35K a year -- I had that number in my head very specifically as an amount that sounded not just sufficient but luxurious -- which it absolutely is if you don't have dependents, a mortgage, etc . . .
17: Eh. Ten months is ambitious, but he's still keeping two cars and a motorcycle, and I think I'd kill that were I trying to be frugal before getting a second low-paying job. I agree with your 19; but the result is that it makes it profoundly less interesting as a story of one man vs. his debt.
I could theoretically pay 2000/mo on debt
Would that actually be a good idea? It depends on exactly what the loan terms are, I suppose, but if they're not totally unreasonable student-style loans, it seems like having savings would be better. If you still have the savings in five years and want to pay it off in a lump, great, but between then and now, that's a lot of emergency car repairs or something that you're prepared for.
I did pay off the smallest of my student loans when I probably should have kept the cash, but Sallie Mae was driving me nuts. It worked out OK. My dad, conversely, used a windfall to pay off his mortgage, but then had no cash left and had to take out another one in short order. Would have been better to just keep the cash around in the first place.
The thing that jumps out at me from that blog is how much Austin has changed. A decade ago it would have been a tremendous effort to spend $150/week on dinner dates; now his pre-frugal spending is at the level I'd expect of someone living in the Bay Area.
25: I got a decent-paying computer job straight out of high school. I spent the money on video games and weed, more or less. I have no idea what it did to me, as I've always been kind of terrible with money, but that dude's spending habits still baffle me.
I paid off my outstanding student loans during a horrid year (billed 3000+ hours, had to travel to Mexico City 10 or 12 times in the course thereof, the Flip-Pater had heart attack #2 and had to be defibrillated in a helicopter,* etc.), sending every spare dime to the not-particularly-usurious-as-these-things-go usurers. I didn't invade my savings, but I didn't save anything additional in that time. Probably not the wisest course, but I was sure I would quit my job in a scorching rage or be fired for assaulting the partner I was working for.**
* Saving grace: Everyone in the cardiac ICU at MG, including the Big Blue-Scrubbed Cheese of cardiac surgery, was indescribably kind and helpful. I'd donate a wing to the place if I could.
** I remember recurrently contemplating breaking his office window and chucking him out onto Third Avenue. He stopped asking me to his office about halfway through that year.
And the interesting thing is how hard it is to live outside the norms for your social group.
Yeah. I only scrolled through the first page of his site, but the Dating on a Budget post is a weird hybrid of self-awareness and obliviousness:
However, it has become apparent to me that there is a certain type of woman who wants money to be spent on her. This is the kind of woman who is okay with and actually encourages the social concept of legalized prostitution.
Then there is the kind of woman who gets it, and doesn't feel like her self-worth is validated by how much her man spends on her. At the beginning of NMHD, I actually gave a damn about what the women in the former group thought about me. These days? I'm getting more ok with not being "in their league," and while that does admittedly weigh on my mind, I have consciously added "frugality" to my mostly subconscious list of traits I want in a girl I'm dating.
Talk about your binary distinctions. In his mind, women are either validating themselves by how much money gets spent on them, or are frugal.
I'm torn between being impressed that he's putting more time into thinking about things than other people with his level of wealth and privilege are likely to do, and being appalled that this relatively shallow level of analysis seems impressive.
how hard it is to live outside the norms for your social group
But it's funny, I don't get the impression that any of this experience is causing him to be critical of the norms of his social group at all. For instance, with the dating thing, he realizes that he used to date some pretty shallow and materialistic women, and that he has to look for someone with different qualities now, but I don't get the impression that he won't go right back to the shallow hotties as soon as he's back to his old lifestyle.
Further to 30: The prepayment, per 19, was enabled by the fact that I had little or no free time that year and all the friends whom I had had when I arrived in the big city or had made soon after arriving had, by then, left, so I had nobody to spend money with.
I am very glad that the Flip-pater did well and is still around to help prod you into Jonathan Edwards mode on things like Sandusky vel sim.
I got a decent-paying computer job straight out of high school. I spent the money on video games and weed, more or less. I have no idea what it did to me, as I've always been kind of terrible with money
I should add that the person that I was thinking of is good guy. I was always sort of amused by him because my circle of friends (including his brother) were the introverted/geeky/anti-social crowd and he seemed like a good example of the positive side of "normal." He was stable, seemed well-adjusted, made good decisions while still seeming like a genuine and quirky person.
As far as I know he probably did the same thing you did along with buying a slightly too expensive car but I don't think he had any real problems because of it. I don't know him well though.
But I remember a story from when he was working in Seattle of some new service which would allow you to order music and somebody would deliver it to your workplace. It became a thing in his office because, of course, it's fun to be the person at work getting packages.
It's stuck with me as an example of how it could be easy to spend way more money on the same lifestyle -- rather than spending $8 on a used CD (remember when used CDs were still expensive?) you could spend $25 to have a new CD delivered to your office.
34: Thanks. You aren't the only one. This week's PVP storyline is painfully and amusingly familiar.
Further to 30: The prepayment, per 19, was enabled by the fact that I had little or no free time that year and all the friends whom I had had when I arrived in the big city or had made soon after arriving had, by then, left, so I had nobody to spend money with.
That sounds horrible (which is, I realize, your point).
I'm trying to build up some savings and contribute to my IRA, but I'm also trying to pay down my debt. The payments I'm making are more than I could afford living alone or with a non-romantic relationship roommate. They're about 60% more than the regular payment would be, but a lot more than the Income-Based Repayment that I'm entitled to. For my top-up payments, I'm focused on the ones that have non subsidized interest so that if I go back to school, I'll have less interest accruing on those.
You have a spouse, right? Who even works at home, if I recall. Why is this entirely your responsibility?
It's been almost entirely his responsibility for most of the marriage -- if I call it 80-20 I think I'm being generous to myself. He's been putting in more hours lately and it's turned into a lot of takeout, and I need to pick up some slack.
Even though it makes David Brooks respect you more, paying down your debts throws the economy further into a recession. You people do realize that, I hope.
EVERYBODY SHOULD BE BUYING SHIT! THAT'S HOW WE DEFEATED AL QAEDA! THIS GUY IS AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!
OK, now I've read further. How on earth is this guy spending $114 a month on water? I've paid bills for a five-bedroom house (admittedly, with only two people living in it) that were about $35. And that includes summer garden (not lawn) watering.
Seriously, what the heck? Is that normal for Austin?
37: Well, it's not like I never spoke or e-mailed them, but it weighed heavily that they were all, suddenly, gone. I found out after that year was over that they had had a little huddle of worried conversation about my physical and mental health, spurred by 3 a.m. e-mails from the office and so on.
