I am not a financial advisor - this is just to document how I do things.

I developed this system when I was contemplating retirement and needed to get a good handle on my expenses. I wish I had done this decades ago, but it wasn’t even possible before electronic banking.

Short version:

1. Know what predictable, recurring, expenses you are committed to monthly

2. Have a separate bank account to pay them

3. Have payments made automatically

4. Use a service to track all this in one place

1. Itemizing predictable expenses

When I started thinking about retiring, I needed to know what my expenses really were – what did it cost me to “keep the lights on” or “keep the ship afloat.” The trouble was, I had never separated my ongoing, predictable expenses from my others, like entertainment or travel. And I had never categorized even my predictable expenses into necessary or voluntary.

So step 1 was to set up a spreadsheet (any spreadsheet will do) and start listing everything I could find that was recurring. This ranged from big items like mortgage, insurance, and taxes, to little things like subscriptions to web sites that were only a few dollars per month.

I went through my credit card statements and bank statements. I checked PayPal. Every time I saw a payment that recurred, I put it in the spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet listed the payments, plus – and this is vital – a column that prorated the payments into a monthly amount. Some were already monthly, like the cable bill. But my water bill was paid every two months, so I divided the payment by 2 to show the monthly equivalent. Some payments were twice a year; the taxes were annual. In every case I calculated what it cost per month. Coming up with this list required going through an entire year of statements.

Note that when I was doing this I didn’t judge whether these payments were necessary or not. I figured that would just slow me down – that could come later.

After finding all the predictable recurring payments, I added three things that vary but happen every month: gasoline, groceries, and restaurants. To get those amounts I went back a few months and calculated an average.

Now I had a total. I knew that if I had that much money coming in every month I could continue to live exactly as I had been. And I knew what I had left over that I could spend on entertainment or travel or whatever.

Also, I could lower the number a bit if I dropped some of the items, like subscriptions for things I wasn’t actually reading or using. It can be helpful at this point to separate the list into items that are necessary and items that are a choice. Taxes and insurance are necessary. Netflix is not.

2. Separate accounts

In order to make the predictable / voluntary expenses distinction more clear, I set up a new checking account at my bank just for the predictable expenses. And I got a credit card for this. You could also do a Paypal account, or Venmo, or any other means you use to pay bills.

I set the credit card to be paid, in full, automatically every month, from the bank account.

I seeded the bank account with enough money to last a couple of months, based on my calculation from step 1.

3. Automate payments

The next step was to make every payment possible automatic. I went through the list from step 1 and set everything to withdraw money automatically from my bank account. If that wasn’t possible, I set them to be paid with the credit card or Paypal.

(The reason for preferring automatic withdrawal from the bank account is that credit cards expire after a few years and then anything being paid by them needs to be updated.)

The only thing I haven’t been able to automate is my town, village, and school taxes. Each of these happens once a year and they have no arrangement that would allow automatic payments. I have them set up as payees in my bank account so I just have to schedule these when I get the bills in the mail. Typical that government would be behind the times.

I set some of the money I have coming in every month to be direct-deposited into the autopayment back account. Now I can just monitor the balance to make sure that there is enough money there to keep the system going.

[To think that in the old days I would get bills in the mail, then I would write checks and put them in envelopes, put a stamp on them, and mail them back. So much time we don’t have to spend any more!]

4. Tracking service

This is a separate issue from the items above and is worth doing even if you don’t do 1 – 3.

There are a number of services that can connect to multiple accounts and display all their activity in one place. Your bank account may do this. I have used Intuit Mint, Microsoft Money, Tiller, and Quicken Simplifi. Other options are out there.

The advantage of these is that you can go to one place to see what charges have been made to all your credit cards and bank accounts. You can quickly check to make sure that all the charges are legitimate, and take action if anything appears that shouldn’t be there.

One other item that is also separate from the above: set every credit card to pay the minimum balance automatically. Then you never have to worry about forgetting to make a payment and getting penalized.

Conclusion

Having done all this . . .

- I know exactly how much money I need to continue my current lifestyle

- I can see, every day and in one place, any charges that have been made to any of my credit cards or bank accounts, to make sure they are legitimate.

- My bills are [almost] all paid automatically.

- Credit cards always get at least their minimum payment, so I don’t have to worry about missing a payment

[from an email written shortly after election day 2016]

I was shocked Wednesday morning when Trump won. I was so sure he would lose I didn’t even stay up to watch the returns come in – I thought it would be too depressing. It’s been 12 years since a Presidential election wasn’t depressing. But I woke up at midnight and learned he was ahead so I got up and watched for a while. (the wife was up the whole time.) It was astonishing.

