My son’s friends are frustrating me.

Some borrow money – and don’t pay it back.  Some let him pay for them whenever they go somewhere.  I admire his generosity, but…

Most are just actively trying to talk him out of pursuing his goals – to work less and save less.  I don’t get it.

Your 20′s is when you usually leave some people behind.   Although it’s sad, it’s probably a good thing.

My son puts in 70+ hours a week across 3 jobs.  In the last 3 months, he’s had 2 days off, one of which was Christmas Day.  I think he slept for about 14 hours.

He gave one of his friends the Christmas gift of forgiving a $150 loan (that’s the cost of one of his university textbooks!) that he made to her about 6 months ago.   The chick has an iphone (and he doesn’t), a 2 bedroom apartment (and refuses to get a roommate) and puts in less than half the hours he does.  She calls him lucky and herself unlucky.

Yup, lucky.

Six or seven months ago I had lunch with one of my good friends. At lunch, she told me that she had a potential job for me at the company where she works. In September when I got back from holiday, she emailed to confirm that I wasn’t working yet – and again in October, and November… Finally, in December the job got the green light and I’ll be starting in a week or so. Hooray!

Along the way I started to lose hope that the job would come through. I had promised myself that once I got to the cut-off threshold of $10k in my “not working savings account” that I’d start looking for something short term just in case this contract didn’t come to fruition. That amount represented about 6 months of non-working expenses – 8 or 9 if I cut back to bare bones. For whatever reason, $10,000 is a kind of magic safety number for me. So at the beginning of September, I was sitting pretty at around $25,000.

Then I bought a new vehicle. Then I kind of lost a bit of control around Christmas buying stuff like makeup, a fitbit (best self-Xmas present ever BTW and first time I’ve actually lost weight over the holidays), new luggage for a cruise in February since I’m too cheap to pay for checked baggage…

About a month ago, little things started to bug me. The sound of the furnace kicking on every half hour, the gas mileage indicator on the new vehicle, that crazy triple mortgage payment in December, the stock market (ok, that was a big thing)… I started hoarding groceries again in preparation for an apocalypse…

Right before Christmas, I got another contract offer from someone else I used to work with where I could earn about 2-3 times what my friend’s job pays. (Why does this happen anyway?)  Even a couple of years ago, I would have gone for the one that paid the most because it would mean more money earned to save up for more time off.

But now that I know that I’m not really that great at dealing with large amounts of free time, I’m taking the one that I think I’ll do the best at and will satisfy more of my other needs.

Things like:

• Being a good manager
• Working with friends
• More time off regularly throughout the year and a more flexible schedule
• A big mess to clean up and a sense of progress to satisfy that need for challenge and to make a difference
• Greater autonomy – which contrary to Dan Pink’s advice – isn’t always a good thing for people like me who have a hard time with this work-life balance thing
• Better future prospects (a major consideration now that I’m closer to 50 than 40)

Unlike Jacob’s at Early Retirement Extreme’s un-retirement plan, I’m not planning on keeping up a Spartan-ish budget. Sometimes it’s a good thing not to have a reputation to uphold. Saving 50% is a nice round number and I’ll focus a lot more on conscious spending that makes life easier and more fun.

I even made a spending spreadsheet.

Yay house cleaners again!

I’ve enjoyed every one of Richard Wiseman’s books – the latest being 59 Seconds.

There’s so much nonsense advice handed out in the self-help world nowadays (and it’s been made worse by *some* bloggers IMO), it drives me crazy.  Books like 59 Seconds or research-based blogs like PsyBlog (who has had a bunch of posts lately dealing with personal finance) are great resources for cutting through the crap and helping us figure out what really works and what doesn’t – for most people.

According to Wiseman, here’s a list of things that DON’T work to motivate you to reach your goals:

1. Focusing on someone you admire for achieving so much:  eg. Steve Jobs
   
2. Thinking about bad things that will happen if you don’t achieve your goal:  eg. my former tendency of thinking I would end up sharing a bowl of Friskies with my cat some day.
3. Trying to suppress unhelpful thoughts:  eg. avoiding thinking about how you’ll manage to avoid shopping for Christmas.
4. Relying on willpower:  I used to do this a lot in the beginning but switched to changing up my environment so I didn’t need to rely on willpower as much.
5. Fantasize about how great life will be when you reach your goal:  my guess is a lot of people that dream about early retirement or financial independence – or just being able to chuck it all and go traveling forever do quite a bit of this?  I know I certainly used to.

