Weeknote for 4/25/2021

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

😎

I’m time blocking again, and so far it’s working very well. My disorganized evenings the week before didn’t leave much time for projects, and I spent most of the time blogging. This highlighted a dissatisfaction I’d been having, that I was developing some good routines that were tangibly improving my life, but only in its day-to-day aspects and not in relation to my longer-term goals. I needed to carve out time for my projects. Returning to an idea I picked up from Cal Newport, I created a new spreadsheet template that lets me plan out blocks of my personal time and then record how I actually spend it. Comparing my planned and actual schedules should help me plan more realistically. And planning out my whole day instead of only part of it should keep my evening tasks from being derailed by a disorderly afternoon.

Housekeeping

😎

I did a bunch of cleaning. Now that I had a tentative cleaning schedule and a way to reserve time for it, I spent the week trying it out, especially tackling the harder parts that have been burdening my mind with their griminess. I took a different room each day and dedicated an hour to however much I could get done, with exceptions for a couple of rooms that took more work. It definitely feels like my home has entered a new plane of clean. Next my goal is to reduce my regular cleaning time to 30 minutes a day, which I’d like to spend on the Maker Method‘s “express clean” for the day’s room plus one or two extra spots that need attention.

Finances

🙂

I continued researching my simpler financial goals. I spent last week on technology and home goods I might want to buy over the next few years. Thanks to my time blocking, I was able to get through much more of it than before. For this research I’m focusing on how much money I’ll need for these potential expenses and over what time frame. Later I’ll look at how to reach these goals.

Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva (video interview) got me thinking about what to invest in. I rarely hear from Native Americans, so his comments were very interesting and thought provoking. The primary audience for the book is philanthropists, so listening to it was like peeking into another world, but it did get me thinking more seriously about socially responsible investing (Ben Felix’s take), or even the more ambitious concept Villanueva prefers, mission-related investing.

Movies

🙂

Wall Street left me with mixed opinions. I wasn’t a fan of the soundtrack, and I’m sure some of the casting choices could’ve been better. But it’s a very quotable movie (I found out it’s where “Greed is good” came from), and I’m happy to report that the villain is not my only favorite character this time. I also liked Bud’s father, Carl Fox, and his boss, Lou Mannheim, who reminded me of the authors of the investing books I listened to, people in finance who actually have a heart. And thanks to those books, I again halfway understood the plot of the movie. Hopefully once I dig into my own investing decisions, I’ll learn enough to understand four-fifths.

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Weeknote for 4/18/2021

Posted on April 18, 2021 by Andy

Website

😐

I updated my website software. I made a WordPress update, which broke the blog, updated my PHP version, which broke the wiki, and updated MediaWiki, which fixed the wiki except for the abandoned extensions I’ll have to replace. The wiki took up my project time on Saturday because it’s less automatic than updating WordPress, which is why I haven’t updated it in a few years, but it took less time than I expected. Now everything is shiny and new, but only behind the scenes.

Finances

🙂

I planned out my simplest goal, my next car. I’ll try saving what I paid for my current one, adjusted for inflation, with a target date of 15 years from that purchase. I’m not sure how used car prices behave over time, but I’m thinking they’ll either rise with inflation or they’ll stay about the same and I’ll be able to buy something more expensive, maybe an electric car. Or maybe I won’t need a car by then, who knows? The world keeps changing.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator has lessons even for people who aren’t into stocks. It’s the fictional memoir of a stock prodigy’s journey of learning. I recognized some of its advice from other investing books, such as buying as the price is rising from a dip and selling as it’s falling from the peak. If you can wait out the stretches of jargon-heavy narrative, you’ll hear that even a natural has to learn, and learning can be found in any experience—failure, success, and even partial success. My other key takeaway was that some fields are extraordinarily counterintuitive, so it takes exceptional discipline to succeed at them. Some fields are practically antisocial. In stocks you have to follow the logic of the market and not the pressures of social connections (such as tips, favors, and the enthusiasm of the masses).

Video

😎

I kicked off my finance movie project with Trading Places. It was okay. My favorite character was the affably evil Randolph Duke. Trying to understand the trading floor scene will be a project in itself. The movies in my project are from this Investopedia article and a Letterboxd list or two.

I found some good YouTube channels on finance. These stand out to me because they seem sensible and well researched. I’ve been watching through their uploads.

Life maintenance

🙂

My whiteboard of life maintenance is filling up. I added a printout of my new cleaning schedule based on Clean My Space. I settled on a one-month table with a column for each week so I can check off each task for that week. The three pages take up the bottom half of the whiteboard in my bedroom. The top half has my Elastic Habits printouts and an empty space that will be filled with a graph for my habit scores, once I figure out how to make it. It all looks very sterile and corporate except for the colorful magnets I’m using to hold up the pages.

 

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Weeknote for 4/11/2021

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I’m getting back into GTD. I’m trying to use it as a low-energy activity to stay productive when I’m tired after work. So far I’ve mostly been organizing the uncategorized tasks I’ve accumulated in Nirvana over the years.

