Blog2020-12-23T18:36:21-05:00

The Astute Angle

A fresh and simplified perspective on personal finance topics

Flu Vaccines and Small Sample Sizes

I got a flu shot in the fall of 1999.  It is a seemingly trivial detail of life that should be long-forgotten but was, instead, memorialized by what followed.  A few weeks after receiving this [...]

April 19, 2019|

Socrates Demystifies the Social Security Decision

The Greek philosopher, Socrates, left no known writings.  Only secondary sources exist for historians to piece together a recount of his work and teachings.  The Platonic dialogues - roughly 30 dialogues written by Socrates' student, [...]

March 26, 2019|

Can Student Loans Fairly Be Labeled “Good Debt”?

Last week’s Astute Angle post explained some fallacies related to mortgage borrowing and how the free pass treatment of home mortgages as "good debt" leads to poor financial decision-making.  In response to that post, I [...]

March 1, 2019|

The Mortgage Myths We Want to Believe

Baseball, apple pie, mom, Chevrolet, hot dogs, and home ownership.  Americana.  To question any of these things is un-American.  And so it becomes a largely unquestioned truth that borrowing money to buy a home is "good [...]

February 22, 2019|

Snowfall in Finland Is Above Average This Winter So Why Do The Knicks Keep Losing

You may have heard the news.  Between October 1st and December 31st, the stock market delivered its worst quarter since 2008 to culminate its worst year since 2008.  It was the stock market's worst December [...]

January 22, 2019|

The Rewards of Fear

26 days into my professional career, something that had never happened before, happened.  And it was not an unprecedented event that largely went unnoticed – like the time, early in my career, when I inadvertently [...]

January 10, 2019|

Underwhelmed, Most of the Time

Investing in the stock market probably does not feel boring in December 2018.  Scary, volatile, unsettling, and capricious are terms that might be used to describe investing over the past few weeks.  But not boring. [...]

December 27, 2018|

Things That Are Rare

Let's have an honest conversation about things that are rare. 1) A perfect game in baseball In over 210,000 Major League Baseball games spanning 140 years, there have been just 23 perfect games. 2) A [...]

December 20, 2018|
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