Here’s what DOES work according to Wiseman and the research:

1. A step by step plan – have a maximum of five steps with subgoals that are objective so that you can definitively say whether you’ve hit the target or not.  Give yourself a reward when you’ve reached the goal.  Give yourself a target time limit.  Don’t listen to those people who say that goals are terrible things to have – they just aren’t doing it right and are or were too hung up in the outcome.  It’s a classic throwing out the baby with the bathwater approach.
2. Tell other people about your goal – heck, even set up a whole blog about it.  Your readers will keep you on the straight and narrow.
3. Think about the good things that will happen by achieving your goal – remind yourself of these things on a regular basis.
4. Reward yourself for making progress – but not by doing anything that conflicts with actually achieving your larger goals.  Like don’t have a goal to pay off a credit card and then run out and buy a new car.
5. Record your progress – use net worth calculators, those little widgets for recording debt balance pay-offs or savings goals – or, use your banking software and good old fashioned spreadsheets or journals / graphs if you’re more of a Luddite type.

I’m firming up my financial goals – and processes – for 2012 right now.  Goals are something that I always tackle from a broad perspective around Christmas and have been doing that for the last 20 years – with sometimes great success and sometimes not so great.  Where they didn’t work, it was because I didn’t – work at them that is.  They also didn’t work where I didn’t allow for the peculiarities of my personality (of which there are many) , setbacks, or obstacles.

So far, it looks like it will be “the year of the mortgage payoff” – or half payoff.

I’m setting a maximum limit on savings as well since I know I can be a little too motivated weird that way.  I don’t want to go to Hoarder Rehab – no no no.

Oops, I don’t mean “retirement” calculators – since use of the R-word is fraught with controversy.  Let’s call them financial independence calculators.

Besides, I don’t even have a category called “retirement”, only “financial independence”.

Here’s an offering for Canadians from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/pages/retirementplan/

This nifty little tool also allows you to include the effects of inflation on OAS and CPP and estimate the percentage of your income you’ll need in actual retirement.  Which, according to Malcolm Hamilton is around 50% of your working income.

I think that 50% figure assumes two things:  you will have a paid off or mostly paid off house and your kids will be gone and finished with any post-secondary schooling.  Because, as I’ve concluded through personal analysis, general expenses certainly don’t go down when you’re not working.  Mine are still higher (except for taxes).  Having said that, if I were 65 and not 46, they would probably be lower.  Maybe.

If you want to geek out a little bit, you can import the table into your own spreadsheet and manipulate the numbers too.

Calculators for US people – this blog post highlights a few choices:

How to choose the right retirement calculator for you

Here’s the best one that I could see from the ones he reviewed:

http://www.choosetosave.org/ballpark/

I tested it out against my more detailed spreadsheet and came out with very close to the same result.

Let me know if there’s any better calculators out there that are online and I’ll update to include them.

I have a problem with OCD. That stands for “Obsessive Compulsive Doodling.”

Bill at Credit Card Assist put together a very complimentary interview with me over on their site for their Best of the Best Blogger series – here it is:

Interview with me.

In the interview, I suggested that people at least ballpark their “magic number” for financial independence, but that’s not what I really do / did.

I go beyond Breaking Bad

This week, I’m battling with the last of my pre-Christmas house decluttering and deep cleaning and watching Breaking Bad simultaneously.

In Season 2, Walter White figured out how much money he needs to earn to support his family after he passes away from terminal cancer. The number White came up with was $737,000 using your basic back-of-the-envelope / top of the head OCD methods:

Adjusting for inflation… Good state college, adjusting for inflation… Two kids, four years of college: $360,000. Remaining mortgage on the home: $107,000. Home equity line: $30,000. That’s $137,000. Cost of living, food, clothing, utilities: say 2 grand a month. I mean that – - that should put a dent in it anyway. $24k a year – provide for say, 10 years. That’s $240,000. Plus $360. Plus $107. Seven thirty seven. Seven hundred and thirty seven thousand. That’s what I need. That is what I need. You and I both clear about 70 grand a week. That’s only 10 and ½ more weeks. Call it 11. Eleven more drug deals… It’s doable. Definitely doable.

Am I the only one that thinks it’s really wrong that the cost of college for 4 years is 1.5 times higher than the cost of living for the whole family for 10 years? And he’s low-balled the cost of living number anyway since he has a newborn baby and his wife probably won’t have health insurance… hmmm… why am I over-analyzing a TV show like this?