I know this is not what some wanted, and I sympathize – trust me, however bad they feel about Trump being President, I felt that bad about Obama. It’s not easy to absorb. The funny thing is, Trump is probably the most big-government-friendly socially liberal Republican ever. Maybe it won’t be so bad for the other side.

Consider the upsides: Newspapers will remember that their job is to keep an eye on government, not cheerlead for it. Democrats will remember why we’re supposed to have separations of powers, so the President can’t just do what he wants with executive orders. Dissent will be patriotic again.

I don’t know how good a President Trump will be but I’m glad he has the chance rather than Hillary. I not only voted for him I gave $500 to his campaign (don’t tell the wife). Given the sorry state of our country and government I’m happy to have a non-politician in there throwing grenades around. The status quo gives me no hope.

For eight years I’ve lived in a country where the President despised me and people like me. And, by the way, so does nearly everyone in academia, the press, Hollywood, etc. To be a conservative is to be assumed to be evil and stupid, whose ideas are not to be considered and engaged with but to be shamed and hounded from the public square. Try to be a conservative and get a speaking gig on a university campus, for example – there’s always a threat of violence. Where are liberal speakers afraid to appear? Nowhere! This treatment wears on a person.

Those on the left are not immune – look what’s happened to teachers at several colleges and universities. One failure to give enough trigger warnings, one failure to use the right pronoun, one micro-aggression and the students may declare you a monster who has to be removed for them to feel safe. This political correctness is dangerous and it all comes from the left. Trump defied it like few could and survived – I think this is good for everyone.

So now at least people like me have been heard. We’re tired of being called racist and every other epithet for not agreeing 100% with today’s liberal dogma. My God, are we tired of that! Wanting to secure the border is not racism. Keeping people from terrorism-supporting countries out of America is not xenophobia. Keeping taxes low is not hatred of the poor. Keeping health care in the private sector is not indifference to the sick. Defending the 2^nd Amendment is not advocacy for mass shootings. Believing that marriage is self-evidently a man/woman thing is not homophobia. And on and on. There are arguments to made on these issues but no one on the Left will listen. Obama sure as hell didn’t – he never credited anyone who disagreed with him with good will. His attitude was “I won.”

I didn’t think there were enough of us left to matter, but it turns out there are. I don’t know if it will last, but at least it’s not over for us yet. Donald Trump does not despise me (or Democrats!). And thanks to Obama, the Democratic Party has been decimated all over the country. Despite it all Republicans are in charge almost everywhere but the big cities.

Speaking of big cities, note the protests and violence that have broken out in several cities. Do conservatives ever behave like that?? When did a Trump or Romney supporter ever break a store window or set a car on fire? Why did people fear Trump supporters but not Hillary supporters? It’s the result of what can only be called propaganda. It’s insanity. It’s the Left that uses violence.

And I’m thrilled we’re done with the Clintons. The lies and corruption these two have inflicted on our country have been a burden for decades now. They should both be in prison. Do you really believe anything they say about anything?? Even Comey said that every story Hillary told about her email server was a lie, though his reaction as a law enforcement official was to shrug and say “whatevs”. Good luck getting that treatment if you’re not a Clinton! Imagine a new unresolved scandal every month for the next 4 years – that’s what we’ve been spared.

As for me, if Trump gets Obamacare repealed, secures the border, and puts an originalist on the Court, I’ll be happy.

If you have six minutes watch this:

. It’s a British actor portraying a news reporter who’s furious at Trump’s win (and at Brexit and the Tories) but has useful things to say about why this happened.

Hold your nose if you have to, but vote for the Presidential candidate who will try to undo some of the current madness.

- The insane policy of wide-open borders, bringing in millions of people, and with them more crime, drugs, and sex trafficking

- The preposterously named Inflation Reduction Act, which did the opposite by funding an orgy of spending on everything Congress could think of. That and COVID-inspired spending gave us dramatically higher prices

- Toleration of lawlessness: homeless encampments in cities, riots, and organized looting of stores

- Opposition to fossil fuels in pursuit of NetZero, an unnecessary and impossible goal which can only result in higher energy costs and turning off the electricity and heat for millions

- Pressuring social media companies to suppress the speech of those who oppose government policies, or reveal wrongdoing

- Promotion of gender confusion which results in males in female spaces and sports, and encourages vulnerable young people to take puberty blockers and mutilate their bodies

- Enforcing pointless COVID policies like masks on planes and mandatory shots to stay employed (fortunately these have already been overturned by courts)

- Endless funding of the war in Ukraine, bringing us closer to direct conflict with Russia, and resulting in constant deaths to move a border half a kilometer here and there.

