It depends. If you’d like to maintain the lifestyle a $140k income provides, then yeah, you’re behind. If you’d like to maintain the lifestyle a $60k income provides, then you’re in good shape.

Serious question for the cricket folk out there: what do they do in this situation? Wait around a while while they send someone to go get the ball back? Start a new ball? In another sport, a new ball would make sense, but as I understand it, managing the condition of the ball is a key part of the strategy of the…

I guess I’m thinking in terms of what I like/dislike in a job. I like using my skills to solve tricky/high-value problems that other people can’t solve. I dislike being on call at all hours, dunning clients, and resolving problems with “who values their time less” contests.

“It will suck at first” doesn’t sound like a “rich” lifestyle to me. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with your general philosophy, I was also on the stack-up-my-pennies side of things in my 20's. But I think you’re conflating “rich” with “financially independent.”

The biggest thing keeping me out of owning rental property is that it seems like a kind of miserable part-time job. Do you use a property management company?

It depends a lot on what you mean by “how much money.” Do you count retirement savings? A pension? A house? A mortgage? College savings?

(“Place a thin, skinless chicken breast in a half-quart mason jar with a cup of white wine, then add water until the chicken is covered by an inch.”) Having none of the required ingredients save water, I put three boneless, skinless chicken thighs in the pickle jar, dressed them with olive oil, kosher salt, pepper,…

I’d say it depends on a few factors:

Well, yeah, it’s easy to move a mortgage if you’re getting a cheaper rate. But mortgage rates have crept up in the last couple of years, and if I refinanced today I’d be paying at least 1.5% more. My ARM starts to adjust in 2023, but until then, it doesn’t really make much sense to switch.

I’ll have to double check, but I wasn’t previously a customer of WF, and at the time it was pretty explicit that I had to autopay from a WF account to get the discount. Then again, that was in the era of fake accounts, so they may have just lied to me. Thanks for the tip, I’ll check on it.

The half-point I save on my mortgage is pretty substantial.

I’ve stayed with Wells because that’s where my mortgage is, and it’s really hard to move a mortgage. And I save something like a half point on my mortgage by paying it out of a Wells Fargo checking account.

How do you handle bills that vary month to month?

My DirecTV bill auto-pays as soon as I get the bill, which is kind of annoying, since sometimes stray fees can crop up on there. But other than that, yeah, auto bill pay always seems to just work.

Thanks!

Terms you use that I think could use further definition:

Is 23% a pretty steep autograt, or have I just not ordered room service in a while?

• Which show is the best at teaching people how to cook? I went from zero to being a pretty decent cook mostly from watching Good Eats. These days I’m picking up a lot from Cook’s Country.

This is a bit like an article about “how to create your own meme” explaining how to grab a still frame from a video and put some text on it. For some definition of “meme,” sure, that’s what “creating a meme” is. But for another definition of meme, you’ve gotta get it to go viral somehow.