Cutting Personal Expenses

[RustedFox]

I'd definitely live in downtown DAL. One of my favorite big cities. Reasonable cost of living, no taxes and decent restaurant nightlife. RF why do you hate it so much?

Agree completely on the other high-tax hellholes you mentioned.

My mistake. Good eye!
I meant Houston.
Was there for about a week last year.
Humid. Crowded. Traffic. Urban sprawl for counties.

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[TooMuchResearch]

I've never been those things. Even young and single I disliked big cities.

Oh I 100% agree that these are possibly the worst financial cities to live in, but if you’re a single, self-proclaimed “decent” looking 30-year-old young attending, can you really put a price on the social life of living in a big city making 300,000 versus living in the sticks making 450?!

 

[miacomet]

I don’t. I think this is temporary and we’ll bounce back quicker than during other downturns. If it started quick, we can come out of it quick. But I was pretty bad at predicting corona, so take my Econ predictions with a grain of salt.

Sign of intelligence is changing one's mind with new info.
When did you begin to realize this was bad bad?
Curious as to what you think mad you predict this poorly, and how you might change your thought process in the future?

 

[hundreddaysoff]

... But the traffic. Doesn't it take forever just to get from one side of the city to the other? I have never stayed in Dallas, but I always dread passing through on my drive to other parts of Texas.

Went to med school in Dallas. Yeah, traffic is terrible, but still better than LA. And the DART is decent.

The trick, much like LA, is to find a neighborhood you like (eg Uptown) and stick with it. Then you don't even need a car mostly. I didn't buy one till MS3.

 

[Birdstrike]

When did you begin to realize this was bad bad?
Curious as to what you think mad you predict this poorly, ...

I vividly remember SARS-COV. It was a coronavirus. It emerged in 2004 in China. It got a massive amount of press. We asked every ED patient screening questions about it every day for months. It had a case fatality rate (11%) even higher than this virus. Despite the hype, contagiousness and high fatality rate it fizzled out with very little impact in the States and without nearly as much as predicted.

This experience led me to believe SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) would mimic my experience with SARS-COV, and that it would fizzle out before it impacted us in the ways predicted. That assumption couldn't have been more wrong.

Sign of intelligence is changing one's mind with new info.
... and how you might change your thought process in the future?

In the future, I won't attempt to predict pandemics better, I won't try to predict their course at all. My future stance will be that they're too unpredictable and that trying to do so is more likely to make one look like a fool, than not.

At the same time I'm reminded of a few other things I said early on in this thread like, 1) "Media exaggerates things for ratings and profit," 2) "Experts are wrong often," and

1) "Media exaggerates things for ratings and profit."

The media has been as predicted on this. They have oscillated from "COVID's a hoax" to "COVID will kill 2.2 million Americans" and everything in between. The only constant has been that they zero in on the most sensational extremes at the expense of accuracy. Regardless of how severe COVID-19 turns out to be or does not turn out to be, I think it'll be pretty easy to make the case the media made an inconsistent, sensationalistic, hot mess of it, while creating a lot of attention, ratings and profit.

2) "Experts are wrong often."

"The experts" have been a disaster on COVID-19 as predicted. I just saw a clip of Fauci on January 21 saying, "This is not a major threat to the people of the United States and this is not something the citizens of the United States right now, should be worried about." Then he and others told us 2.2 million of us were going to die. Then they said, 100,000-200,000 might die. I think the latest is, "Don't hold us to any of these numbers." I said early on experts are wrong often, yet I still fell into the trap of believing them.

3) "Once in a century pandemics are less common" than #1 and #2.

It's too early to say whether COVID-19 will become our "Once in a century pandemic" or not. As of today, COVID-19 has killed 7,000 Americans. To become the worst in the past 100 years, it's got a long way to go. It's got to beat the Hong Kong flu of 1968 (116,000 deaths USA), Asian flu of 1956-1968 (100,000 US deaths) and HIV/AIDS (675,000 US deaths). I sure as hell hope I'm not wrong about this one, otherwise we may not be around to chat about it on SDN.

But yes, I couldn't have been more wrong about the course COVID-19. I've moved on from trying to predict it, and instead I'm trying to look past it and simply hoping we all get through it in one piece.

 

[Groove]

Not really...well kind of unintentional. We cancelled our vacations this summer and our annual Dec ski trip is up in the air depending on how things are going with the pandemic (hopefully better by then). Otherwise, we are spending about the same on food/takeout/entertainment. I'm picking up extra shifts to take advantage of what I consider to be at least 8-12 months of a bear market. I intend to sink as much extra money as I can into some of these cheap, cheap, stocks. That being said, I'm still splurging. Hell, I just bought $1K of rare scotch that I've been wanting to try forever and am considering purchasing an entire set of gym equipment to transform a room upstairs unless the local gyms open up soon. I really miss the weights. I'd like to invest over $120K this year while the market is down.

 

[TooMuchResearch]

We've decided to go ahead with a moderately expensive backyard reworking. Here's to hoping volumes bounce back.

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