Hello, Apexians! It’s Monday, and we have money stories for you. Are you ready to dive into some of the best personal-finance articles from around the web? I am!
A midwife in the North Country. [The New Yorker] — “Sunday Smith is likely the only certified nurse-midwife offering out-of-hospital births in a hundred-mile radius. Her services are in high demand, yet she has trouble making ends meet.” This is a l-o-n-g article (and it may be behind a paywall for you) but it’s fascinating. It touches on many different aspects of personal finance. Well worth reading, if you have the time.
Five lessons from the “witch” of Wall Street. [Morningstar] — “During the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, a woman named Hetty Green was one of the most powerful financiers in the world. She made the vast majority of her $100 million fortune ($2.3 billion in today’s dollars) herself, investing in railroad stocks and bonds, government bonds, and mining stocks. She also provided loans to cash-strapped businesses and bailed out the city of New York on several occasions…Here are five lessons we can learn from Hetty Green about investing and life.”
The aggregation of marginal gains. [Josh Overmyer] — “The guys on the ChooseFI podcast talk about it all the time, how life doesn’t just suddenly become wonderful overnight. Each and every small change or improvement we make adds up and compounds over a lifetime. And because of the power of the Aggregation of Marginal Gains, Brad posts a prompt every Friday morning asking ‘What was the ONE THING you did this week to make your life easier, happier, wealthier, more efficient, etc?’ I’ve gone back to almost every week in 2019 to gather what I posted on each of the Friday Facebook prompts from Brad. Here’s a look back.”
It’s time to let go of commuter culture. [Jalopnik] — “Cities across the world are re-examining the role of the automobile. More specifically, and especially among American cities, they’re trying to get more people to commute like Leo. This is happening because, in many cases, policymakers have realized that they cannot continue to grow by adding more people who use cars as their sole transportation method, to say nothing of mitigating the never-ending gridlock and poor air quality that exists today.”
To wrap things up this Monday, here’s a very important non-financial article from Audobon: When is a bird a “birb”? — “Birb is a slightly daffy word from the same school of internet absurdity that gave us LOLCats and Doge. Yet unlike these online gags, or memes, birb functions as a category rather than a stock character. It is roughly akin to ‘doggo’ or ‘snek’, yet all dogs and snakes are contained within those words; birb remains amorphous.”
Jim and I are here to help you with all of life’s important matters. 😉