What’s Wrong With “Green”

Last night I posted an interesting article on considering “end of life” costs when calculating your retirement savings. Afterward, I started thinking about my recent posts and realized there may be an unintended trend emerging.

If you’ve been reading my articles, there’s a certain “negative” vibe to each of them. On the surface it may appear I’m a NO kind of guy and my aim is to tell you everything that’s wrong.

This could not be farther from the truth.

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First, set age to retire. Second, set age to die.

I debated whether it was in my interest to post such a morbid topic so early in my blogging career, but decided it’s an important consideration people should think about.

Life is dynamic, and retirement is no different. When people first determine how much they need to retire, they have to make some baseline assumption of how long they plan on living. Even if its not an exact age, they have to make some guess at a range.

This is silly because you don’t know for sure exactly how long you’re actually going to live.

With the potential advances in healthcare, it’s likely I’ll live into my 100s. How can I say this?

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Convenience Tax: You’re Only Charging Yourself

 

Often people lump debt into one of two categories – “good” debt and “bad” debt.

Typically good debts refer to student loans, business loans, and anything resulting in your general betterment. Bad debt includes all of life’s temporary luxuries.

There’s another side of debt many people don’t often consider. Not a separate group, it’s more a subcategory to both good and bad debt .

What I’ll call the “Convenience Tax” refers to our preference towards making things easier. Not completely unwarranted, with the technologies available this day in age, why would you go out of your way to make yourself uncomfortable?

Because these conveniences are adding

unnecessary debt to your balance sheets.

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