A musing Beam

Some of you may be familiar with Dave Ramsey.  He is a financial advisor with his own show, etc.  He compares his advice to a dietician who says "Eat less, exercise more."  I came across a resonating line in his Total Money Makeover book a few nights ago:  "My plan isn't complicated, it's just hard." Partially because we felt like we were treated poorly by AT&T (which jacked our interest rate up to 26% after we were a day late on our payment ... the day before the new consumer protection law went into effect), and partially because we have felt like we were financial dolts, Dee and I decided to join the ranks of people following the Ramsey plan.  It requires a few things: 1)  Get current on all your bills 2)  Create a detailed, written, zero-based monthly budget (and use it!) 3)  Get a liquidated $1000 emergency fund 4)  Cut up all your credit cards and vow never to use credit again (with the possible exception of a home) 5)  Pay off all your cred

I had a crazy trip to Minnesota in the latter half of last week.  My law school sent two moot court teams, and we competed.  Moot court is where you get up in front of a 3-judge panel and argue a contentious, current legal issue for an hour (each team puts up two people, and each of those gets a quarter hour).  I like to compare it to being like doing a comedic set, except you have to be respectful to the hecklers who are constantly attempting to throw you off your game. To make a long story short, we lost every match.  The first one was actually against our other team, and basically both sides had their worst arguments of the competition.  We lost to them, but it seemed pretty close to a tie (which would have meant they won, anyway, based off a written portion of the competition).  The next two arguments we thought we had destroyed the other teams -- our coach sent a text out saying we had just "pummelled" one of the other teams ... yet we lost both times, somehow.  Our fi