I think most people treat their housing payment as the one thing they’re gonna pay no matter what. If you miss a credit

Thanks for reading! I have loads of food essays (delicious recipes too) and thoughtful and quirky simpler living essays waiting for you. (Well over 100 of them!) And this story caught the attention of NBC News in New York!,If you take home $4,000 a month and want to attain financial flexibility (or freedom) ASAP, it begins and ends with your expenses. I keep my expenses — fixed and discretionary — below $3,000 (generally around $2,500) most months. If I were earning $4,000 a month, this means I have between $1,000 and $1,500 left over each month. Remember those numbers.,If anything’s over, it’s the city previously known as “Instagram New York.” Covid-19 has pulled the filter off much of our lives, revealing fault lines that had been there all along. Nowhere has this shift been more apparent than in New York City. The wealth that flooded into the city during the Bloomberg years, bringing with it a staggeringly inflated real estate market and making a comfortable home here unfeasible for anyone but the very wealthy also brought with it a rosy lens that allowed a lot of people to “perform” city life. Crime was low; social media and delivery apps replaced serendipitous interaction, allowing residents to glide alone in black cars or eat without the mess of ever getting a table. Increasingly, New York seemed to function less as a lived place than a recognizable backdrop against which people could live otherwise largely suburban lives without having to contend with the unpredictability city life normally involves.,So when I say it’s easier than you think to amass $1 million in 20 years, I say it from a position of privilege to an audience largely comprised of people on the same perch. This isn’t to say hard work doesn’t get you anywhere. It does. But, speaking for myself, I’m aware I have a head start. And it has little to do with anything other than my place in life. Hard work didn’t get me here. Luck and where and when my parents decided to have sex mainly did.,I’m under no illusion. I write these articles about personal finance from a privileged position. There’s a good chance you read them with privilege fully intact. If we spend our time thinking about building wealth rather than how to make ends meet, chances are we were born on third base. We didn’t hit a triple.,And yet, despite the stories of an exodus from New York, real life in the city remains on the rebound even as the days grow colder. The move to outdoor dining has left parts of the city feeling like Paris (perhaps even more so than the City of Lights itself, which is currently under curfew as a second wave of the virus hits the city). There is live music to be found in pockets everywhere. A few weeks ago, I biked across Terrace Drive in Central Park at 11 p.m. and jumped off halfway to join in an impromptu, and socially distant, dance party. Museums have opened and, absent the tourists, can actually be enjoyed on the weekend. Wherever you turn, there is a pervasive feeling of residents doing their best — to be safe, to keep others safe, and to enjoy themselves however they can. To live.,It’s really no surprise, given all this, that the last viral “New York is dead” cri de coeur came in the form of an opinion piece in the New York Post by a wealthy white man (no, not the president). New York may have been declared dead in the past, he conceded, but this time, it’s “completely dead.” Or that a letter sent to the mayor by 163 business leaders in September that described “widespread anxiety over public safety, cleanliness and other quality of life issues that are contributing to deteriorating conditions” was barely recognizable to those actually living here; Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, told the Times they had waited to send it till after Labor Day because “they felt it was unseemly to be writing from the Hamptons.”,I wish Apple has sent me the baseline, $999 MacBook Air with its 7-Core CPU. I don’t imagine the benchmarks would be wildly different, but that OpenCL number would surely be lower, by how much I do not know. In any case, keep in mind that I tested the $1,249, 8-core, 512 GB model (all systems come with at least 8 GB of RAM, which mine had).,It’s tempting to crack wise and say, “If that’s so, then I’ve been seeing a lot of dead people these days.” Except that nearly 24,000 New Yorkers have died from Covid-19, making Donald Trump’s trash-talking even more gruesome.,Here’s how it can look on the ground. After establishing the cash flow part, it really is easy. So easy, in fact, it’s a wonder more of us don’t do exactly what I’m about to lay out.,A running joke on social media among New Yorkers who stayed put for the pandemic roller coaster ride these last seven months is to match evidence of joyful city life that has exploded everywhere against proclamations of the city’s death. “New York Is Dead!” run the headlines next to photos of streets teeming with outdoor diners and shots of Central Park’s Great Lawn full of masked New Yorkers socially distanced in the late autumn sun. This outcry kicks into overdrive every time the president gets in on the doomsday action, as he did again during Thursday’s debate: “Take a look at what’s happening to New York. It’s a ghost town. It’s dying.”,Those questions aside, Apple M1 chip, Apple’s first home-grown silicon, is a major achievement. It’s powerful, stable, sips power, and can power up in seconds. The compatibility circle that encompasses native and many third-party apps (thanks to Rosetta 2) is not just commendable, it’s usable. As a result, the Apple Silicon strategy leaps out of the starting gate and gallops into a future where Intel on Macs will, ultimately, be nothing but a warm memory.,It sounds painfully impossible to “only” spend $3,000 versus $4,000 in monthly cash flow, or to “only” spend $4,000 versus $6,000 in monthly cash flow. It sounds tough to have a significant surplus left over at the end of the month. Except, it’s not. Not if you sacrifice a little and compromise a little more.,Those questions aside, Apple M1 chip, Apple’s first home-grown silicon, is a major achievement. It’s powerful, stable, sips power, and can power up in seconds. The compatibility circle that encompasses native and many third-party apps (thanks to Rosetta 2) is not just commendable, it’s usable. As a result, the Apple Silicon strategy leaps out of the starting gate and gallops into a future where Intel on Macs will, ultimately, be nothing but a warm memory.,If you’d like to post a representation of yourself online without worrying about mass surveillance—or if you just want to test how well your contacts know you by swapping your Twitter profile pic for a fake and seeing if anyone notices—check out the Anonymizer. At the very least, it’s fun to see a grid of your own personal fake clones. And if you’re posting sensitive content online, worried you could be targeted for stalking, or just want to control who knows your true appearance, the Anonymizer isn’t just a plaything — it’s a potentially powerful tool.