During my last couple of years at my last job, I became known for giving personal finance advice to my colleagues. After I changed jobs in 2021, I channeled my personal finance interest not into Amazon’s 15,000-member personal finance community, but into Visual Studio Code, where I wrote the book’s text in Markdown. I did most of the first edition’s editing myself, with the help of a few friends who volunteered to review some part of it as a favor to me, and who I thanked in the book’s acknowledgements. Before publication, the largest expense that I had was a cover from 100 Covers, which designed a simple e-book cover, based on a stock photo I picked out, for $100. After publication, on the advice of a family friend who promotes e-books as his job, I spent another few hundred dollars on advertising, mainly on Amazon and on Twitter (in the pre-Elon era). These ad budgets were exhausted quickly, and I didn’t get enough sales from either platform to justify the expense. LinkedIn quoted me at least $13 per click for an ad campaign, so instead of paying for LinkedIn traffic, I began a saturation marketing campaign of talking about my book constantly, in as many contexts as possible, with no shame about glomming on to others’ popularity. I estimate that my social media advocacy resulted in much of the early sales. The book became the #1 new release in Amazon’s personal finance and money management category, although it took only a few dozen sales to propel me to that level — I guess there weren’t many other books in that category that came out around the same time as mine did. If I had stopped at the first edition, the book would have turned a net profit of a few hundred dollars.
Based on the good feedback from the first edition, by the end of 2022, I had enough suggestions to publish a second edition. I added several new chapters about topics I had missed the first time around. My readers wanted print and audiobook formats as well as e-books, and I had no idea how to produce print or audio to a high standard. Using Reedsy, a marketplace for do-it-yourself authors, I hired an editor to proof my entire manuscript. She, in turn, referred me to a graphic designer who used Adobe InDesign to redo the layouts and graphics in the book in a consistent, professional, and print-ready style. Each of these two professionals did a fantastic job, at a cost to match; editing and graphic design each cost me over $1000. I also hired an indexer to review the print version’s PDF copy and create an index to place at the end of it. That work cost a few hundred dollars more. For the 11-hour audiobook, I built a script with slight modifications to the text, and a companion PDF containing my designer’s revised tables and diagrams. I also compiled the edited text and images into a Microsoft Word document for the second edition’s e-book. Lastly, I used Audible’s Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) to audition narrators to record my book. The winning bid, priced at over $100 per completed hour, required me to review a draft recording — of all 11 hours — and to request a few rounds of changes. Had I recorded the audiobook myself, I would have spent less money, but I would have had to buy equipment, learn how to record and post-produce everything, and I would have had to balance all this with the work required of my day job.
In total, the expenses to produce the second edition, with professional help and a revised print cover from 100 Covers, totaled well into the thousands of dollars. Had I deposited that same money into a savings account or a low-risk bond investment, I probably would have made more money in return, plus I’d still have the principal. Publishing a personal finance book, unfortunately, is one of the less financially rewarding things I’ve done. This is disappointing, but consistent with the advice I’d heard and read before. Publishing a book oneself requires a cash investment, and working with a traditional publisher requires a good deal of connections, credentials, or luck just to get in the door. I did my best to promote my book with local shops, especially when the second edition was made available in print, and on media of all sorts, but very few places would even talk to me. Writing a book is hard, but a lot of people do so every year, and self-published books still have an unfortunate and undeserved stigma as being somehow unworthy of attention. I’ve been told that the real money in personal finance is in turning pro, not writing books: giving seminars, going back to school to earn credentials to give individual investment advice, or becoming a media personality are pathways to a career in the field. I already have one full-time job; I don’t want a second one, for the sake of my own wellbeing.
Even if the financial rewards of writing a personal finance book haven’t amounted to much, I am still proud of the work I’ve done. The book has a 4.9-star average rating on Amazon. I enjoy talking with my friends and coworkers, whether they’ve read my book or not, about financial topics, although I still try to avoid giving financial or tax advice broadly, as I did before. I have a long to-do list for a third edition, for publication someday. I’ve spoken with a former colleague who left software development to start a new career as a credentialed financial planner, with their own firm, and they find the work rewarding, albeit much less lucrative than their prior tech company jobs. Perhaps, when I want a break from the tech world, I might pivot into financial planning myself.
Having written a book, I can now consider myself part of the creator economy, joining the ranks of crafters, producers, and streamers who pursue their interests and who try to make money from their work. Writing a book takes months of effort at the very least — potentially much more, if substantial research is necessary, and the world hasn’t shut down for a global pandemic. Book sales are hard to come by, even for well-known authors. The full author experience, which would involve publishing lots of articles based on the book’s content, giving seminars and one-on-one coaching, appearing on podcasts and other media platforms, and collaborating with other creators, is itself a job — and it pays among the least of any job in America. I now respect people much more who are trying to make themselves heard in a media landscape with oceans of high-quality, often free or very underpriced content. When someone else I know writes a book or appears in any other kind of media, I’m now quick to support it, because I know that an audience’s attention is incredibly hard to get and near-impossible to hold onto. My advice to anyone reading this is that you should support your favorite content creators not just by sharing their work, but also by paying them for it.
Thank you to everyone who has read my book, given me advice or feedback about it, or otherwise supported me in this project. I encourage everyone to pursue their side interests that bring them joy, even if they don’t turn out to be profitable. Creating a big original work is an accomplishment worth celebrating, no matter what the sales figures look like.
At time of publication, I worked for a division of Amazon and held shares of the company. This post does not reflect the opinion of Amazon or any of its subsidiaries.
]]>Before Crazy Eddie came around, stereo and television manufacturers worked with their authorized dealers to sell their products in particular ways, at particular prices, with margins that caused consumers to pay more. Crazy Eddie engaged in a lot of novel practices, many of them fraudulent, to send a message to consumers: “We will not be undersold!” Crazy Eddie told customers to shop around, find the best price for what they wanted, and bring it to a store, where Crazy Eddie would offer an even better deal. Their sales staff would aggressively push customers to buy combinations of products that appeared to be good deals, but which might have been misrepresented, inferior, or cobbled together from returned or used equipment. At the time, price matching and haggling were very unusual for electronics retailers, but today, even mainstream retailers compete on price.