I agree that paying down a medium-interest loan in a hurry could be a mistake. If your income drops and you can't make payments, you won't get credit for the extra early payments.
How on earth is this guy spending $114 a month on water?
We've got from $30 to $80 and it is still rising. It costs a great deal of money to make sure that shit doesn't go into the Mon often enough that the EPA won't sue you. Plus, I suspect the management is horrible.
I had the same impression as 31 and 32. It's probably not fair to judge him too harshly, though. I guess the only young people I usually read nowadays are articulate and self-aware. And when I was young, it wasn't really feasible to read anything unedited by ordinary young people.
18 made me laugh. It's like a set from Sleeper or something, right?
As of tomorrow I have under 20k of MSW debt. I could certainly tear it down faster than I'm doing now but my only really ridiculous spending habit is takeout. So now I'm wondering how much I could save up by eating, you know, steamed cardboard and stuff, whatever I'd come up with in the absence of restaurants.
And of course I enter the state's loan repayment lottery every year because I like a good futile gesture as much as the next social worker.
OT: Rock on, Newt Gingrich: Gingrich Would Consider Palin as Running Mate.
Witt, some people like the water more than others. It's quite legal and does no one any harm. We shouldn't think of that as a moral failing.
I remember recurrently contemplating breaking his office window and chucking him out onto Third Avenue. He stopped asking me to his office about halfway through that year.
I worked for a partner once with a softball-sized glass sphere on his desk -- some kind of bogus award or memento of something. I spent a lot of time fantasizing about whipping it into his face as hard as I could. He was really irritating. Not the worst person I've ever worked for, but possibly the most annoying to be in the same room with.
(Do I talk about wanting to hit people too much? I never actually do. It just wouldn't work out well. And of course, it's wrong.)
46: Yes. I can't even think of other movies by title, but the feeling persists.
45: I have to admit that I sort of wonder if he's going to make it over the hump and realize that there are real people in the world who neither spend hundreds of dollars on cocktails in a weekend or expect that sort of money to be spent on them. He seems almost human, and as if he might possibly make it all the way. Or not, which adds drama to the blog.
37: Well, it's not like I never spoke or e-mailed them, but it weighed heavily that they were all, suddenly, gone.
This stings a little bit for me. I've been working a bunch over the last two-to-three years (not even unhealthy amounts, just normal, "the job is taking up almost all of my brainpower") and I've been steadily drifting out of touch with a couple of close friends who have moved out of state.
I'm not sure what to do about it (and, thankfully, I feel like it wouldn't be difficult to re-connect given the opportunity), but it feels like a slow and gradual loss.
If you still have credit card debt that probably means you have little to no cushion. Personally, I wouldn't consider paying back more than the minimum on my student loans until I had at least 10-15K in the bank on top of normal cash flow. You need some liquidity for emergencies/unemployment/moving costs.
OK, now here's another puzzling thing. He didn't go home for Christmas because the airfare costs $500. He says he loves and misses his family and wishes he was there.
Seriously, dude? Life is short. I know a 34-year-old with lung cancer. What is going to matter more, if you pay off your student loan on June 1 or June 15, or if you have an extra holiday's worth of memories with your family?
I dunno, it just seems like swinging wildly from one extreme value to another. Maybe he'll wind up in the middle at some point.
Oh and cocktails. Bad habit. Delightful bad habit. However, I got four kinds of crazy and delicious bitters as a New Year's gift and am now morally obligated to become an accomplished maker of cocktails. (On which topic please tell me if you know a good drink with Pisco and not a lot of other crazy ingredients because something possessed me to bring a bottle of Pisco to our holiday hosts before realizing I don't really know what you do with the stuff.)
I remember recurrently contemplating breaking his office window and chucking him out onto Third Avenue. He stopped asking me to his office about halfway through that year.
Perhaps we shouldn't overshare, but my worst boss was a slender, stylish, yuppyish woman. She wasn't a naturally horrible person, but the operation was being massively transformed and she got handed some of the dirty work, which she gladly accepted because she was a climber. Part of her job involved making 2 years of my life unbearable.
At one point we were standing at the top of the stairs talking about something and I envisioned pushing her down to the landing below and then landing on her with both feet and jumping up and down a few times.
I was able to leave fairly shortly, and a few years later I started collecting my early retirement pittance.
But it's funny, I don't get the impression that any of this experience is causing him to be critical of the norms of his social group at all.
No, definitely not. He's counting the days until he can go back to his normal lifestyle.
It's been funny watching how the people I knew in grad school changed when they got real jobs. Most of them stayed frugal, because that was just how they were, and so they'd save the extra money, or send some of it home to their parents. (Whether their parents needed it or not.) But some of them really changed, I think because they felt that their new jobs were kind of a delayed reward for having worked hard in grad school. When they were frugal before, it wasn't a virtue, it was more like paying dues, or investing in the future, and now that they had gotten to the next stage of the game, they were getting their payoff. So they'd buy a big condo, regardless of whether they'd wanted one before, and they'd learn to enjoy it.
Some of the worst money managers are MDs, they say, because they're 30 before they earn any money and they've been watching their unambitious friends having fun for close to ten years.
7
... I'd say that what he's doing is more sensible than making regular payments on his debt and spending the rest of what he makes, which is what I think the realistic other option would have been.
How about not working two jobs? I haven't read the links or anything but I would think you would generally be better off advancing your career by devoting your energy to your primary job. Although I suppose for some people keeping busy keeps them out of trouble.
And it doesn't make much sense to me to be really frugal part of the time as opposed to moderately frugal all of the time. Why is it so important to pay off your loans in 10 months?
A decade ago it would have been a tremendous effort to spend $150/week on dinner dates; now his pre-frugal spending is at the level I'd expect of someone living in the Bay Area.
I would have found it tremendously difficult to spend that half that much on dinner dates when I lived in the Bay Area (though I did spend more than that out of what was essentially spite at Bar Tartine once).
I am pretty sure that if my income increased markedly, I'd be able to find things on which to dispose it pretty easily, but I'm not sure how many or how expensive such things would be. I am, however, willing to find out, if any of you wants to donate your largesse to the cause of science.
Unnecessary interest expense? I mean, it is a moderately loony thing to do, but he's going to make a profit on it.
58
Some of the worst money managers are MDs, they say, because they're 30 before they earn any money and they've been watching their unambitious friends having fun for close to ten years.
I have heard that MDs are often bad investors because they are arrogant and over confident. You sometimes see that in professional athletes also. Not sure if that is what you mean by bad money management though.
Most of the MDs I know in my general age cohort don't have time to spend very much money.
