Fearless Money

On this 100th post for Fearless Money, I am taking the opportunity to discuss the future direction of the site. As you may have noticed if you are a long time reader, the site has changed direction.

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My [tag]Amazon[/tag] book selling money has really tapered off now, so I’m moving on to eBay.Now I’m going to unburden my self of my robotics hobby, as well as ridding myself of any computer equipment that I’m not using now.

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I found a great site the other day which has helped cure more of my money fears.

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From the Economist article Steady as she goes:But is the world really starting to run out of oil?… Despite today’s obsession with the idea of “peak oil”, what really matters to the world economy is not when conventional oil production peaks, but whether we have enough affordable and convenient fuel from any source to power our current fleet of cars, buses and aeroplanes. With that in mind, the global oil industry is on the verge of a dramatic transformation from a risky exploration business into a technology-intensive manufacturing business. And the product that big oil companies will soon be manufacturing, argues Shell’s Mr Van der Veer, is “greener fossil fuels”.What of the notion that oil scarcity will lead to economic disaster? Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren of the Cato Institute, an American think-tank, insist the key is to avoid the price controls and monetary-policy blunders of the sort that turned the 1970s oil shocks into economic disasters. Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor and the former chief economist of the IMF, thinks concerns about peak oil are greatly overblown: “The oil market is highly developed, with worldwide trading and long-dated futures going out five to seven years…. We might be running low on $20 oil, but for $60 we have adequate oil supplies for decades to come.”Alternative fuels will not become common overnight, as one veteran oilman acknowledges: “Given the capital-intensity of manufacturing alternatives, it’s now a race between hydrocarbon depletion and making fuel.”… As Peter Robertson, vice-chairman of Chevron, puts it, “Price is our friend here, because it has encouraged investment in new hydrocarbons and also the alternatives.” Unless the world sees another OPEC-engineered price collapse as it did in 1985 and 1998, GTL, tar sands, ethanol and other alternatives will become more economic by the day.

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As a new feature, I’m going to begin tracking my investments "In the open." It is a good time to do so, since I’m about to rollover a 401K into an IRA, and I’m starting a new 401K at my new job. This month, I’ll just set the baseline, the interesting bit will be next month.

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“If I knew I was going to live forever, what skill or experience would it make sense to bring with me?”

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In the tradition of the Virtual Coffee Table posts I’ve been making, I think I’ll start sharing about significant new possessions entering my life. For the moment, I’m picking $100 as the cutoff for a single item to be marked “significant”. Before we started the budget last year, $100 was the cutoff amount between “spend at will” and “talk to my spouse.”This month was much bigger than normal.

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This is the third edition of my "Virtual Coffee Table", a fun tradition I began observing back in February. I just take a shot of the books I’m currently “actively” reading.

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My Amazon money flood is finally slowing a bit. I’m only shipping one or two books a day now, and every so often I have a day where nothing sells. Even with the slow-down I’m still making a couple hundred dollars a week, and my grand total so far is about $2400.I’ve got about 150 books listed right now.

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