Weeknote for 3/28/2021

Posted on April 3, 2021 by Andy

Finances

🤔

I got partway through my taxes. I did the time-consuming part of organizing my records. Maybe this year I’ll organize as I go. Anyway, I’ll finish the taxes this week.

I watched a bunch of videos on diversifying one’s income (example). My reactions to the advice have been mixed, but it’s given me ideas.

I listened to articles on poverty. These personal finance books make financial responsibility sound expensive. How is there any hope for poor people to do it? Judging from the articles, there are societal factors working both for and against low income earners. The most informative was a paper by PolicyLink. I don’t know yet what I’ll do with this information.

While researching poverty, I found out how to be extremely frugal (example). It reminded me that money is not the only resource to consider when weighing costs. Time, energy, and emotion come to mind. It also reminded me my employer has a tiered contingency plan for different levels of hardship, so I’m thinking of using some of these tips to create a plan of my own.

Productivity

🤔

I started tracking my evening activity again. It did improve my productivity somewhat, but I have more changes to make.

I started journaling again. It began as a way to clear my mind for sleep, but its purposes quickly expanded. I need to evaluate it carefully so it doesn’t take up all my time.

Music

🤔

“Is He Worthy?” is my new favorite song. My church has been featuring it during Lent, and that Sunday it caught my attention and held it captive the rest of the day. And really every day since then, though I mostly avoided listening to it that week so I wouldn’t get tired of it. It came at the right time to blend with some current themes in my life, color my overall mood, and catalyze some ongoing reflection.

Outdoors

😎

I started walking again by exploring new parks. Health isn’t enough motivation for me to exercise—I need the experience of nature to draw me out of my home. But since I do need regular exercise and I’m in an organizing mood, I’ve made walking my lunchtime routine, and I spent last week finding places to do it. “Is He Worthy?” gave me an extra spark to get started, because that first day I needed an epic setting to listen to it on repeat, like one of our larger parks with a lake.

The Pocket Scavenger by Keri Smith is a template for creative collecting. I read it on Saturday to add an extra layer of exploration to my walks. I don’t know how closely I’ll follow the book, but it gives me a way of thinking about observing and art making. It’s giving me ideas for other projects too. No surprise there.

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Weeknote for 3/21/2021

Posted on March 23, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

😎

I started a new productivity experiment at work. It went very well all week. Instead of letting myself extend my workday several hours to make up for wasted time, I’m only letting myself work between 7:30 am and 5:30 pm, and I can only make up 2 hours on the weekend. If I have more wasted time to make up for, I have to use paid time off. I loathe using PTO for lack of discipline, so it’s sort of a commitment device for staying on task.

My time management after work was far weaker. I was tired at the end of the workday and let myself lounge around doing nothing. This week I’ll apply my workday techniques to my evenings.

Finances

🤔

Thanks to my poor time management last week, I didn’t get around to my taxes. I’ll try again this week.

I waded deeper into trading topics with Investopedia. I listened to sets of articles using these starting points:

These are the aspects of trading that make it feel like magic to me. I still don’t understand them clearly because I was only half listening, but sometimes when I plan to study the material later, the purpose of listening is to give me the gist while simply keeping my mind on the subject and sparking related thoughts. My very tentative idea is to try making a trading bot sometime, if it seems worth the time and effort, once my other financial goals are covered. If nothing else, studying these concepts a little will tell me what’s happening when I’m watching trading streams.

Coffee

🙂

I give Coke with Coffee Dark Blend 5/5. One of my streamer friends was drinking this one day, so I decided to try it. I was a little scared, but it was surprisingly good and not at all bitter. I tasted caramel and vanilla, even though it wasn’t the caramel or vanilla variety. And it was only 70 calories.

Outdoors

😎

I spent the week watching desert hiking videos. I played them on mute while I was working, with a playlist of drone music in the background. The videos were supposed to cathartically symbolize to myself the desolate, frustrated way I sometimes feel about work, but (1) I wasn’t feeling that way last week, and (2) the videos were surprisingly beautiful and got me curious about nature and hiking. So my plan completely backfired.

