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How couples can create a shared plan for the future

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J.D.'s Intro
Last December, I took a trip to Europe with my cousin Duane. Before I left, I received email from a GRS reader named Matthias. “If you come through Switzerland, let me know,” he said.

The stars aligned so that Matt was able to join us for several hours on a train across the Alps. He brought Swiss chocolate and a bottle of whisky. As we talked — and became pleasantly buzzed — he told me about how he and his wife tackle couple goals together via five-year plans for their future.

“I love this idea,” I told him. “Will you write about it for Get Rich Slowly?” He did. This is Matt's story about creating a shared vision as a couple. Enjoy!

J.D. and Matthias

In the spring of 2006, I'd been living and working in Taipei, Taiwan for two years and my contract was about to expire. Soon, I'd be returning home to Switzerland.

On a pleasant weekend evening in my downtown flat, my Taiwanese girlfriend and I were reminiscing about all of the wonderful memories we'd made. We waxed nostalgic about the two years we'd enjoyed together. But it dawned on us that if we didn't make some bold moves, our relationship might be coming to an end.

We opened a bottle of fine wine in order to enhance the depth and wisdom of our conversation. Before long, we'd switched from sweet nostalgia to dreaming about our potential future — together.

How to set couple goals

Imagineering the Future

My girlfriend had just graduated from college and was working in her first job. For my part, I’d just received an offer for my dream job — but it meant I'd have to move back to Switzerland.

The wine was an effective dream enhancer. We let our imaginations loose as we talked about how we could potentially live our lives together. The future took many shapes.

  • Where would we live?
  • What jobs would we work?
  • How could we both be as happy as possible together?

Honestly, it was overwhelming. Our lives three months ahead were like a blank slate. Everything seemed possible! Nothing was certain! Anything could happen!

In order to conceptualize our thoughts and concerns, we decided to write down all of our dreams and goals on yellow stickynotes. This mother of all brainstorming sessions took us half an hour. We each wrote down what was important to us, stuff we’d like to achieve, skills we’d like to acquire — in short, what we’d like to do with our lives in the next few years.

Next, we organized those dreams in terms of feasibility, urgency, and requirements. (To meet certain goals, we had to accomplish others first.) During this process, we tried to keep things fair. We both got the same number of stickynotes. All goals were open to debate, yet at the same time we tried to figure how to best help each other achieving them going forward! Our aim was to work together as a couple.

Step three was to put up an A3 formatted white paper on the wall, draw a timeline from 2006 till 2011 – yes, we were going to plan out the next five years of our life! – and arrange our couple goals in a meaningful way to our life’s “game plan”.

The first five-year plan

Our dreams included things like:

  • Get married.
  • Move to Switzerland.
  • Save for a new home.
  • Learn German.
  • Start a business.
  • Become parents.

In a nutshell, nothing extraordinary — the things young people usually dream of. It was clear that some goals had to be achieved before others. We agreed that pursuing them in a specific order made sense. Then we arranged them accordingly on the timeline.

Becoming a Dream Team

Planning our future was an ecstatic activity. In fact, doing so was the defining evening for our relationship.

That very evening, we actually decided to get married. We decided to chase our dreams together as a team. She was 23 years young; I was 26. Little did we know that this shared activity would help us tremendously on the path to our dream life. We had become a dream team! [Read more…]

Spare change: Awesome articles from elsewhere

Nobody is an expert on your life except YOU

How much to tip when traveling

Craving freedom, Japan's women opt out of marriage [NY Times]

How TV homes influenced real-life homes

"We have seven kids and our budget isn't working." [YouTube]

There is no 100% safe investment portfolio. The future may not look like the past.

Are stocks best for the long term?

Measuring the cost of poor timing when investing ("the behavior gap")

A fascinating look at working hours across time and cultures

Why you're afraid to follow your passion

Find an archive of all past spare change links on Pinboard.

Which financial advice should you trust?

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Commenting on a recent article, Carmine Red asked an excellent question:

How do you evaluate the financial advice you get from other sources? Specifically, how do you decide if some piece of advice is for you, or if you should discard some adjacent advice. Is there an amount of pick-and-choose?

