Money Tips Network

I want to throw a selection of interesting stories at you, all at once.

The average human is lonelier today than at any point in recent human history, and loneliness has hugely negative health and psychological effects. Here’s a good summary of those studies.

What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to summaries of five or fewer words. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Time to change career path?
2. Overdraft problem with bank
3. Ally Bank’s “buckets”
4. Tracking fuel data
5. Board games as holiday gifts
6. Earning is more important
7. Borrowing from TSP
8. Cleaning a dishwasher
9. Cold-brew coffee setup

Over the last year, a few people have written in with a mailbag question along the lines of this one from Jenny:

You have an Instant Pot, right? Why don’t you mention it when you mention slow cookers?

The truth is easy: we don’t use it much at all anymore.

There are a whole bunch of reasons for this, but I want to start off by saying that Instant Pots do the job they’re designed for quite well, but that job that it does well turns out to be a job that’s not very useful in our lifestyle. It is absolutely perfect for very small pressure cooker tasks and for very long preparation meals. The truth is that we very rarely have a need for either.

So, let’s dig in.

One of the big unspoken elements of improving one’s personal finance situation is the “why” element. Why are you doing this?

It’s easy to understand the “why” when you’re looking at digging out of a really bad financial situation. You don’t want your car repossessed. You don’t want to be paying 10% of your paycheck each month to a payday lender. You don’t want to be kicked out of your apartment. You don’t want to damage your credit because that leads to high interest rate loans or even refusal of loans. Those are very visceral things, things where it is extremely obvious why, if you don’t make some good financial moves and cut your spending right now, there are going to be some really negative consequences to your daily life.

Are you ready for your car to become a self-driving chauffeur? 

Progress in the field of self-driving cars has been enormous over the last decade. Waymo and Uber, both top contenders in the race for an autonomous driving future, weren’t even incorporated before 2009. 

Between 2015 and 2019, Tesla’s autopilot achieved more than 1 billion miles of total use. And between January of 2019 and January of 2020, Tesla’s autopilot is expected to more than double to more than 2.3 billion miles of use.

Even with all this progress, accidents and deaths from self-driving cars still pose a very real threat. In this article, we cover the ins and outs of the autonomous vehicle industry, the technology driving the progress and what problems threaten public safety as the technology is rolled out (all puns intended).  

One of the most useful strategies I’ve ever found for encouraging myself to be more frugal is something that I’ve come to call “pre-loading.”

The idea is really simple: I do things when I’m feeling very frugal such that it’s easy to make frugal choices later on when I might feel more inclined to make other choices that aren’t as frugal. For example, I might do something right now such that, when I’m making a choice later, one of the less expensive options becomes a lot more appealing or easy.

I’ve come to recognize that I do this all the time throughout all kinds of different areas of my life. Here are eleven ways in which I pre-load frugal choices.

In early October 2016, I flew to New York City to attend Ramit Sethi’s Forefront event, a weekend conference about entrepreneurship and excellence. As I always do when travling, I agreed to meet with a few readers and colleagues while I was in town.

One sunny morning in Madison Square Park, for instance, I sat on a bench and chatted with Travis Shakespeare. “I'm a film and television producer,” Travis told me. “But I'm also into the FIRE movement. I just got back from the chautauqua in Ecuador.”

The FIRE movement, of course, is all about financial independence and early retirement. And the chautauquas are annual gatherings for FIRE folks who want to dive deep into the subject. (I've now attended four of these myself.)

One of my favorite strategies for getting down to the core of something is to use a trick I call the “five why’s.”

Basically, I use this technique whenever I identify a problem of some kind in my life, or when I’m trying to dig into the core of an idea. I’ll take that problem or that idea I’m trying to understand and I’ll ask “why?” Then, I’ll take that answer and ask “why?” again. I’ll keep asking why until something interesting or valuable emerges; it usually takes five “why’s.”

Let me share my favorite example from the old article:

We often wind up with a large backup of laundry, then find ourselves doing several loads on a single weekend day.

Why? Our laundry routine doesn’t work.

You already know that signing up for a premiere travel credit card or cash back credit card can help you earn points or miles for each dollar you spend.