I spent Saturday night making a list of parks in my area where I could walk. I felt a strangely sad nostalgia for when I used to do that, as if I couldn’t have continued almost this whole past year and as if I weren’t about to start it up again. Some of the nostalgia was for my overall circumstances at the time, but now it’s time to make new memories in new circumstances.

Spirituality

🙂

Every Moment Holy gives me a lot of good material for the prayers I have in mind. I don’t know Douglas McKelvey’s writing process, but I thought I glimpsed the kind of approach I would take: Think of all the important things to say in the situation, and craft them into some artful form. The audiobook is narrated by a tag team of Fernando Ortega and Rebecca K. Reynolds. Fernando Ortega gave a good, standard reading, and his voice faded into the content. Rebecca Reynolds had a distinctive style that I never really got used to. But it was a very fitting one for a Rabbit Room book. I felt like she should be reading classic children’s literature. And, in fact, she does.

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Weeknote for 3/14/2021

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Andy

Stormwater management

😎

I visited a dam with Tim. For my birthday I decided to kick off my stormwater management sightseeing with a trip to the dam that led to this new hobby. The dam keeps the area’s major river from flooding downtown. It was a fairly warm day, but the snow hadn’t all melted, so we had a nice picnic at a table in the middle of a big patch of snow, watched Practical Engineering’s stormwater intro video, and then crunched down a snowy path through the woods to the dam. It’s not huge, but it has floodgates that rise on tall columns, so it looks impressive.

Finances

😐

I’m researching health and disability insurance to help me plan my emergency fund. So far I’ve reviewed what my personal finance books have to say and made a list of questions to answer.

Sometime soon I’ll map out the rest of this project. I could easily drag it out the whole year, so I need to prioritize my tasks and give myself some deadlines.

I’ll do my taxes this week. Although these books talk about taxes constantly, I’ve been forgetting about actually doing them, so that’s my assignment for myself this week. I use H&R Block’s web app, and this time as I go, I’ll poke around in the sections I always ignore to see what might apply to my future financial activities.

Concentrated Investing argues that with enough skill and effort, you can not only beat the market but forego diversification. It bases this contention on ten or so case studies, one of which was of information theorist Claude Shannon. I’d like to hear a reply from passive investing advocates. But the book concedes that if you, like most people, aren’t prepared for a Buffett level of dedication, an index fund is the way to go. Still, some of the profiles are interesting, and the discussion of the Kelly Criterion seems worth studying.

Pitch the Perfect Investment gives me a mathematical framework for evaluating a company’s fundamentals. It doesn’t say much about actually researching them, so I’d have to supplement it with the other books on stock picking. But overall I found the book satisfyingly methodical yet approachable. And it drew on a lot of the books I’ve been listening to over the past few years, so it felt in tune with the zeitgeist. The later chapters on communication were also helpful, though, of course, I wouldn’t be using them to pitch an investment to a portfolio manager.

Coffee

🤔

I’m organizing my coffee taste testing. I listed all the coffee varieties from Aldi I wanted to try, and now I’m working my way through the list. Here are my latest ratings:

  • Café Bustelo: 2/5. I liked the aroma, but the taste took some getting used to. Sucralose and the creamer I use mostly worked.
  • Dunkin’ Original Blend Medium Roast: 1/5. On its own the coffee reminded me of vegemite. With any sucralose it immediately became too sweet. I tried two or three cups, couldn’t finish them, and gave up.

I’m avoiding coffee after lunch. My body is usually pretty resistant to caffeine, or maybe my constant fatigue always gave it too much work. Last week I watched Better Ideas tell us not to drink caffeine after noon because it’ll stay in our system past bedtime. I didn’t take this advice too seriously until I rushed to finish my box of Café Bustelo, got jittery and irritable for the rest of the day, and took two hours to fall asleep. So it seems drinking too much coffee does affect me after all. Maybe with some coffee discipline my sleep will be more consistently restful.