GRS definitely doesn’t seem like a dogmatic 100% one-way-of-doing things site, so I’d love to hear about the critical thinking you employ, and that I’m sure we can all use a little of since we’re getting bombarded by financial “do this!” or “don’t do this” instructions from so many different dimensions.

Carmine is right: GRS is not dogmatic. From the start, my top admonition has been “do what works for you”. By this I mean that you should test financial advice to see if it works for you and your situation. There's little (if any) advice that applies to 100% of people in 100% of cases. Life is messy. Money is messy.

So, how can you decide whom to trust? How can you evaluate a piece of financial advice to decide whether it has merit? And if the financial advice does have merit, how can you tell if it's right for yor life?

Today, let's take a deep dive into this question. Let's explore how to evaluate all of the financial advice you get — from the internet, from television, and in real life.

How to Evaluate Financial Advice

Before I answer Carmine's question directly, I want to approach it obliquely. If you find this section boring, please skip to the next one. I won't hold it against you!

In 1940, Mortimer J. Adler published How to Read a Book, which contained 400 pages of advice on doing something that most people would argue needs no instruction. In 1967, he revised the book and turned it into a little masterpiece.

In the revised edition, Adler argues that there are four levels of reading:

  1. Elementary Reading. At this basic level, the reader is able to answer the question, “What does the sentence say?” But reading at this stage is a mechanical act.
  2. Inspectional Reading. At this level, a reader's aim is to get the most from a book (or article) in a minimum of time. “Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically,” Adler writes. Your aim is to get a surface understanding of the book, to answer the question, “What is this book about?”
  3. Analytical Reading. At this level, you're doing the best, most complete and thorough reading of a book that you can do. Inspectional reading is done quickly. Analytical reading is done without a time limit. Its aim is understanding. This is the sort of reading that most of us do most of the time.
  4. Synoptical reading. At the fourth (and highest) level of reading, we read comparatively. “When reading synoptically,” Adler says, “the reader reads many books, not just one, and places them in relation to one another.” My ongoing project to read about the history of retirement? That's synoptic reading.

What has this to do with evaluating financial advice? Well, I think similar principles apply. When you receive a piece of financial advice from somebody, or you read a recommendation online, there are four levels of evaluation.

  1. Elementary evaluation. When you pick up a piece of financial advice, start by asking yourself “What does this advice say?” You're not trying to judge its merits. You're merely trying to parse the recommendation. Believe it or not, you can throw some stuff out at this level because it doesn't say anything. Or what it says is nonsensical. (I don't mean nonsensical as in “I disagree with it”. I mean nonsensical as in it literally makes no sense.)
  2. Inspectional evaluation. Next ask, “What is this advice about? What is the overall message? What is its core argument?” You're not trying to understand nuance here. You're trying to get the main point. For instance, in Mr. Money Mustache's popular article “The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement”, the core argument is “the more you save, the sooner you can retire”. The main point of the article you're reading right now is: “There are smart ways to evaluate financial advice. Here are a few.”
  3. Analytical evaluation. The biggest part of evaluating financial advice is taking time to analyze it, to examine the advice in detail, to really understand it. This usually means asking “why?” Why is the person giving this advice? What's their motivation and what does this advice aim to accomplish? (The rest of this article offers some tips for applying this step.)
  4. Synoptical evaluation. Lastly, if you're evaluating important advice (such as how much to spend on a house), you should make time to do some comparative evaluation. What do other people have to say? Why do they agree? Why do they disagree? How does this advice fit in to what you already know and what you're already doing?

Here at Get Rich Slowly, one of my primary aims is to “evaluate synoptically”. I don't want this site to be one-dimensional. When I write my articles, I try my best to draw from a variety of disciplines and sources. I look for differing opinions. Does that mean I stray from strict personal finance sometimes? Yes, absolutely. But it makes the writing more interesting for me and, I hope, for you.

Okay, that's some semi-helpful, high-level philosophical stuff about evaluating financial advice. Now let's look at how to put this into practice. How do you actually analyze financial advice to decide whether it's good or not?

