My ambition has long been to be a young man of independent means. I achieved the “independent means” part some years ago, but I don’t seem to be making much progress toward being a young man.
Still working on it!
My ambition has long been to be a young man of independent means. I achieved the “independent means” part some years ago, but I don’t seem to be making much progress toward being a young man.
Still working on it!
Back in the late 1970s, Merrill Lynch, and then several competitors, created what became known as a Cash Management Account. I really wanted one.
Basically, a Cash Management Account was a brokerage account wrapped around a money market fund and an associated credit card.
It was really aimed at high-value customers. The sort who might make discretionary purchases in the $10,000 range. The sort who wouldn’t want to have multiple tens of thousands of dollars sitting around in cash just in case a few of those purchases might end up being made in the same month. For those customers, a key feature was that the brokerage account was a margin account.
You had an American Express card tied to your account. You could charge whatever you wanted, just like on any other AmEx card. At the end of the month the account would automatically pay the balance on the card. You also had a checkbook that you could use to pay your bills. If either kind of transaction drained the cash out of your account, you’d automatically get a margin loan against your investments. Margin loans were at a preferred rate (because they were secured).
At your own convenience, informed by knowing when more cash would be flowing into your account (dividends on your stocks, interest on your bonds, transfers from the trust your daddy set up for you), you could either let the margin loan be paid off by incoming cash, or else decide to sell some asset or another.
For someone with liquid assets in, let’s say, the million dollar range, it was really very convenient. For someone with much less than that it was less useful, but to keep out the riffraff (people like me), they required a minimum initial investment of $20,000.
By the time I had the money to buy into an account like that, it’s advantages had pretty much been rendered moot by modernization in the financial industry. Now you can roll your own cash management account easily enough.
Here’s what I do:
I have these accounts connected so that I can transfer money between them via the Automated Clearing House (ACH).
I make my local bank the center of everything: All deposits and all payments flow into and out of that checking account. Any time that adds up to surplus money, I transfer the funds to my internet bank to pick up the extra yield, or else to my brokerage account to be invested.
It’s basically exactly like a cash management account, except that I don’t have paying the credit card automated. (Actually, since I originally drafted this post, I’ve gone ahead and automated paying my credit cards. We went on vacation back in July and August, and were going to be out of town right when the bills could be expected, and not back home until after they needed to be paid. So, now almost all of my bills, finally, are paid automatically. I now live in, I don’t know, 2005 or thereabouts.) Oh, also: my brokerage account isn’t a margin account. (It could be, but the whole preferential rate structure for margin loans faded away some years ago, so there’s no point.)
If there’s something about a formal Cash Management account appeals to you, pretty much any bank, brokerage firm, or mutual fund company offers them now, often with no minimum investment. But there’s really no point.
Currently the ACH takes 2–3 days to move money, but the infrastructure for same-day payments (called FedNow) is now in place. Soon enough a few banks and brokerage firms will make it available to customers to distinguish themselves, and either the others will quickly fall in line, or I’ll move my money to the more enlightened institutions.
Apparently I was a lazy girl my whole life, and didn’t even know it.
The Wall Street Journal provided a fairly succinct summary of a lazy girl job in July: “one that can be done from home, comes with a chill boss, ends at 5 p.m. sharp and earns between $60,000 and $80,000 a year — enough to afford the basic comforts of young-adult life, yet not enough to feel compelled to work overtime.”
Source: The New York Times
Assets are called “safe” when they’re free of default risk. But that doesn’t mean their prices can’t drop, or that the financial system is safe if systemically important institutions buy them on margin.
What appears to be a liquidity issue will ultimately become a financial stability issue as investors discover their “safe assets” are not safe.
Source: Solvency Constraints – Fed Guy
Very occasionally I wish I were the sort of person who kept lists.
It’s most common that I regret not being a list-keeper when someone asks for book recommendations, especially when they want something in a particular scope—the 10 best books I read this year, or three books that I’ve given as gifts.
I’m always daunted by a request like that, because I have no idea what books I read this year.
Some of my tools—in particular, Amazon and my Kindle—do some amount of list-keeping for me. The public library could, but by default it doesn’t. (For very legitimate historical reasons, librarians worry about their patrons’ privacy, and since they don’t need to keep track of what books you’ve checked out once you’ve returned them, they default to forgetting about them.)
I played around with using a little toy tool called IndieBookClub, which posts the books you enter to your site, but it didn’t do most of the things you’d actually want such a tool to do (associate the books you’re meaning to read, books you’re reading, books you’ve read, and your thoughts about them), so I didn’t find it very useful.
Some people really enjoy the process of keeping lists, but that’s not me. Basically, I don’t want to keep lists, I sometimes want to have kept lists. I sometimes regret not having a list of something, but not in a way that makes me think I should start keeping such a list.
I do track some things—money, exercise, sleep—when experience has shown me that doing so is of great value, but in most areas of life I don’t keep track of anything at all.
Just today—after a year of having this post hanging around in my drafts folder—I saw plans for folks working on IndieWeb stuff to talk about how to do personal libraries in a way that would produce decentralized Goodreads-like functionality. That would really appeal to me.
In the meantime maybe I’ll look around at some list-keeping tools (or maybe start using a few pages in my bullet journal to keep track of books and other things worth tracking).
I’ll keep you posted. Maybe next year will be the year I keep a list of one more thing!
Just in case you need an excuse to spend some money:
“spending money to upgrade the aesthetics of your workspace is not just an exercise in expression, but is perhaps instead one of the best business investments you’ll ever make.”
Source: The Forgotten Tale of George Lucas’s Writing Tower – Study Hacks – Cal Newport
Here’s an app that would have been worth a low-key post on @wisebread. It has a “Denomination Detector” (maybe for people with impaired vision?) and highlights security features you can use to check that the note is genuine, including a “Tilt Check Simulator” that reveals how the security features of banknotes function when in motion.
Source: Cash Assist Mobile App | U.S. Currency Education Program
Gee, a few banks are being every so slightly less cruel to poor people!
An increasing number of banks are introducing services including grace periods and small short-term loans that provide less-punitive alternatives
Source: Banks Slowly Offer Alternatives to Overdraft Fees, a Bane of Struggling Spenders
On one of my top-two issues when it comes to means-testing benefits, @interfluidity gets it just right:
“Requiring demonstration of inadequate means up-front, rather than on the back-end, creates at best a delay between when a shock is experienced and when it can be ameliorated. “Delay” can mean your kid skips meals, you start rationing your insulin, or your family is evicted from its home. It’s a big deal.”
As a big ol’ banknote design geek, I found this delightful:
“We analysed the world’s banknotes, looking at their colour, characters, buildings and animals to discover the DNA of our world currency”
Source: Currency in colour: a visual guide to 157 banknotes around the world