Death

🤔

I processed my friend’s death. Monday evening I posted about it on the forum where I met him. The few days before had some sharp and rather deep dips into sadness, which surprised me. We hadn’t spoken in several years, but it seems I was more attached to him than I realized. It was a suicide, and my thoughts kept returning to how terrible he must have felt to go to such lengths.

But I had good friends who listened sympathetically and a pastor who prayed for me, and I got used to the news, and its intensity subsided. It did spark several trains of thought that I hope will be beneficial. But for my friend and his family, my main hope is that he won’t be forgotten and that they will be able to make their way through grief.

Spirituality

🤔

Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Haley Barton (conference talk) gets closer to the way I think than other books on the disciplines I’ve read. I recognize myself in many of her reactions to the disciplines, and we share some key values in shaping a set of disciplines. They should be informed by our needs, and they should create a framework that allows our spiritual life to pervade our everyday life.

To help with my prayer project, I’m listening to Every Moment Holy, Volume 1, by Douglas McKelvey. My brother got this for Christmas, and it’s perfect for what I’m trying to do, so I bought the audiobook, and I’ve been listening to a section each day. After that I’ll choose some prayers, condense them, and probably try to memorize them so they’re easy to summon at the right moments.

Posted in Coffee, Death, Money, Spirituality, Stormwater management, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/7/2021

Posted on March 9, 2021 by Andy

Hobbies

😎

Sunday, thanks to procrastination, I let my mind wander for quite a while on the web, and I was inspired by two ideas for new hobbies.

I’m adding stormwater management to my local sightseeing. Living in an area that floods fairly often has made me more aware of the way nature encroaches on civilization despite our efforts to keep it at bay, and it’s given me a respect and a bit of awe for the task of stormwater management (interesting and informative video). A while back I signed up for my county department’s email newsletter, but until that Sunday I’d always skimmed over them. This time the strange structure in the email’s photo caught my attention. I decided to investigate, and an epic, hidden world was revealed. Hidden because you barely know it’s there unless you know what to look for. Epic because every day the system stands ready to perform its quiet but massive task of averting floods. Some of it even looks epic—mysterious pumps and large floodgates. And it helps me answer one of the questions in the back of my mind: How does a city work? So now I’m exploring this new layer of my surroundings, and I’ll be making field trips. This will probably get me to revive my practice of visiting the area’s forest preserves, since I haven’t seen them all yet.

I might look into container gardening on my balcony. This one was inspired by my impression that investing is similar to farming: You plant your seeds in the right circumstances for them to thrive, tend them, and wait for them to grow and produce fruit. Then watching one of my streamer friends play Minecraft reminded me that farming is one of my favorite parts of that game, and I thought maybe I should try actual gardening to see what that’s like. I remember hearing at least once in college that gardening is a spiritual discipline, and that’s always seemed right to me. So if my interest continues, I’ll do some research and see what’s involved.

Finances

🙂

I refined my budget and emergency fund. My budget spreads my yearly expenses across the whole year to make sure I’m saving enough for them. But the expenses are staggered throughout the year, so I needed to calculate the year’s starting budget with some of those goals in progress.

For my emergency fund, I imagined losing my job at the worst possible time and having to pay all my yearly expenses rather than only saving a few monthly fractions of them. This made the total more intimidating, so instead of six months of expenses, I might start with three and build up. Next I’m researching the expenses I’ll only have if I’m unemployed (health and disability insurance, maybe others) so I can incorporate those into the emergency fund.

Penny Stocks for Dummies by Peter Leeds is a nice in-depth primer on fundamental and technical analysis. Penny stocks are more vulnerable to the forces that move prices, so they’re a keyhole through which to view the topic of careful investing and trading. The book’s checklists and flowcharts for making wise trades felt solid. It also sparked the realization that you can base decisions about your own business on the factors in fundamental analysis (how much debt to take on, how much advertising to do, etc.).