And of course, like most back of the envelope calculations, Walter didn’t include an emergency fund that was needed because of surgery, his brother-in-laws long term physical therapy… and I’m sure something else will come up in season 4 that he didn’t consider either.

But don’t tell me what happens in season 4… I need something to get me through this cleaning project!

Not only that, Walter actually seems to like working now. Sort of like me!

Walter needs a spreadsheet – and so do you

No matter how old you are, whether you want to be financially independent or retire early or whatever you want to do as far as savings or spending goals go, everyone needs a spreadsheet or some calculation method of projecting out future cashflow.

I spend more time working with my future cashflow spreadsheet by far than I do analyzing what I’ve actually spent historically, but still only about an hour a month. It’s been very depressing lately working with it with the stock market going down but it is what it is.

Ideally, the spreadsheet has 3 scenarios – best, worst, and probable. But you’ll be far ahead of the general population by just doing a probable scenario which – for most people – is probably overly optimistic.

Retired Syd did an interview with Canadian Dream on her spreadsheet process here: Interview with Sydney from retirement – a full-time job

Hey, this is what accountants do for fun. And safety. Safety’s important.

Making spreadsheets has got to be more fun (and safe) than cooking meth.

Let me know in the comments if you’d be interested in more specifics on how I geek out over my spreadsheet(s). (Yay! Tabs!!!) If so, I’ll try to post some kind of link if I can figure out how to do that.

Who knew?

Well, you all probably knew this, but I didn’t. I’ve just never done it before.

I think I’d be happy living in a cave – as long as that cave was lined with bookshelves.

The key is useless things

Apparently decorating is made up of useless things that serve no purpose and they have to be assembled in some kind of manner that’s aesthetically pleasing. This is really hard to wrap your head around if you don’t notice your surroundings.

So I asked my friend Mel (a psychologist that knows about decorating – because I clearly need both kinds of help) – who from 3000 miles away is trying to help me decorate.

She thinks it’s important to decorate your house for yourself so YOU feel happy in it. I think it’s important to sell my house for the max money I can get. To do that, I have to do this decorating thing. Because people like decorated houses.

But they can’t be too decorated, like with pictures of your family. Or books that you actually read. Nono. It has to be these useless things.  Unless you’re Lindy and can pull off pretty and useful.

So I email Mel with pictures – like this first decorating fail:

Subject: Help?

Me: This doesn’t look right to me. I’m going to replace this sideboard thing with a dark wood kind. But it seems like I should have something else.  Something taller?  Maybe put something in that urn thing?  Like something seasonal I can change out for Xmas / summer? Or put a poinsettia for now and something else with some color after Xmas?

Mel: Okay, I like the furniture and painting together but your pieces are too dark and small IMO. You need something, floral maybe in seafoam and off-white that is larger in scale. Or, you keep your pieces and change the sideboard and painting. You can make those three pieces more substantial by clustering them and arranging them at different heights, like on a stack of small, old books or something. What do you think?

(EEK! She asked me what *I* think?!? That’s the problem – I don’t!  Think of this stuff that is.  I’m also not sure what color seafoam is – or if it even is a color. Is this decorating-speak for light green? Or does she think I should have flowers that are made out of foam that came from the sea?)

Me: Heighten with books?!?  I didn’t think of that!  Oh yes, I have books up the ying yang.

I agree on the size.  I got this Ethan Allen decorating book from our book swap place and I can see that there’s a very clear style that I like (warm tones – no blue, grey or green, darker colours – OR pure black and white – but I won’t go there).  What it looks like they do in some of the pictures is to have a picture on the wall and then they put a smaller picture so it kind of leans up against the bigger one and partly covers it, but only a bit.  In this one pic, they have a basket (which I have a few of) – and they put a few books in it and sort of layer something else in the front of the whole thing.

It seems kind of complicated and I guess you just don’t move or use anything?  Like – they’re not actually reading the books right?  So it’s not like it’s a basket with my library books in it?  I don’t know if I can keep that up.

There was another picture that I really liked in the book where they’re decorating with books that are sort of stacked and intermixed with other things.  Layering things seems to be quite popular, that just never occurred to me.  I think I will move those useless things in the picture to my bookshelves in the office.  Then I’ll start playing around with various sizes of things.  I’ve got taller things that are lighter.  And if I don’t, I can start looking for some.  I have a nice wine rack.  Maybe I’ll try that out.

