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When Your Brain Chemistry Screws Up All Your Relationships (Even at Work)
The third in a series about money and depression (but mostly depression).
How to Stop Going into Credit Card Debt for the Sake of “Points”
First you have to have this revelation: Spending money now to save money later does not make sense. It’s illogical. Points systems make you think that spending extra on your credit card, right now, is a responsible thing to do. It isn’t. It took me six years to figure out why.
An American in Israel, Navigating Credit
How credit works in Israel.
Pilot Season Job Offers of Shame
When you read this offer, please picture Ms. Leesa Kugel as she is—a television producer who always chews gum, probably even in her sleep, and engages in verbal up-speak. All names have been changed to protect the guilty and, yes, this was an actual job offer.
I Hired an Esteemed Cat Photographer to Take Photos of My Cat
Chanan is arguably the preeminent cat photography team in the country. The name “Chanan” is a roundabout abbreviation and concatenation of the husband-wife duo’s first names, Richard and Nancy.
The Story of My Secondhand Stuff
So here’s the story of my old stuff. It behooves me to say that I’m blessed with an extremely generous family, who’s helped me get on my feet in a variety of ways. Stuff is just stuff, sure, but everything comes with a story.
My Parents Gave Me Money, But They Also Gave Me Tools
Your parents can give you money, and teach you how to live responsibly. But you have to live your own life.
Talking About Jealousy of the Professional Variety
Do you get jealous of other people’s jobs?
Money Lessons In Children’s Books
Before we traded in our Konigsburg for Kafka and our Dahl for Dostoevsky, the authors of our childhood laced their stories of mystery and imagination with advice on money and finances. Money was something in this stories, but not everything.
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler Lesson: Be resourceful and borrow—if you must.
Consider the classic tome from the great and recently deceased E.L. Konigsburg. In it, young Claudia Kincaid is confronted early on with the consequences of being a compulsive over-spender. Almost as soon as she decides to run away to the comforts of the Met, she realizes she can’t. She’s broke. Solution? She does what we all do: makes nice with her little brother Jamie (Dad)—who is responsible and likes to save his money—and convinces him (Dad) to go with her (finance her big, New York City lifestyle). She’s also not above fishing for change in the museum fountain, which is great, for obvious reasons..
Once Jamie agrees to join forces, they run away with his $24.43. (How many of us, upon first read, thought that was a ton of money?) But here’s a dark and ugly truth about Jamie’s fortune. He got it cheating at the card game War on the bus with his friends. Somewhere in there is a lesson about dishonest forms of accumulating wealth. But we like Jamie and assume he won’t grow up to exist on ponzi schemes, insider trading, gambling, or whatever else those fat cats do.
‘It Was Funny to Write the IRS a Check That Was Bigger Than One Year’s Salary’
I’m 30 and have a lot of money at my disposal (As in a few million dollars? For some reason the question mark makes me feel less weird writing that).
