Philip Morgan

Comments:

• You want a dirty little secret? Cloth bags are far worse for the environment than those disposable plastic bags. The impact of making a single reusable cloth bag would require you to use it thousands of times before it yielded an improvement over using the disposable t-shirt plastic bags. Does anyone use the same cloth bag for 10 years? Are Plastic Bag Bans Garbage? : Planet Money : NPR

  Post: Bagging It

  Link to comment from August 22, 2023

• Yeah I didn't know we had cash anymore! In all seriousness, my college-age kids haven't carried cash at any point in their lives. Envelope budgeting isn't a fad - as someone else pointed out, it's a legit budgeting tool that been around for decades, but using actual cash in envelopes is obsolete. If someone wanted to produce something actually useful, a bank should make an option that stores your money in virtual envelopes and if you over spend from one, it cuts you off unless you explicitly override the envelope.

  Post: The Envelope Returns

  Link to comment from March 6, 2023

• What you describe as an alternative to budgeting is called "Pay yourself first" and is an accepted method of handling your money. There are many books about it! I've always thought that the Pay Yourself First method is far superior than tracking every bagel I buy. As for the rest, if working an extra 10 years and generating a large nest egg reduces your fear and therefore makes your life more enjoyable, then you have made a good choice. For, me, I would much rather be retired in my 50s and enjoy a decade of good health with no work responsibilities, if all I have to do is some expense projections to enjoy it. I'm also not sure if you have to save in retirement to account for inflation. Your retirement nest egg should not be in cash - it should still be invested, in securities that outpace inflation. This ensures you can increase your withdrawals each year to keep up, without having to actually save any money in retirement.

  Post: To Budget or Not?

  Link to comment from October 10, 2022

• I think you have the right of it - you can't base your happiness on perceived global conditions, because it's always a serious mess. You have to act and react locally and see to you and yours. One of my college-age kids said the world is going to end soon due to global warming, etc. and she was only half joking. I told her the exact same things were being said in the 1970s, but it was nuclear war, acid rain, the hole in the ozone, etc. All insurmountable problems of the time that doomed us to destruction - and ended up not destroying us. You have to keep your eyes a little closer to home and try to help those around you, and happiness will follow.

  Post: Sick and Tired

  Link to comment from April 25, 2022

• First of all, the COVID vaccine is a vaccine. It provokes an antibody immune response from the host, which is the definition of a vaccine. You are arguing it is not an effective vaccine, which is different. But to be frank: yes, COVID is difficult to create an extremely effective vaccine against, because it is a variant of SARS, and is related to the flu in that they are respiratory tract viruses. There viruses mutate very quickly, and for a variety of other reasons, can't be prevented as effectively as tetanus. However, the vaccine is extremely effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths. Before COVID, many anti-vaxxers lobbied against the measles vaccine. They argued that for most, measles is a bad flu, and natural immunity from getting the disease is better, so why innoculate all children? They still argue this. Did you know polio only causes flu like symptoms most of the time? In fact, much of the time, polio is asymptomatic. Do you feel that the vaccines for measles and polio are not necessary? People's risk tolerances are different - but when you make a stand against COVID policies, ask yourself if you have the same feeling about polio - and if not, why not?

  Post: Positive but Not

  Link to comment from December 16, 2021