Crazy Eddie’s second store was in Syosset, New York, where I lived from 1987 to 1999, although I don’t remember going to it; all of the company’s stores closed in 1989, when I was 8 years old. Although Crazy Eddie eventually succumbed to its own poor accounting practices and criminal activity, their peculiarly aggressive sales strategy continued to exist at other electronics stores, particularly those specializing in cameras and personal computer equipment. B&H Photo, Adorama, and other shops copied Crazy Eddie’s playbook: bold ads with attractive prices, prominent mentions of major brand names, and promises to negotiate with customers for better prices. I remember going with my mom to LaBelle, a camera shop just down Jericho Turnpike from Crazy Eddie’s former Syosset location, which made the unusual boast in the early 2000s that it would match prices from online sellers. I brought a series of printouts from reputable online shops selling the same camera, and the aggressive LaBelle salesman batted them all away, like a basketball player rejecting shot after shot. Without providing evidence, he questioned the legitimacy of one of the retailers. He doubted that another company, a well-known seller, actually sold the camera they had listed on their own web site. It became clear that at LaBelle, they would only match prices to a limit, and beyond that, their salespeople would try to use fear, uncertainty, and doubt to try to win the customer’s business. On that day, my mom and I left LaBelle empty-handed and disappointed, and we bought the camera online instead.
Crazy Eddie’s “insane” salesman ads had a precedent, although most people in the New York hadn’t seen the ads of Earl “Madman” Muntz, a California seller of cars and electronics who screamed manically at his prospective customers. Because of Crazy Eddie’s saturation marketing – their ad agency was blanketing airwaves like insurance companies do today, but with much smaller budgets – the company was referenced in TV shows and movies. Malfunctioning Eddie, a maniacal and unstable robot on Futurama, debuted in 2000, more than a decade after Crazy Eddie’s stores closed, for example. Growing up, I assumed that every city had their own version of the screaming, supposedly mentally unbalanced salesperson, willing to beat anyone’s price on a new TV. Radio ads for car dealers are about the closest thing I’d ever heard; even in the mid-2000s, there seemed to be at least one “screamer” ad in every city where I ever drove, and it seemed like there was one ad agency that wrote and produced the same script for every one, with the local dealer’s name filled in. Electronics, though, have gone mainstream. While you can still find suspiciously low prices for gray-market imports, they’re offered by professional-looking web sites that state their prices up front. I used to love shopping at the now-defunct Fry’s Electronics, just south of Seattle in Renton, and whose sometimes misleading ads gave me light Crazy Eddie vibes, but their salespeople were the polar opposite of the high-touch, fast-talking people I remember from LaBelle and other New York shops. I could spend an hour at Fry’s and never hear a word from a single salesperson. I’ve asked around, and no one I know who’s grown up in the Pacific Northwest has told me about a Crazy Eddie-style store of high pressure and questionable ethics. People around here, it turns out, had no problem buying their electronics from dealers.
Reading Retail Gangster made me think about other stores that seem incredible to younger generations. I recently visited Ghosts of Belltown, a large art gallery in the defunct and crumbling Bergman’s Luggage store in downtown Seattle. I talked to Nick, the proprietor, who plans to operate the space as a gallery for years to come. Nick has done an impressive job so far of activating the light-filled ground floor with murals, sculptures, and neon signage, and he has even more space upstairs at his disposal. We talked about the oddity of a downtown store that only sold luggage; even before online retail took off, one could buy suitcases at the huge (and now-defunct) department store across the street, or from any number of general-purpose retailers. In addition, well-built suitcases can last for a decade or more; how often would people need to buy luggage to sustain a fully staffed retail store in a prime location? The last time I was in Portland, I was walking around near the convention center, and I noticed Stark’s Vacuums, a 90-year-old shop that sells, rents, and services vacuum cleaners. I didn’t walk through Stark’s, but I was still stunned it remained in business: it seems like most people I know buy a vacuum very infrequently, vacuum reviews and sales are easy to find online, and even modestly priced vacuums are built well enough that they will work for years with only a minimum of maintenance. My neighborhood, too, had a vacuum store, until it closed in 2020; I am impressed that its parent company, still open in other locations, has operated continuously since 1985.
One of the nice things about cities is that they can sustain businesses that seem so niche as to be impossible. I heard a recording of a Ricky Gervais Show episode from 2003 about a shop in London that only sold chess pieces and supplies for the game of bridge; in 2017, I was on Baker Street in London, and Chess & Bridge was still in business, as it is today. Last year, I visited the charming and walkable downtown of Edmonds, Washington, about 10 miles north of my home, and found shops that sell lavender products and rocks and gemstones exclusively. I was impressed that they could specialize so narrowly and still have a loyal and dedicated customer base.
I do a lot of my shopping online, especially for commodity products that I could get anywhere, but there are some physical stores that are destinations all by themselves. When I’m shopping for products that I don’t know much about, like paint and tiles for my home, I appreciate stores where the sales staff know what they’re talking about. All the reading in the world can’t prepare me for the experience of walking into a big showroom, surrounded by products that I don’t understand. I also appreciate that, even while I’m on the go, I can look up information about products before I make a purchase. Crazy Eddie and its high-pressure salesmen have given way to a world where consumers can be educated by third parties before and during the sales process. That helps me shop with more confidence.
At time of publication, I worked for a division of Amazon. The opinions in this article are strictly my own and don’t represent those of my employer.
]]>When I see something wrong, my first impulse is typically to diagnose the problem and solve it. In math classes and in my career, diving into the root cause of a problem has been difficult, but often satisfying. Dealing with quick questions has been a good, but not particularly lucrative, side business for me for much of my life. In college, I worked an hourly job at an information desk, providing directions to campus buildings and phone extensions to different departments. I became so known at a previous employer for my personal finance advice that, after changing jobs, I wrote a book to avoid the temptation to answer the same questions repeatedly in a new forum. I still like helping out curious and confused coworkers on different topics, although I have to balance my shallow Q&A with a duty to “dive deep” on meatier technical problems.
