Over the past decade I’ve rented places in Florida through VRBO, and I’ve noticed an interesting change in the ongoing battle between owners and renters.  Early on, when searching for a place, filtering by price worked reasonably well.  You could count on the actual full price to be 20-25% more than the advertised rental price once they added various fees.  Then owners got clever and began to add ever-larger nonsensical fees.  In one extreme case, the added fees doubled the total rental cost.  Filtering by price became useless.  VRBO responded by calculating a full price with all the add-on fees to show to prospective renters during their search.  So, filtering by price works again, except for a new game.  Owners are very cagey about the price of pool and hot tub heat.  Because this is optional, VRBO doesn’t include it in advertised prices.  Owners try to get renters to commit to a rental and then hit them with punitive pool heat prices....

Just in case you’ve ever wanted to read a book about both retirement planning and the music of the 60s and 70s, Daryl Diamond has you covered with Retirement for the Record: Planning Reliable Income for Your Lifetime … to the Soundtrack of Your Life .  This book’s main focus is the value of an advisor (and his firm in particular) in retirement financial planning.  However, about a third of it is stories about the music most relevant to those born near the peak of the baby boom. I expected more discussion of how to plan your finances in retirement, but the consistent message is that such planning is difficult, you need help, most advisors aren’t good at it, but Diamond and his firm do it well.  An early chapter tells us that there are no cookie cutter solutions, because the answer to most retirement planning questions is that “it depends” on your particular circumstances.  There is some truth to this, but it would certainly be possible to lay out 6 or 8 examples that ...

In his book Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral & Drive Major Economic Events , Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert J. Shiller calls on other economists to incorporate the study of narratives into their predictive models.  He believes the stories we tell each other that go viral are important factors in how economic events unfold.  The book is clearly written and makes its case convincingly, but there isn’t much for individuals to apply to their own lives unless they are economists or politicians. A simple example of how narratives can cause future events is a viral story about deflation.  At times in the past, people have widely believed that prices were going to fall.  As a result, consumers delayed purchases expecting to buy cheaper later.  This caused spending to fall, and ultimately contributed to sellers lowering their prices.  Narratives can become reality. Shiller gives many examples of different classes of narratives, including the moral...

I’m not against having grand plans, but I’ve often seen them get in the way of real progress.  I recall a family member telling me about grand plans to organize his many piles of papers strewn throughout his house and eventually write a book.  I asked “would you like me to help sort this one pile of out-of-order papers right here?”  The answer was “No, no, not right now.”  A friend and I were looking in one of his closets one time, and he told me about plans to sort through everything in his overstuffed house.  As he reached to set down an item he had already declared to be garbage, I asked if he wanted me to throw it out.  The answer: “No, that’s fine.  I’m going to do it all together one day.”   Waiting for a magical day in the future when you’ll want to do what you don’t want to do today isn’t a great formula for success.  I do better completing tasks in small steps.  My wife and I just got rid of some old paint cans.  We could h...