Welcome to February, my money nerds, and welcome to another week of Apex Money. To kick things off, I have an interesting little essay that does a good job of capturing much of my personal world view.
Dreams and kindness are all we have. [Interfluidity] — “Unmediated, outside of the temptations of commerce, the humans are mostly remarkably good to one another. It’s people being awful that goes viral on the apps, but those videos are absurdly unrepresentative. When our imaginations and conversations are dominated by salacious, mediated events, we become tempted to override our own gentleness, to prosecute cruelties in the service of an imagined cause with little connection to actual humans here and now.”
For fifteen months in 2015 and 2016, Kim and I traveled across the U.S. in an RV. We met all sorts of people form all sorts of backgrounds with all sorts of beliefs. During those fifteen months, we had encountered two rotten apples. Of the thousands of others we dealt with, everyone was pleasant and kind. But you’d never know that if you believed what you saw on the news…or on Reddit.
And here’s the rest of today’s news…
How we’re establishing a family money philosophy with our children. [Frugalwoods] — “Our oldest child, six-year-old Kidwoods, started asking about money this fall and her curiosity reached an inflection point earlier this week thanks to a school book sale flier advertising a $7 unicorn book. So here’s my non-expert, imperfect tale of how we’re teaching money management to our children. Well, really just to Kidwoods since Littlewoods (age almost four) remains unimpressed and uninterested.” [This is an excellent, thoughtful article.]
Everything must be paid for twice. [Raptitude] — “You can pick up Moby-Dick for a dollar at a garage sale, but it’s a wasted dollar if you don’t subsequently pay a significant second price: sixteen hours of attending closely to long Victorian commentaries on whales and the men who hunt them. And you’ve got many more debts competing for those same sixteen hours.”
The small steps of giant leaps.[Farnam Street] — “When you look below the surface, giant leaps aren’t really giant leaps at all. They’re a series of ordinary choices that suddenly become noticeable. If you look for the magic moment, you’ll miss how ordinary becomes extraordinary.”
To wrap things up today, here’s an hilarious two-minute video I found on Twitter. It’s a commentator (from St. Louis, I think) laying out how bleak February is.
Give this man a Pulitzer pic.twitter.com/jRdHP3hTJI via @ShawnHils
— Taylor Lorenz— ON BOOK LEAVE (@TaylorLorenz) February 4, 2022
Honestly, it’s not February that’s bleak in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. It’s January. And we’re past that. February actually brings signs of hope. In fact, right around this time of the month is when we get our first warm, sunny days of the year. Temps climb to 15 or 16 or 17 (the low 60s, if you’re still a Fahrenheit user), and we Oregonians don shorts for a couple of days.
Then things turn wintry again haha.
Okay, that’s it for today. I’ll be back tomorrow with more money news. See you then!