A news story, whether a health update about a relative or a disaster far away from me, is not typically a problem, and I cannot solve it. Even the decision to share the story shouldn’t be taken lightly: we should all know by now that the “share” button can cause a strong emotional reaction. My response to many emotionally charged messages had been, “How can I help?” Now, and without condescension, it’s more likely to be, “That sucks.”
“Do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged?” is a question I read about earlier this year. It comes from teachers with young, emotionally overwhelmed students, but with a little wordsmithing, the question also works well for adults talking with adults. In some cases, a person in a bind really needs a question answered with facts or advice. In other cases, the question is rhetorical, and even trying to answer it could be seen as disrespectful. In others, the person asking the question wants a little compassion. The “hugged” can even be done in text: Slack and Discord have reaction emoji including a hug and many hearts, and I’ve seen a lot of people using them recently.
I only worked at Salesforce for a couple of years, but I credit the company and its culture for getting me to try a mindfulness practice. I learned that mindfulness isn’t about tuning out to the world. I was expected to pay more attention to the world around me, whether or not my eyes were open. I was often advised, by the disembodied voices of the Calm app, to observe things, notice them, identify them, and let them go. That was a good plan to deal with much of the unpleasantness of 2020 and 2021. I still return to mindfulness practice when I feel particularly overwhelmed, though it isn’t a daily habit for me anymore.
After starting to pursue an appropriate level of outrage with respect to political news in 2017, I’m continuing to stay current on news about matters personal, local, national, and international. I try to detach without coming across as overly cold or uncaring. Sometimes, people sharing a problem are seeking help with it. At other times, they want to vent, and I have to choose whether I want to be a sounding board. At other times still, I accept that people want to be hugged; sometimes, a hug comes with an acknowledgement that a bad situation is out of all of our control. “That sucks” is a perfectly fine thing to say, although I lament how often I’ve had to say it lately.
Disclosure: As of the original posting date, I own shares in Salesforce. This article does not represent the opinions of my past or present employers.
]]>I grew up in the suburbs, where driving is an absolute necessity. When I received my driver’s license about 25 years ago, I became the de facto chauffeur for my friend group, and I enjoyed that role. During my time in and just after college, day-long road trips were normal for me. The joy of seeing new places with friends and family outweighed the stress of navigating without a smartphone.
My relationship with driving changed significantly after I moved to Seattle in 2006. My new employer gave me a free transit pass and charged for parking, and I started commuting almost entirely by bus or on foot. With incentives provided by the city of Seattle, I sold my car in 2007 and began to rely instead on a series of car sharing services: Flexcar, Zipcar, car2go, ReachNow, LimePod, and, currently, Gig.
I kept up the transit commute habit, and I started biking to work about six years ago, for both speed and exercise. Then, a series of events halted my drive to drive for much of this decade.
In January 2019, while attempting to merge onto Interstate 5 under the convention center in Seattle, traffic in front of me slowed down, and I couldn’t stop in time; I crashed into the car in front of me, and it in turn crashed into a third car. Fortunately, no one was injured. On the day, I thought my biggest cost associated with the crash would be the ticket that the Washington State Patrol wrote me for driving too fast for conditions. (I didn’t bother to argue it; the laws of physics backed up the trooper’s ticket.) I was in the process of moving to a new house at the time, and I continued to do a few drives from my old place, shuttling fragile items in and bringing empty boxes out of the new house. I didn’t take I-5, though. My new home is much further away from the interstate than my old one was, so I didn’t really think much of the choice.
In January 2020, around the first anniversary of the crash, I started seeing a therapist, with the goal of regaining my nerve. Then, COVID-19 shut down everything around me, and we were all urged to stay home for the common good. Delivery services of all sorts kept me fed and kept my cupboards stocked, although for a brief period in the spring, I wondered whether I’d need to get a car of my own, in case those services became unavailable. During COVID lockdowns, I avoided a lot of small shared spaces, and I decided not to take a chance with a shared car that might have been used recently by an ill driver or passenger.
Despite my then-employer’s wildly optimistic plans to reopen offices a few months into the pandemic, I continued working from home for effectively all of 2020 and 2021. After not driving at all in 2020, I drove a car just once in 2021, an eight-mile ride to two local businesses, and I was trembling for hours from the adrenaline rush of going as fast as 30 miles per hour on my own. In 2022, I didn’t drive at all. I had little confidence in my driving ability after my crash in 2019, but after years of little to no driving, I was concerned that my skills had deteriorated even further.
While COVID remains a major health issue – and I contracted it myself, for at least the third time, three months ago – I decided earlier this year that I wanted to get back to visiting friends, family, and interesting places not accessible by bike or public transit. As I had started to do in 2020, I worked with a professional to discuss my anxiety about driving. I found a helpful, hourlong video by mental health professionals about driving anxiety. I bought a “non-owner” car insurance policy that, because of my 16 years without insurance, is considered pretty high-risk. In the spring, I booked a Gig car and drove for about a mile to a local bakery, feeling like I was on top of the world for having practiced a dormant skill. Then, in March, I booked another car and headed north to Lynnwood’s Alderwood Mall, taking I-5 for the first time in over four years.
For me, the most terrifying aspect of being on a roller coaster isn’t the high speeds, but that ratcheting rise to the top, anticipating the sudden drop. That was my sensation on March 11 as I wended my way through north Seattle to the I-5 on-ramp near Northgate Station, about five miles north of where I had crashed in 2019. Merging on, accelerating, and keeping my place in the slow lane were not anywhere near as difficult as the path to the on-ramp was. I made it to my destination, bought a few things, and returned home, taking I-5 back to town. I still struggle to explain to people how exciting it was to travel 15 miles to the suburbs to buy a cookie and a case of sparkling water. This wasn’t a cure, but it was a major step forward.
