2014-06-20

Back to Basics

A lot of the advice you'll come across in life has an expiration date.  This seems to be especially true in personal finance and lifestyle engineering spheres.

This site is certainly not immune to the ravages of time.  Browsing through last year's articles:

High-Efficiency Procurement:

The $0 Landline:

"This leads us to the qualifiers for the Google Voice XMPP integration with OBi devices. One Google Voice feature getting the axe is XMPP integration in Google Voice. Support for XMPP call delivery will shut off on May 15, 2014"

Cashback Credit Cards:

"In 2013 Citi pulled the plug on the regular Forward card, but continued to offer the application for college students until just recently — that too is no longer available."

Well shoot!

(somewhat amazingly, all of the apps in the External Motivation article still exist)


So what's the punchline?


Little deals and tricks and hacks and tweaks come and go.  I've watched strategies go up in smoke that used to save me a few bucks here and there.

The net effect on my savings rate?  Absolutely negligible.  If your financial strategy is based on stealing all of the after-dinner mints at restaurants and redeeming credit card points, you've got bigger problems.

At the end of the day?  Financial independence is still based on one extremely simple concept, and you still can't afford not to invest.  Take care of those big, meaty double-digit percentage categories in your annual expenses, and everything else is just details.

The blogosphere is littered with great deals and neat tricks that don't work anymore.  When you come across one, just scoop yourself another bowl of sauerkraut and relax.  Cheers to that!