I recently read a blog post by Natalie Peace, entitled Your 6 Most Important Things. For those of you not familiar with her, Natalie is a serial entrepreneur, hailing from Canada. As is usually the case with her writing, this blog post was straightforward, to the point, and reminds the reader of something he or she probably knows, but has forgotten. At least, that was true for me with respect to this particular post.

The point of the post is to make a list every day of the six things that you will get done that day. Things that you will accomplish if humanly possible, but which are not automatic, like brushing your teeth. I make myself lists like this all the time at work—I always have a lengthy to-do list going, which I update as my workload evolves or priorities change. That list usually has far more than 6 entries—sometimes, it has dozens and includes sub-bullets!

But for some reason, I was not applying the same method to the ever-growing list of things I want to accomplish outside of my job. After reading Natalie’s post, I started making a list each morning, following her suggestion and using 6 items. It immediately made a difference in my ability to focus. Rather than wasting “just another couple of minutes” on various blogs or whatever was distracting me, I found it easy to get back into productive mode.

An obvious tip, perhaps, but a useful one, so I thought I would share it with y’all.

P.S. If you find this information useful, I highly recommend following Natalie’s blog or following her on Twitter at @Natalie_Peace.

Posted in Miscellanea | 1 Comment »

Those of you who live in Houston know that we have had five months of mandatory water restrictions. After this Monday’s torrential rains, the restrictions have been lifted. For some of you, that means you can water your lawns again. For others, it means you can keep doing what you were doing, but legally…

Posted in Miscellanea | No Comments »

On the heels of my post on upward mobility comes an insightful post by Cato’s Michael Tanner. Two key quotations:

In the end, however, one has to ask a more basic question. Why do we care about inequality at all?

Poverty, of course, is a bad thing. But is inequality? After all, if we doubled everyone’s income tomorrow, we would eliminate an enormous amount of economic hardship. Yet, inequality would actually increase. As Margaret Thatcher said about those who obsess over inequality, “So long as the [income] gap is smaller, they would rather have the poor poorer.”

Another Nobel Prize winner, F. A. Hayek, concluded, “The rapid economic advance that we have come to expect seems to be in large measure a result of this inequality and to be impossible without it. Progress at such a fast rate cannot take place on a uniform front but must take place in an echelon fashion, with some far in front of the rest.”

We should all seek a prosperous, growing economy, with less poverty, and where everyone can rise as far as their talent and drive will take them. Equality? Who needs it?

Well put.

Posted in Politics | No Comments »

I just read about Duolingo on CNN. The concept is fascinating: teach people foreign languages for free, by feeding them text to learn and/or translate, some of which comes from real websites. In the end, you end up translating the entire web—the real goal. Some of the gotchas are obvious: getting enough participation to succeed on such a large scale, for example. Others are less obvious: e.g., how to get enough help translating text in truly obscure languages (those with a few million speakers or less). Still others are very obscure: how to translate text that, in many countries, either is illegal to view at all or at least raises potential difficulties for the viewer (for example, translating Wikileaks material or “how to” manuals dealing with explosives may draw attention). In other words, some parts of the web may stay “dark,” at least in some languages. And in any event, non-native translators will be doing the vast majority of the translation.

At the end of the day, I have no idea how well Duolingo will work, but it’s a very interesting concept.

Posted in Tech | 1 Comment »

Say what you want about Ron Paul—and there is a lot to say—this is perhaps the best one-sentence commentary on his candidacy to date:

It is quite remarkable that a man who renounced his membership in the Republican Party because he so despised the Ronald Reagan administration could now be running for the GOP nomination for president.

Read the whole post at Power Line.

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I read an interesting article on economic mobility in National Review Online, which got me thinking. The article is good in that it points out some of the statistical challenges in measuring upward mobility. For example, who counts as poor? Who counts as middle class? Are we measuring intergenerational or intragenerational mobility? In acknowledging these questions, the article does well. Where the article falls short is in two key areas.

First, it assumes that upward mobility in the United States is lower than in many other countries. This may or may not be true, depending on how it is measured. For example, how much credit should be given to official statistics as reported by various countries? Certainly, focusing on the official “poverty” level will give bad results, as discussed here.  But even using income percentiles poses challenges. For example, should welfare and other “benefits” in socialist European countries be counted as income? When I lived abroad, I routinely encountered people making more money than I did, for doing absolutely nothing. The individuals in question were not independently wealthy or trust-fund babies; they were merely beneficiaries of a very generous welfare state, which rewarded them for being unemployed and sitting around various public areas all day, which making no effort to find work. The artificial support given to such individuals may mask the natural cause-and-effect relationships between work and prosperity on the one hand and sloth and poverty on the other.  The NRO article, like most discussions of economic inequality, also totally ignores wealth, focusing only on income. There are good reasons for this, chiefly the availability of data on income and lack thereof on wealth, but the distinction is still an important one and is totally ignored in the article in question.

The second and more significant failing is in the article’s assumption that increasing upward mobility is always a good thing.  That’s not necessarily true.  Certainly, increasing opportunities are always good, but one can easily imagine a very high-mobility society with an extremely dysfunctional economy.  For example, imagine a tax system in which anyone whose parents were in the top 40% of the income distribution at the time of his or her birth pays a tax surcharge of 40% of his or her gross income, which funds are then distributed to those whose parents were in the lowest 40% of the income distribution.  This would, at least temporarily, result in incredibly high mobility, but it would be manifestly unfair and strongly disincentivize anything resembling ambition or hard work.  The point is that mobility is not the goal; opportunity is. Past a certain level, increased mobility can only be achieved at the cost of stability and fairness.  For every person who moves up the income distribution, somebody else moves down, because rankings are a zero-sum game.  Foster too much movement from the lower end of the distribution into the higher end, and you are by extension fostering an environment in which many of the highest earners suffer precipitous plunges in their incomes.