I can drive on an interstate again; that’s one more “normal” thing that I can do as I had done before the pandemic. Rediscovering how to drive made it possible for me to visit my goddaughter for her birthday; I hadn’t seen her since before 2019. I also feel just a bit more confident that I can visit other places in the Pacific Northwest that I haven’t been to in years, or at all. I’ve been driving about once a month, to keep in practice. I hope that carsharing companies like Gig stay in business; by my choice, I’m dependent on an industry that is raising prices, having trouble with car availability, and that is free to impose restrictions on its customers. I’m grateful that, at least for now, it’s keeping me mobile.
]]>My fever only lasted a few days, and I tested negative for COVID this past Monday and Wednesday. My cough and fatigue lasted a bit longer, though, and current protocols would have required me to mask up at all times while indoors — and I had planned to be indoors at the conference center all day long, for four days of my trip. I found no reasonable way to continue the trip as planned, so I instead spent a morning trying to cancel transportation (successfully), event tickets (ditto), and hotels (no luck). I also broke the news to my teammates, two of whom went to the conference, and to the many other open source Jupyter collaborators who I had hoped to meet for the first time after a year and a half of working together.
Especially on that chaotic day of travel cancellations, I was hurt more emotionally than physically. I had been looking forward for months to meeting one of my AWS teammates and dozens of Jupyter collaborators in person for the first time. The trip was going to offer a little vacation time, and the conference venue was in the 19th arrondissement in northeastern Paris, a part of the city I had never visited before. Instead, I found myself racked with guilt and self-blame for having been exposed to some variant of the virus that I wasn’t yet immune to, despite four vaccine shots and at least two prior infections. My teammates, friends, and family have been supportive and positive, and I’ve been recovering without major problems.
Before I cancelled everything, I consulted JupyterCon’s health and safety guidelines, which read, in part, “Individuals should not attend the event if they are COVID-positive, are exhibiting COVID symptoms (as defined by the CDC), or have been exposed, within 10 days prior to the event, to someone who was COVID-positive or showed COVID symptoms.” One of my first thoughts after testing positive, based on my experience going to Europe last year and facing no questions about COVID until I was about to re-enter the U.S., was that the E.U. would probably let me in this year despite my fever and my positive, undisclosed, COVID diagnosis. I might have even made it to the conference, feeling well enough to sit in a chair, talk about my projects, and so forth. Instead, I decided to follow the published guidelines and stay home. I didn’t want to be patient zero of JupyterCon 2023’s version of the infamous “con flu”. The U.S. public health emergency that precipitated a lot of those precautions ended on May 11, during JupyterCon. I wonder how future events, not just future JupyterCons, will adapt to countries where COVID-19 is no longer, officially, an emergency situation.
I still intend to stay home, whether by working from home or rescheduling or cancelling travel, when I’m not feeling well. This also means that I should be booking travel tickets and hotel rooms that are refundable, even if they cost more than the non-refundable rooms I’ve been booking for most of my life. The two hotels I booked for my Europe trip were both affiliated with the multinational Accor chain, and both of them declined my request for a refund, since I had chosen a rate that was prepaid and nonrefundable. (Googling “Accor COVID” turned up a few optimistic business news stories, but no recent anecdotes about sympathetic hotel managers.) Refund policies, credit policies, and travel insurance were all things that I largely ignored prior to COVID, but to me, they are important for any trip I book in the future.
Despite this bad experience, I am still planning to go to other events, including other indoor conferences and conventions, as long as I’m feeling healthy before I go. In addition, I plan to be cautious in the days or weeks before a major event, masking up indoors and avoiding riskier events. Having spent most of this decade sitting at home out of an abundance of caution, I don’t want to spend the rest of my existence in isolation. Here’s hoping I can stay healthy and enjoy the next big event.
]]>Younger workers might not think much about Social Security, the federal entitlement program that might provide them some cash in retirement — unless it runs out of money 10 years from now. If you don’t have a my Social Security account yet, register for one now. This account helps you verify that all your income has been reported as expected, and it prevents an identity thief from registering for your benefits. It also lets you download your annual Social Security statements, so that you won’t get them in the mail.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a flood of new unemployment claims from workers who were laid off. Opportunistic scammers helped themselves to at least $646 million in fraudulent unemployment claims in 2020 in just my home state of Washington; in addition to other disputed claims in Washington, and fraud in other states, the total fraud was well into the billions. I found that a scammer had already set up an account at the Washington Employment Security Department (ESD) to make a fraudulent claim using my personal information, and many of my coworkers were also affected. After reporting the fraud to the ESD, I was able to reclaim my identity and put it under my control.
As a defense against unemployment fraud, see whether your state offers an online account for unemployment benefits. Even if you’re currently employed, and even if you’re not sure whether you would qualify for unemployment, sign up for a free account. This prevents someone else from exploiting your personal information for their own fraudulent gains.
Creating an IRS Online Account can be complicated. I created mine at a time when ID.me, the only identity provider that the IRS supported, required applicants to show their identity documents to a human attendant on a videoconference call. After a bipartisan backlash to ID.me’s use of facial recognition technology, the IRS last year announced that it would allow an alternative. Earlier this year, after a disappointing delay, the IRS said that it would offer an alternative sign-in using Login.gov.
Once you’ve created an IRS Online Account, you can log in to view and pay your income taxes, view official notices that the agency has sent you, and verify your balance due for prior years (hopefully, it’s $0).
The IRS also lets you request an Identity Protection PIN (IP PIN), a six-digit number that is required for taxpayers to file a return. If you’ve been the victim of identity theft in the past, the IRS might send you an IP PIN automatically. If you don’t have a PIN, it’s easy to request one. Be sure to include it in your tax software when you file your return; once you’ve received an IP PIN, the agency won’t accept your return without it.
It might seem obvious to create an online account for your bank — this is a common step when depositors open a new checking account online, for example — but there are cases where you might have to create a financial account manually. For example, I’ve had mortgages that have been sold and re-sold, and each time, I may have to register a new account with the new company that services my mortgage.
