DISQUS

Steve @ bripblap @Curmudgeon: You did! Your thoughts on regular exercise were what made me think of writing this post...

Steve @ bripblap @Curmudgeon: Maybe I should revise to say "life in the URBAN northeast." I doubt that I'll miss snow at all, but since we still have family in New York I'm sure we'll have the occasional wintertime visit.

It is a case of to each his own. I grew up in the South and winter therefore never became a core part of my experience. My first "real" winter was spent in Moscow, and the next three winters as well. Certainly my thoughts have always been that I'd rather live in warm weather climates and visit cold weather rather than the opposite.

But true, some of my complaints might have gone away if we had lived in Burlington instead of NYC.

Mr. ToughMoneyLove The rewards card "I never carry a balance" advocates and defenders also overlook the repeated studies that show that people who buy with plastic spend more (including on the same goods and services) than do people who use cash. (I wrote about the most recent of these studies not long ago.) Everyone says "not me" but those studies don't lie. The card companies know about them so if you think you are the winners and the card companies are the losers, you are fooling yourself.

Let's be honest - lots of bloggers make lots of money pimping credit cards. As long as readers understand that, they can make their own decisions. It just so happens that most of those decisions are lousy ones.

Steve @ bripblap @Curmudgeon: I guess my defense would be that moving to a big city early in your career can (almost artificially) accelerate your salary growth. My second defense would be that I personally don't want to - and haven't found the way to - continue to increase my six-figure salary to maintain the lifestyle I'd like. Before that sounds like I want simply to spend more, that means sending kids to a decent public school, having a reasonable commute, and living in a less urban environment. To have a yard, a short commute and decent public schools (not to mention a less urban environment) is possible, perhaps, in some large cities but not New York.

I would still say moving to a big city is a better path to a six-figure career, though, and advise anyone to do that when they are young, single, childless and ambitious. If I had to do it over again, I'd still move to Moscow (then New York) when I was in my 20s.

But a good point, and a good example of how posting my thoughts online can really reveal my changing thought process over time!

Steve @ bripblap Argh, Curmudgeon, you broke the cryptograph embedded in my posts - I guess someone was bound to do it eventually. Heh. You're right, I probably do, and it's something (to be covered soon in my writing) that I'm getting much closer to doing in the near future.

Steve @ bripblap Curmudgeon, you're completely right - I consider myself lucky to have failed and recovered, which gave me confidence that future failures were surmountable. If my first failure had come when I was 10 years out of school it might have been much, much harder to recover.

And I never said I enjoyed accounting :) Accounting was chosen simply because I saw an opening there for international travel and a widely-sought after skill that would make me uber-employable. The mistake I made (and I'm sure I'll come back to it in the future) was in thinking that I could choose a profession for what it would GET me (travel, money, etc.) rather than for a profession I loved just for the sake of the work. The travel and money seemed awfully important at the time. Enjoying the work seemed less so...