These are just some quick musings on the article; I would be curious to hear what others thought.

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments »

Follow me at @EdInHouston. Not everything on here will necessarily be on there, and vice versa.

Posted in Miscellanea | No Comments »

After posting to this blog only 5 times in all of 2011, I have decided that it is well past time to revive this blog. I regularly come across material that I would like to share on here, but inertia and the press of other concerns tend to take over. No more.

In 2012, I hope to post every week, at minimum. This should be easier than it has been in the past, thanks to a new phone (Baker Botts is now supporting iPhones) and a wonderful new gadget: the amazing and useful iPad 2 that Sarah and I received for Christmas. This truly is an ingeniously designed device. I am actually typing this post on it, which is not quite as natural as typing on a full-size keyboard, but still remarkably easy.

Anyway, look for a major rebound in this space soon.

And if I haven’t talked to you in the last few days, I hope you had a merry Christmas and have a wonderful 2012!

Posted in Miscellanea | No Comments »

Never assume that a logical connection exists between some instance of what is and some ideal of what could be. Some things cannot be redeemed, but are best destroyed or simply left alone. Indeed, many of history’s saddest chapters began with efforts to turn a present but dying evil into a lively engine for good.

Posted in Faith, Miscellanea, Politics | No Comments »

Thanks to a post by Tim Challies, Sarah and I decided to download and try a trial of a software product called You Need a Budget, or YNAB. We are now in love with this product.

The premise of YNAB is simple: (1) everyone needs to budget, and (2) no other software products out there on the market really get it quite right. I still remember clearly a moment when I was a kid, probably around middle school age, when somebody made a statement to the effect of “Oh, well, the [family name]s have to live on a budget,” with the clear implication that this was a lamentable condition. My reaction was that this was an absurd way to think—even the wealthiest individuals would be better off budgeting. So, I was already sold on YNAB’s first premise. As for the second, we have been doing our budgeting using a combination of Quicken 2011 Premier and a complicated Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. (We had also been using Mint, but abandoned it after it proved to be entirely unreliable—it would show that we had spent huge amounts of money in categories without a single transaction, or very little in categories with relatively huge amounts of turnover, like groceries.)

This was a pain to maintain and made it very hard to track how well we were doing on a month-to-month or longer-term basis. Quicken would routinely panic if we paid our car insurance in the last week of July, for example, rather than in the first week of August, and the Excel spreadsheet made month-to-month comparisons nearly meaningless. After all, what did it really mean if we had $X in the bank at the end of June and only $X-100 at the end of July, if we had also made a large, planned-for, one-time purchase in June? Or if we came out with more money than we anticipated, but had also received a gift or some other one-time income? This system worked in the sense that we were able to make sure we didn’t over-spend, but it wasn’t exactly transparent. So, we came to YNAB with open minds.

YNAB is based on four simple rules:

1. Give every dollar a job. Every dollar should have a job, and “not budgeted” doesn’t count. This is where Quicken falls short the most noticeably—the built-in budgeting features in Quicken just tell you what’s left, encouraging you to go spend it somehow. We worked around this by using Quicken with a series of spreadsheets that I cooked up, but this was not a user-friendly way to do things, and it required a lot of maintenance.

2. Save for a rainy day. This concept starts with the emergency fund that everyone should have (a la Dave Ramsey), but goes further: YNAB is intended to help you smooth out the financial ups and downs of your life by helping you budget for lumpy expenses (car insurance, property taxes, or anything else that doesn’t hit every month, or hits in variable amounts).

3. Roll with the punches. This rule is all about accountability. If you overspend a category in your budget in YNAB, it doesn’t let you just shrug it off and try again. It forces you to figure out how to make up the difference, whether by spending less in that category next month or allocating additional money to that category from somewhere else.

4. Stop living paycheck to paycheck. This is the real goal of YNAB: to live off of last month’s income. In YNAB terms, this is a “buffer” (and having acheived it is affectionately called being in “bufferland”). Because there is no “perfect” month when it comes to budgeting, the idea of the buffer is to smooth out the bumps of life, especially for people with irregular income or every-other-week rather than twice-a-month pay schedules.

YNAB is entirely built around these four rules, with the result that you can easily see at a glance (1) how you are doing this month, (2) what effect, if anything, your spending this month will have on next month’s budget, and (3) how you have done over time. To help with this at-a-glance summary of your finances, YNAB also includes some very handy reporting functions that let you get both reports and graphs on the fly. Of course, for any of this to work, you have to get your information into YNAB. While YNAB does not have “direct connect” functionality to download your transactions for you, it does make it very easy to work with standard .QFX files from your bank (or exported from Quicken).

As I said, we love YNAB. I would strongly recommend it to literally anyone.

[Update & Disclaimer: When I originally posted this review in August 2011, I did not receive any compensation for this article or for any traffic to youneedabudget.com from this blog; I just really like this product!  As of July 2012, I have added a special link to this post; I will receive a small commission for any sales made through that link.]

Posted in Miscellanea | 1 Comment »