The Little Book of Valuation by Aswath Damodaran (Google talk) took me further into the benefits and intricacies of judging the health of a venture. In the context of investing, valuation is the process of determining what a company is worth so you can compare it to the company’s stock price. Some features of the book that stood out to me: (1) It discusses valuation measures for each stage of a company’s lifecycle and offers ways an investor can benefit from even a failing company. (2) It discusses techniques for special cases, such as companies with intangible assets, which apparently accountants don’t evaluate well.

The Little Book of Investing Like the Pros is another rich resource for learning and planning. It puts valuation in the context of an overall procedure for active investing. This book could be a good way to learn about accounting and investing concepts, since I’d have to look up 10 terms on every page. But I got the gist of their approach, and it was the kind of process I would use: Progressively narrow down the stock choices, decide what to do based on the stock quality and my overall plan, then monitor and adjust.

Common Stocks and Common Sense takes a case study approach to its advice, which helpfully gives me a lot to analyze. Hearing about a value investor’s work reinforces my sense that this is the approach I’d take if I were picking stocks. It appeals to my preference for sifting through a pile of options to find the one that feels best based on careful research and weighing the relevant factors. To the other ideas of value investing I’d already picked up, this book added the idea of looking for a large safety margin.

Sleep

🤔

I learned (again) I can go to bed earlier with proper motivation. My bedtimes had been pushing the limit, but Thursday’s was 15 minutes too late for me to count it as a win. In Elastic Habits you get one patch per two-week period to make up for a missed habit. I decided I could patch Thursday’s sleep time if I got to bed a little earlier the next day, and I managed 10:00. This reminds me that it’s possible and just takes planning throughout the evening rather than ignoring my target bedtime until the last minute.

Death

😢

An online friend died. I found out a couple of weeks ago, but I waited to talk about it until I could find more news. Thursday I found an obituary and other confirming information. And I felt I needed to tell the community we were a part of, which forced me to face the situation. It’s been hard. I may have more to say about it next week.

Posted in Death, Gardening, Money, Sleep, Stormwater management, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/28/2021

Posted on March 1, 2021 by Andy

Blog

🙂

To make these weeknotes easier, I’m writing parts of them in advance. Specifically, when I finish a book, I’m making myself write about it before I start the next one. Writing a weeknote segment is part of my definition of “done” for a book. The idea of writing about events as they happen has come up before, but I was never organized enough to make it happen. It’s worked well with books this past week, so maybe this technique can be a model for other weeknote topics.

Sleep

🤔

I need to move my bedtime up to 10:30. For the most part, my elastic habit has been getting me more sleep and keeping me from naps, but I’m sort of cheating. Working from home means I can wake up later, so I can push my bedtime later. But that won’t work when I go back to the office, and I tend to wake up at 6:30 against my will anyway, so I’m figuring out how to get to bed earlier.

I finished my big tub of Beaumont Classic Roast Coffee, and I rate it 1 out of 5. I wasn’t a fan of the flavor or the aroma.

Finances

😎

To help me manage the flood of tasks in my finance project, I grouped them into categories. To come up with an initial task list, I surveyed my personal finance books and added whatever else was on my mind. Then in my task manager, I grouped the tasks by category and moved them into new projects so I wouldn’t have to look at them all at once. I ended up with thirteen categories: budget, current status (net worth and cash flow), goals, emergency fund, retirement accounts, management (mainly organization and scheduling), additional insurance (especially disability), charity, expense reduction, income, advisors, estate planning, and active investing.

Adding my bills to Quicken reminded me of how many I have, and not all of them are necessary. Quicken has its bills feature to remind you to pay them, but most of mine are paid automatically. I’m using it as a convenient list to remind me of my recurring expenses and help me refine my budget. I can save about $100 a month if I drop a bunch of subscriptions.

The Elements of Investing is a surprisingly helpful little book. From the table of contents, I assumed it would be a simple, bland rehash of the basic investing principles I’d picked up from the other books. But no, it was engaging and practical, with specific recommendations for funds, allocations, and further reading. They even suggest strategies for dealing with bear markets and the lower returns on bonds we can expect right now. Not bad for a two-hour read. And I was pleased they give us permission to do what I’d been planning, to keep some money on the side for “fun” investing, as long as we’re using more secure strategies for our core investments.

