Philip Brewer's blog

Philip Brewer's fiction

This post won't go up on the front page at Wise Bread; only people who subscribe to my posts via the RSS feed or email should see it. Even for you guys, I'll keep it short, becaus

That "What if you knew you were going to die" question

You've no doubt seen the question in many different forms. Sometimes it's, "What would you do if you learned you were going to die tomorrow?" Other times it's "What would you do

Book review: Wabi Sabi Simple

I think so. To me, living large is about the breadth and width of my life, not about how high I can pile up stuff. If that is how you want to live large, you'll find a lot of

A champion of savings over spending

We're subjected to constant barrage of unhelpful advice to the effect that what the economy needs is more spending. (The stimulus program is one piece of this.) It's kind of unde

Frugality goes international

The existence of a strong frugality movement in rich countries may be more of a surprise to people in the poor countries than the other way around. Still, with the economy the way

Needs, wants, and not even wants

Hang around with frugality and simplicity types for any length of time and you'll hear a lot about distinguishing between needs and wants. It's come to me, though, that this issue

Not stupid--hopeless

You can't avoid hearing about them these days--people making stupid financial choices. I heard a while back from a woman with huge debts wanting arguments for convincing her husba

Too broke to be frugal?

The first few years after I got out of college my finances were seriously out of control. I was making pretty good money, but I was spending all of it. Worse, I wasn't keeping tr

6 Options if You're Underwater on Your Mortgage

Here are six options for people who are underwater on their mortgages.

Security is an illusion. Freedom is real.

There's a seeming tradeoff between freedom and security: You can stick with the day job or chuck it to live your dream--if you're willing to give up the security of the regular pa

Three bad ways to fund mortgage lending (and maybe a good way)

Any institution that wants to fund mortgages has a problem. They want to lend the money out for thirty years, but the money they have to lend comes from deposits that can be withdr

Not too late to get your IRS stimulus rebate--if you qualify

A lot of taxpayers missed out on getting their IRS economic stimulus rebate last year, even though they qualified. If you're one of them, you'll be glad to know that there's a way

Book review: Game Over

Stephen Leeb's new book makes that case that we're running into resource limits on every front--energy, metals, water--and that this problem is going to affect everything we do. T

Organized tips on getting through tough times

If you like Wise Bread for all the tips and suggestions, here's another resource full of much the same kind of information, but organized differently. Instead of a blog, it's a bu

The "one big lump" theory of your money

Don't get confused by the way your money's divided up. It might be split up into IRAs, 401(k)s, 403(b)s, 529 plans, and annuities. Separately from that, it might be invested in d

Lucky trade-offs

I view frugal living as essentially hedonistic: I don't deny myself things. Rather, I spend less on the things I don't care about in order to be able to spend more on the things

Plan for your wants

Budgets tend to focus on needs--food, shelter, heat, light, transportation, and (of course) taxes. They also provide for wants, but generally the smaller, shorter-term wants--cabl

Book review: Farewell, My Subaru

There are a number of books now by people who set out to live a more local, more sustainable life, and wrote a book to document their experiences. Most of them approach the proble

Time for some new retro

For some time now, we've had good success drawing on the decades from the 1950s through the 1990s for our retro. Some bolder types have even made some use of the 1890s and 1920s--

Are poor folks and the middle class on the same side?

Rational people try to buy what they need at the cheapest price they can find. There's a contrary argument, though, that holds that it's "shooting themselves in the foot" for poor