I think 'bad money manager' in the MD context means blowing all of your income on sports cars, nice clothes, and (as I have heard at least one surgeon has done) full length portraits of yourself dressed as a conquistador. Not incompetent investing, but silly spending.
Hey guys, just saw from my wordpress stats page that about 50+ hits were generated from this source, so I thought I'd take a moment to stop by. Your comments are interesting--I wish I got this kind of candid feedback directly on my blog.
25 & 32: I'll be writing a post on this soon.
31: A lot of my blog is tongue-in-cheek
7: the rate on the last loan ($33k to go) is 7%
64: Yeah, that. Per 63, a lot of them may not have time to enjoy the shit they buy.
One very eminent and prosperous MD I know kept getting married and divorced. That will do it. He was on his 5th kid from his 3rd marriage and whether or not she was fucked up like the others, she was spoiled rotten.
I suppose that most wouldn't regard that specifically as a money management problem, though.
61
Unnecessary interest expense? I mean, it is a moderately loony thing to do, but he's going to make a profit on it.
Well sure if you borrowed from loan sharks you want to get out from under as fast as possible. But typically aren't at least some of your student loans at low (even subsidized) interest rates which it isn't that advantageous to pay off quickly? After people don't usually worry a lot about all the interest income they are giving up by not quickly saving a bunch of money although (to an economist at least) the same considerations apply.
65: Nice to see you here, and my apologies for anything that sounded too harsh -- it's a tough crowd.
I would have found it tremendously difficult to spend that half that much on dinner dates when I lived in the Bay Area
I'm sorry no one ever responded to your messages on OKCupid, nosflow.
68
7: the rate on the last loan ($33k to go) is 7%
Ok, if the rate on the cheapest loan was 7% I can see trying to pay them off quickly (if not in 10 months).
And when I say it's a tough crowd, I include myself in that. I certainly haven't been polite.
Yeah "candid feedback" is perhaps a more polite term for my comments than they strictly deserve. No offense, dude!
LizardBreath--all good. I raised my eyebrows a few times as I read through, but really, it's all good. I am who I am...douche (#12) or not ;)
Oh no, is an Internet Mean Girls event happening when I'm not near a computer?
it doesn't make much sense to me to be really frugal part of the time as opposed to moderately frugal all of the time.
This is a good point. A lot of "cheapskate living" style advice that some friends of mine are annoyingly fond of appears to suppose that the only options are out of control credit card spending or mad coupon-clipping.* I'll admit to being on the cheapskate end of things (grew up kind of broke and then went to graduate school and the frugality seems to have stuck), but I think it's far more important to be reasonably frugal than to swing wildly from austerity to largesse. We built our budget on the assumption that I was the only salary, and this has worked out surprisingly well.
*I have a rather intense reaction to any advice that tell me I can save $1400 a year by not buying lattes. I already don't do that! So why should I follow your advice when you are worse at this than I am?
54 -- I'm definitely in the 'life is short' camp. I could be, and by many measures should have been, a lot more careful with money in years past. And now. The thing is, once you get past the basic level of human needs (nearly out of reach for the vast bulk of humanity), experience and memory is what life is made of. There are surely at least one million better things I could do with the money I'll spend taking my son (a HS senior, and so soon to be launched on his own adventure) abroad skiing for a week this winter. He'll have to buy his own cocktails, though.
78: I do think there are different kinds of people, for whom different styles of managing money are appropriate. The really frugal to meet a goal thing appeals to me, because while I'm fairly flexible about lifestyle, keeping track of what the most sensible spending decision is requires more attention than I've got. A blanket "Am I spending money on that? No. Whatever it is, no." is easier than figuring out how to do the same things I was doing before more cheaply.
I save a ton of money by not buying lattes ($1400), cappuccinos (another $1400, give or take), gibraltars (ca. $1000), or espressos (ca. $1000). Instead, I buy macchiatos, but I still come out $3800 ahead.
Oh no, is an Internet Mean Girls event
happening when I'm not near a computer?
Dammit, and I'm just heading out to bike, too.
80: Agreed. I just ain't clipping coupons and I don't care how many Oreos I could have bought.
I save at least 50 grand a year by not buying a $50,000 car every year.
Which is great because I really couldn't afford that.
I am far more frugal than you -- I pass up a Lamborghini annually. One of these days, the accumulated savings are really going to start adding up.
Sometimes I buy a macchiato at a place that doesn't serve gibraltars, so that throws the calculations off a bit.
Now can we all sit in a circle, hold hands, and sing Kumbaya?
*I have a rather intense reaction to any advice that tell me I can save $1400 a year by not buying lattes. I already don't do that! So why should I follow your advice when you are worse at this than I am?
Cala FTW.
Speaking of spending money, I've just made an end-of-year donation to Scarleteen. Time for my annual appeal: If you know a teenager, care about a teenager, or were once a teenager, please donate to the most practical, frank and supportive sex education website for young people that I know of.
They get 750,000 unique visitors a month, most between 15-25, and do it all on a budget of just $75,000 a year. Truly a labor of love.
You know what else is frugal? Not paying your taxes!
I know, I know, tongue in cheek.
I can save $1400 a year by not buying lattes.
... She had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I could put her upon her feet in a week. It brightened her up, it filled her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do. So I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for four days, and then she would be all right again.
And it would have happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking and drinking, because she had never done those things. So there it was. She had neglected her habits, and hadn't any. Now that they would have come good, there were none in stock. She had nothing to fall back on. She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard and lighten ship withal.
NMHD, fwiw I'd probably have been a lot crankier and more pointed had we been having a conversation in person. That probably says more about my tolerance for disagreement than it does about being meannn on the Internet, though.
I was pretty frugal in my 20s, and squirreled a way quite a bit, only to loose a solid chunk of it on what seemed like sound investments at the time (buying a house, owning tech stocks during the tech bubble, buying stock in AIG right before the economy blew up).
I've come to the conclusion that long term investments really can't be counted on in tumultuous economic times, so I might as well save less and spend more.
It would be imprudent to have any net worth on Dec. 21, 2012; the good money manager will have arranged to be hocked to the gills at that point.
That sort of happened to me, and my conclusion was to "save" money instead of "investing" money.
I know it's not cool to read Yglesias anymore, but he did have a very nice post about how non-rich people shouldn't invest (and instead should live in countries with social security).
88: Oh, dude, no. It's not you, look at any other comment thread on this site. Once it gets going, it's a couple hundred comments of intermittently hostile sniping, no matter what the topic. Kumbaya only happens if everyone happens to get worn out at once.
97: I mean, it could be him too.
