If you were starting a project or business, common sense would tell you that you could produce 5x as much output if there were five people working on your goals than if there were just one person. If you are running a counseling program, ten counselors should be able to do 10x the work as a single counselor, right? If you are starting a candle company, twenty employees should be able to produce 4x the work as five employees, right? If you are a mom cleaning out a garage, you should get … [Read more...]
Response to What Is Probably the Most Ignorant Message I’ve Received In 10 Years of Writing Finance Articles
July 26, 2010 By 2 Comments
A reader named Medusa wrote me and, to keep it short, explained that I shouldn't believe people should be rich because the Bible is against rich people, that I was going to die a miserable, lonely old man with no one who loved me because I saved my money instead of spending it, and that after reading a profile I wrote based on Federal Reserve data of the Capitalist Class in the United States, she was starting to consider the possibility that the rich were nothing but oppressors who steal from … [Read more...]
Locks of Love Donation … And I’m Nervous (Before and After Pictures)
March 30, 2010 By 2 Comments
Over the past year, I have grown my hair out to donate it to a charity called Locks of Love that creates custom-tailored hair pieces for children suffering from cancer (and the unfortunate side-effect of baldness, which comes from full-scale chemotherapy and radiation treatment). They aren't wigs - they will actually fit each child's head and no one can tell the difference - they can even swim without a problem. That is one of the reasons they need hair donations because the costs are high for … [Read more...]
The Tragedy of a Flag Burning Constitutional Amendment
March 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment
You all know that I can tolerate almost any political point of view as long as the person espousing it can intelligently explain their reasons for their beliefs and support it with facts and data. For example, although I don't personally agree, Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol didn't believe in charity because he thought the poor should either work or starve to death because he himself had worked his way up to success. I think that is bad public policy, but Scrooge was … [Read more...]
The Joy of Cash Dividends
March 12, 2010 By 2 Comments
Over the years, I've written a lot about dividends on the Investing for Beginners site at About.com. In fact, over the past few years it has been one of my absolute favorite topics to cover because through the Great Recession of 2007-2009, those who owned a collection of high quality dividends stocks were better able to ignore market fluctuations and avoid selling their ownership to pay their household bills. It isn't an infrequent thing I'll hear people opine, "yeah, but who has money … [Read more...]
I'm a private investor who loves architecture, furniture, clothes, history, philosophy, books, cooking, and music as much as I do finance. 
