Health savings accounts (HSAs) were authorized by legislation signed by President Bush in late 2003. They were an improvement over flexible savings accounts (FSAs) in two ways. You still get to pay for your health care with pre-tax dollars, but with an HSA, you don’t lose any unspent money left over…

Mon 07 April 2014 economics / trading / high frequency trading / predatory trading Follow @stucchio In the good old days before the computer revolution, stocks were generally priced by traders using pencil and paper. Analysts would read news, study corporate financials, and then give ideas to…

Prerequisites: Basic financial literacy. Summary: When we asked individual investors what they would like to know about the performance of their brokerage accounts or 401k accounts, by far the most frequent answer was something like, “I would like to know what would have happened had I invested in…

The more I learn about doctors and their finances and the more I talk to other docs, the more I see several recurring themes that cause them to have difficulty reaching financial success. This post explores these themes. 1) Poor Debt Management This one begins early for most medical students as they…

I’m not different from most entrepreneurs in that I have the patience equivalent to that of gravity.   (E.g. If something has to come down, it may as well come down right now .)   We see where we want to be and when we decide we want to be there, we are immediately uncomfortable not being there. In…

Everything about George Martin’s medieval fantasy saga Game of Thrones is extraordinary. Millions are glued each week to the HBO adaptation. I got my fill of the story last year, when I read the first four of Mr. Martin’s books in about a week – and then gave up, exhausted by all the carnage,…

Better. Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content . These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical. Each, in its own way, contributes to the imperative that we constantly expand our portfolio of shallow but strongly-held…

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In a world of constant change, the fundamentals are more important than ever In this era of dramatic change, we’re hit from all sides with lopsided perspectives that urge us to hold nothing sacred, to “re-engineer” and dynamite everything, to fight chaos with chaos, to battle a crazy world with…

I wrote this in 2012 in response to a twitter conversation with Mike Taylor , who was patient enough to read a draft of this post in late November and point out all the various ways it could be changed and improved. No doubt if I had taken the time to take his advice and change the post accordingly,…

When I teach Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, I take great pains to un-sully it from students’ film-adaptation-induced misconceptions that it’s a “romantic” novel. As a satirist, even if a gentle one, Austen offers rather unromantic corrections to vices and foibles, many of which range far beyond…