Blog

This is a personal story of how much mortgage debt I have and how I acquired it. Ordinarily I do not post numbers about my assets or debts, but I’m comfortable making these known. I don’t necessarily intend for there to be a moral to this story; it’s just an objective tale of how I took on the debt that I still have. You, dear reader, probably [...] Read more

What’s the most important investment product that you own? Shares of GE? Apple? An index or bond fund? Your house? Nope There’s an investment product out there that’s far more important than any of those. In fact, it’s such a monumental investment that it makes any stock certificate look like a lifeless, meaningless piece of paper (or, um, binary [...] Read more

Note: This is a follow-up from a previous post (Desperately Seeking a Job). As some of my readers (both of you) may remember, I’ve been on the job market for some time now, furiously and desperately trying to land my first job as a university professor. Times have been tough. My wife and I have been scraping by on laughably pitiful salaries as [...] Read more

I generally try to post information that is useful and helpful to other people, but now and then I need to reserve a post for an outpouring of personal information and emotion. This is one of those posts. I admit: I’m downright nervous about jobs, or in this case, the lack thereof. As some of you may remember, I’m a graduate student at the very [...] Read more

Mr. IM has a confession. For all intents and purposes, I’m unemployed. No, that’s not quite true. I’m actually a doctoral candidate at my university, and astute readers (both of you!) may remember that in some of my posts from last spring, I made references to being on a job interview. i actually had two interviews at differing universities (for a [...] Read more

My wife and I are both grad students, currently without any children. Even so, I recently opened 529 plans through Learning Quest (Kansas). What is a 529 plan? Essentially, it is a tax-advantaged account meant for future expenses related to higher education. I’m embarrassed to admit that I thought you could only open 529 plans after you had a [...] Read more