“In a racing capacity I’d absolutely want a clutch and a stick”

Counterpoint: what kind of superhuman stops at just one donut?

Next week on Lifehacker: how to make authentic egg foo yung.

Anecdotally, I did a completely unintended experiment with this over the winter. I got sick of running in the cold... so I stopped, and hit the gym instead for about 2 months. I hate running on treadmills so I did nothing but strength training (some days more cardio oriented, e.g. burpees and the like).

More broadly, some people are maybe play-acting frugality and eco-consciousness, rather than assessing what steps will do the most good.

This is “the perfect is the enemy of the good” logic. Is your 401k maximally good if it has a bunch of high-fee investment options? No. Is putting post-tax money into a Roth better than putting pre-tax money into that imperfect 401k? Possibly, but only after you’ve exhausted your employer match.

Spicy pork burger at McDonald’s in Thailand. That thing is NOT messing around.

Here’s the problem with applying these suggestions to real life: the men who “get it” are already able to navigate consent smoothly with confidence and sex appeal, and the men who “don’t get it” are already turning off their potential partners but will misread their failure to gain consent as a problem with the…

Or you can ask it in a less loaded way: what would a small law firm do? E.g. a business where the staff is too highly compensated to justify standing around in lines and too lean to have spare people sitting around. Because anything companies can outsource, you can outsource too.

Boston is a town Sports media is a field in which a local sports columnist will urge his young protege to adhere more closely to the values of <raging a-hole X, Y, X>.

Perhaps. With the benefit of hindsight that might have been the thing to do, but on the other hand applying for a loan is itself a negative indicator. A priori I wouldn’t have guessed that the change in available credit would have outweighed the hard inquiry by much if at all, but that appears to be the case.

This happened to me because my HELOC reached the end of its term and was closed. It had been paid off in full years prior. So my “available credit” dropped dramatically overnight, and my score dropped from the 800s to the 600s. It still hasn’t fully recovered over a year later.

But... you can go get a cash advance just as quickly as you can get cash from your bank account. Or if you need to pay by check you can take that cash advance and deposit it and write a check.

A credit card is generally going to be more accessible in an emergency than a bank account. The only area of likely non-overlap is circumstances where you can write a check but not pay by CC. But how many expenses are settleable by check and yet must be settled so quickly that you can’t take a few hours to transfer…

It is not at all unforseeable that the moment your creditors see you have lost your job they dramatically lower your credit limit or close your cards all together.

It’s a fair point, but you can’t dispense financial advice at all in a case like this without assuming some degree of reasonableness on the part of the recipient. To be clear, I’ve had situations come up with friends where I’ve advised them to cut up their credit cards and pay for everything with cash just to get…

Agreed, with the caveat that the experts in this case are specifically talking about emergencies, which by definition are infrequent and unexpected. You’d have to estimate a very high probability of needing that emergency cash advance in order to come out ahead by keeping the balance outstanding.

But credit cards can be turned into cash just as quickly as, well, cash can. Unless you’re literally talking about physical bills in a safe or under your mattress.

This, this, this - a thousand times this!

Of course you should use emergency savings to pay off credit card debt!!! If an emergency comes up, the newly available credit can always be drawn down again and you’re in no worse a position than when you started.