Never say “I don't have time to.”

There are some things which I don't have time for. I could not walk 100 miles a day. I could not read 100 books in a day (well, maybe kids' books). 

But have you noticed that when people say “I don't have time to” they are never talking about activities that are actually, physically, impossible to find time for? 

“I don't have time to...cook, exercise, read, keep the house clean.” But other people do all those things. Do they have more time than you do?

A variation is to extend “I don't have to” to pretend that literally no one can do the thing. “I don't understand how anyone can work full time and still find time to cook.” Or: “once you have kids, you won't have time to exercise.”

These lines always trigger me because they are so obviously false. Look around you and you will see many examples of people who work and have kids and still manage to do X.

(We have a cultural taboo about talking about success, so the people in your life who actually do do the things might never tell you about it, unless you actively ask. [I'll tell you, but I have no social skills.])

So why do people claim that things they want to do are impossible? Partly because they don't have successful role models. Partly because it palliates the pain of failure. “No one with kids has a clean house.” “Of course I'm fat, I'm an American haha.” “Only rich people can save money.” Stop doing this. To invest in convincing yourself your goals are impossible is to commit to failure rather than success.

To steal a line from another domain: you have time for anything, but not everything. 

Note that I am not telling anyone what to do. You understand your own circumstances best, and I don't have the information or the right to tell you what your priorities should be. If you've looked into the costs and the benefits and you're happy not exercising, not reading, or whatever, that's fine with me. I hear TV is great lately.

What I want readers to get out of this is the understanding that their life choices are choices. Distinguishing between a choice you are making and a fate you have to accept is surprisingly hard. It took me about 20 years to break out of that sort of learned helplessness. No institution, and no parent, really has an interest in helping you build an independent life—they want you to conform, consume, and defer to them. It's hard—but you have to build the life you want for yourself yourself.

To a first approximation, your life is not imposed on you by Fate. You choose what your life looks like.

Capital gains taxation

 

Long-term capital gains and dividends are taxed at special lower rates. The best way to understand this is to look at the tax rate charts for ordinary income and for capital gains and run some examples.

A middle-income person, with income of say $50,000 for a single person or $100,000 for a married person, would pay a marginal tax rate of 22% on ordinary income, and 15% for capital gains. (Note, to interpret the capital gains tax rate charts, understand that your bracket depends on total income, not just capital gain income).

The difference is bigger for higher incomes. If my income is a million dollars, then capital gains would be taxed at their maximum marginal rate—but that's still only 20%. Meanwhile, ordinary income would be taxed at a marginal 37%.

You often hear capital gains taxation discussed as something that only benefits the rich. This is mostly true, because rich people are more likely to have capital gains income, if only because they can afford to hold more investments. And because they can afford expensive accountants who can advise them on tax avoidance strategies. But in theory, the poor can benefit from capital gains tax rates too. If I make $10,000, my income tax marginal rate is only 12%, but I can get capital gains for 0%. This is why some people argue that the ideal income is precisely $80,000 in capital gains and no other income—this would allow you to have a generous $80,000 to live on, with a federal income tax rate of zero.

If you're doing your own taxes, reporting capital gains is going to be a little bit harder. You have to track gains versus losses, long-term vs. short-term, and your brokerage can report these things in several different ways. Or not report them at all, if you've got crypto gains or losses :) But it's all quite feasible!

Note—most of this discussion does not apply to short-term capital gains, which are taxed like ordinary income. Short-term means held for less than a year.

Facta non verba

 

How much effort do you think society should put into detecting and punishing bad actions? And how much to detect and punish bad speech? And how much to detect and punish bad thoughts or beliefs?

Now how much attention do we give to thoughtcrime? Or bad words?

God, how easy it would be to do bad deeds if you had the self-restraint never to talk about it.

You choose how much free time you have.

 

Will you buy a house or rent? Live close to work or further away?

Do you want a pet? Multiple pets? What kinds?

What about a child, or multiple kids? Will you wait until you're in a stable relationship to get pregnant?

Will you see friends or family every week? Less often? Not at all?

How many hobbies will you have, and how much time will you spend on them?

We don't usually think of it this way, but when we make these decisions we are deciding how much free time we will have. You get to choose!

 

What inspired this post is the vibrant debate in the personal finance community about whether it makes sense to hire a housecleaner. Some are violently opposed. Obviously, being time-rich makes it easier to make choices on principle, whether it's cleaning your own house, living with one or no cars, or cooking your own meals. The time-poor have less slack, due to their choices.

Some choices are more easily reversible than others. Once you've decided to have three kids, two dogs, and live in a big house an hour from work, it's going to be hard to impossible to get back to having more free time. 

Are those bad choices? Eh. Everything's a tradeoff.

The more I write about this, the better the analogy between time and money seems.

“But I can't sell my house, I'd lose a fortune. And I can't give away my dogs! And of course I can't abandon my kids.”

Actually, you can. People make these choices every day. They don't make them without cost, or effort, but they make them.

Now don't confuse the statement that you CAN do something with the statement that you SHOULD do something. Of course you shouldn't abandon your kids, or give away your pets (exception for vicious dogs). But making that mental step from thinking of your life as your fate, to thinking of it as your choice, is crucial.

On socialism

 

The same people who were "liberals" 30 years ago, and "progressives" 10 years ago, have now started rebranding themselves "socialists." Why the constant rebranding? The right doesn't seem to do this. I think it's related to the shift leftwards of the Democratic party—each new generation of activists wants to prove it's more leftist than the last one. 

 

I'm probably fighting a losing battle, but it's disturbing that so many people want to affiliate themselves with socialism, an evil totalitarian system that has killed tens of millions of people. And when you ask, generally they don't actually endorse any socialist ideas. Generally they endorse garden-variety liberalism, with higher taxes, more regulations, and a welfare state. 

 

The conversation goes like this.

 

I'm a Nazi.

 

—What? That's terrible.

And by Nazi, I mean that I enjoy baking pies.

—Um, okay, I guess you CAN use the word 'Nazi' that way, but it's sure gonna confuse people. And why would you want to use a label associated with a bunch of evil murderers anyway?

Oh, the Nazis weren't TRUE Nazis. TRUE Nazism, as defined by me, is about baking delicious pies. You have some sort of problem with pies?

—No, but the dictionary—

Screw the dictionary. I can be a Nazi if I say I'm a Nazi!

But why do you want to?

How to understand me

 

Please judge my arguments and opinions based on what I say. What you imagine I might be thinking, what you intuit between the lines, and what you think you know about my personal life or history, are not reliable guides to what I think. If you can't tell whether I meant what I said or whether I meant an esoteric hidden implication of what I said, I meant what I said.

Stop making assumptions. They're usually wrong.

See What You Made Me Do: The Dangers of Domestic Abuse [book review]

 

This is a book review for "See What You Made Me Do: The Dangers of Domestic Abuse that We Ignore, Explain Away, or Refuse to See," by Jess Hill. It's also ~5000 words, so uh, you've been warned.

I'll give you a table of contents to create the illusion of organization. The actual book's table of contents has uselessly vague headings like “Shame,” “The Underground,” and “Fixing It.”