I think it helps to ask four questions. [Read more…]

The best investing apps for 2019

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J.D.'s note: This article marks the GRS debut for my business partner, Tom Drake. Tom's primary role is managing the technical and business sides of things, but as a long-time Canadian money blogger, he'll contribute the occasional article here at GRS.

It has never been easier to invest.

In only a few years, the rapid advancement of mobile technology has placed the power to invest at our fingertips and ushered in a wave of fintech startups, armed with new and innovative solutions for investors. Names like Acorns and Stash are now competing head-to-head with traditional brands such as E-Trade, and TD Ameritrade. (Imagine E-Trade being considered a “traditional” brand!)

With so many great options to choose from, it can be downright difficult to decide which investment app is right for you. To take out the guesswork, I’ve compiled a list of the best investment apps for 2019. From beginner investors to advanced traders, there’s something here for everyone.

Before we dive in, I should point out that this list of best apps is not a ranking. Instead, I’ve chosen what I believe are the best apps for a variety of situations – trading stocks, exchange traded funds (ETFs), no-fee, and micro-investing, you name it.

This means that the investment app I chose as best overall for 2019 won’t necessarily be the top pick for every investor. Rather, it’s the one that I feel most clearly meets the needs of its target client. With that in mind, I present to you the Best Investment Apps for 2019. [Read more…]

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More money, less happiness: When money makes you miserable

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More money, less happiness: When money makes you miserableMoney, the conventional wisdom says, doesn't buy happiness. Modern psychology seems to back this up, with studies suggesting that beyond an income of $75,000, money doesn't make you any happier.

This conclusion is simultaneously obvious and counter-intuitive.

As an abstract principle, most us acknowledge that money doesn't buy happiness. But, at the same time, we all want more of something material — a nicer house, nicer vacations, the ability to live in a certain neighborhood or eat at fancier restaurants — that we think would make us happier. (If you're J.D., you think maybe season tickets to your favorite team might make you happier.)

So, we're left with a conundrum. Or, rather, a series of conundrums: Does income in excess of $75,000 make us happier? And if not, why not?

When Money Makes You Happier

In answer to the first question, I believe that all else equal — and as we'll see below, this is a huge qualifier, as things are rarely equal — more money generally makes you happier.

To be clear, money won't solve every problem. If you're lonely or bitter or angry, for instance, more money won't make you any happier. But just because money doesn't solve every problem doesn't mean that money won't solve any problems.

Money can make many things easier, or better. With more money you can:

  • Build a nest-egg.
  • Pay off your house or car.
  • Go on more vacations.
  • Have more kids.
  • Be a stay at home parent.
  • Eat better food.
  • Retire early.

With more money, you can do any number of other things that people enjoy and that make them happier. And if you're a victim of systemic poverty, more money can change your world.

As much as we pay lip-service to the idea of money not making us happy, it often does, and it's okay to admit this. It doesn't make us materialistic or greedy to want retirement savings, a nicer home, a paid-off car, or a trip to Europe.

When Money Makes You Miserable

Assuming that you buy the premise that (in theory) more money should (generally) make us happier, it raises the question of why (in practice) income beyond $75,000 annually doesn't make us any happier.

I think the explanation for this seemingly irreconcilable conflict is that most people spend the extra income poorly. Most people use money ways that make them less happy.

Their Job Makes Them Miserable.

People who earn a lot of money often assume that they're paid well because of their intelligence and skills. And that is undoubtedly often the case.

But often they're paid well in whole (or in part) because they've accepted a very difficult, demanding job that pays well precisely because it makes people unhappy! A job with long hours, lots of stress, lots of travel and time away from family and friends will generally pay well, but also significantly impair happiness.

It shouldn't then be surprising that people with high incomes are often unhappy. The high income and unhappiness have the exact same origins.

They Spend Money on Things That Bring Them No Happiness.

People are generally conformists. Drive through a rich neighborhood, and you'll see people dressed similarly, driving similar cars, going on similar vacations.