Use a password manager, like the open source Bitwarden, to generate and save unique passwords (and, perhaps, unique usernames) for each of your financial institutions. Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) as much as you can. Download, save, and back up your statements regularly; if your online account becomes disabled or your account is closed, you might lose online access immediately.
Keep your credit report frozen at the major bureaus, and temporarily lift the freeze only when you need to open a new account, apply for a loan, or do something else that requires unfrozen credit. You can find info about major bureaus’ credit freeze services here:
Run your credit report for free, every few months or immediately before you apply for a credit card or mortgage, at AnnualCreditReport.com. This is the only site authorized under federal law to provide free access to your Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion credit reports. In the past, each report could be run only once per 12 months (so I recommended running one report every 4 months, rotating across bureaus), but during COVID-19, you can run reports for all three bureaus as often as once per week. If you find anything that looks incorrect, such as an account that you don’t remember opening or past-due payments that you are confident you made on time, the report should include information about how to correct it. Be sure to run another report after some time has passed to verify that the incorrect info has been removed.
Use a credit monitoring service, but don’t feel required to pay for one. If you are included in a data breach, you may be entitled to a year or more of credit monitoring at no cost to you. Some financial institutions offer credit monitoring as a free service for their customers; at least two institutions that I use do this. You can enroll in alerts in your email or on your phone. There are plenty of standalone services for credit monitoring and identity theft alerts, but I don’t have any recommendations for them, since I get enough peace of mind from my regular credit reports and my bundled credit monitoring services.
]]>Links to Airalo from this post may earn me a referral commission if you sign up for their service.
My old phone was an iPhone 11 that only got what AT&T calls “5G E” service, a fake 5G rebranding of its 4G network. I decided last year to upgrade to an iPhone 13 mini, which supports 5G networks, but after upgrading my phone, I was still stuck on the same “5G E” network. I tried calling AT&T’s customer service, and a rep advised me to reset my network settings. That terminated my customer service call, deleted all my saved Wi-Fi passwords, and didn’t fix the problem. I also went to AT&T’s web site to generate a new eSIM for my phone; that didn’t fix the problem, either. My family members on the same plan reported getting 5G service, or even faster “5G+” service, so it wasn’t the phone plan that was the problem.
After a few months of this mild annoyance, I wondered whether my phone, still under warranty, was somehow defective. That’s when I decided to put the Airalo app I’d had on my phone for a while, but never used, to work.
Airalo is an app that sells prepaid eSIM cards; it’s mostly marketed to travelers. In the past, when I’ve gone to another country, I’ve usually visited a local store to buy a physical SIM card and a short prepaid plan. This is annoying for many reasons: I can’t use my phone on arrival, airport vendors overcharge tourists, and there may be language barriers or long lines. On my trip to Copenhagen last year, the airport’s many convenience stores didn’t sell SIM cards at all; I ended up buying one at the first 7-Eleven I found in the city proper, then, without much sleep or Danish language fluency, I used the carrier’s web site to add money and service to it. Airalo simplifies this by selling me an eSIM before I leave home, not starting the clock until I activate it after touching down at my destination. Airalo also offers eSIMs that work in multiple countries, something that I thought my Danish prepaid carrier offered within the EU, but which didn’t really work in the two other EU countries I visited on my trip. (No, I didn’t spend my vacation time talking to a Danish prepaid phone carrier’s customer service department.)
I decided to solve my 5G problems in the U.S. using Airalo. To start, I snagged a $3 discount from a referral code (feel free to use mine if you need one) and I bought a one-week, 1-gigabyte eSIM for the U.S. My iPhone 13 mini already converted my old iPhone 11’s SIM card to an eSIM when I set it up, but it let me use both AT&T’s and Airalo’s eSIMs at the same time. Then, I set the new eSIM as the primary card for mobile data, and I went for a walk around my neighborhood. Airalo said that my new eSIM would work on the T-Mobile and Verizon networks, although I only ever saw “T-Mobile” appear on my phone. I ended up with real 5G — not “5G E” — next to my signal strength meter. I ran a few speed tests, probably consuming much of my 1 GB data limit, and I confirmed that the speed with my new eSIM was closer to 5G range than what AT&T was giving me. This was the proof I needed: it wasn’t my plan, my phone, or my location that was causing problems with AT&T’s 5G network.
As my week of high-speed data ended, I called AT&T’s customer service, describing all the troubleshooting I had done. The representative put me on hold, then told me that despite having migrated my SIM card to an eSIM, AT&T still thought I had an iPhone 11. He corrected the record, and shortly afterwards, I was able to get a weak but usable 5G signal in my home. My problem was solved, and all I had to pay was $1.50 for a week’s worth of data with a second carrier.
I’m surprised that this sort of eSIM test drive isn’t more popular. There are a few other apps I found for wireless carriers that let people buy service and get an eSIM, but they require months of commitment and a credit card on file. Airalo’s service is limited to data only in every country I’ve seen, but realistically, I don’t use my phone for local calls and texts when I’m abroad. (AT&T offers Wi-Fi Calling, and the iPhone is smart enough to use a second SIM or eSIM to route my AT&T calls and texts over another carrier’s data network.) Overall, I’m impressed with Airalo’s service in the U.S., and I’m planning to use them the next time I go overseas.
]]>The yield on any investment is the amount of income it provides you as a percentage of your principal. Until recently, savings accounts offered less than 1% interest in the U.S.; depositing $10,000 would yield less than $100 per year. Now, some banks and credit unions are teasing depositors with 3%, 4%, or even 5% interest; on a $10,000 deposit, you might expect to get a few hundred dollars more. Cash deposited in a bank is insured by the FDIC for up to $250,000 per depositor per bank. Credit union deposits are likewise insured by the NCUA. This means that if your bank or credit union fails, you’ll get your entire balance back. Your interest rates, though, are not guaranteed to last.
