[From The Key to Wedded Bliss? Money Matters - NYTimes.com]
IF you ask married people why their marriage works, they are probably not going to say it’s because they found their financial soul mate.
But if they are lucky, they have. Marrying a person who shares your attitudes about money might just be the smartest financial decision you will ever make. In fact, when it comes to finances, your marriage is likely to be your most valuable asset — or your largest liability.
- act with more intention
- be more present
iGTD is a fantastic GTD app - and i’ve tried em all (kinkless, actiontastic, etc, etc…). it’s made by a 26yo polish developer, and it’s the first Mac app he’s ever written. very impressive. there’s been a rash of GTD apps coming out (mostly for Mac), and this is the first really usable one that i’ve found. Merlin Mann, the GTD evangelist, also likes it.
basically, the idea is this: information and things “todo” are coming at you left and right in life & the workplace. the GTD philosophy says “get it out of your head” and “put it all in a trusted system”. that system can be pen & paper, index cards, whatever…for the uber-nerds it’s a GTD application like iGTD.
what’s great about iGTD is that it makes the 2 main steps of GTD flow really easily:
1) “Collect”: it’s effortless to create tasks with links to URLs, files or email messages. Dump them all into the “Inbox”. While working in any application, if you think of something you can pull up the Quicksilver plugin, type in the task, and it will be whisked away to the Inbox.
2) “Process”: periodically (at least daily) you process all the tasks in your inbox and assign a Context, Project, and/or Priority. This puts them into neat little buckets for you to knock off at the right time & context.
if this sounds like something that might help you out, i suggest reading the book first, or at least the GTD wikipedia entry.
here are what seem to be the top podcasts on real estate:
i just reached a watershed moment i’ve been waiting for for a *long* time - as of this moment, i have zero credit card debt. that may not sound like much of an achievement, but it’s been a long ride for me…and it started with those evil credit cards you get in college. i had no concept of fiscal responsibility - as long as i could make the payments, it was all good to spend. it got pretty bad in my mid-20’s, when i remember shuffling the balances around to different cards to get the low transfer rates, and a whole lot of my disposable income was going towards making payments. anyways, as of now it is all GONE, and i’ll never let myself get significantly in debt again (eh, mortgage notwithstanding). if someone told me the actual amount of finance charges i’ve paid over the years, i think i’d stab myself in the eye with a fork.
i also just paid off my student loans, which i’ve been paying as long as i’ve been paying the credit card companies. the not-so-funny thing is, these loans weren’t for my undergrad or grad school…but for that silly law-school experiment gone wrong when i was 24 or so.
anyways, f the banks, it’s all gravy from here on out. i’m also contributing the maximum to my 401k plan for ‘07 (and apple has great matching), and the maximum to the company stock purchase plan. together that’s almost 25% of my pay going into savings.
a final bit of financial peace-of-mind comes from *not having a car payment*. sure, it’s nice to have a nice car, but is it $500 a month nice? not to me. give me that money. i need to save up for an iphone.