This isn't just a happy coincidence, that all these kindred spirits serendipitously found each other and formed a happy community. Rather, people succumb to keeping up with the Joneses and continually buy stuff — not because they enjoy it, but because they'd be embarrassed not to have it.

To a large extent, individuals let their peers dictate how they spend their time and money. Living on somebody else's terms — living somebody else's life — is not a recipe for happiness, and if you do it, extra money won't make you any happier. You'll be spending it how other people want you to, not how you want to.

They Take on More Debt.

When people begin to earn more money, they generally upgrade their lifestyle — buy a nicer home and buy a nicer car. The problem is, they don't pay cash for these things. Rather, they use their new, higher income as a means to borrow more money. Far from providing financial security, the extra income often makes their financial position more precarious.

Instead of using the extra income to buy freedom and peace of mind — which would make them happier — they incur more debt, which makes them more anxious than ever, with the added fear that if they lose their job, they'll be humiliated at having to ratchet back their newly lavish lifestyle.

Extra money won't make you happy if it tethers you to a heavily indebted lifestyle.

The Bottom Line

The lesson here is simple: If you come into more money, it can make you happier — provided that you use it in a way that provides you security, freedom, and sincere pleasure, not merely conformist consumption.

Money, in short, is neutral. It's a tool that can make you happier, or less happy, depending on how you choose to spend it.

Money will make you happier only if you choose to spend it in accordance with your values and your preferences. Nobody — not your parents, not your friends, not your neighbors, and certainly not a blogger! — knows what makes you happy better than you do. But, this doesn't stop people from assuming that they know what is best for you: what neighborhood you should live in, what car to drive, what education you “owe” your kids. If you listen to them, more money won't make you any happier; in fact, it may make you less happy, because you're working hard and incurring debt to live out somebody else's life.

Our family's life is a microcosm of this.

In our twenties, my wife and I both had good jobs in a large city. We had it made by what society values, but we weren't very happy; we worked long hours at demanding jobs. We did however live frugally relative to our incomes.

Burnt out on our jobs, we eventually moved to a smaller city and my wife quit her job so that we could have three kids that she stayed home with. Those were expensive decisions, both in terms of cash outlays and opportunity cost. But they were good decisions; we had less money, but far more joy.

This trade-off was only possible because we had spent many years saving our money, deferring gratification — ignoring a culture that told us to spend as a reward for our hard work — so that when we finally spent the money, we spent it on something that we valued, namely our family. It was the best decision that we've ever made (all the credit goes to my wife!), but it was only possible to live that way in our thirties because of how we had spent, or more accurately not spent, in our twenties.

The point isn't that we're so smart, and that you should have a bunch of kids too. It is in fact the opposite: I have no idea what your best life is.

But then again, neither does anybody else besides you. If you find the courage to decide for yourself what you value, and you use money wisely to pursue your goals and your dreams, you will find that, contrary to popular opinion, money will buy you happiness.

The Portland Timbers and me: A personal case study in opportunity costs and conscious spending

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Saturday night, Kim and I joined 25,216 other soccer fans to watch the Portland Timbers defeat the Vancouver Whitecaps 3-1 during a crazy rare August rainstorm. (Portland gets a lot of rain…but not in early August.) The match was a lot of fun, with three terrific goals. Here. I'll share highlights with you…

I've owned Timbers season tickets since 2010, the year before they made the leap to the top league in the U.S. — but I've been a fan since 1975, when I was six years old. My earliest sports memories are listening to Timbers games on a transistor radio, cheering for the likes of Clive Charles, John Bain, and (especially) goalkeeper Mick Poole. I wanted to be Mick Poole.

Each year in August, I get my Timbers renewal letter. If I want season tickets again, it's time to purchase them.

For the first few years, this was an easy decision. Tickets were cheap. In 2011, they cost me $41.91 per seat per game. Even in 2016, the cost seemed reasonable at $54.00 per ticket per game. Over the past few years, though, ticket prices have skyrocketed. If I want to renew for 2020, I have to be willing to pay $79.12 per ticket per game.