The Bogleheads’ Guide to the Three-Fund Portfolio gives practical advice on a simple retirement plan, but it takes its time getting to it. The three funds are chosen to be as broad as possible: total market funds for US stocks, US bonds, and international stocks. The book spends most of its time trying to convince you of the plan, which I’m sure is necessary for many readers. If you’re already convinced, the advice you can find for free online may be good enough.

In The Investor’s Manifesto, William Bernstein tells us how to handle the massive risks of investing. My dad had the print version of this book and gave it to me a few years ago, but I didn’t know enough about investing to feel ready to read it. Now I have enough of a clue that I could mostly follow it. Bernstein is like a slightly less crotchety and more practical Nassim Taleb. But his main contribution for me was his historical perspective. Financial markets are a lot older than I thought, and the dramatic events we see today have happened before. I especially took note of Eugene Fama and the efficient market hypothesis, which will be relevant if I get around to exploring technical analysis.

Stock Investing for Dummies was a very worthwhile listen even if I’m not its target audience. It’s a book for investors who want to pick individual stocks, and I’m left wondering what John Bogle would think. But even if I stick with mutual funds and ETFs, the book still gave me a lot more detail on how the stock market works. He even explained short squeezes. So I found it valuable. Speaking of which, the book also told me what value investing is, and if I did pick stocks, that sounds like the route I’d take, so I’ve added those books from the bundle to my reading list.

Online Investing for Dummies is just what I needed, an annotated bibliography of the investing web. I thought the book would be a repeat of Stock Investing for Dummies with a few instructions on placing orders online, but I was wrong. It’s a guided tour through the vast realm of online information and tools you can use to research, choose, execute, evaluate, and discuss your investments. It told me even more about how the markets work, such as how a trade makes its way from your order to its execution. And I finally learned the names for the conflicting investing styles being advocated in these books—active and passive. Krantz doesn’t take sides and shepherds you to resources for whichever style you prefer.

Spirituality

🤔

Immanuel Prayer hasn’t been happening, so I’m rethinking my plans for Lent. Immanuel feels a little too time consuming right now. Two alternatives come to mind: (1) listening to some books on spirituality, as I have in the past, and (2) adopting a practice of praying in everyday circumstances, such as while going to sleep or preparing food. This practice dovetails with the kind of habit formation I’ve been working on. One way of establishing a habit is to piggyback it off another habit you already have, such as when you’re eating a meal.

Posted in Blog, Coffee, Money, Sleep, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/21/2021

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Andy

Blog

🤔

I need to budget my blogging time. Last week’s project time was taken up by blog writing, which is not how I’d prefer to use it. I’ve used various time-limiting strategies for my blogging in the past, so I need to revisit them or try new ones.

Finances

🙂

I set up my budget in Quicken. It still needs refinement, but the basics are there. This week begins the March project month, and I’m continuing the finance project. My next step is creating a task list from the advice in my personal finance books.

The Savage Truth on Money is the personal finance book I’d recommend if you only wanted to read one. It’s wide ranging, packed with details, and friendly yet straight talking. Of course, I haven’t read many of these books, so take that recommendation for what it’s worth.

From Here to Financial Happiness is a devotional-style book for people who want to get started quickly. That is the opposite of my approach, so if it’s effective for such people, I wouldn’t know. But I value it for the bit it contributes to my overall understanding of money management.

Spenditude is a slightly confusing examination of three types of spenders. I think it’s really about two consistent approaches—wasteful and frugal—and an inconsistent third one that’s a mixture of the others. My takeaway was that consistent frugality is the way to financial success, but you can still give yourself a little freedom (though they hardly say anything about that, so I can’t tell if they mean it).

Work Your Money, Not Your Life is a mix of career counseling and financial advice aimed at letting you enjoy your work and semi-retire early. I don’t know how it ranks among all books of this sort, but I think it has a lot of advice worth considering.

