Back during the Affordable Care Act repeal debate I wrote pretty extensively about the threat repeal posed to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship by preventing self-employed people from being able to sign up for affordable, comprehensive health insurance. Instead of the doing the same thing for the House and Senate tax "reform" bills, I thought I'd take a different approach … [Read more...] about Five questions about tax “reform”
Archives for November 2017
On mutual understanding
I think that, to a degree that sometimes seems unusual in these heated times, I enjoy reading and listening to people who don't just disagree with me, but fundamentally disagree with me. This is partly because I don't even agree with the people who agree with me, so I get annoyed whenever a Democrat suggests a new means-tested tax credit and I see in my mind's eye the dozens … [Read more...] about On mutual understanding
The low-hanging fruit of personal finance
On Friday I wrote about how people making payments in excess of the minimum to student loans need to make sure their student loan servicers have instructions to credit the excess payments to their highest-interest-rate loans first. It's the kind of simple measure you can take to save money on student loan interest, and all it takes is a single letter to put the appropriate … [Read more...] about The low-hanging fruit of personal finance
On compound interest (and peeking)
There's no subject personal finance bloggers love gushing over more than compound interest. Conjure up a conveniently "assumed" rate of return, give it a few decades or a few centuries, and presto, you're worth more than Warren Buffett. The thing about compound interest, though, is that it doesn't work over long time periods, it works over many time periods. I was riffing on … [Read more...] about On compound interest (and peeking)
One weird old trick to save money on student loan interest
Back in September I wrote about how structuring your borrowing and investing decisions properly in the first place is superior to continually trying to optimize and re-optimize them. However, there's an important corner case where you're able to optimize your post-borrowing behavior, and that's the case of student loans. Depending on a number of factors including the … [Read more...] about One weird old trick to save money on student loan interest