As much as I love the Portland Timbers, they might have found my limit. This price point tests my patience and my pocketbook. I'm not alone.

The High Price of Fun

I own two seats near the top of section 118, which straddles the midfield line in the old part of our stadium. (As a frame of reference, if you watch the highlight video at the start of this article, that view is basically from our seats. We sit six feet in front of the television camera.)

I was very deliberate when I chose these seats. I don't need to sit in the new section; I'd rather look at it. Our seats are never in the sun, and they're sheltered from the prevailing weather pattern, which is important when you get as much rain as we do here in Portland. (Saturday, for instance, we were completely dry. The folks across the way in the expensive seats got drenched. Many retreated to watch from other parts of the stadium.)

If I renew for 2020, each season ticket will cost me $1325. That's a total of $2650 — plus a bullshit $40 service charge.

2020 Timbers ticket prices

Now, $2690 isn't the end of the world. Sure, it'd be expensive if I were still deep in debt and struggling to get by. But I'm not. Today, I'm financially independent. I can afford some indulgences.

But here's the thing. Games cost more than just the ticket price. It costs money to get downtown. If costs money to park. It costs money to eat and drink, whether we do it at the stadium or at a nearby restaurant. It costs money for Timbers gear. Sure, many of these expenses are completely optional. But for us — and for most sports fans I know — the ticket price is just part of the expense of going to games.

I'm sure we spend an additional $50 per match. And it might be closer to $100!

Let's consider Saturday as typical. We paid $8 for parking in a “secret” garage an eight-minute walk from the stadium. At the game, Kim and I each had two $10.50 beers (for a total of $42) and a $6 slice of pizza (for a total of $12). So, we spent $62 (plus gas) in addition to two $69 tickets. Our grand total for the evening? Exactly $200.

And that's for one of seventeen home games!

I calculate that our annual expenses for the Portland Timbers are at least $3500 — and they're probably closer to $4000.

I'm sure you'll agree that $4000 is a lot of money. That's a nice trip to Europe, for instance, like the one I made in May with my cousin Duane. That's a substantial portion of a new Mini Cooper. It'd fund an entire year of HelloFresh for two people, four nights a week.

I love the Portland Timbers. But do I love them this much? [Read more…]

Seven things college freshmen don’t need — and ten they do

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This article originally appeared on NerdWalletThose ubiquitous checklists of “dorm room essentials” for college freshmen are filled with items that will be ditched by the end of first semester.

Some parents “go to the store and grab a list like they did when their kids were in elementary and high school and just go straight down the list,” says Lisa Heffernan, mother of three sons and a college-shopping veteran. Or they buy things they only wish their students will use (looking at you, cleaning products).

You can safely skip about 70% of things on those lists, estimates Asha Dornfest, the author of Parent Hacks and mother of a rising college sophomore who’s home for the summer.

What college kids need

What not to buy or bring

Freshmen really need just two things, says Heffernan, co-founder of the blog Grown and Flown: a good mattress topper and a laptop.

Here are seven items you can skip:

  • Printer. Don’t waste desk space or, worse, store it under the bed; printers are plentiful on campus.
  • TV. Students may watch on laptops or on TVs in common areas or in someone else’s room. Bonus: Your teen gets out and meets others.
  • Speakers. Small spaces don’t require powerful speakers; earphones may be a good idea and respectful of roommates.
  • Car. Some colleges bar freshmen from having cars on campus or limit their parking. You also may save on insurance by keeping the car at home.
  • Luggage. If you bring it, you must store it. Heffernan suggests collapsible blue Ikea storage bags with zippers.
  • Toiletries to last until May. Bulk buying may save money, but you need storage space.
  • Duplicates of anything provided by the college, such as a lamp, wastebasket, desk chair or dresser.

Items left behind when students pack for the summer are telling. Luke Jones, director of housing and residence life at Boise State University, sees unopened food — a lot of ramen and candy — and stuffed animals and mirrors.

Jones says many students regret bringing high school T-shirts and memorabilia and some of their clothes (dorm closets typically are tiny).

What can you buy, then?