Back in the late 2000s, I signed up for a high-yield account with HSBC that paid 5% interest. After a couple of years earning that high rate, I started to receive near-monthly messages entitled “An update regarding your Online Savings Account” from HSBC. Every one included a new interest rate, lower than the month before. HSBC’s problems with anti-money laundering compliance hurt the bank’s financial picture further. I ended up closing my account after its annual interest rate fell from 5.00% to 0.50%, a 90% drop in yield; later on, that yield fell another 90%, to 0.05% interest per year.
Some banks offer teaser rates to entice people to deposit new money. I’ve seen some “high-yield” accounts in the past year that have significant limitations. Several apply the teaser rate to only the first few hundred dollars or few thousand dollars of deposits, then pay little or no interest on deposits beyond that. In some cases, depositors have to Direct Deposit some or all of their salary every month to qualify for the teaser rate. In others, depositors have to use their debit card a certain number of times per month — that can be annoying for customers who prefer to use a cash-back credit card instead. Sometimes, a teaser rate requires a customer to refer other customers to the bank or credit union; unless you have a list of like-minded friends, this turns you into a sales rep. In all cases, the teaser rate is never guaranteed; it can decrease at any time. When you see a teaser rate, read the fine print and understand what you need to do to qualify. If you get an extra one percentage point of interest, that’s $100 of taxable income on $10,000 deposited; is your time and effort worth the $60 to $70 you’d net after taxes?
Renaming accounts is a common way that banks tease high rates for new customers without benefiting their existing customers. For example, I qualified for a 5% interest rate by opening what HSBC at the time called a “Direct” savings account. Later, they renamed my account to an “Advance” account as my interest rate ticked down, month after month. After I closed my account, they introduced a new “Direct” account with a higher rate, but customers who had “Advance” accounts weren’t automatically switched to it. Customers had to specifically ask the bank to switch their account, if they qualified for it.
Neobanks are tech startups that look like banks, and that sort of work like banks, but are not necessarily insured like banks. In some cases, they hold funds in an FDIC-insured institution, but in the name of the neobank, not in the neobank customer’s name. Neobanks have offered high interest rates, but with requirements and restrictions that have caused problems. Beam Financial, for example, promised both FDIC insurance and 7% interest — way more than what traditional banks paid at the time — but it was shut down after some customers complained that Beam wasn’t fulfilling requests for withdrawals. Chime, which describes itself as a “consumer software company”, agreed to stop calling itself a “bank” after complaints from California regulators. Other neobanks have specialized in cryptocurrency, promising high interest rates but without any form of insurance, and have lost billions of dollars of customer deposits in just the past half-year. Because there isn’t much settled law about cryptocurrency, people who put their crypto on deposit with companies like Celsius and FTX might have to endure years of court battles before they get even some of their assets back.
Emergency funds are best placed in an account with a reputable bank or credit union that you can access easily, such as through ATMs near you, or by making free online transfers and bill payments. If you have your emergency expenses covered for a few months in an easily accessible account, there are a few other places where it’s safe to store cash.
Money market accounts (MMA) are offered by banks and credit unions and may pay higher interest rates than savings accounts at the same institution. If you have a savings account that’s paying little or no interest, check your institution’s web site to see if they offer an MMA. Moving funds from a savings account to an MMA at the same institution won’t require a credit check and can be done in just a few minutes, online or over the phone. MMAs are FDIC or NCUA insured, so you won’t lose your principal if your institution fails. As with savings accounts, you are expected to make withdrawals from an MMA only rarely; your institution may limit you to 6 withdrawals per month, and they may charge you fees if you exceed this limit. As with a savings account, your interest rate in an MMA is not guaranteed; it may go up or down at any time.
Money market funds are not the same as an MMA; these are offered by brokerage accounts, and they often look and work like MMAs and savings accounts, with higher yields than both. The major difference is that while an MMA is insured, a money market fund is usually not. A money market fund looks and works like a mutual fund with a share price of $1.00, and it pays interest or dividends every month, which get reinvested back into the fund. The risk of a money market fund is that it can “break the buck,” by having its share price go below $1.00. If a money market fund breaks the buck, shareholders/depositors will lose money. Breaking the buck is extremely rare; during the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the U.S. Treasury Department offered extra assurance for institutions to protect money market funds against breaking the bank, and no depositors lost a penny. As with savings accounts and MMAs, money market funds’ yields can go up or down at any time.
Bond funds invest in a variety of debt, including U.S. government debt instruments like Treasury bills (T-bills), T-notes, and T-bonds. You can also buy bonds directly from the Treasury using their free, yet clunky, TreasuryDirect web site. You can also buy bond funds from your broker. The 10-year T-note is considered a benchmark for the economy; in early February 2023, it paid 3.738% interest per year, nearly double its rate from a year before. As with bank interest, most bond interest is taxable income. You might be able to save money on your taxes by buying tax-free bonds, such as municipal bonds (or “munis”), in a taxable account. If you live in a state with an income tax, buy a muni bond fund carefully, so that you avoid both federal and state taxes. Bond funds are not insured and may increase or decrease in value. If you buy a 10-year note, your rate is locked in for the duration, but if you buy into a bond fund that trades debt every day, your yield can vary daily.
CDs typically offer a higher yield than a savings account and don’t have teaser rates; a CD’s rate is locked in for the duration of its term, and can’t go down. (Some banks have offered CDs whose rates can increase, although I haven’t seen any recently.) The advantage of a CD is that your funds are FDIC or NCUA insured, just like a savings account is, so that you can get your principal back if your institution fails. (You might not get all the interest, though, in that case.) The main disadvantage of a CD is that your funds are locked away for the term. You can build a CD ladder of, for example, CDs whose terms end every month or every three months, so that you’re never too far away from having at least some of your money available. Fidelity Investments, of which I’m a client, offers brokered CDs and has tools to set up CD ladders more easily. Brokered CDs, for reasons I don’t understand, are sold by banks to brokerages like Fidelity, and they offer much higher yields than the same banks offer to their own depositors. At a time when Chase offered me a 3.25% yield on a one-year CD, for example, Fidelity sold me a Chase CD yielding 4.75%. Brokered CDs can be resold, possibly at a higher or lower price, if the owner needs cash immediately. Some brokered CDs are callable, meaning that it’s possible that a bank could “call” the CD by paying the principal and some, but not all, of the interest; callable CDs offer higher interest rates, but buyers accept a little more risk than if they buy a call protected CD.
