Good morning, friends! It’s J.D. here again for another week of sharing links to the best stories about mastering your money — and your life.
I had a crazy thing happen to me last week. I’ll write the full story at Get Rich Slowly once I have a firm conclusion, but the basics go something like this: Took my car in to the dealership to get it serviced. While there, they offered me $33,000 for it.
I bought the car for $35,990 just 26 months ago, and I’ve never really liked it. It’s fine. But it’s a small SUV (Mini Countryman) and I’m more of a small-car kind of guy. I regret the purchase.
Well, I took the dealer’s offer to another car lot, and that second dealer agreed to match the offer. So, it appears that I’ll be upgrading to a car more fitting my wants and needs — a Mazda Miata. But we’ll see. The deal isn’t done yet.
Anyhow, you’re not here for my automobile adventures. You’re here for hot, juicy personal-finance links. Let’s get to them.
In remote Alaska, meal planning is everything. [Eater] — “Bettles is part of a vast array of rural Alaska communities, most of them Alaska Native, that remain disconnected from America’s road-based supply chain…When you move to a rural place like Bettles, it fundamentally changes the way you think about how to procure food and how to create a community in which to share it.”
“Somebody died and now I’m stuck dealing with this mess.” [Ms. Demeanor on Tumblr] — “This is an eighteen page book that you can print out, download, share, and give away; it is meant to be used to collect information about funeral planning and account management after a death OR you can use it BEFORE you die and give people information so they’re not stuck playing Nancy Fucking Drew while trying to keep seventeen cousins who crawled out of the woodwork from gutting each other.”
Prepper FI: Taking control of your future beyond just money. [Women’s Personal Finance] — “Most of the PrepperFI people that I’ve encountered are pretty logical…Most of us have a fair amount of trust in the markets, at least for the time being. Maybe you’d call it hedging your bets? Hope for the best but plan for the worst? When people mention HUGE market downturns, I’m rarely concerned about the thought of losing money. If the global economic system were to collapse, I’m worried about war, looting, starvation…I’m thinking MAD MAX.”
Related to that last story, here’s a 12-minute video from Kurzgesagt, one of my favorite YouTube channels. It tackles a question that’s been on my mind (and the mind of many others): Is civilization on the brink of collapse?
(I think this video is incorrectly titled. It’s more about whether humanity could recover from a collapse. But it’s still interesting.)
That’s all for this Monday. See you folks tomorrow…