Before you shop, find out what the college forbids (candles, space heaters, electric blankets and halogen lights are common). Have your student check with assigned roommates about appliances (who’s bringing a fridge or microwave?) and color scheme if they want to set one. Know the dimensions of the room and the size of the bed. And most of all, know your budget. Not everything has to be brand new.

Ten things — besides the all-important mattress topper and laptop — that many students consider dorm room essentials include:

  • One or two fitted sheets in the correct bed size, plus pillowcases. Heffernan says most students don’t use top sheets.
  • Comforter or duvet with washable cover.
  • Towels in a distinctive pattern or light enough for labeling with laundry marker, plus shower sandals.
  • Power cord with surge protector and USB ports.
  • Basic first aid kit.
  • Easy-to-use storage. If it’s a lot of work to get something out, your student won’t, Heffernan says.
  • Cleaning wipes. Students might not touch products that require multiple steps, but they might use wipes, according to Heffernan.
  • Reading pillow with back support for studying in bed.
  • Area rug. Floors are often hard and cold.
  • Comfort items. Dornfest says it could be a blanket or a picture of the dog — something from home that will make the space a bit more personal.

Afraid you’ll forget something important? You might, Heffernan says. But chances are, you or your student can order it online and get it delivered. Consider doing this with some items simply to avoid the hassle of bringing them yourself, and remember that “dorm necessities” often go on sale once school starts.

Do a reality check

If you or your student still want to replicate the rooms you’ve seen on Instagram and Pinterest, think about how the room will actually be used.

Once your son or daughter moves in, the room will never look like that again. Opt for sturdy items and be realistic. Will throw pillows make the place look more homey and inviting, or will they be tossed on the floor until parents’ weekend?

Dornfest, a co-host of the Edit Your Life podcast, offers a compelling reason not to make things too comfortable. “A freshman needs to be encouraged to get out of the dorm room,” she says. “Anything that pulls you into campus life can be good.”

She’s not advocating a monk-like environment, but rather one that encourages breaking out of routines. College should be a time to try new things and meet people from different backgrounds. Dornfest advises making the bed as comfortable as possible and keeping a few reminders of home. The ideal dorm room is more launch pad than cocoon.

More from Nerdwallet

The article 7 Things College Freshmen Don’t Need — and 10 They Do originally appeared on NerdWallet.

The Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy

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Viability of the Spend Safely in Retirement StrategyLast month, the Society of Actuaries (a group I was born to belong to!) published a mammoth (84-page) report entitled “Viability of the Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy”. Despite its opaque title, this report (written by Steve Vernon, Joe Tomlinson, and the estimable Wade Pfau) contains some interesting info about planning for retirement income.

On the surface, this report's advice seems stupid simple: To optimize retirement income, delay Social Security and make the most of required minimum distributions from tax-advantaged accounts. Isn't this pretty much what most of us plan to do? Maybe so, but I doubt that anyone else has crunched the numbers like this.

Plus, this strategy provides a specific plan for folks who haven't considered how to approach retirement income. As the authors note, most retirees fall into two camps.

  • There are the people who are scared to spend their savings, so they sacrifice current lifestyle.
  • There are those who “wing it”, spending without a plan.

The Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy is useful for both groups. It shows the specific steps needed to maximize retirement income. Those steps might seem obvious to those of us who read and write about personal finance every day, but they are not obvious to our family and friends.

Here's a quick overview of the Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy (or SSiRS).

The Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy

Vernon, Tomlinson, and Pfau introduced the concept of the SSiRS in their 2017 report through the Stanford Center on Longevity: “Optimizing Retirement Income by Integrating Retirement Plans, IRAs, and Home Equity”. (You can download a PDF of the paper from Stanford.)

“This strategy has a significant advantage,” they wrote. “It can be readily implemented from virtually any IRA or 401(k) plan without purchasing an annuity.”

That 2017 publication was mostly theoretical. There wasn't a lot of info on how to approach their strategy from a practical perspective. This new project is more about actual implementation.