Mel: You’re so funny. No, you don’t typically use your decorative items but if you do, that’s even better. You’re in the right track figuring out what you like and trying different arrangements.

Me: Well, it seems pointless to me to have things hanging around that you never use.  Then you just have to dust them.  It’s sort of a make work project.

But I have to learn how to do this stuff or else hire someone to do it for me which seems silly to do if I can figure it out myself.  I think people who are buying houses want to see something pulled together properly.  It’s like window dressing in a store – it seems stupid and unnecessary, but people buy based on emotion, not logic.  I do it too!

Plus I can buy things at the auction and save a lot of money.   If I focus on it now, I have lots of time to be able to pick up stuff off-retail.  They had some things there that I could have bought at this last auction, but I didn’t know what I should have.  AND – if I get it figured out for once and for all, it’s done and I don’t have to think about it anymore.  To be honest, it hurts my brain and confuses me.  But I think there’s a pattern there that I’m starting to comprehend.

I get by with a little (lot of) help from my friends

Hey! I got these mirrors for free. Guess how I managed that? My friend that went with me to the auction asked for them.

Oh, I’m replacing that door too.  And the mirrors need to be dusted.

But I think they might be useful for me to check how I look before I leave the house – when / if I go back to work – and maybe pay someone to do this maddening decorating project for me.

The major project I’m taking on during this time that I have off is to finally declutter everything that I’ve put off decluttering for the last – oh – lots of years. Fortunately, there hasn’t been a build-up of crap in the last 12 years or so since I kind of generally just stopped buying things I wasn’t going to use right away. In my decluttering frenzy method, I did come across a box of old tax records from almost 15 years ago. I’m really quite impressed with the state of my accounting records at the time. I spent a lot of time recording minutiae.

Unfortunately, not a lot of time was spent stepping back and analyzing it to look at the big picture – that I was spending more than I made.

A lot of that spending was on books – in many months it was upwards of $200 per month, every month. And I see there were quite a lot of library fines in that time period too – that’s what happens when you reach the upper limit of 99 books able to be withdrawn in a 3 week time period and can’t keep track of them all. (Yeah, I read them all – I read kind of fast.)

Minimalist son?

My oldest son has inherited my book addiction. Even during my brokest periods, if he wanted a book – I bought it. The difference between him and me (apart from the last year or so) is that he keeps all of his old books and I give mine away. He has somewhere around 1000 books in his collection and I have about 300 “keepers”. There’s about 80 books in my “to be read” dedicated bookshelf alone. A box off that shelf goes go with me when we travel and I give them away along the journey.

I keep my addiction in check by having a buying limit of one book a month – always non-fiction. I no longer buy fiction but put in a request to my library to stock any fiction titles I’m interested in that they don’t already have. My “rule” is to check every book out of the library first – if it’s something I think I’ll want to refer to again, I’ll buy it.

The oldest kid has decided that he wants to become a minimalist. He’s been reading Thoreau and Epictetus. I think he already is a minimalist by definition – he’s a 23 year old bachelor that lives in his mother’s basement. So I think he’s going to spend some bucks converting most of the books he owns into digital versions which seems wonky to me. Does it make sense that you should have to spend money replacing something you already own in a different format in order to embrace minimalism? You still have the “stuff”, it’s just in a portable format. Maybe he’s just dreading the thought of moving out and packing up all those books.

But just look at Christopher Hitchen’s study and that wonderful stack of books.  It’s a thing of beauty.

Borders close-out

I broke my “one book buying rule” on our little journey down south this summer when I came across the close-out of a Borders store in Montana. I picked up a couple of writing books and this recipe book:

The Take-Out Menu Cookbook – this is an excellent book for anyone who’s into cookbook p0rn like I am. You can save a ton of time on some of your favourites by making up a batch of sauce for a dish like Pad Thai and freezing it in individual containers. Total cost to make the sauce is under a buck compared to a jar from the store that runs around $4.

I whittled down my recipe book collection by putting all my recipe books outside of my kitchen on a bookshelf for a year. If I used them, they remained in my kitchen and whatever was left after a year got packed off to my local freebie book swap center. I eliminated over 60 cookbooks in the great cookbook purge of 2010. This is sort of like First Gen American’s pantry method – which I’m going to start applying. Soon.

Freebies!