Is anything - anything at all - better than it was in [pre-COVID] 2020??

Maybe with help from Elon Musk some progress can be made about government spending and inefficiency. Maybe with help from RFK Jr. some progress can be made about the obesity and poor health of Americans.

Our current path is nothing short of insanity.

- COVID is spread by tiny aerosolized particles that can hang in the air for hours. There is no stopping this – masks are useless. Six-foot distancing does nothing. Plexiglass barriers in stores are a joke. Unless you can isolate every human from every other human, everyone is going to be exposed to it eventually. “Stop the spread” – impossible. “Slow the spread” – maybe, to some extent, but at the cost of lives disrupted, businesses destroyed, education delayed.

- COVID was not that deadly except for the very elderly and the very sick. The average age of death was around 80. Even in my 60’s, and overweight at the time, my chance of surviving COVID was about 99.7%. For healthy children it was more like 99.999%. Keeping children out of school and away from playgrounds was preposterous.

- It’s in the nature of viruses to mutate and become less dangerous, and that’ s what’s happened with COVID. That anyone is still wearing a mask or getting shots or worrying about catching it in 2025 is ridiculous.

- Ventilators were exactly wrong as a treatment for COVID, and most likely killed a lot of people who would have recovered. The fatality rate for people put on ventilators was very high.

- You can’t vaccinate your way out of an epidemic already in progress, especially when the virus is mutating rapidly. There was no chance that vaccinations would stop everyone from catching or spreading COVID. But that’s what we were promised.

- Given how long vaccines usually take to develop, it was absurd to focus on them anyway, instead of working on treatments. I don’t know how well hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin work, but they deserved better controlled testing rather then being banned or mocked. (But if there are effective treatments, drug companies can’t get emergency approval for vaccines.)

- The experimental mRNA vaccines were a mistake – they should never have been given emergency approval. We conducted an immoral experiment on billions of people at once. Their risks, such as myocarditis, were not explained, and their effectiveness was exaggerated. Whatever good they do lasts a short time. European countries were faster to recognize this, and soon stopped giving them to young people, especially children. That we still give them to babies is insane. It should be stopped.

- The idea of “vaccines passports” was evil. It was based on the lie that those who got the shot would not get or spread COVID, and yet they were still at risk from the unvaccinated. It divided society into factions, one of whom was encouraged to view the other as diseased and dangerous, needing to be segregated and not having the same rights as the others. Where have we seen this before? We all like to think that we would have protected Anne Frank, but given how readily vaccine passports were accepted, the truth is most people would have pointed to her annex and said, “She’s in there!”

No one was “acting on the best info at the time.” There were plenty of people pointing out how wrong it all was in early 2020. And they were getting banned from social media for speaking out. There were protocols in place before COVID as to how pandemics should be handled, and just about every county immediately threw them out and made up new rules from nothing. Thank goodness for Sweden showing us how it could be done better. Thank goodness for Georgia and Florida and other states that backed off from the worst policies pretty quickly. My state, New York, was one of the worst.

If there’s another pandemic, the only rational response to advice from the CDC or the WHO or any of those organizations will be to ignore them completely. They might be right, or they might be completely wrong, and there will be no way to tell as they will be certain either way.

Maybe RFK Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya and the other newcomers can fix some of this. I’m sure they’re not right about everything – no one is – but it’s hard to see how they could be more wrong than the crew on deck during COVID.

Re RFK Jr.’s beliefs, I don’t know if our childhood vaccination schedule is excessive, but kids do get way more shots than I did, which seemed to be enough. Given that there’s some risk in every shot, especially for babies, I wonder if we’re on the right side of the cost/benefit analysis. I don’t know if they cause autism, but something sure has caused the number of cases to go up dramatically. What is it?

One final semantic point: people say that things happened because of COVID, but that’s not right. COVID could make people sick and sometimes die, but it didn’t dictate policies. Those were enforced on us by governments. People are to blame for what we went through, not a virus. And none of them has paid a price.

Insulin resistance

A lot us are fat and diabetic, and the diagnosis is insulin resistance, a term that should be as well-known as “Ozempic” or “Jardiance”. Maybe it needs a song.