The best part of The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning was that it introduced me to the Bogleheads. They’re a fan club for John Bogle, the revolutionary founder of Vanguard and all around good guy. Here’s a short video tribute to him. The book itself is jam packed with details and advice, but it was a slog to get through. It probably needs updating too, but that’s what their wiki is for.

I started watching stock and crypto trading streams. Not for advice or news really, just for the ambience of the live graphs and the chat.

Music

😎

City pop is my new finance soundtrack. It came up in an unrelated Twitch stream, but right away I found it went perfectly with the trading streams, so I looked up a playlist, and the whole week I kept it on in the background of anything I did with finance.

Housekeeping

😐

I chipped away at my pile of unfiled papers. The pile is gone now, and so I’m one step closer to cleaning the bedroom.

Spirituality

🤔

I did exactly zero Immanuel prayer. I’ll need to find ways to motivate myself and fit it into my day.

Space

😎

I watched the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars. My current interest in space started with the landing of InSight, NASA’s previous Mars mission, so I was looking forward to this one. I was also more anxious about it, now that I knew how risky these landings are. Plus its mission felt more weighty and exciting to me than InSight’s. So I shared the team’s relief and celebration when Perseverance landed safely.

Posted in Blog, Housekeeping, Immanuel prayer, Money, Music, Space, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/14/2021

Posted on February 20, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

My elastic habits are still going well. I’ll get into specifics in the finance and housekeeping sections. To keep the blog from getting too repetitive, I’ll make this the last Elastic Habits update until something changes.

Finances

😎

I updated my budget spreadsheet to reflect my current spending. Not surprisingly, I spend more on books than I thought. My next step is to set up the budget in Quicken, and then I’ll start working through the advice in these financial books.

I got a sense of the big picture of personal finance from Douglas McCormick’s Family Inc. In contrast with the piecemeal way I’d been thinking about the issues, McCormick systematically applies the tools of corporate finance to the household, treating your whole financial future as a unit and strategizing to optimize and protect it. It felt like a revelation, and McCormick’s book quickly became my favorite in this project so far.

I started reading the OpenStax textbook Principles of Economics. This is partly to get a general understanding of how money works, but mostly it’s because I’ve discovered I think a lot in terms of economics, which I’ve learned isn’t so much about money as about decision making under scarcity. So this book is part of my decision making project, along with Making Hard Decisions, which is about decision making under uncertainty.

I extended tendrils of understanding into finance by reading many articles.

Housekeeping

😐

Last week’s housekeeping project was digging my car out of my parking space. I had an office party at work to drive to on Friday. We’d had a couple of snowstorms in the past few weeks, and since I hadn’t moved my car at all in that time, the plows had surrounded my car in a mountain range of snow, not to mention the foot-thick blanket covering the car itself. I spent three half-hour sessions brushing and shoveling away the snow, but at the end of all that, the car would barely budge.

People

🙂

My friend Tim saved the day with his snow removal skills. I called him Thursday night once I knew I couldn’t do any more for my car. He does this kind of thing for a living, so I knew he could help. I was going to get a ride to the work party with a coworker and worry about my car later, but Tim said he was free that night, and he came over soon after. His first idea was to tow my car out of the space with his truck, but after not finding a good hitching point on my car, he tried putting salt behind the tires. That’s all it took. I drove my car to a temporary spot, and we spent a while shoveling away the extra snow around my space. We weren’t expecting to get together till the weather improved, so my conundrum worked to our advantage.

 

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Friday was my work department’s delayed Christmas party. This was the reason for all the shoveling. We ordered from McAlister’s Deli, which I’d never heard of but immediately added to my list of places to eat with friends, and congregated in our floor’s large conference room so we could spread out. While eating we guessed which answers were whose to some ice breaker questions. My alphabetically ordered guesses scored surprisingly well. Then we played charades with titles of books we’d published. I found out I don’t mind charades as much as I thought, which I partly attribute to my interest in visual memory techniques. Finally was a gift exchange, which due to circumstances I wasn’t able to contribute to, but they gave me something anyway, a steering wheel desk for my parking lot picnics. It was a fun time.