Housekeeping

😐

I decided on a cleaning schedule, and now I need a layout for it. I’m loosely using the schedule in Clean My Space by Melissa Maker, adjusted for Elastic Habits. That is, I’ll do more on some days and less on others, depending on circumstances. I’m trying to find a way to display it so I minimize the amount of printing it takes.

Coffee

😑

Barissimo Breakfast Blend: 2/5. It was good when I could get it to taste right, but it was finicky and unreliable. It often had the too-sweet problem I had with Dunkin, though not as severely.

Finances

🙂

My next task is to quantify my financial goals. I’ll see if I can do one per week.

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain made sense to me and pushed me further away from cryptocurrency. It wasn’t exactly a balanced discussion, but if Gerard is missing the point of crypto and blockchain, it at least gives me talking points to research. I do want to look into blockchain and Ethereum sometime just to see how they work.

Investing for a Lifetime takes a deep, mathematical dive into retirement planning. It came at a good time in my reading schedule, since I’m at the point of examining my financial goals and finding strategies to reach them. I may use it as my starting point for studying investing in detail, since he carefully lines up the options and weighs their pros and cons.

How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street takes a deep, amusing dive into the Boglehead three-fund portfolio. I would recommend this one over the similar Larimore book because Roth goes into much more detail. But while Roth tries to keep investing simple, in my experience with these books there’s only so far that can go. There are always caveats and circumstances to consider, and the arguments for the various options get a little involved. It’s hard to sort out while listening. But I was able to pick out some of the factors to compare, which I’ll nail down when I come back and study it. I’m coming to the conclusion that the key to really grasping investing is to make comparison tables and graph a bunch of equations.

With that, I’ve finished the Humble Book Bundle on personal finance and investing by Wiley. All in all an excellent collection. Of course, as a neophyte I can’t properly evaluate them, but I feel they’ve put me in a much better position than I ever have been to understand finance and make financial decisions.

I’m not quite done with financial books. I have the OpenStax economics textbook to finish, a novel, a book on social justice, and some Nassim Taleb to revisit. Then, unless my financial reading list expands even more, I’ll be on to entrepreneurship.

Exercise

🙂

I’m getting used to walking. My goal was to increase my endurance, and now I feel unsatisfied with less than 30 minutes. I’ve rarely ever wanted to challenge myself physically, but I’m starting to see how it could be appealing.

Video

😎

I’ve expanded the walkthrough travel videos I’m watching. First it was deserts, and now I’m taking my virtual trips everywhere. Here are a few you might like:

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Weeknote for 4/4/2021

Posted on April 5, 2021 by Andy

Blog

🤔

I’m rethinking how I write these weeknotes. I spent way too much time last week writing my update. And what I was trying to write would’ve taken much more time, but I scaled it back. Since I need to spend that time on my substantive projects, I’m taking a closer look at how to fence in the blogging.

Finances

🤔

I finished my taxes. It was more work than I expected. Next is planning the rest of the project and continuing to improve my budget setup.

I looked into the FIRE movement. That’s Financial Independence, Retire Early. It came up in some of the income videos I’ve been watching. It appeals to me because I’ve been casting around for specific financial goals and strategies, and this movement has them. I’m toying with the idea of Barista FIRE, where you semi-retire and work part time. I suspect the AI work I want to do might involve an uncomfortable pay cut, so it’d be nice to be able to make up the difference.

Cryptocurrency Investing for Dummies still left me wary of crypto. I did end up with a more complete and organized understanding of it, but I’d have to do a lot of paper trading to convince myself crypto’s prices are at all predictable. I still don’t get what fundamentals a cryptocurrency can have that would anchor its value.

Video

😎

I finished Twin Peaks: The Return. This completes the whole Twin Peaks saga, unless they make another season. I loved this season. It was interesting and weird to the end, and it was more my style of weird than the earlier installments. It was also very confusing, so after the finale I immediately turned to YouTube for commentary. Here’s a fascinating take by Nyx Fears. That was all I got around to, but I’ll watch others later.

Westworld (1973) is disappointing on AI but effective as a suspense and action film. I’ve returned to my AI movie project, which I’ll intersperse with some finance movies. This one is an object lesson on mistakes in risk management. Sometimes our disaster mitigation is too little too late. Michael Crichton was very expository in the two books of his I’ve read, so I was expecting more on the concepts, but evidently that’s not the kind of movie he was making. I did notice it was surprisingly current with the idea that the robots’ developers didn’t understand how they worked and that some of the designs were produced by computers. My next AI “movie” will be the Westworld TV series.

Outdoors

😎

I accidentally found out I can visit the lake closest to home. I thought it was strictly functional and blocked off by trees, but it turns out there’s a path around it. So now I have a new everyday walking spot.

 

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Spirituality

🤔

Happy Easter!

I made a tentative daily schedule of liturgies from Every Moment Holy. Even though Lent is over, this project will continue. Next I’ll experiment with following the schedule.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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