Well, I do "save", but I have less faith than ever that its going to be around by the time I need it. I mean, while chances are that things will probably be ok, my takeaway from the events of past decade is that the chances of everything one day going all bob mcmanus aren't as remote as I would like them to be. And if thats the case, I'll be wishing I'd spent more money now.
We're being too goddamn nice, but since I've returned to the internet I've been troll lite. The Troll of Sorrow hates me now, nice as I was to him.
As they say, dope will get you through times whithout money better than money will get you through times without dope. This is also called the diamond-water paradox. Sort of.
You're right. I should spend more money dope.
I do sort of feel like Spike. I spent a lot of time getting told that it was vitally important to start investing while you were as young as possible so that the miracle of compounding would work for you. And all the 401K money I put away while working at law firms? Last I looked at my balances, I'm right around where I would be if I'd kept it in cash in a box under the bed.
Also, we call it comity, not kumbaya.
99: Well, that too -- it's not that there's not genuine judgment going on. But I do worry when people come by that the level of energy devoted to discussing them seems disproportionate. We can devote this much energy to talking about bottlecaps.
I have a 401k I lost track of for about a decade. I think it's below the amount contributed.
106: I was, of course, thinking exactly the same thing.
My sister lost about 2/3 of her slim retirement. She made one mistake (home loan for improvements) but was otherwise very prudent.
Good question for a 6 year old to ask: "Where did the million dollars you lost go to, Daddy?"
Why can't they all be twist-offs? I hate having to root around for an opener.
When I was in the Peace Corps, I learned how to take off a bottlecap with a spatula. But it never worked again after I got home -- the first three or four times I tried it, I whacked the neck right off the bottle. Cleanly -- you could still drink the beer if you used a glass -- but still not a desirable outcome.
Bottle caps rotate in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere.
Wine bottles with twist-off caps are awesome. Corkscrews seem so 19th-century.
When I was in the Peace Corps, I learned how to take off a bottlecap with a spatula.
I've also seen this done with the butt of a butter knife. This, along with being able to whistle piercingly, is on my list of life skills I've been meaning to learn but will never actually figure out.
113: Something special about Samoan bottles, or about Samoan spatulas?
In my culture you learned to use the edges of counters, belt buckles, screwdrivers, pliers, teeth, and pretty much anything else.
Why wouldn't you use a lighter like a normal person?
American beer bottles are for wimps. Samoans drink real beer.
||
I'd love to get gswift's take on this story. I bet he'd have been disqualified.
|>
Let's all save money by not taking our children to parts of the world where nobody has even seen a violin.
119: I remember when I realized the difference between renting and owning. It's when you won't open a beer bottle on the edge of the counter even if you can't find the opener.
My first thought upon reading that he's considered doing porn is "oh hey is he hot?" but I guess I'm glad I didn't write that since he seems to have dropped by. Hi, NMHD!
123: it's cool; if you read the pedicab entry you will learn that he has determined that gay guys are funny.
Lighter, feh. In college we used this*.
*Which seems to have been moved. It used to be on the quad. Hmm.
120: Wow. I can sort of see the thinking behind screening out very very bright people (I think it's silly, but I can follow the argument). But no one with an IQ over 125? That's a pretty tight standard.
I love all you guys so much, sometimes it's hard to decide who's my very best friend. I'll keep it a secret so I don't hurt anyone's feelings.
I never got the hang of the lighter thing -- it always pinched the skin of my thumb and hurt.
127: "Why train them if they'll just get bored" sounds an awful lot like "Why train them if they'll just have a baby."
105
... And all the 401K money I put away while working at law firms? Last I looked at my balances, I'm right around where I would be if I'd kept it in cash in a box under the bed.
401K money is pretax of course. And didn't you get any company matches?
130: Not that I believe that that's really their reason, though.
127
Wow. I can sort of see the thinking behind screening out very very bright people (I think it's silly, but I can follow the argument). But no one with an IQ over 125? That's a pretty tight standard.
Actually the cutoff was a lot lower than 125, he scored 33 which was said to be the equivalent of 125 and they only considered 21-27. He took the test in 1996 which seems like quite a while ago. Perhaps he should just have taken the next test, I bet if he really tried he could have lowered his score enough to qualify.
31: if NMHD is still reading, one trick to dating and socializing frugally is to hang out with a lot of PhD students. And they have interesting stuff to talk about! For certain values of "interesting".
Does anyone else like pickles? I love them.
You still have to pay taxes on 401K money when it comes out. So that balance is really "money that hasn't been taxed yet."
401k matches are nice, but it would be nice if jobs just paid more, instead.
5 gets you 100 that 128 is knitted footwear.
Frugality is relative: what looks frugal to someone who can seriously consider paying of $100 in a year is different to what looks frugal to most people.
I suppose I've saved money by not drinking coffee or, very often, the demon alcohol, but I'm sure I've squandered those savings on books, suits, colorful socks, etc. I know I saved money by not taking a vacation for a stretch of about five years, but I cannot in good conscience recommend that.
However, as of yesterday, the LAPD might want to consider raising the lower limit on their scoring system.
LOS ANGELES -- An officer was injured today when he shot himself in the foot in a police cruiser while responding to a call in South Los Angeles.
The officer was riding in a patrol car with his partner, who was driving. They were on their way to assist another unit near Broadway and Century Boulevard at 9:10 a.m. when he accidentally shot himself in the foot, said Los Angeles police Officer Bruce Borihanh.
I've heard a lot of complaints about police work, but never that it is boring.
141. Isn't it like the classic description of infantry warfare: long days of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror.
gswift just said he gets at least one domestic violence call a night. I imagine those are infuriating, just because people are acting like irrational dipshits, but I wouldn't call it either boring or terrifying, unless something goes seriously wrong. .
140: Do big-city police not get firearms safety/use training? Do I want that question answered?
146: Yes, of course they get motherfucking training you fucking overly self-regarding fucking fuckheads. Give X cops, Y time to ride around with weapons and there will be Z "stupid" incidents like the one described even if the probability of occurrence is very low. See discussions on this very fucking blog about car seat incidents for instance.
But don't let me stop anyone having their pathetic fun with it.
70
Ok, if the rate on the cheapest loan was 7% I can see trying to pay them off quickly (if not in 10 months).
Ok, the thing is the cheapest loan had a 3.13% rate but he paid this off first in part by taking a 35% hit for cashing in an IRA. Let me just say this does not seem like the sort of economically rational decision making that one would expect business school to teach.
149: Maybe he learned that on his own.
149: Yeah, that bit was a questionable decision (and when I say questionable, I mean I can't really see any way it makes sense.)
I'd show you racist! But I have to go be social for like the nth evening in a row. I'm primed.
||
Link to holiday pics up on Flickr for the next day or two. Teraz, I think you'll enjoy my family's celebration of Wig/ilia through the years.
