Personal Economics 101

You'll find these concepts of Stoicism in Meditations  by Marcus Aurelias , a Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and a Stoic philosopher.

If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, i

Get the book at ThriftBooks:  Think and Grow Rich  

This is your bedrock for all your finances. Without an emergency fund, any other goals you may have, such as investing or saving for a vacation or college, will get derailed. It's difficult to recover.  But first of all, have a budget and follow it. I'm retired now, but still use a budget. It's basic to sound financial planning and peace-of-mind. Recent surveys indicate that 61 percent of American families cannot come up with $400 to meet an emergency. Don't be one of these people. 

You do not want to get caught in the debt trap. Credit Card Debt is the most damaging to your financial freedom and welfare. See Getting Out of Debt  or I'm In Debt. How Do I Get Myself Out of This Mess. Total household debt balances continued their upward climb in the third quarter of 2022 with an increase of $351 billion, the largest nominal quarterly increase since 2007. This rise was driven by a $282 billion increase in mortgage balances, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt & Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data . Mortgages, historically the largest form of household debt, now comprise 71 percent of outstanding household debt balances, up from 69 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019.  An increase in credit card balances was also a boost to the total debt balances, with credit card balances up $38 billion from the previous quarter. On a year-over-year basis, this marked a 15 percent increase, the largest in more than twenty ye

By J.P. Morgan Wealth Management Birds and bees are great – but so are brains. In the last few decades, behavioral finance has emerged as a field of study that merges psychology and finance. It’s a subset within the field of behavioral economics, which was developed by, we assume, super smart dudes named Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In 1979, they proposed the idea of prospect theory, which argues that people make decisions based on the potential value of gains and losses rather than the utility of a decision itself. Their empirical findings challenged the assumption that human rationality prevailed in modern economic theory – and in 2002, Kahneman even won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. (See, we were right, they are super smart.) To put it simply: investors are humans. We feel greed, fear, hope, excitement – all sorts of emotions impact our behavior on the micro and macro levels. It is precisely because we are human that we often make irrational decisions. Behavior

 This plan would actually benefit the wealthy more than the poor.  It might be the biggest giveaway in American history and goes much further than anything Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren have proposed. Biden now wants to cancel more than $1 trillion dollars in student loans – he's already let college graduates delay repayments for years. This plan makes suckers out of the millions of Americans who have felt honor bound to pay off their debts. Even more lavishly subsidizing higher education will only push tuition even higher and making the next round of student debt even higher. But who would ever pay off a student loan after this blanket forgiveness program. Who would benefit? The most recent Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances found that only 22% of families had student loan debt and "student debt has consistently been disproportionately held by higher-income families." Canceling all student loans is supported by 19% of voters according to the latest poll –

This Headline from the Los Angeles Times was eye catching.  Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours. Here’s what you need to know: “The bill, AB 2932, would change the definition of a workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours for companies with more than 500 employees.” Companies would be prohibited from cutting the pay of workers – so effectively every worker covered by the law would be getting a 20% mandatory pay raise. France and many other Western European nations tried this in the 1980s and it led to the deindustrialization of these countries, before they abandoned the ruinous experiment. I wonder if the geniuses in Sacramento who are plowing this bill forward have any idea where the money will come from so that workers can be paid more to produce less. It’s a very good way to move all manufacturing out of California. Some employers will simply try to raise prices to make up for the higher labor costs, which will only make inflation worse. Brilliant. And Governor Gavi