Spirituality

🤔

For Lent I’m going to self-facilitate some Immanuel prayer, possibly via Immanuel journaling. Lent goes from Wednesday the 17th to Easter on April 4. It’s been a long time since I’ve conducted Immanuel, so I’ll try it this week and then decide whether to continue or switch to some other practice.

Posted in Housekeeping, Immanuel prayer, Money, People, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/7/2021

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I finished my first two-week period of Elastic Habits, and so far it’s going really well. My score was 129 out of a range of 0 to (I think) 366 (for my 14-day schedule). The main goal is not to miss more than one day on any habit, and so far I haven’t missed any.

Sleep

😐

My bedtime trended later as the week went on, but I was still able to get to bed in time for 8 hours, at least in principle. In practice I’m learning how my mornings go, and I’m finding it’s hard to sleep in unless I’m extremely tired, which I shouldn’t be on my new schedule, so there’s only so late I can push my bedtime.

Housekeeping

🙂

Last week’s cleaning theme was the bathroom. I got through about a third of all the cleaning it needs, which was pretty good for me.

Finances

😎

I started listening to some books on personal finances. I picked them up in a Humble Book Bundle. They’re all published by Wiley. My goal was to fill in any gaps in my knowledge and help me plan. All three of the books from last week sounded very sensible, so I’ll go back and work through them in detail as I address my finances.

Personal Finance in Your 20s & 30s for Dummies by Eric Tyson covers what I presume are all the basic topics in a clear, well-organized, and approachable manner, so I felt it was a good introduction for me. I didn’t know disability insurance existed, so that was one gap filled. There were others, but that one stood out.

Making Money Simple by Peter Lazaroff makes money simple by (1) reducing issues to their essentials, (2) giving you worksheets to guide your decisions, (3) recommending that you automate as much of your finances as possible, and (4) recommending that you consult a financial advisor for the parts that aren’t simple.

Morningstar’s 30-Minute Money Solutions by Christine Benz was helpfully worksheet oriented like Lazaroff, but unlike Lazaroff, it kept money complicated. Benz tended to assume a lot of prior knowledge. But the book still seemed worth understanding, so I’d like to acquire that prior knowledge.

I finished setting up my accounts in Quicken. I’m not sure I should keep my retirement accounts there, since these books warned against paying too much attention to the fluctuations of your long-term investments, but I’ll decide later. In any case, the next step is to set up an updated budget in the software.

I’m extending my financial project to next month. These financial books have altered my agenda quite a bit, and it’ll clearly take more than a week or two to address all the issues.

People

🙂

I got a call from my good friend Tim, who I hadn’t spoken to in months. Our long silence wasn’t on purpose—we just hadn’t been organized enough to stay in touch. What finally did it was that I accidentally invited him to sign up for the Citizen app, which I was setting up just to try. He was calling both to catch up and to ask questions about the app. So now we have open plans to get together sometime when the weather’s better.

Posted in Housekeeping, Money, People, Productivity, Sleep, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 1/31/2021

Posted on February 2, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

😎

Week 1 of my elastic habits went very well. I didn’t miss a day on any of my habits (sleep, housekeeping, and projects). I’ll cover the details in the next sections.

Sleep

🙂

I got an Elite win every day on sleep. That means I was in bed with my night routine done in time for 8 hours of sleep. Some days my sleep got interrupted, but the important thing is I was prepared for 8. As a result I was less tired and more focused most days and had more time in the evenings, though there were still a couple that dragged and needed a nap.

Housekeeping

🙂

I got through cleaning my whole living room and part of my kitchen. Given the amount I procrastinate on cleaning, this is a big deal for me. My goal is to get through an initial cleaning of everything and then decide on a schedule. I’m also going to purge and organize, but I’m on my guard against using those to put off cleaning.