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I haven't read the OP yet, but I can kinda sympathize a little. When I was at the brokerage, I occasionally wound up hanging out with the real comers who would spend several hundred dollars on entertainment for Fri and Sat nights. It's easy to get sucked into that, and you feel like you never spend any money during the week, except on fast food for lunch and expensive convenience food from the yuppie grocery store for supper. And when you have zero long-term responsibilities, it really doesn't seem to matter much whether you have $100 or $1000 in your checking account when then next paycheck hits.
I'm not sure how tongue-in-cheek the dating part was supposed to be, but it certainly seemed to me that, if you're in that kind of environment, all the potential partners you're likely to meet are going to be pretty shallow and materialistic by our standards. Which is pretty sad, really. I hope NMHD finds someone nicer than that for a long-term relationship, if and when he's ready to do that.
OT: It's a little amusing that a large, nicely-officed Manhattan law firm, called to produce a new document "along the lines of" a letter drafted by some dolt on a wheezing MacBook in a dusty (at best) apartment, returns to said dolt the same goddamned document with some new brackets. I guess they took the trouble of attaching a boilerplate form of relevant agreement referenced in the letter, which is nice.
Heh. I can just see the panicked junior associate tasked with producing the letter without any model other than your draft. "Maybe no one will look at it, so they won't notice I didn't make any changes?"
157. This is how they afford their nice offices, no?
158, 159: End of December, what are you going to do? I'd say the experience of being a client is interesting, but that would be a contemptible lie. It's informative, though.
Not paying off loans in decreasing order of interest seems really bizarre to me. I can kinda understand some financial irrationalities, like treating credit cards differently than cash say. But other than ignorance or idiocy why would you pay off a 3.5 before a 7? Are we missing something?
What if it's a Roth IRA, which in many cases (possibly this one, not sure) is tax-free upon withdrawal? I am considering this - I was told, apparently ultimately from a tax accountant, that the principal can be withdrawn tax-free before retirement for any reason; OTOH, Wikipedia mentions a "five-year seasoning period."
Ah, I see, since it's only a year interest doesn't matter that much, all that matters is the psychological benefit of paying off a whole loan to keep him going. I guess that's not so unreasonable.
163
Ah, I see, since it's only a year interest doesn't matter that much, all that matters is the psychological benefit of paying off a whole loan to keep him going. I guess that's not so unreasonable.
Well 4% extra on $25000 for a year is $1000, even for just a few months it's still hundreds of dollars. And this of course is assuming everything goes to plan. If for any reason things don't he will end up stuck with the high interest loan for no good reason.
And there is also the question of his mortgage, if it has an interest rate greater than 3.13% maybe he should be paying it off before the cheap student loan. (This is a little more complicated because mortgage debt is dischargable and you can walk away if you have to.)
148: ADs are going to happen. Shooting oneself in the foot during one doesn't happen unless there's major stupid (without the scare quotes) going on too. That cop had to have violated 57 varieties of gun safety rules taught during training to accomplish that.
162
What if it's a Roth IRA ...
It wasn't.
Then subtract 10% on top of 25% from that IRA-an early withdrawal fee plus the income tax imposed to liquidate the IRA. ...
That cop had to have violated 57 varieties of gun safety rules taught during training to accomplish that.
No time for backup.
Doesn't go by the book.
Plays by his own rules.
Gets results (of a sort), damn it.
Loose cannon, obviously.
165: I wonder if his partner's heart has stopped racing yet.
161: the classic debt snow ball, IIRC, recommends that one start with the smallest balance in order to gain psychological momentum.
Happy New Year all, GMT!
|| I did not know that Sausagely was at Slate. This is sad. As far as I know it's an upward career move, but Slate is mostly crap and the piece I just saw was ill-informed contrarianism.
The media deal with product, and if you're looking for understanding you go elsewhere. If you want to be a creator of understanding, you're in a hell of a bind as far as making a living goes.
I get paid to try to understand stuff.
You have to create enough understanding that you can write a paper but not so much that you can't justify a grant for more research.
If you want to be a creator of understanding....
Girl, trying to get me to join a religious/New Age cult: "Do you ever feel like you're ... looking for something?"
Me: "No, I feel like I'm the sort of person who finds things."
"Do you ever feel like you're ... looking for something?"
Usually, my keys.
What stuff, Moby? Not all understanding is swamped with product. Most of all in Yglesias's chosen trade. His optimistic article on the economy is a very, very bad sign about his career path.
Data analyst. I know nothing about a knee that would be useful to anybody who wasn't worried about a whole bunch of knees.
"Well, I have this problem with my knee, maybe you can help me with it......"
I always celebrate GMT so I can go to bed earlier.
"Do you ever feel like you're ... looking for something?"
"why yes. I'm looking for someone with whom to share my etchings...laydeez."
180: It will either get worse slowly or get worse rapidly or get better briefly before getting worse.
Well, Yglesias has just found that disinformation and misunderstanding sell better than understanding. He actually was capable of better but his career choice precluded that. That's the price of getting an audience.
I was capable of better but I never could do things in the right order.
I got myself some new shoes which should pretty much solve my knee issues for good, I'm assuming.
187: I tell myself the same thing whenever I pass the John Lobb store.
I took a tumble while running and the recovery took four months. The doctors I work with said I probably bruised the bone.
Good thing the fall spared your low-hanging fruit.
I've found that Yglesias hasn't yet gone off the contrarian deep end as much as I would have expected, but he did get a lot worse surprisingly fast. I suspect that whatever editorial control Slate is exercising on him is largely to blame. The weirdest part is that he's actually doing a lot fewer posts, and they're mostly really lame and insubstantial. They may be pressuring him to focus more on the weekly(?) columns, which I haven't been reading.
190: Under Armor keeps things from hanging when I run.
Happy New Year, Internet reprobates. May you all enjoy the best of health and familial-social conditions while continuing to shock my delicate and refined sensibility with your depravities.
Just in case I can't manage to stay up that late I'll do my happy new year to y'all now. Here's hoping 2012 and beyond go better than 2011. Thanks much.
191: but he did get a lot worse surprisingly fast.
I think it amounts to 'he's fine for being at Slate'.
The weirdest part is that he's actually doing a lot fewer posts, and they're mostly really lame and insubstantial. They may be pressuring him to focus more on the weekly(?) columns,
The column thing is weird. He does a lot of them but he doesn't always link them and so you don't know the goddamn thing is there, which means they're getting edited I suppose. And then they don't get announced. He is definitely doing fewer posts, so it's really like the last year of his econ post at CAP, without anything else, which makes it... drab.
