Personal history with money and the origins of this blog

In my earliest recollections, I was worried about money. I have a clear memory from when I was young, perhaps around 10. I was in a bookstore and I stumbled into the personal finance section and I vividly remember the panic. Just from the sheer numbers of titles, I concluded that money must be an impossible problem for most adults. If so many people had so much issue with it, I would likely have difficulties. I did not presume I was exceptional in any way so I thought I had just discovered a new lifelong stream of problems, a bit like discovering I had a previously unknown, debilitating, chronic disease. My father calmed me down a great deal by explaining that most people are incredibly foolish with their money. He pointed around the mall and issued a thought experiment. How many people need, really need, the items in those shopping bags? For most people and most items, the answer is no yet these are the people for whom those these finance books are written. People buying things they do not need even when they are clearly in a state of financial distress.

Since my earliest days, I have been a natural saver. I have never made the common financial mistakes of my peers, fiddling money away unaware of how I lost so much. This is not to say I have not made mistakes, it is only to say that my mistakes with money are typically far larger and less frequent than average. I may not have blown a few hundred per month eating out and drinking in college but I did spend three or four thousand dollars on two pieces of equipment for a hobby that I barely used. My checking account is not drained by a thousand little leech bits, my checking account is annihilated by an angry crocodile every once in a while.

At the beginning of graduate school, I began keeping thorough accounting records since I was lending a good deal of money to the University by purchasing lab equipment on personal credit cards and then filing reimbursement requests. The value of my reimbursements was about as large as my paychecks so it would have been easy to slide off track and suddenly run myself into the poor house. Five years and over $100,000 of reimbursements later, the discrepancy between my reimbursements and expenses was less than $20 (mostly because the University would not reimburse sales tax) but the credit card rewards were over $2,000. This obsession with accounting gave me the first real complete analysis of my financial life which I now believe is a critical part of understanding any person’s financial picture.

Near the end of graduate school, at the recommendation of a former college roommate, I began reading the Mr. Money Mustache blog. The desire to give mathematical rigor to some of his ideas led to this analysis which then grew into a 90-page manuscript directed by my curiosity about money and requests from friends between 2016 and 2019. In 2019, I began the process of adapting those thoughts to this blog.

After building the blog, my curiousity shifted to other important lifestyle decisions dependent technical subjects which are widely misunderstood. This led to a couple research articles on sex, drugs, and refrigeration (the largest driver of home energy use).