They write:

The SSiRS includes two key steps:

1. Optimize expected Social Security benefits through a careful delay strategy; in this case, many middle-income retirees may have all the guaranteed lifetime income they need.

2. Generate retirement income from savings using the IRS required minimum distribution (RMD) rules, coupled with a low-cost index fund, target date fund, or balanced fund.

The authors stress that the SSiRS is meant to be a baseline strategy, a starting point from which retirees (and/or their financial advisors) can build a more customized plan. It's like a basic bread recipe that yields good results every time. If you want to make fancier bread, you're free to do so. But you don't have to.

Let's look at these two key steps in more detail. [Read more…]

Death by a thousand cuts

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I've been on the internet for a long, long time.

Via local Bulletin Board Systems, I started reading USENET newsgroups — mostly Star Trek and comic book and computer game stuff — during college in the late 1980s. I got sucked into the world of MUDs. Soon after graduating, I heard about this new thing called the World Wide Web, so I installed Mosaic on my Macintosh SE.

Mosaic on a Mac

Before long, I taught myself HTML and built my first website. Eventually, in 1997, I started my first blog — back before blog was even a word!

I was drawn to the web (and the internet) in part because it seemed so egalitarian. Anyone could start a website about anything, and as long as they produced great stuff and shared it, people would read. I also liked the fact that almost everything was free. It didn't cost anything (besides your $19.95 monthly dial-up service) to access any of this information. The early web was a de facto sharing economy.

Best of all? The web was a wide open space, a blank slate, a platform free from dominance by mainstream media. Little people like me could have a voice.

None of this lasted long.

The Monetization of the Web

Soon, banner ads came along. I hated banner ads when they first appeared. “My site will never have banner ads,” I told my friends. (This was my first real lesson that you should never say never. My friends have been giving me grief about this for more than fifteen years!)

In 1998, Google arrived and changed everything. Until that point, web search was a miserable experience. It wasn't very good and it was overly monetized. Google was the opposite. It was amazing and had no monetization at all.

Hahahahahahahaha. How things have changed. Today, Google is all about ads. And using it is more and more a miserable experience. Look at this mess:

Look at all the ads on Google!

How long until Google has transformed itself into AltaVista?

In time, the mainstream media realized that the web wasn't going anywhere. By the early 2000s, they were treating it as an important part of their operations. By the early 2010s, the web had become the most important part of most media companies' platforms. And if it hadn't, those companies would soon be dead.

Meanwhile, two parallel (but related) trends developed.

  • First, there was the rise of “software as a service” (Saas). In the olden days — 1995, say — when you wanted a computer program, you went down to Circuit City and bought it. You paid for it once and you owned it forever. As “web apps” became a thing, companies shifted from one-time payments to a subscription model. Today, even big companies like Microsoft and Adobe have adopted the practice of continually charging for their products. (And if they don't use a subscription model, they often “sunset” their software, which is essentially the same damn thing.)
  • Second, forward-thinking sites and companies learned there was money to be made by disrupting existing business models. Netflix is a great example. Founded in 1997, this company has single-handedly destroyed multiple industries, most notably retail video. And, eventually, Netflix began to disrupt the monolithic television industry itself! Initially, this was beneficial to consumers. Now, in 2019, it's become apparent that oops, nope it's not. (See also.)

Twenty-five years ago, when the web was young, it was all about free. Anyone who could afford a computer and a $19.95/month dial-up connection was free to create and publish whatever they wanted — and free to consume what other people had created. It was like some sort of digital utopia.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Today, the web is most decidedly not free. And it's getting less free with every passing month. Let's be honest: More and more, life online is expensive. It's like death by a thousand cuts. [Read more…]

A brief guide to the Equifax settlement — and how to get what you’re owed

written by — published (updated ) 22 Comments

Two years ago, credit reporting agency Equifax suffered an enormous security breach. Hackers gained access to the personal data of 147 million Americans: Social Security numbers, credit card details, and other sensitive information. Almost half the U.S. population was affected.

Recently, Equifax reached a settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission to provide compensation for those impacted by the data breach. The FTC has posted summary details at its website. And if you're a real masochist, you can read the entire text of the settlement via PDF.