176: His optimistic article on the economy is a very, very bad sign about his career path.
There's nothing wrong with it, per se. He probably shouldn't have used the word 'boom' since even 4% growth next year would not be a boom. But there's no particular reason for the *American* economy to sink next year. And some reason for it to grow, since Congress will be on one leash or another til November. If you live in Italy, Spain, Greece, or Ireland you are, of course, 100% fucked. And if you live in China you are maybe economically fucked next year, but you were fucked anyways, and you live under communists and if you live in a resource exporting country you are kinda fucked, and if you live in the UK you are sorta fucked. But basically the entire world sinks and suddenly the US is on top (consumption-wise) of the world - albeit a depressed, crappy world with (tah-dah) lower resource prices. Which is great if you're the sort that likes driving Hummers.
Matthew is really hurt by not being able to range around and cover a lot of topics, so he winds up sounding like one of those business reporter dudes. (Whereas, the business reporter dudes like Nocera who are perfectly high-quality reporters who then talk about non-economic policy apparently turn into David Brooks. Ugh.)
Not to worry, if Yggles goes over to the Dark Side (as opposed to taking up speaking econdouchese) I will be among the first to start making obscene and offensive pointed remarks.
max
['If you want to despair over the right-wingedness of it all, read his comment section. Sheesh.']
50 :46: Yes. I can't even think of other movies by title, but the feeling persists.
THX-1138! Silent Running! (But not Solyent Green) The Prisoner interiors! UFO! Phase IV, at least the ant parts! Logan's Run! The Westworld interiors! The inside of the Enterprise! The first three Star Wars movies on the good guy ships. (The evil Empire ships have gray industrial interiors.) 2001!
Anywhere the future was supposed to be groovy or at least not horrible, the interiors were plastic rounded white. And where the future was ugly or horrible or killer Aliens, the interiors of the future were done in gritty urban industrial area. Also, blondes are nice, redheads are spunky and temperamental, raven hair indicates Shocking Evil, silver hair is spacey and sexy and brunette means unnoticed and/or run over by steam roller early in the plot. (This works regardless of decade.)
Now add the numbers of the leads and villains, mix with whatever the fuck the elevator pitch was and whammo! Instascript.
max
['Gosh! You really don't watch movies anymore? Why?']
I keep reading the post title as "Get Gets Fungal" and thinking "Aw, poor Chet."
The first three Star Wars movies on the good guy ships. (The evil Empire ships have gray industrial interiors.)
Wait, what? The Milllenium Falcon is as "gritty urban industrial area" as it gets. That's the whole point.
In the spirit of 194:
Well, in case I'm having too much fun at my friends' party to check in four hours from now, I'll do my Happy New Year now: Happy New Year, Mineshaft! I'm not sure it was for the best, but you were certainly a big part of my 2011. Oh, the memories.
There's nothing wrong with it, per se. He probably shouldn't have used the word 'boom' since even 4% growth next year would not be a boom. But there's no particular reason for the *American* economy to sink next year.
As I remember from Baker and DeLong, 4% isn't even recovery in the sense of getting back on track. But we're less bad off than many other fucked places, true. We're riding the top of the wave of global decline.
Happy Newfoundland New Year even though they're screwed up by half an hour! Happy Nuuk New Year! Reykjavik is the place that's really screwed up, they just slavishly follow London.
We're riding the top of the wave of global decline.
USA! USA!
I still have many hours until the New Year. I'll head downtown in a bit to see what's going on.
Half a bottl of bubbly left over. What am I supposed to do with that?
Bubbly enema. You'll never forget it.
John Emerson is full of good advise this evening.
happy new year's day, all! flippanter, I sent you an email which is unlikely to shock your delicate and refined sensibility, to your pseud @gmail.
I am torn, because I am in so much pain, but if I really bitch to the doctor's emergency line they will send me to the hospital, where they will, in all likelihood, still not give me any fucking good drugs because they are a bunch of little bitches. particularly the timorous ones forced to work over new year's. but my more sympathetic doctor doesn't open till the 4th. and even then...well, he has effective migraine meds but will they work on a headache of such differing etiology? and tramadol, whatever. probably the best solution would be for me to send a relapsed sponsee out with $70 to buy me a straw of heroin.
naw, but there is a kind of superstitious karma thinking at work in which I imagine every undeserved shot earlier in my life will translate into one 6-hour period of untreated, agonizing pain later. for god's sake, people, just give me some decent drugs. I won't get hooked on them in 2 weeks. the pain eats up the high anyway, I cannot be more insistent on this. the misguided fear that someone might have undeserved fun isn't even applicable. my father-in-law is under the weather; if I've given him para-typhoid fever I'll feel bad. it doesn't seem likely I will feel much worse than now, however. I didn't say that.
my fancy internal medicine guy advised I take tylenol "as needed." like, other than the maximum, probably won't kill you dose? and are you fucking kidding me? my husband says my habitual stoic attitude served me ill.
Thanks to all here who've helped me so much this year. I'll make it the twenty minutes to 2012 here, but I might as well celebrate now. I'm so grateful for so many things and hopeful for the future.
Are you watching Lady Gaga, Thorn, or is there something better on? (I just put an end to our household's Big Bang Theory marathon).
People, could you pull yourseves away from your silly New Years' parties and do some important drunken blogging? My Newfie New Year has come and gone.
be the change you want to see in the world, emerson. get drunk and entertain us.
206: oh, which email you got, never mind.
Am sober. Would be able to tolerate Jenny McCarthy more if I weren't.
I'm working on it, bitch. Paratyphoid exempts you from obligation.
"USA: riding the very top of the wave of global decline" is my new slogan.
OK, it's now 2012 in the elitist part of the country where all you assholes live. Whoopty-do.
Happy New Year to everyone on the East Coast. (Heading out now.)
207: Your husband is correct. Been there, have seen the autopsy results.
I may be drunk, madam, but you are sober and I'll be ugly in the morning.
Jenny R, Lee got back up from bed and has been watching a Braxtons reality tv marathon even though I think she's seen all the episodes before. I finished one book I'd had going because it lets me count 155 books for 2011, though two of them I booked were about adoption and just relevant to a reading challenge I was doing there. I like round numbers, so that was satisfying.
The bubbly is hardly even bubbly anymore. Me sad.
Happy New Year, Easterners far and near!
Having watched that movie about the French monks in Algeria, I'm now ready to head downtown and die for the faith. Or maybe dance to techno music.
Happy New Year! I spent part of the party talking to a nice old man who claimed to have played stickball on 137th St. with Harry Belafonte back before WWII, and another part talking to a guy who claimed to have spent half an hour chatting up Ryan Seacrest in a bar without knowing who he was. The first story was better.