Hey, Amazon has a sale on for some free kindle books (courtesy of dailycheapreads.com).

http://dailycheapreads.com/2011/11/07/free-now-five-business-and-career-books-from-ft-press-and-pearson-prentice-hall/

http://dailycheapreads.com/2011/11/06/free-now-six-books-on-writing-from-writer%e2%80%99s-digest-books/

PS – I highly recommend “Getting the Words Right.” Too bad I already bought it at Borders this summer. But hey! Now I have an electronic copy too!

Or stuff. Or experiences. Or something.

I was driving with my son recently and asked him…

“so… if I went back to work and made a fair amount of money, what should I do with it?”

He said “I don’t know – buy a new TV?”

Well, he’s 23 – what else would you expect him to say?  Nope, don’t need one of those since I don’t (generally) watch TV. Don’t like HD either. It’s TOO realistic. I don’t want to see the spotty skin on Elisha Cuthbert’s face in 24.

We tried to think of a few other things, but neither of us could come up with anything. Mmmkay… Believe me, there’s things that I don’t have in my home that most people would consider to be necessities.

I had dreams of being able to help my kids buy a house or something – but the oldest doesn’t want my surplus money. He says he “doesn’t want to live off a woman – especially his mother.” Call me crazy, but I kind of admire that.

Or maybe I’ve just traumatized him somehow.

In thinking about First Gen American’s post on Rules for Lifestyle Inflation – I thought about:

Poverty of Imagination

Is there such a thing?

Do people who stop or restrict spending for long enough lose their ability to even be able to think of things they could buy – or do -that would make their lives more enjoyable? I think so. I’ve seen it happen too many times in too many people to not think this is a very real phenomenon.

I see it in me. And it kind of freaks me out.

Think about it. If – to save for big goals like early retirement or a paid off house – you had to constantly restrict yourself. Every month or year – or every couple of days – you pat yourself on the back for resisting all that temptation. You start to see yourself as no longer slave to your wants or emotions.

Eventually you think that people who DO spend everything they make (and possibly then some) are sort of silly or stupid. Do it for enough years and you become a financial anorexic. There’s food (money) all around you, but you refuse to eat (spend) it because you feel virtuous for not spending it. You’re not physically wasting away though – so there’s no brakes to your “issues”. Hell, some people even admire you for it!

As much as I truly value my frugal friends (and make no mistake, they aren’t as frugal as I am) – I value the spendy ones just as much, if not more. They push me to spend on things when I internally kick and scream (mentally) not to. They plan holidays and ski trips and restaurant outings. They look great and go clothes shopping with me so that I stay in touch with the fashion world – even just a little bit.

I just have to show up and hand over my wallet. I’m forever grateful to them for this. They’re enablers – of the best kind.

They bring me back to the earth I want to live on by acknowledging that yes – it’s completely idiotic to expect me to be biking or walking around when its -30C in the winter – and tell me that I really do need a vehicle. Preferably one with 4WD.

Can I take the other approach? You bet I can.

But I don’t need to be walking up the hill (going uphill both ways of course) in freezing temps – with a broken leg and no shoes.

And I don’t need to be thinking that I “should” either.

This post by Steve Pavlina is one that I used to (sort of) agree with: 10 reasons you should never get a job

But even though I’m probably as Type A as Pavlina, if not more so – I’m not sure that I agree with him anymore.

Here’s my reasons why I should start working for “the man” again after just 4 months off anyway:

