You know what I like to do on a beautiful fall day? Sit on a couch and watch other people exercise! Furthermore, I cheer for a bunch of people I'll never meet, representing a team based in a city they didn't grow up in. Heck, I myself haven't lived in that city for many years.

Yep, I'm talking about watching professional football — in my case, cheering for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, since I grew up in nearby Clearwater, Florida. However, at this point, I've spent most of my life living outside of the Tampa Bay area. But that doesn't change the emotional connection I have to a team I watched as a kid, taking the bus from Clearwater Mall to Tampa Stadium to watch Lee Roy Selmon, Doug Williams, Jimmie Giles, and those ‘70s-inspired creamsicle uniforms.

But I don't watch football as much as I used to. I certainly don't get the NFL Sunday Ticket like I used to, which allowed me to watch every and any game I wanted (at a cost of $299.95). With a bunch of kids, I just don't have the time. And, frankly, I feel more and more like it's kind of ridiculous.

I just finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America for the third time. In this book, the author chronicles three one-month stints working as one of the American poor. Her goal is to demonstrate that it's difficult to succeed as a waitress, or a maid, or a Wal-Mart employee.

This is a book that I wanted to like — I sympathize with the author's motives — but what could have been an interesting project (and an interesting book) is instead a bizarre Marxist screed about class warfare. Ehrenreich enters her experiment with the end in mind — failure — and she seems to do everything she can to make this end come to fruition.

Nickel and Dimed could have been so much more. I wanted to hear about the people Ehrenreich worked with, wanted to hear their backgrounds and stories and dreams, but very little of that comes through in the book. Instead, we learn about all the little ways in which Ehrenreich sabotages any chance at success.

Yesterday, I mentioned that because I grew up poor, I inherited a faulty money blueprint from my parents. They didn't know how to handle money effectively, so they couldn't teach me how to handle it effectively. I entered adulthood with many of the same bad habits they'd had when I was a kid.

I was a compulsive spender, for instance. I had a shopping addiction. I had no willpower, no impulse control. Even when I had no money in the bank, I still found ways to spend. I took on over $20,000 in credit card debt before I turned 25!

Nowadays, I mostly have my spending under control. I'm no longer in debt, and I force myself to make conscious decisions about what I purchase. (Conscious spending is one of the keys to overcoming emotional spending.)

Last Monday, I got an email from Spotify saying that somebody in Brazil had logged into my account.

I checked. Sure enough: A stranger was using my Spotify to listen to Michael Jackson. I told Spotify to "sign me out everywhere" — but I didn't change my password. Continue reading...

Which streaming services are best? Kim and I have been wrestling with this question for a week now. We've done lots of research and testing to see what we like. We've pencilled out prices. And then I put all of the info into a spreadsheet. (Yay, nerds!)

We learned that there's plenty of choice for cord cutters at the moment — even for folks who want to watch free TV. There might even be too much choice. In fact, whereas I was once hopeful about the future of streaming entertainment, now I'm wary.

I used to envision a world in which big players like Apple gathered all content in a central location, then customers could select what they wanted, like ordering from a restaurant menu. That's what people have been demanding from cable for years, after all, and for a time it seemed that streaming might head that direction. Continue reading...

Last month, the Federal Reserve released a new report: Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2021 [PDF]. This annual survey gauges American financial health and attitudes. The 2021 edition was conducted last November.

Here are some highlights from the report:

• Seventy-eight percent of adults were either doing okay or living comfortably financially, the highest share with this level of financial well-being since the survey began in 2013.
• Fifteen percent of adults with income less than $50,000 struggled to pay their bills because of varying monthly income.
• Fifteen percent of workers said they were in a different job than twelve months earlier. Just over six in ten people who changed jobs said their new job was better overall, compared with one in ten who said that it was worse.
• Sixty-eight percent of adults said they would cover a $400 emergency expense exclusively using cash or its equivalent, up from 50 percent who would pay this way when the survey began in 2013. (Note that this survey is the original source of this oft-quoted statistic.)
• Six percent of adults did not have a bank account. Eleven percent of adults with a bank account paid an overdraft fee in the previous twelve months.

These little nuggets of info are interesting, sure, but what I find even more interesting are the charts and graphs documenting long-term trends.

For over five years now, I've spent most of my waking hours reading and writing about money. I've learned a lot. Using this knowledge, I've been able to get out of debt, build savings, and even begin pursuing my passions. What's next? As time passes, I find myself thinking more about financial independence and early retirement.

No surprise then that over the last couple of months I've been obsessed with Jacob Lund Fisker's Early Retirement Extreme blog. And no surprise that my first book review since September is of Fisker's book, also called Early Retirement Extreme.

Early Retirement Extreme

Imagine a personal finance book written by a theoretical physicist. What would it be like? Full of formulas and figures, right? Well, that's what you get with Early Retirement Extreme. But you get more, too.

Since my twin victories of paying off our last credit card and funding a summer of travel, my husband has begun to show interest in personal finance.

It's not that he wasn't supportive of my efforts before — he just preferred to support them from a safe, ignorant distance. A distance from which I handed him an envelope of cash each week to do the grocery shopping, he didn't ask too many questions, and somehow we were climbing out of debt. He was more than happy to adopt any frugal-living strategy I suggested, as long as he didn't have to think about the Big Picture.

That system worked, but I longed for more active participation from him. Not only because I wanted us to share equally in the journey toward financial freedom — I do want that — but also for a selfish reason. I wanted him to participate because he's better at this stuff than I am. He's a whiz at spreadsheets. The man has a Ph.d in Physical Chemistry. You don't get one of those without doing a few math problems.

When Kim and I go to bed each night, we spend time casually browsing Reddit on our iPads. It's fun. Mostly.

She and I enjoy sharing funny animal videos with each other (from subreddits like /r/animalsbeinggenisuses, /r/happycowgifs, and /r/petthedamndog). Kim dives deep into /r/mapporn and /r/documentaries. I read about comics and computer games and financial independence.

But here's the thing. After browsing Reddit for thirty minutes or an hour, I'm left feeling unsatisfied. In fact, I'm often in a bad mood. After browsing Reddit, I have a negative attitude. My view of the world has deteriorated. Why? Because for all the fun and interesting things on Reddit, it's also filled with a bunch of crap.

When I was a boy, I told my father I wanted a fish. I meant that I wanted a little orange goldfish in a small bowl that might live on the kitchen counter, just like other kids have. My dad knew that. But instead of buying me a goldfish, he went to the pet shop and purchased a 20-gallon aquarium with a bunch of expensive tropical fish.

The fish were fun for a day, but I was seven or eight or nine years old. I lost interest quickly. The fish became more of a nuisance than a novelty. And, eventually, one of us three boys -- I can't remember which -- broke the tank, and then we had no more fish.