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Blog

Musings on personal finance and more. Not written with AI since 2012.

I am not me: Capital One and the failure of Know Your Customer

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A frustrating experience trying to login to an account leads to a rumination on how Know Your Customer (KYC) fails us and our humanity. In the financial services industry, you need to be familiar with a procedure called Know Your … Read More … Read More

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Time to be intentional with your accounts

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Verifying your accounts will keep your funds all accounted for, and will help you to decide if it’s time to change servicers. It’s a new year, and with it the usual deluge of good intentions, lofty goals, and everything going … Read More … Read More

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Reflect on how much progress you’ve made

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Why and how to reflect on how far you’ve come, not just how far you need to go, so you can be stay motivated to continue. I moved to New York City in 2003. Life in NYC was hard, and … Read More … Read More

Year in review 2019: Top 10 posts

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The top posts of the year on Empathic Finance, including both my favorites and the ones readers viewed most. At the beginning of this year, I made a big change to this site. After six years of blogging on a … Read More … Read More

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Your income is not your value

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Our beliefs about income can be toxic. People who make more than you are not better than you, and they don’t have a higher value either. I’m a huge fan of older video games, the ones made before 1990. Some … Read More … Read More

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How would your life be different if you weren’t concerned about money?

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Your life may look very different if you weren’t concerned with making money. You should learn this now to help you be more intentional later. Most of us have aligned our lives around the acquisition and protection of money in … Read More … Read More

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The ritual of the end-of-the-month budget freeze

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When your budget has you run low on money at the end of the month, the upside is that it feels all the better when the new month begins. Wow, this last month was tight. I pretty much spent all … Read More … Read More

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The Semi-Joint Life: How partners can (partially) combine their finances

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When partners wish to share finances without going all-in, there is more than one way to set up both individual and joint accounts to maximize everyone’s feelings of autonomy and connection. I believe that there are four main ways that … Read More … Read More

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Is financial coaching the same in different countries?

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Our financial products may be different, but that’s not what’s important. Most of my readers are from the U.S. That’s not surprising. I’m from the U.S., and I talk about U.S. specific issues, from current events such as the 2016 … Read More … Read More

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How to break the belief that it’s only okay to spend on your needs

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You have much more control over what you define as wants and needs than you think. Some people have a lot of trouble spending money. I’m talking about the people who see spending as a “bad thing”, who feel shame … Read More … Read More

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