1. I like seeing my bank account balance going up, not down. I’m still in that no-touchy phase of my investments – and besides, they were going down too until recently. Back when I was saving, saving, saving – everything went up all the time and I didn’t notice or care about the blips that much. Wow, that was great.
2. Missing work friendships. I *still* can’t seem to find groups in real life that I fit into at my age – the difference between now and last year is that I’m more actively looking for them now – and they aren’t really there. Not only that, but the ones that are meet at night (to work around the working people’s hours), which is when I like being at home with my family.
3. It sucks to have no minions. Even worse, my only available minions – my kids – are slacking on things they used to do because I’m at home all day to do them now. Even the pets are becoming needier, following me around all day, meowing at doors or to get fed 52 times a day – or bringing me shoes as a hint that more than 2 walks a day would be appreciated. I’m tempted to do like I am the working poor – and cut the interwebz and cable – except I’m the one that would get hurt the most from it.
4. My honey-do list is ugly. I can see now that there was a reason why I wasn’t doing all of the things at home I was *supposed* to be doing before when I was working. Mostly that I hate doing them. Work was just more fun.
5. That whole Parkinson’s Law thing?: The amount of time which one has to perform a task is the amount of time it will take to complete the task.
   Yeah, it’s true. Even my grocery shopping time has increased by a factor of 3. Everything has increased in the time it takes me – cleaning, cooking… I think it’s called puttering but I’m not sure since I’ve never done it before.
6. Not enough sensory input. I wrote a LOT more on this blog when I was working. I was interacting more with people. The Unabomber tendencies I have just get exacerbated when I’m home.
7. Routines are wonderful. Back when I worked, I’d wake up at 5 or so every morning and write because that was the only time I had. Most posts took about 15-30 minutes to write. Now that I know that I can write at almost any time, I put it off. And I even LIKE writing!
8. The internet sucks me in and wastes my time. I was always the kind of person that could go to a library or bookstore and spend 6-7 hours reading dozens of books. But at some point of course, I’d have to leave. Usually because they were closing. The internet never closes. And I never have to leave. How do I end up on these remote tangents?
9. I miss fixing problems. At most of my jobs, my time was spent fixing things or putting things together (like spreadsheets). It was like playing Sudoku all day long with a bunch of friends and I was really good at it. People even patted me on the head for it. I miss those head pats and miss the problems.
10. Apparently I like stress and urgency. It’s that Type A personality thing (there’s hope for me since I only scored 73/100) and it’s a problem. I guess there’s a reason why I always gravitated towards jobs with tight deadlines that required heroic effort. Nowadays I’m setting myself crazy goals like knitting a scarf in a day and cleaning the house in half an hour.

Have you ever just missed the simplicity of work? Like if you were on maternity leave or something?

Am I wacko?

And why can’t I be more like Retired Syd?

I got tagged in a meme by First Gen American this summer while I was on holiday.

I’m going to do some creative accounting and post more than 7 links. But only 6 points – becuz nmbrs r hrd when you’re not working and doing math every day.

1. Most beautiful post.

   Here’s a post with a picture of my beautiful dog buried in the beautiful sand dunes of beautiful Oregon last summer (we had beautiful weather). Hopefully that counts. RV vacation spending update.

   I liked this post. Should I stay or should I go? I’ll get there yet.

2. Most popular post (and #3 – most controversial). I got a few comments on that one saying my parents should have been put in an insane asylum so I’m guessing it annoyed people. I deleted them because… well, because I felt like it. On a positive note, I’d probably win Survivor if I ever competed.

   Growing up super-frugal, minimalist and dysfunctional.

    

3. Most helpful post. I think this one is the most helpful because I literally had a huge a-ha moment one day at a seminar – something about maybe starting to take a bit of responsibility for my life and where I was going to end up if I kept on doing what I’d been doing (that under-earning thing). It was enough for me to make and save a ton more money than I had previously anyway.

   Want to retire or make a ton of money? Focus on effort not outcomes.

    

4. Post whose success surprised me. This guest post on GRS got mentioned on lifehacker (totally freaked me out.)

   How to buy a car at auction.

   Mitsy tells me to be careful when she senses the temperature’s below zero outside. Love, love, LOVE her. And she obviously loves me too.

    

5. Post I feel didn’t get the attention it deserved. How do I know? Maybe they didn’t get attention because they didn’t deserve it. Maybe this one: How to get into debt – part 0. And this one when I first woke up and started realizing my spending habits were stupid: How to get out of debt part 1.1 – rock bottom.

    

6. Post I’m most proud of. I like the funny ones.

   Like this one: Is retirement like a beer commercial with white hairs?

   Or this one: I think my librarian is trying to date me.

   Or this one: Stuff Frugal People Like: Stockpiling groceries. Maybe that one’s controversial too because the lady that posted the first comment was clearly pretty pissed at me. She’s probably just mad that my pantry inventory system is better than hers.

   And this one: The Money Learning Curve. And maybe this one: Passing for Normal.

Who I’d like to see post their 7 links?

• Psyblog – best personal development blog on the interwebs
• Retirement – a full-time job – because former accountants shouldn’t be all play and no post (haha “post” – now that’s a really lame accounting joke)
• Move to Portugal – I want to be like Laura when I grow up
• Consciously Sedated – because she’s funny
• Canadian Dream – Free at 45 – because surely he must be running out of ideas from all that daily posting.