Happy New Year, Unfogged! I barely stayed awake. That youngster who performed on the TV before Cee-Lo should get off my lawn.
197: I've been alternating between "Chet Gets Fungal" and "Che Gets Frugal."
I am way behind on my newfound goal of spending $150 a weekend on cocktails. Something to change in 2012.
Prediction: 2012 will go down in history as the year the Higgs boson is definitively discovered, for those of you keeping score at home.
There must be someone to stand between me and a filled sidebar.
Hey, people! Essear is the only one trying!
Thorn: round numbers and books: both good things. I've loved reading your bog this year, and wish you, Lee, the kids, and their other families all the best in 2012.
Somehow I think that I'm exhorting the wrong people. Story of my life.
229: Thanks, John. Now I can go to sleep without feeling like I failed.
In honor of the season, following local custom, sort of, I ate almost a pound of smoked carp today. The carp was only mediocre because it was sort of mushy, but it was still better than whatever crap you ate. Carp rules!
235: Nuh uh. (I might be finally approaching drunk now. I love Bellinis.)
We have just enjoyed some truly mind-blowingly good (and sporadically engulfed in quite impressive flames) cocktails at our new local joint, which we have resolved to come back to basically daily. Quality way to ring in the apocalypse! Happy Nu-yere!
Real New Years is approaching in CST. If you people, except for the ones with para typhoid, aren't commenting up a storm by then I'll go to bed.
An underutilized resource. Contrary to the scare stories, carp do not eat children bigger than about 10 lbs.
228: me, essear. there's me. except the light of the computer screen is hurting me. maybe I should go to the hospital? the hospital bites ween, though. they just fuck with you every 4 hours to get your vitals, and it's loud, and the food sucks. if I were only sure they were about to hand me a fentanyl patch when I walked in I'd be over there now. I don't even have a detectable fever at the moment (having taken all the tylenol.)
sifu: I approve of good, periodically-on-fire cocktails and suggest you save $1000 a month by only spending $250 a weekend there instead of $500.
Tweety-- the name of this new joint?
Happy New Year to all. "2012" sounds like the future.
(And may January be better than what was, for me, a very sucky December.)
OK, the real New Year has arrived now here in God's country, and I'm inclined to go to bed. Happy New Year!
Happy New Year, and may you all be free of plague-ridden mercenaries.
happy new year, john! dream of carp.
You to, ala. And Mekong catfish.
2012 = 2×2×(23+33+53+73). So we've got that goin' for us, which is nice.
Happy New Year, Unfoggedies!!
Got to give both my wife and baby boy New Year's kisses (no tongue for the baby), so it's already a good start.
I am going to be better at RTFA this year.
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_10454.html#1164802
Austin, TX: $67k average non-housing spending.
http://www.bundle.com/spending/city/austin-tx/
Happy New Year from the central time zone, bitches.
The West Coast is so 2011. Don't even get me started on Alaska.
I am way behind on my newfound goal of spending $150 a weekend on cocktails. Something to change in 2012.
238 is to say: we cal help you with that!
[OMG people, the Seelbach.]
I am way behind on my newfound goal of spending $150 a weekend on cocktails. Something to change in 2012.
238 is to say: we can help you with that!
[OMG people, the Seelbach.]
What we wanted to do was spill boiling oil onto the heads of our enemies as they attempted to bang down the gates of our village. But as everyone now knows, we had some problems, primarily technical problems, that prevented us from doing what we wanted to do the way we had hoped to do it. What we're asking fortodaythis year is another chance.
Wait, isn't the world is meant to end in 2012? Here's hoping we find something edible to gnaw on after the oceans rise and the mountains fall. Happy New Year!
I'd love to get gswift's take on this story.
Jesus, I've never even seen anything like that. I wonder if that's isolated or if it's common on the east coast? Our written sounds a bit more basic than what they're using and in our department your score is 50 percent of your placement on the hiring list. We're a fair sized department getting a lot of applicants. You have to score over 90 percent on that thing to have a shot of getting hired.
but I wouldn't call it either boring or terrifying, unless something goes seriously wrong.
Boring it is not, at least not in any kind of decent sized metro area. Thinking someone will get bored because they're "too smart" is ridiculous. Do they really think people are applying expecting a life of the mind?
anyway, if they think you're so smart, can't they just promote you to detective after a reasonable time or something? and you can think about crimes with your mighty brain?
Do they really think people are applying expecting a life of the mind?
no, see, that's why mycroft is just sitting around on his ass at the club.
goddammit I can't decide whether to go to the hospital. I fucking hate the hospital. I don't even have a fever at all right now. and it's going to be so crowded and loud. I just don't know if I can handle the pain any more.
Time and effort spent on the project "staying out of hospital" is almost always regretted.
ok, fucking fine, I am in the NUH waiting room, 20 queue numbers to the bad. but the thing is, I am too sick to sit up and it's too loud and bright. shouldn't these places be made more friendly for sick people?
should I be more yell-y? yelling is deprecated in narnia. I brought my husband with me to provide credibility, I really think he should have dressed better.
149-151: Yeah, his thinking about cashing in the IRA seems to have been based on extrapolating recent experience:
My financial advisor-a term I use loosely since we've only talked four times since I started investing with him in 2007-strongly advised me against both of the moves above. I explained to him that the way I see it, I have loans accumulating interest at a rate of 3% to 8%, and funds losing value at the rate of 10% or worse.
This gets into that thing about past results being no guarantee of future returns. Sure, if you expect your IRA to continue losing ground at the rate of 10%+ per year, you would want to cash it out as soon as possible. But the odds are still pretty good that the future expected returns will be positive, not negative (with wide error bars, natch). This does get complicated with a small account that the fixed annual fees may start eating into that positive expectation, but I don't think it was quite small enough for this to be a significant factor.
As others have mentioned, I think the real reason for doing it was the psychological boost from getting a loan paid off immediately. If that makes him more likely to stick with the rest of the program, maybe it's worth it.
The string of Hollywood fires continued Saturday making it the third consecutive night of infernos in the Southland.
The fourth reported blaze of the evening broke out in West Hollywood around 9 p.m. just south of Santa Monica Boulevard in the 1300 block of Sweetzer Avenue.
Very close. Three blocks south. Too close. I will reverse my schedule for a while.
sorry biohazard. stay safe. I hope you fuckers are happy; the queue numbers haven't moved at all in an hour.
I don't think Yglesias has gotten appreciably worse than before. His posts on macroeconomic and monetary policy are still good. This post on the ECB's moves to save the euro is succinct in describing how the policy is working, and pointed in describing the moral implications.