If all goes well, carbs in food result in an increase in glucose in the blood, which brings on an increase in insulin, which causes cells to process the glucose for energy. Glucose goes back down. Insulin goes back down. All is well.

But if someone has developed insulin resistance, they get high blood glucose and high insulin that do not go back down like they should. The cells don’t process the glucose well and it hangs around until it’s cleared by storing it as fat. Hence a high a1c reading. Hence weight gain. And it’s not just about weight gain – a high a1c also means inflammation. This is bad for arteries, bad for the heart and liver.

Ketosis

There are drugs that can help with this, but there’s a much better way: just stop eating all the carbs to begin with. Low enough carb intake brings on ketosis, another term most people don’t know about. But our bodies can run on fat instead of on carbs, and that’s what happens when carb intake is restricted while eating a diet that includes enough fats.

This is demonstrable: a device like a breathalyzer or a blood test can show that ketones are elevated. (My last blood work said I was either on a low-carb diet or starving.)

The first benefit of the keto diet is the restoration of normal blood glucose levels, a normal a1c. But another benefit follows quickly: if your body is now looking for energy from fat, and you have extra fat on board, it will use that instead of making you hungry for carbs. Your weight will start to drop, and your appetite will decrease. I lost 60 pounds in 6 months, without feeling particularly hungry.

A lot of promises are made about ways to help you “burn fat” but ketosis actually does it.

Food

The “low-fat” food craze is based on the fallacy that some fats go more or less directly from your food to your body. But it doesn’t work that way - see the book The Big Fat Surprise. If it did, we wouldn’t have stores full of low-fat foods and fat people. In a low carb diet, fats are good. Eat butter, not margarine. Drink whole milk. Enjoy meat and eggs. (That worry about cholesterol in food is just as wrong as the worry about fat.) Have bacon! Stop eating stuff that is mostly sugar.

This idea has made enough of an impact that supermarkets now carry lots of products that say “keto-friendly” on them: bread, cereal, pasta, cookies, yogurt, pancake mixes, etc. They may use almond flour, riced cauliflower, monk fruit for sweetening, and other substitutes. Even chocolate is fine as long as it’s very dark chocolate. And restaurants either have keto-friendly items or they at least aren’t bothered when you order a burger and tell them you don’t want the bun, just a knife and fork. I have never been to a restaurant where I couldn’t find something to eat. There’s always a chicken Caesar salad.

Change your diet and you won’t need Ozempic or Jardiance for the rest of your life.

Oh, and get some exercise, because exercise is good for you. But it won’t matter for your weight – it’s almost impossible to burn enough calories via exercise to make a difference.

I’ll close with a helpful YouTube video . . .

Puffins are true sea birds – the first thing young puffins do when they leave their cliffside nests is fly out to the ocean. They live there for three years before they ever come back to dry land, floating and diving for fish. They have to be in the water to survive, and they have only one chance to get there. Young puffins (“pufflings”) that land on the ground are doomed because at that age they can’t get airborn again. They will die from starvation or predation unless humans rescue them and get them to the sea.

This happens in a number of places around the North Atlantic, but Ground Zero for puffin rescue is Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland. This is a town of about 4000 on a little island just south of “mainland” Iceland, which has perfect seaside cliffs all around it. Puffins by the millions dig burrows above the cliffs, and in late August/early September the pufflings venture out of their burrows in the middle of the night. They step over the cliffs and fly for the first time, heading toward the light of the stars and moon, and landing on the water.

Unless, that is, they get distracted by the lights of the town, fly in the wrong direction, and land on the ground. Thousands of them will land in the town and need rescuing, and the town has embraced this task. Every night during this time, everywhere you look, people will be driving around slowly or walking with flashlights, looking for lost pufflings.

My wife learned about this many years ago from a children’s book, Nights of the Pufflings. She’s been entranced by the idea ever since, and we decided it was time we went there and helped out. So we spent the first week of September in Vestamnnaeyjar, along with one of our nieces who wanted to help (and didn’t mind missing a week of Senior Year).

The Hunt

We headed out every night at 11 or midnight, armed with flashlights and cardboard boxes, and spent two or three hours poking around. We looked in a lot of places, but spent most of our time around the golf course west of town. It’s near some cliffs and there are lights along the road that attract the pufflings. We’d find the little guys wandering around the course, or in a sand trap, or huddled by buildings. We had to chase and grab them. This isn’t easy – they can’t fly off the ground, but they can flap their wings and run pretty fast! This is where it helped having a 17-year-old along. When we did catch them, we’d put them in the cardboard boxes for safekeeping.