Money

🙂

I decided on Quicken for software and defined some questions to answer. After looking closely at the free program HomeBank, I decided my financial software needs to be as automated as possible so I don’t get tired of all the recordkeeping and give up, since that’s what’s happened every time before. So it needs to get automatic updates from my accounts. It also needs to cover budgeting, investing, and invoicing. I looked at reviews of some options, and in terms of well-established apps, my requirements all seem to point to Quicken Home & Business. So I’ll set that up and see where it gets me.

Looking into HomeBank got me worrying about financial issues, so I made a worry list. Part of my procedure is to respond to each of my worries with possible rebuttals or solutions, and I organized my responses into a set of financial questions to answer. They ended up sounding like basic financial planning questions: What are my goals and their time frames? What sources of income would fit those requirements and be appealing and feasible for me? Also how can I avoid disastrous investing mistakes?

Reading

🙂

To procrastinate on the epistemology book I’m trying to get through, I’ve been catching up on a bunch of miscellaneous articles. Some highlights:

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Weeknote for 1/24/2021

Posted on January 26, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

Just in time for the next project month, I finished setting up my elastic habits. Here’s a good video explanation of Elastic Habits. Here are the official guides. I made a custom version of the tracker and a template for a habits poster. The tracker is tailored to my 28-day project months just to keep myself on a uniform schedule. I printed the tracker and a poster filled in with my current habits and put them on the magnetic whiteboard in my bedroom.

For habits I’m starting with sleep, housekeeping, and projects. Later I’ll add or switch to other important life activities such as exercise, but at the moment I see myself as being in self-rehabilitation mode, and these are the habits that feel both doable and impactful.

Sleep is interesting because I can’t really scale the habit levels by sleep time, since I’m aiming for 8 hours every night. Instead I’m scaling my preparation for sleep. The Mini habit is falling asleep anywhere (such as on the sofa) in time for an 8-hour sleep (or within an hour of getting home). The Plus level is being ready for an 8-hour sleep in bed with my nighttime medication done. The Elite level is sleeping on time with my whole night routine done.

Reading

🤔

I’m rethinking my goals for reading my long print books. I spent a lot of time reading on my day off on Monday, but it reminded me that reading takes a lot of time, and I don’t know what’s a realistic daily page count, especially when I often miss days (like most of last week) and have to catch up if I’m trying to keep a schedule. So for now I’m just going to see how reading fits into whatever routine my chosen elastic habits create and not worry about deadlines for finishing these books.

Life maintenance

😐

February’s project is my finances. My goals are to settle on some financial software, update my budget, and start at least my emergency fund investment. Hopefully my new elastic habits will help me make faster progress on this project than I made on the setup of those habits.

Thinking

🙂

Melanie Mitchell’s Complexity: A Guided Tour does just what it says on the tin. My attention was turned to this topic by Robert Flood’s Rethinking the Fifth Discipline, in which he appeals to complexity as a corrective to the top-down solutions to systemic problems Peter Senge recommends in The Fifth Discipline. In my view any approach that goes further in grappling with the world’s messiness is a step in the right direction, so I was intrigued. It hasn’t been easy to find a good overview of this field, but Mitchell’s looked promising.

As the book progressed I found out why it might be hard to find good intros: The story she tells is of a newish science trying to find its footing, not even sure how to define itself. The book is fairly personal, and I was intrigued to find that Mitchell is part of the Sante Fe Institute and that she studied under Douglas Hofstadter, who was the one who turned me on to cognitive science. In the end I did feel I’d been guided through the highlights of complexity science, so as usual with these books I now have many starting points for research.

Politics

😌

I was relieved to see a peaceful transfer of power. I was also gratified to see the new administration hit the ground running, addressing so many talking points right away that the pundits I listen to have commented on for so long. My political attention might wane a bit now that I feel the adults are in charge, but watching politics has become another habit for me, so I’ll have an eye on it for the foreseeable future. And in case you’re interested, here’s my growing Twitter list of extremism researchers.

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