Lastly, consider I Bonds, which are only available from TreasuryDirect. I Bonds are 30-year bonds that pay a fixed rate (currently 0.40%) and a variable rate (currently 6.48%) that adjusts every 6 months based on inflation. I Bonds’ yields can go up or down, but they never go below zero. Each U.S. person can buy $10,000 worth of electronic I Bonds online, plus up to $5,000 worth of paper I Bonds using the proceeds from their federal income tax refund. After one year, a bondholder can cash in an I Bond and forfeit three months of interest. After five years, they can cash in an I Bond and get all the interest that has accrued so far. After 30 years, the I Bond will stop earning interest entirely. Unlike with a bank account or Treasury bond, the interest is only taxable income when the holder cashes their bond in. I Bonds have great rates, and after you hold them for one year, they might even be suitable for storing some emergency funds. Just be aware that it’s more time-consuming to cash in an I Bond than it is to withdraw cash from an ATM.
In the long run, equity investments such as stocks have outperformed all other U.S. asset classes, and they grow faster than inflation. Stocks can rise in price and can generate dividends from business operations. Even a “high-yield” cash investment is unlikely to keep up with inflation. If you’re looking for places to stash some cash for emergency expenses, or for a big short-term spending goal like a mortgage down payment or a college tuition bill, consider all your options for saving your cash wisely and safely.
]]>My support of I-135 represents my opinion alone and does not reflect the opinions of AWS, my employer, or its parent or subsidiary companies.
Seattle has been in a housing and homelessness crisis, officially, since a Proclamation of Civil Emergency in 2015. Seattle’s housing is among the most expensive in the country. A family of four earning over $100,000 per year may be unable to find, say, a 3-bedroom home for a few thousand dollars a month. Being rent burdened means that one is spending more than 30% of their gross income on housing. Public servants, like teachers, shouldn’t be rent burdened. Even at tech companies where I’ve worked, some of my coworkers have found themselves either rent burdened or displaced far away.
I used to consider myself a “market urbanist,” confident that if the city wanted to be affordable to everyone, it just needed to permit as many housing units as possible. I now understand that market-rate housing alone isn’t enough to serve low- and middle-income people. Private-sector landlords (both large and small), existing public and nonprofit housing organizations (some of whom I’ve supported with donations and investments), and low-income-targeted community land trusts are all providing housing for people today. I believe that social housing, built by a public developer, can complement — not replace — these existing models for housing.
Social housing is a public good, run by and for tenants. The public developer’s 13-member board will have at least 7 members who are currently tenants in social housing. The communities will be cross-class, not solely shelters for people without incomes and not projects that are limited to residents making 50% or less of AMI. They should be available throughout the city, integrated with communities, so that people won’t have to endure long commutes to work at good jobs in prospering areas.
The public development authority (PDA) movement has precedent in Seattle. After nearly being torn down for redevelopment in the 1960s, Pike Place Market formed its own PDA after a successful ballot initiative campaign in 1971. Today, the nonprofit Pike Place Market Preservation & Development Authority preserves the Market’s eclectic assortment of shops, businesses, charities, housing, and health care facilities. Once formed, a PDA like the proposed social housing developer can continue to exist with little interference from local legislators.
Who’s going to pay for it? A common “no” argument is that I-135 will require tax dollars to start and will not have a funding source of its own. This is misleading; a public developer doesn’t have taxing authority, but it can borrow money by issuing bonds. While it is true that the public developer will require a small amount of public money to establish, nearly all of the funding for its affordable housing will come not from taxpayers, but from bond investors. The residential buildings that the public developer owns will charge rent indexed to income for the life of the building — not just for a period of time before the building is allowed to revert to market rates.
Where will housing be built? I-135 won’t change zoning rules; social housing will have to obey the same rules as existing housing, so it will be expensive to build or buy homes. The roots of our housing shortage go back about 100 years to the birth of Seattle’s exclusionary zoning in the 1920s. Although multi-family housing existed in “single-family” residential zones before then, today, it is largely restricted to urban villages that are typically close to noisy and polluted arterial roads. To work around the zoning, single-room occupancy “aPodments” sprouted up around the city about 10 years ago, until the city closed the loophole that allowed micro-housing to flourish. The limitations on zoning are also responsible for the development of skinny, expensive, often-derided townhouses like the one I own and live in. The city’s Comprehensive Plan, currently being revised for adoption in 2024, needs to be rewritten to allow for more affordable housing in more places.
I-135 adds another option for Seattle to buy or build permanently affordable housing for the thousands of residents, present or future, who struggle to afford living in the city. More sprawl and displacement will only add to traffic congestion. Low-density housing construction in the suburbs and exurbs requires more land per capita and ever-longer commutes, often by single-occupancy vehicle, which are environmentally damaging. The public developer will complement, not replace, private-sector landlords and nonprofit housing providers. The model has worked in Vienna for generations and is now being introduced in other places, including Toronto and Maryland. If we want to avoid people falling into homelessness and if we want housed people to have a better shot at upward mobility, we need permanently affordable housing. I’m voting Yes on I-135 and I encourage Seattle voters to do the same.
]]>Start saving money early. At my first job, I learned about 401(k) plans for retirement saving, but at age 22, I had no desire to invest the maximum of $12,000 (then, nearly a quarter of my salary) into a 401(k). It made no sense that $12,000 would ever amount to something that could cover any of my retirement expenses. I figured that there were better things to spend my money on, like electronics and vacations. In retrospect, I could have still lived well without that $12,000 in the bank (and I’d have saved money on my taxes in the process), and, had I invested $12,000 in an S&P 500 index fund with dividends reinvested, that year’s contribution would be worth over $77,000 today. A person just starting out can make their money grow tremendously by investing it and leaving it alone. Your Money or Your Life is a good read about the value of saving; it also inspired me to write my book on personal finance for techies.
