I read a book called The Millionaire Next Door that described how getting married and staying married was one obvious way to boost wealth. Not only is divorce really expensive, but married people on average use less space per person than single people.
You can obviously construct scenarios where this isn't true—what if you marry a spendthrift?—but it was still a really interesting point.
I haven't read the book but my wife and I started investing in our mid twenties and were blessed with generous matched contributions from our employer. We both maxed out the 401k contributions and (she) still does. We also do ROTH's as much as we can. She is into finance and 'manages' it by logging into the accounts 2x per year, looking at performance and making adjustments as needed.
The growth in the past few years is cool to watch now that we are ten years in and the curve is accelerating; even with the stock market crash in '08.
We are sensible on how we spend but not spend thrifty. We take at least on nice vacation a year and are able to visit family in other parts of the country for holiday's etc. When we invest in equipment for hobbies etc - I tend to buy things that last: Burton snowboards, Patagonia gear (I have a winter coat that is almost 10 years old, etc ...)
There was a monkey wrench thrown into the mix about four years ago but as she gets older her costs seem to be coming down. I'll know more how this affect the long term savings plan when she gets closer to being a teenager.
If you want to improve the returns on your 401k, a buddy of mine runs http://kivalia.com, where they provide advice on allocating the money to funds available in many companies 401k's.
If your company is not listed, you can easily create a new plan (clever crowd-sourcing ;), which then gets optimized. You can also get feedback on your current allocations. HTH.
This comment: "Third, every time something goes wrong anywhere, a blizzard of new rules and procedures descends upon the school's obligations, lest that mishap recur anywhere else" is a lot like the part of The Other half of Artists Ship (http://paulgraham.com/artistsship.html) where pg says,
"Whenever someone in an organization proposes to add a new check, they should have to explain not just the benefit but the cost. No matter how bad a job they did of analyzing it, this meta-check would at least remind everyone there had to be a cost, and send them looking for it."
Good point. I'd also add something from George Orwell's Politics and the English Language: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm , where he has a bunch of rules like the ones in this thread: "(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
Rules aren't really rules—they're principles. Part of knowing how to write is knowing when and how to bend or break those principles.
Depending on how you use it, OS X can feel a lot like Linux. If you're spending most of your time in Terminal and Emacs, usually ssh'ed into a server, then your technical answer will diverge pretty far from your "real" or metaphysical answer.
I work for multiple clients. After messing a few years with "I need a postgres for this one, a mysql for this one and sometimes, things just break on the live server because Mac OS X is almost linuxlike", I switched to a fully virtualized development stack and haven't looked back since. So the answer is not metaphysical, but true.
I read a book called The Millionaire Next Door that described how getting married and staying married was one obvious way to boost wealth. Not only is divorce really expensive, but married people on average use less space per person than single people.
You can obviously construct scenarios where this isn't true—what if you marry a spendthrift?—but it was still a really interesting point.