I fear that Dave Ramsey may go gunning for me. There’s an old joke that I heard twice. The first time the teller was Dr. James T. Jeremiah, president of Cedarville College, a very conservative Baptist college. He told it in chapel. The second time I heard this joke a flaming Atheist used it as part of his case against Christianity. Here’s the joke. It recounts a conversation between a suicidal person standing on a bridge and someone trying to talk him down. »
As you know, I have found several parallels between frugality and weight control. Both of these disciplines require you to “mind the gap” and both are neither sprints nor marathons. Sprints and marathons have finish lines, but frugality and weight control have NO FINISH LINE. This means that your crazy vow to eat nothing but grapefruit until you pay off your credit cards, or to drive a clunker until you fit into skinny jeans will fail. »
I recently likened the money in my Vanguard account to Shroedinger’s Cat and though I entitled the post Quantum Portfolio Management I merely introduced the metaphor that your invested money is in something like quantum superposition. Apologies if you’ve heard me say this before, but it bears repeating. There are only two times when the value of your shares of any equity is real: on the day you buy them, and on the day you sell them. »
I ran into this article How Much Money Does It Take to Be Happy?, and though I saw some helpful things, it missed one thing: savings. I believe a person should master the skills of frugality to live comfortably with minimal expenditure of money and resources. Mr. Money Mustache does a good job of advocating frugality, though I’m not as strict about it as he is. It is just flat out stupid to be wasteful of any kind of resources. »
Quantum Mechanics is spooky, but it’s real. It does things that are counter to common sense. For instance, a single bit of light, a photon, is both a wave and a particle. Quantum systems can exist in a state called “superposition.” Quantum computers are built using things called “qubits” that simultaneously zero and one while they are in this state. When you observe the qubit, it collapses into a zero or a one. »