269: Things seem to quieted down in WeHo. No choppers for a while. Al, emergency rooms are my idea of hell no matter if I was a patient (once) or hand-holder (I lost count years ago).
Cedars is set up for efficiency, not comfort, but has been swamped by numbers. And it's several steps above the county places that get featured on YouTube when someone dies on the floor as staff steps over them. USA! USA!
Yglesias writes very well when he knows what he's talking about, but that's not the problem. I started following him as an undergrad and he improved steadily for a number of years. I stopped following 2-3 years ago and he seems to have gone downhill in the way I said. It had to be frustrating watching less-smart people who wrote less well passing him on the career track.
So, hey: a, little insults to one's worth as a person, a, lot of great music, a few probing questions about the narrative of one's life, one demand for the URL of the mineshaft... A standard new year's! Love you all, hate you all, etc., etc. woo 2012! Probably haven't hurt anyone much this year, all due to y'all.
pethidine injection and approximately zero improvement. however thanks for the "go to the hospital" advice, clearly something is badly wrong. I'd have felt dumb at home when my brains started coming out my nose.
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Plucked out of context from one of those Crooked Timber subthreads that is far too tedious to link to, but I thought this rejoinder had the makings of an Internet classic:
Please do not attribute to me views I am far too well-informed to hold.
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fuck me pethidine is demerol? that should have been fucking great?! WTF?!
fuck me pethidine is demerol? that should have been fucking great?! WTF?!
Yay, alameida! My rule of thumb now is that if I'm asking friends to talk me out of going to the doctor or hospital or whatever it may be, that means I know I need to go. This message is brought to you by my gall bladder being successfully removed rather than erupting on its own, but just barely on both fronts.
Stormcrow- that is indeed awesome. Al- my sympathies, that sucks. We believe in you! To overcome, With impeccable Confederate style! But in a very non-racist, only drunk sort of way.
Jesus. Hanging with poly burners can really fuck with one.so to speak.
With impeccable Confederate style! But in a very non-racist, only drunk sort of way.
Stop trying to make a racism-absolved "Confederate style" happen. It's not going to happen.
My comment was cross-posted with alameida's drug specifics and the yay was for going to the hospital, not for getting drugs that don't seem to be helping, though that seems to be a standard part of most hospital visits.
267
This gets into that thing about past results being no guarantee of future returns. Sure, if you expect your IRA to continue losing ground at the rate of 10%+ per year, you would want to cash it out as soon as possible. But the odds are still pretty good that the future expected returns will be positive, not negative (with wide error bars, natch). This does get complicated with a small account that the fixed annual fees may start eating into that positive expectation, but I don't think it was quite small enough for this to be a significant factor.
The only way paying a 25% surrender charge makes sense is if the IRA is such an unmitigated ripoff that it is worth paying almost any price to get your money out immediately. This is vaguely possible (a 25% surrender charge is really outrageous) but still seems a bit unlikely. And of course you still don't have to terminate the IRA (and pay the 10% IRS penalty), you could just transfer it to a reputable provider like Vanguard. Finally if the IRA was funded with pretax dollars (which seems likely as it came from a 401k) he will owe ordinary income tax (in addition to the 10% penalty tax) on the amount withdrawn which he does not seem to be accounting for.
As others have mentioned, I think the real reason for doing it was the psychological boost from getting a loan paid off immediately. If that makes him more likely to stick with the rest of the program, maybe it's worth it.
This assumes the rest of program is worthwhile. But by his account he was previously handling his finances in a reasonably prudent way. So his entire program is like someone at a healthy and normal weight embarking on a bizarre crash diet because of a mistaken belief that they are disgustingly fat. It's not like he was the financial equivalent of morbidly obese.
Sorry, al. I was at the local ER last night with my BF who had heart palpitations. I think we got triaged to the 2nd to lowest priority group. Just above "damn, if only there was an urgent care clinic that we could send these people with the flu to. They never told us what the different color codes were. Got there at 4:30, left at 1:15 AM.
in the ward but husband x is trying to get me a single room do I don't murder the nice chinese lady next to me WATCHING TELEVISION at 12:15 a.m. thorn, glad to hear you're ok! yeah, arguments about whether you should go to the hospital usually mean you have to go for sure. the doctor is coming soon so I can explain they need to give me a lot more drugs, fucking yesterday you cocksucking bastards!!1 well, no, I'm sure they're all lovely people who, sure, suck people's cocks from time to time as, why should they not? let she who is without sin and so forth.
283: UNFOGGED: Where Harvard MBAs go for financial advice and personal abuse.
So his entire program is like someone at a healthy and normal weight embarking on a bizarre crash diet because of a mistaken belief that they are disgustingly fat.
[Whistles, strolls aimlessly past cemetery.]
the Seelbach
This gave me a very confused moment of wondering how your new local joint could be in downtown Louisville.
285: They're not going to give you anything super-strong until the docs have some idea of what's causing a headache of that intensity, or can at least rule out some.
Happy new year everybody!
UNFOGGED: Where Harvard MBAs go for financial advice and personal abuse.
It will be amusing if NMHD comes back today or tomorrow and reads through the rest of the thread -- it has ended up as a rather fair example of what unfogged is like.
who, sure, suck people's cocks from time to time as, why should they not?
Sometimes it's the only way to get the venom out of the snakebite in time.
ok, finally settled in my private room and that second shot of demerol really gave me the warm fuzzies, though my rues still hurt agonizingly. ct scan for brain tumors blah so, but I don't have a brain tumor so no worries. thanks again for all the go the hospital votes, though the hospital sucks, this room is very nice.
Good to hear, on balance. Try to sleep now. No tumour is good, it's prolly some opportunistic virus that you'll kick when you're rested.
Yeah. Nap time, Al. I just checked my Narnia clock, that's a horrifying time of early morning to be awake.
290: a rather fair example of what unfogged is like.
Gynotikolobomassophile (M, 43) seeks neanimorphic F to 60 to share euneirophrenia. Must enjoy [annoying] librarians (and be able to provide the correct term for same).
-- They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books (book previously referenced here by Gonerill in 2007)
And I think Carp's 'life is short' dictum in 79 applies to the guy's whole gig. The whole thing *is* vaguely distasteful as most financial stunts by people who make comfortable livings are, but certainly an interesting experience for the guy even if he is not maximizing net present value.
295: Wait, what? "Annoying" is an incorrect term?
Happy New Year, everyone! (For real this time.)
Wow, Alaska must be farther away than I had thought.
It is, of course, but actually I just woke up a couple hours ago.
So you knew how far away essear thought Alaska was?
Alaska is always further away than you thought it was, for any value of "you."