Over the past week, there have been a lot of stories going around that everyone is entitled to $125 due to the Equifax settlement. Here, for instance, is one of my real-life Facebook friends excited at the possibility of free money.

Equifax settlement conversation on Facebook

On Friday, one U.S. Representative tweeted: “Everyone: go get your check from Equifax! $125 is a nice chunk of change. Get that money and pay off a bill, sock it away, take a day off, treat yourself, whatever you'd like.” And at Slate, one author wrote that you have a moral obligation to claim money in the settlement.

I'll admit: Even I believed I was going to get $125. I told Kim about it so that she could get her $125 too.

But being a skeptic by nature, I've been digging a little deeper. Turns out things with the Equifax settlement are a little more complicated than “everyone gets $125”. In fact, most people won't (or shouldn't) get any money. [Read more…]

The power of focus: Why you should tackle one goal at a time

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I used to be the sort of guy who loved to have a list of goals. At least once a year — usually around New Year — I'd sit down and make a list of all the things that were wrong with me, all of the things I wanted to change.

In 2007, for instance, I made a list of 101 things I wanted to accomplish in 1001 days. (It took me longer than three years to finish that list, by the way. In fact, I still haven't done everything on it because my priorities have changed. But now, ten years later, I see that I have completed nearly all of the ones that still matter.)

Eventually I realized that making a long lists of resolutions is a sure path to disappointment — at least for me. There's a reason you see newspaper and TV stories every spring about how most people aren't able to maintain the resolutions they set at the first of the year. It's because most of us try to do too much. (And, I think, because we try to set goals that aren't truly aligned with our primary purpose in life.)

Nowadays, I do something different, something that's actually proven to be successful. Instead of trying to change many things at once, I've learned to change only one thing at a time.

One Thing at a Time

In 2010, for instance, I focused on fitness. In fact, I dubbed 2010 “The Year of Fitness”. My aim was to lose fifty pounds. Every decision I made, I made with that goal in mind. You know what? It worked. Though I didn't lose fifty pounds that year, I did lose forty. (And I lost the final ten by the middle of 2011.)

[Weight Loss Progress]

I was able to do this because for the entire year, my only goal was to get in shape. I was focused. Nothing else mattered. I didn't have any other big goals clouding my view or competing for my attention. I set one goal, and I worked hard to meet it.

In 2011, my one goal was to learn Spanish. And I did it. Three times a week, I paid a Spanish tutor for ninety minutes of personal instruction. In my spare time, I watched Spanish movies and listend to Spanish music. I read Spanish books. I consumed Spanish podcasts. Within a year, I'd achieved reasonable fluency in the language. I could carry on converstations in South America, and I could read Spanish-language novels. (Though not all Spanish-language novels.)

In 2012, I tried something a little different. Instead of one big goal for the year, I chose to work on one goal each month. Some examples:

  • In March, I had lunch or dinner with a different friend every day. This let me reconnect with people I'd been missing.
  • In April, I embarked upon my Extreme Dating Project. I'd just been divorced, and my goal was to meet as many women as possible. (April was a fun month! And it led to my current relationship with Kim.)
  • Next, my goal became to make it to the gym every day in May. I didn't quite succeed — I only worked out 28 out of 31 days — but I came close.
  • My next goal was “no junk in June”. I focused on my diet, which helped me lose five pounds and two percent body fat.

Sometimes I spend a year on any given goal. Sometimes, I spend a month. And sometimes I spend even longer! After Kim and I decided we wanted to take an RV trip across the United States, for instance, I spent the next eighteen months devoted to that project.

During the first part of 2015, we shopped for and purchased a motorhome, then prepped it for life on the road. We left Portland on 25 March 2015 and spent the next six months exploring the U.S. We paused for six months in Savannah, Georgia, before beginning our homeward journey this time last year. On 29 June 2016, we made it back to Portland. We had a blast — because for those eighteen months, we were committed to one thing and one thing only.

You get the idea. At any given time, I'm concerned with only one major goal. [Read more…]