I finished reading reading My Brief History this afternoon, and after a trip to two local book stores in two days, have found myself picking up a used copy of what seems to be an original eduction of Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez’s Your Money Or Your Life. I was first introduced to this book from The Billfold, but this is my first time picking it up to give it a read. It’s already different than I expected, in a good way, indicating right out of the gate that consumerism is not only a big part of our collective financial struggles, but of significant environmental impact.

I have found as I have been focusing on paying down student loans and thus cutting out most non-essential purchases, that I not only save money, but I find less desire to then purchase things. It’ll be interesting to see where this book goes, and also if I at some point find myself wanting to read the updated edition to see how it has evolved.

I’m currently reading Stephen Hawking’s My Brief History, and found myself surprised, then not surprised, when he noted that people reacted negatively to the cover of his mass market book, A Brief History of Time, because he was a person with a disability writing it:

“The book was intended as a history of the universe, not of me. This has not prevented accusations that Bantam shamefully exploited my illness and that I cooperated with this by allowing my picture to appear on the cover. In fact, under my contract I had no control over the cover.”

What’s so interesting about this seemingly thoughtful concern is that it presumes that a person who presents with the appearance Stephen Hawking did was, as a result of their disability, incapable of making their own decisions on the matter.

As if I needed any more reasons to be making the switch away from Gmail, it turns out they also track and every single search you make within Gmail itself. Recent searches include looking for a receipt, an email address, etc. It also logs ‘viewed Gmail ads’; I never actually click, them, I just delete them so they’re out of my way. Evidently that’s what counts as a view and is then tracked, so it’s time I stopped doing that now.

I found this simply by going to my Gmail account settings, clicking on ‘Data & personalization’, and then click on ‘My Activity’ under the ‘Activity and timeline’ box. I can think of no valid reason this should be saved, even if it’s ostensibly “Oh, I forgot what I was looking at earlier, let me check.” I don’t do that, and can’t say I know anyone else who actually does either.

I’ve been talking for a while about moving away from Gmail as my primary email provider. I’ve used it since the earliest days, when an invite was required, and what really started to seal the nail in the coffin was learning that Google keeps an entire purchase history, separate from your email, that it gleaned based on email receipts.

Granted, I learned about this last spring, and have since then only thought about how to transition away. In part, this is because I overthink things, which then leads to decision paralysis (by way of fatigue), and ultimately I get caught up in everything else life throws at you. The only one laughing here, of course, is Google.

This weekend, I finally started to make some changes. I’ve long used Fastmail to host my email for my various websites over the years, and I recently realized it can be used to create email aliases with their @fastmail.com address. This meant I could come up with any necessary email addresses for whatever I want, all while keeping my personal email private; and unlike past me, current me is also making judicious use of plus addressing, which makes search and automatic filtering a lot easier.

What’s been fascinating about this endeavor, and maddening, is discovering just how ubiquitous email has become. We don’t think about it, but it ties to so many aspects of our lives now. Personal correspondence, work, travel, insurance, shopping (and hordes of marketing emails as a result of said shopping, and also travel and almost every other category here mentioned here), banking, newsletters, and on and on.

Switching email providers is a time-intensive task, especially if you use your provider’s ‘@‘ email address. It’s making me consider establishing a domain (that isn’t a website) just so I can take better ownership of my email all around, and so that should the need arise, I’ll be able to transition my email a lot more easily to another service at any time. This is step one, certainly, but I think it’ll be in hopefully short order that I get my own dedicated email domain for the future. I’ll have to do a bit more legwork to update what I’ve already done, but since I’m simultaneously using this as a process to decide what emails to keep (and their associated online accounts, if any), it probably won’t hurt to do this more than once to simplify.

I’ve written before about the growing pains I’ve been experiencing with running each of my two businesses. I’ve stuck with Quickbooks Self-Employed for one of them for the time being (the other I use the more robust Quickbooks Online), in part because the added value of TurboTax being included was a nice perk.

Yesterday, I received an email that the price for the Self-Employed version is going up once again, by $8 (a 47% increase over the previous price). Intuit casually mentioned some “new features” in their email to justify the increase, but oh wait! Those new features they cited included automatic mileage tracking and the abilty to pay estimated taxes from within their dashboard, both of which are features they’ve had pretty much since I started using the service in 2015. They even include the same nonsense line in their FAQ page here.

In the past, I’ve requested the ability to keep track of mileage based on odometer readings, citing privacy and confidentiality for the services I provide, and it’s been crickets. I’ve also suggested having even single entry bookkeeping (rather than the ‘ledger’ they provide which shows only amounts spent or earned, and not an account balance for reference) in order to more accurately reconcile. Again, no response.

I get that a company has a right to raise prices, but it’s nonsense to declare that features that have been in place for years are the reason why. The service has essentially remained unchanged in probably about two years now, with the only real improvement being the addition of invoices/payments in 2017. (Interestingly, they neglected to mention this in the current trumpeting of “new’ features.)

At this point, I’m at a bit of an impasse. I manage my books best through good old-fashioned spreadsheets, but it’s nice to have an invoicing system that also has the ability to manage payments. Is it worth the price any longer to leave it in the hands of the biggest fish in the pond, or is it time to move on? Ideally I’d like to move on, but now just to figure out where to go from here.

Just in case we weren’t sure where extreme capitalism is taking us, this week I got a birthday email from the credit account we used to buy our bed last year inviting me to spend more money. Which furthers my resolve to stick to cash as much as possible from now on.

Something that I’m especially mindful of right now is decision fatigue, coupled with feeling that in some ways, I have simultaneously too many choices and also not enough options. A precarious place to be right now, as someone who is a chronic over-thinker.

In addition to reducing lobbying, the current reporting on quarterly fundraising for presidential candidates reminds me that stamping money out of politics should also be about not allowing paid advertising for anyone running for office.

Here’s an example of a way data gets used in seemingly innocuous ways, but is concerning for privacy nonetheless: Years ago, I had a Mint account, which I’ve long since abandoned. I still get periodic emails from them, and yesteday I recieved a “year in review” style email. In it, it referenced the following:

Streaming services spending:

• $314M to Netflix
• $166M to Hulu
• $47M to Sling TV

It also broke down how much Uber was utliized compared to Lyft, and which food delivery services were used the most (Grubhub, Uber Eats, Doordash), also with their respective totals.

I’m sure they’ll couch this as data being “anonymized”, so it’s “private” in terms of not being able to tie some data specifically to you the individual. All the same, these types of data mining show clearly that using certain services like this afford the companies providing the service to see just about everything you pull into the service.

Sure, a “year in review” is looking at trends and is trying to be cute about it, but this is almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg. Mint is a free service to users, and the service’s business model used to rely solely on affiliate links for services purchased from users within it. That seems to be still the case, on the surface, but it’s not a hard leap to imagine that plenty of large companies would love to know more about how they’re doing among competitors.

it’s exactly this sort of information that should be kept fully private. This sort of information has no business being aggregated when the service, ostensibly, is supposed to help an individual budget and get a clearer picture of their finances. This makes me happy that I pay for YNAB, who has so far sent only information about education they provide, and ways to learn how to more effectively use their system.

Happy 2020. Let’s make this a year in which we acknowledge our collective humanity, push back against turning everything into a data point, and place value on privacy and using the things in our lives thoughtfully.