Soft skills are incredibly important. Anyone can memorize the handful of “secret” coding questions that most tech companies use to interview software developers. Interviewers know this, so a good interviewer will probe for soft skills by asking about specific (not hypothetical) situations and how the candidate handled them. The “brilliant jerk” phenomenon, as articulated in The No Asshole Rule, has let many companies’ cultures suffer by retaining talented employees whose lack of social skills can drive other employees away. On rare occasions, I’ve found myself avoiding certain coworkers who, despite being talented and knowledgeable, have personalities that turn me away. Regretfully, I’ve been a coworker avoided for the same reason. Now, I welcome when people point out situations when I need to do less talking and more listening. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” as Stephen Covey wrote, is a great maxim.
As I publish this, the tech industry’s going through a rough patch. More than 150,000 techies lost their jobs in 2022, and more layoffs are already underway in 2023. The industry has survived prior layoff waves during the financial crisis about 15 years ago, during the dot-com bust about 22 years ago, and during the early ’90s recession about 33 years ago. That’s no guarantee that any one company will survive, or that any one worker will keep their job, but I remain confident that people with the skills and the interest to remain in tech will be able to do so, although they may have to accept a change in compensation or location.
Don’t take bad news personally. I’ve worked at companies where people have suddenly been let go, either individually or as part of a larger restructuring. A common reaction, especially when I was just starting out in my career, was to assume that I was next in line to lose my job. This is near-impossible to prove, either positively or negatively; in the U.S., a full-time worker can leave or be dismissed for almost any reason, at any time, with or without much notice. I’ve also listened to coworkers who react to stock market movements or macroeconomic news by projecting their own anxieties onto them. A well-run company doesn’t hire or fire based solely on its own stock price, but a stock price is often the only externally-visible metric about a company, and it is cited as a cause for or effect of many things that have nothing to do with it.
Handling failure is more valuable than handling success is. When times are good, everyone is a genius. Every idea is a winner. Every investment tip is a moneymaker. Every product fits the market. Great leaders show up when times are tough. I’ve found, over my career, that when I encounter negativity, my first reaction is sometimes to latch onto it and make a bad situation worse. It’s more emotionally expensive to acknowledge negativity and also push past it, continuing to get work done. Ignoring bad news leads to toxic positivity, so it’s important to both acknowledge it and proceed to have a positive impact anyway.
For the most part, I don’t actively seek out this information. I don’t read Hacker News, any Reddit site, or any programming news site regularly. Generally, when I’m not at work, I am not programming; rather, I’m pursuing other hobbies and interests that I don’t get to do during the work week. Sometimes, I’ve picked up a new language for a side project I find interesting, such as Ruby for a programmable sign at a friend’s club in 2007, or Perl for an early content management system for this web site in 2001. I don’t learn a language or technology solely because I think it’ll be necessary. A good company should expect a good developer to learn and adapt, and a good developer should know what they want to do and what they would prefer to avoid.
Most of what I’ve done in my career has involved migrating an existing system, which doesn’t give me a lot of choices for the tools I can use. It’s mainly when I work on a brand-new, “v1” project that my team gets to pick a technology. In many cases, the discussion centers around whether one should use an existing, proven, older tech, or an exciting, cutting-edge, newer tech. In some cases, the new project needs to integrate with existing tech, so especially at a larger company, the choices are artificially limited.
I prefer to learn about new technologies and tools not from press announcements, but from successful implementations. At every company where I’ve worked, people have shared news about technologies they’ve used, either internally (e-mail, chat, intranet blog, talk series, etc.) or externally (engineering blog, social media, etc.). I prefer to learn from others’ and my experiences. Nothing succeeds like success.
When you find something better. During my career, I’ve changed jobs, either internally or to a different company, roughly every three to four years. I know people who change jobs more or less frequently than that. I worked for a vice president about 10 years ago who taught me to “run towards” a better opportunity, and not just to “run away from” a bad situation. (True to his word, he found a better opportunity less than a year after he told me this.) Personally, I care about what a company does and I see its chief executive as its standard bearer. I’m at a point in my career when I can say no to entire industries where I don’t want to work.
Not everyone has the same opinions or liberties as I do. Some of my colleagues are in the U.S. on visas that are tied to their employer, and they, should they find themselves out of work for any reason, would have 60 days to find a new visa sponsor. I’ve talked to people who would rather take a job they dislike than turn it down and risk being made to leave the country. For anyone, though, their next job has to be one that they have the skills and the desire to do. Without motivation, it’s going to be a lot harder to be happy and successful at work.
Save your money. This is becoming a sort of personal catchphrase. Your savings can provide a crucial cushion in case someone’s best-laid plans go awry. Major future expenses include dealing with health problems, going back to school, starting a family, or taking a “career break” to regroup and heal. A person who started their career during the tech upswing of the last roughly 12 years might be led to believe that wages, and stock prices, always go up. Even when wages do go up, so too may expenses; lifestyle creep is the real, and often unnoticed, phenomenon when one’s personal spending rises as one’s income does. If a person’s wages decrease, it’s much more difficult to downsize their lifestyle, and not everyone is ready to do so. Stay aware of your income, expenses, and investments, and you’ll be ready when you find yourself in trouble.
Pursue things you like. I’ve talked to people who make “working in tech” their entire identity, to the point that they spend their spare time competitively solving interview questions and shopping for future employers. When I was preparing for my last interviews, in 2021, my prep work wasn’t fun; to the contrary, it took away time for activities I liked. Everyone has non-work-related interests that they’re passionate about. Take vacations (there’s no glory in letting your vacation days pile up) and surround yourself with the people and experiences you enjoy. Your employer will let you work yourself to exhaustion, and they won’t reward you for your martyrdom. Be a whole person. You are not your job.
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