It’s Friday, money friends, and before you saunter off to enjoy your weekend, here are a handful of stories about money (and more) to close out the week.
Are Apple Pay and Google Pay more secure than credit cards? [How-To Geek] — “Even if your Google or Apple account were to be hacked, neither service will allow you to use, modify, or view your payment methods without you using your phone (or other device) to confirm that it is you. This ensures that a hacker won’t be able to go on a spending spree with your cards.” [For five years now, I’ve been easing into Apple Pay. I use it quite a bit now.]
The golden rules of retirement travel. [Traveller] — “Adherence to anyone’s rules will never ensure a vacation free of hiccups, where no flight is ever delayed, every tour is worth the hours put in, and every meal sublime. But learning from others may improve your chances of a good time – even when things inevitably go sideways.” This advice is couched in terms of “retirement travel”, but as a frequent traveler I’d argue it’s good advice for everyone. I agree with nearly every item on this list. (But pack your own toilet paper? WTF? Why would you do that?)
Lessons I’ve learned about death and money. [Kindness Financial Planning] — “As a financial planner, I’m privileged to be alongside people as they experience death in their own lives. I hear what it’s like and help people plan to make it easier on their survivors. I’ll borrow a bit from my work and incorporate themes I’ve seen in my career, but most of this is my first hand experience, including fighting the healthcare system, how the legal system is not well set up for aging, and tips you can take to make it easier on your loved ones.”
A short history of global living conditions and why they matter. [Our World in Data] — “Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today. Is it possible to make progress against this problem? To see where we are coming from, we must go far back in time. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked like during our lifetime, it is easy to think of the world as static — the richer parts of the world here and the poorer regions there — and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and will always be like that.”
To wrap things up, here’s my favorite video from the past week. It’s compilation of the funniest animal videos from 2023. I love it.
So funny. Animals are awesome.
Okay, that’s it for this week. Jim will be back on Monday. I’ll see you in ten days.