They didn’t like being in the boxes! Some of them scratched at them and fluttered and did their best to get out. We had to tape the boxes shut to keep them in.

Only once did we fail to find any, and even then natives who had more than they needed gave us a couple (pity puffins)! We didn’t know that puffling sharing was a thing, but it is. The most we found was 14 in one night, and we gave one of those away to a little girl who was out with her grandfather. Our niece saved one from a cat who was stalking it. All told, we found about 50 pufflings during the week.

The Check-in

A local science museum, part of the Sea Life Trust, measures and tags the pufflings to gather data. So the day after the hunt, we would take our boxes down to the center, along with all the other people. Staff and volunteers would weigh the pufflings (usually 250–300 grams) and measure the last segment of their wings (40–50 mm). A selection of the pufflings got a leg tag.

One day they processed 812 pufflings, and the total this year is over 7,000, the most since they’ve been doing this.

After the pufflings are processed, children (and adults) can pose for pictures with them.

They used to post these on their Facebook page – lots and lots of pictures of little blonde children proudly holding the puffins they saved. [Note 2025: Apparently they don’t publish these anymore.]

The Release

Then it’s time to release the pufflings and get them into the ocean, which means taking them to a cliff and tossing them over the side. We released most of ours by that golf course – sometimes there was a line of families with boxes of birds and we had to wait our turn. When we did this, the wife and niece decided that we had to give each bird a name and announce it during the release, so I said things like, “This is Dumpling!” as I tossed mine.

Standing a couple of feet from a sheer cliff and tossing pufflings is a little scary, and it’s even scarier to watch little children do this, but the parents hang on to them and no one went over the edge with the birds while we were there. A couple of times people stood too far back and failed to get the pufflings over the edge and they landed short. But the birds knew what to do – they walked over to the edge and jumped off. It actually made me wonder why we were throwing them – couldn’t we just set them down at a safe distance (for us) from the cliff and let them figure it out? But there’s no arguing with tradition, so the puffling toss continues.

The wife wants to go back another time and do this again. I kind of feel that once is enough. We’ll see.

If anyone wants to go next year and pay for a guide, I know where to find one!

Last year the BBC did a report on this, which is pretty good except for the usual alarmism. The BBC was there again this year and interviewed my niece, but I can’t find the video online. If I do, I’ll update this.

By the way, one funny thing about puffins is that the little ones look nothing like the adults, with their colorful beaks and somewhat comical appearance:

[This post first appeared on Ricochet: https://ricochet.com/674114/rescuing-puffins-in-iceland]

It starts out almost too normal: our tour bus pulls into a parking lot and drops us off at a visitors’ center, where we show our tickets and pick up headphones so our guide can talk to us. It’s busy – lots of tour groups, lines of people. Just like any number of historic places you can tour. But then it’s our time to enter, and suddenly we’re walking under a gate that says “Arbeit Macht Frei.”

A gate I’ve seen in pictures all my life, as a symbol of horror and genocide, and there it is. We can stop and take a picture, or not. We can comment on it, or not. Now it’s just a physical object whose only power is in memory. Strange. I didn’t take a picture. We just walk in, knowing that in an hour or two we’re going to walk out.

We’re led around the grounds, in and out of buildings. This is where the prisoners slept. This is a room where they were tortured. This is a room full of hair that was collected, mostly from women. Here’s a wall where people were lined up and shot. Most of the facilities where the mass murders took place were destroyed by the Nazis as they were about to abandon Auschwitz, but there’s one left that we go through.

How can we process all this? And what must it be like to be the tour guide, who does this every day?

Then it’s back on the bus and off to Birkenau, just a few miles away. We see the railroad tracks going into it, another image I’ve seen so many times. It’s huge – just rows and rows of buildings that held the prisoners, on and on. Ruins of where the killing took place, again destroyed in an attempt to hide what happened.

On the way back to the bus, there’s a café where we can get some food or a coffee. Is it even OK to say I’m hungry – let’s get a sandwich? Feels weird. But I was hungry. Then we hop on the bus and leave, just like that. Check off Auschwitz as a place I’ve seen, like the pyramids and Stonehenge.

Our tour included another stop, perhaps as an antidote to the horror, an enormous salt mine that is amazing and worth seeing, https://www.wieliczka-saltmine.com/.

For us, life goes on and we continue to do new things. We remember the dead, for a few minutes here and there, and we carry on. Strange.

[This first appeared on Ricochet: https://ricochet.com/1771429/visiting-auschwitz]