I’ve known Stefanie O’Connell Rodriguez for several years and I found her latest post on setting goals for 2021 to be especially valuable given her 2020. She lived in New York City last year and her business was shut down for 7 months. Her husband was out of work for 10 months (he’s a stagehand on Broadway).
Oh, and this was right after they got back from their honeymoon in New Zealand.
So if there’s anyone who is at the intersection of “smart with money” and “severely impacted by the pandemic,” it’s Stefanie.
How to Set Money Goals for 2021 [Stefanie O’Connell] – “While I may not know when my husband will return to work, or whether my business will continue it’s post-lockdown recovery, or when we’ll be able to return to our life in Manhattan, I’m setting resolutions for 2021 as a practice of financial optimism.
Research shows that optimism pays – literally. Optimists are more likely to have an emergency fund, to enjoy greater career gains and higher incomes, and to experience less financial stress.”
How Billionaires See Themselves [Current Affairs] – “… if there is a central recurring theme to billionaire literature, it is this: an insistence that what has made the billionaire rich is helping other people rather than helping themselves. The billionaire wants to explain to us that what might look like the steady hoarding of wealth and a feudalistic imbalance of power is, in fact, the product of defensible moral choices and a fair system.” So many good nuggets in this one – even if it is a wee bit cynical (and long). 🙂
A Massive Fraud Operation Stole Millions From Online Bank Accounts [Wired] – “Researches from IBM Trusteer say they’ve uncovered a massive fraud operation that used a network of mobile device emulators to drain millions of dollars from online bank accounts in a matter of days.”
This one has nothing to do with money but I found it so fascinating I had to share it with you:
How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus [WHYY] – “Viruses such as HIV have been infecting vertebrates for probably a couple hundred million years, according to Chuong. So, according to evolutionary biologists, once upon a time some retrovirus infected an egg-laying vertebrate. And by chance, that virus settled into that animal’s egg cells. And it just so happened that that particular infected egg met a nice sperm and got fertilized. The baby that was hatched — whatever kind of protomammal it was — now had copies of that virus’ DNA in all its cells. This virus didn’t kill the baby — if it had, we wouldn’t be sitting here as humans telling this story. What it did was give this offspring a premium feature.”
Reading that was like reading about how there were once 9 different species of “human beings” – homo sapiens, homo neanderthalensis, Denisovans, etc.