I was going through a notebook that I've been keeping for the past couple of years that has a page in it where I jotted notes about things to write blog posts about. Obviously there is a lot I didn't get around to! But here's the list so you'll have at least some cryptic idea about things that struck me as being interesting from a money perspective:
Babbitt (the book)
The Manticore p 21-22 (a rather fascinating book, with some interesting observations about wealth)
p.154 Murder Must Advertise (another book! I don't remember what the money connection was, exactly)
Elizabeth White Faking Normal (I haven't read the book but saw something on TV about her, I think. A 55 year old woman talks about how she hid her financial problems.)
HDFC coops
"Hard Work"
Social Security projections
XX Finance advice (this related to a friend of mine who invested an inheritance with a financial advisor who had been recommended by some other friends. They put the money in a ton of different funds and did a lot of trading, and then the market went down. XX freaked out and ended up pulling out all her money and taking a loss. She then used the money to pay off her mortgage instead. The whole thing was just a series of mistakes in my view. XX couldn't handle the idea of risk and waiting for longer term results. The advisors were not investing her money efficiently, I don't think. I kept telling XX she could just put her money in Vanguard funds and do better but she was more comfortable playing it safe, even though her mortgage interest rate wasn't that high and she didn't have much of a savings cushion left after paying it off.)
Musicians, $600 (a friend of ours performed in a club, a big career step for him. But he had to pay backup musicians. The club was slow in paying his share of the ticket proceeds, the musicians wanted their cash, and he ended up borrowing $600 from Sweetie to close the gap. Sweetie never got the $600 back, though the friend more than made up for it in other ways later. But it just got me thinking about how many musicians seem to live on a thin edge financially. And that was way before the pandemic.)
Fred Bass $25 mil estate (this was the owner of the Strand bookstore in NYC, who amassed quite a bit of wealth. More recently his daughter caught some flak over her appeal for people to buy books from them during the pandemic, which some people took as a wealthy woman crying poverty.)
Wild (again, the book.)
Baby shower (someone I know spent an insane amount on a fancy baby shower party)
Near misses (__layoffs, __ layoffs, could have changed my luck) (I've worked a few places where other people got laid off and I somehow didn't, at a point where my finances weren't really solid enough to handle it. There but for the grace... etc.)
Investment results
Optimism vs pessimism/distrust
Healthcare, mom's $3k meds, medicare (yikes. now I can't even remember what those $3k meds were!)
Gala (a swanky fundraiser I went to, where the ratio of expense to benefit was probably questionable)
Mom's apartment move
Virus!
That's the whole list. At some point I'll elaborate more on some of those later items, perhaps! Or maybe I'll just keep accumulating notes and sketchy comments!
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