Why do card counters sleep in their cars?

For the last few months I’ve been casually following up on my long-time interest in learning to play blackjack. I’ve now sunk about 100 hours into learning more about blackjack and casino “advantage play” in general, including listening to podcasts, reading forums, and yes, playing for real money in one of our local casinos. While it’s safe to say the casino still has a healthy advantage over me, what has struck me the most dipping my toes into the advantage play community is just how much it resembles the one I’ve been immersed in for well over a decade now: travel hacking.

Introduction to card counting

For those unfamiliar with blackjack advantage play, it consists of three largely unrelated components:

1. The ability to master “basic strategy.” For every set of blackjack rules, each hand of blackjack has a corresponding ideal move that offer the highest expected value to the player. This move does not always increase your chances of winning the hand; sometimes the move with the highest expected value is to surrender your hand and half your bet, guaranteeing your defeat! Playing perfect basic strategy reduces the house edge in most blackjack rulesets to 1% or less.

2. The ability to accurately count cards. There are a number of different card counting techniques with various advantages and disadvantages, but they all share the requirement that you update a running count as the dealer reveals each card. The ability to count cards has no effect on your odds of winning any given hand.

3. The ability to make the necessary moves to take advantage of perfect card counting. The most important of these is changing the size and number of your bets depending on your running count.

Note that these three skills are essentially unrelated. Learning basic strategy is a form of pattern recognition. While there are technically 310 different combinations of dealer and player hands that must be memorized to play perfect basic strategy, these fall into just 6-12 “patterns” (depending on how you find it easiest to memorize them). It probably took me 10-15 hours practicing with the “Blackjack101” iPhone app to be able to consistently play perfect basic strategy. If you practice using an app, note that you should find out the most common ruleset at your local casinos in order to make sure you’re getting the most practice on the ruleset you use the most. Different tables at the same casino can also have different rulesets.

Counting cards is a completely different skill, since there are no patterns in the order of cards dealt from a well-shuffled deck. The only way to learn to count cards is through hundreds or thousands of hours of practice. Depending on how you’re wired, you may find it easy or hard, relaxing or irritating, but if you cannot count cards perfectly every time then you cannot play blackjack with an advantage.

Finally, you must be able to adhere to a system of play that maximizes the amount of money at stake when the deck is rich with cards that benefit the player and minimizes the player’s losses when the odds are in the casino’s favor. This is not a matter of math or intellect at all: the knowledge of the correct bet flows mechanically from the method of card counting employed. But the ability to act on that knowledge is a matter of character and circumstance.

Advantage play and travel hacking

Using this framework, the parallels to travel hacking are obvious.

1. Travel hacking requires you to learn and access with relative ease the details of, if not the entire loyalty universe, then at least the programs that are or might be relevant to you. For a casual US travel hacker, that means at least 4 or 5 airline loyalty programs, one or two hotel programs, and a bank rewards program. Serious travel hackers learn much more, including about obscure and foreign loyalty programs.

2. A completely unrelated skill is learning and monitoring the current state of travel hacking techniques. Here, just as in card counting, accuracy is absolutely essential, since older techniques are constantly dying while new ones emerge. There’s no point applying for a signup bonus that expired last week, or expecting bonus grocery store rewards for a promotion that starts next Friday. Just as the skill of card counting atrophies without constant practice, returning to travel hacking after a long break requires refamiliarizing yourself with the current state of play.

3. Finally, perfect knowledge of loyalty programs and travel hacking techniques is useless without the ability to make the moves necessary to take advantage of them.

Most people cannot play blackjack with an advantage or succeed at travel hacking

A common lie, the motives behind which I’ll return to shortly, is that “anyone can win at blackjack” or that “anyone can be a travel hacker” (the latter claim normally safely couched by affiliate bloggers as “anyone can save money on travel” or something equally mealy-mouthed).

This is, of course, false.

Most people can’t play perfect basic strategy or memorize a dozen airline sweet spots because it is boring and has no meaningful connection to their everyday life.

Most people can’t count cards or decide whether a potential manufactured spend technique is worthwhile because it requires tedious and unfamiliar calculations.

Most people can’t make large bets when the deck is stacked in their favor or go big when a one-of-a-kind travel hacking opportunity presents itself because they are loss-averse, bet too low and forego lucrative plays, locking in their losses while passing up the chance to win correspondingly big.

Successful card counters and travel hackers don’t last long

What struck me most while learning about the card counting community and the available resources is that the biggest voices for card counting don’t seem to actually do it very much.

The typical progression is that someone discovers card counting, has a rough introductory period full of endearing anecdotes, then goes on a winning streak of 6-48 months (the length is immaterial). After that, they start Youtube channels, record podcasts, write books, and launch websites to sell card counting content and merchandise.

This is the same progression we see in travel hacking. Someone discovers travel hacking, has a few big scores, gets involved in the community, then they launch a blog, a podcast, a Youtube channel, and an affiliate relationship with the credit card companies.

There are two major reasons for this. First, the money is better, certainly on an hourly basis. Most travel hacking techniques require at least some time and attention to implement on an ongoing basis. Even simple online techniques require you to sit down at your computer and actually click the necessary buttons to trigger your payout each time. Writing a blog post full of credit card affiliate links, on the other hand, creates a kind of passive, semi-permanent money-generating asset as new readers discover the post and click through to your payday.

The second reason is that most people, even skilled, experienced people, don’t seem to enjoy it very much. For a lot of card counters and travel hackers, actually putting their knowledge to work seems like an unfortunate chore at worst or a dead-end job at best. “Running a business” packaging bite-sized tips on Tik Tok while burnishing your reputation as a Respected Elder must seem like bliss by comparison.

Why do card counters sleep in their cars?

One of the questions posed in the original “Freakonomics” book was “Why do drug dealers still live with their mothers?” The answer they arrive at is that despite handling enormous amounts of money, most individual drug dealers make poverty wages, so they live with their mothers, like many people who don’t make any money and are on speaking terms with their parents do.

What you realize listening to professional card counters is that they live in a kind of self-inflicted misery, driven in large part by the fear of “giving away their edge.” This often takes the ironic form of ascetisism. A common boast is that during a gambling trip a player will play for 20 hours straight every day. When they travel in teams, advantage players will bunk up in a single hotel room like a high school marching band to save on rooms. One player described sleeping in his (heated and air -conditioned) Tesla over the summer as he drove from casino to casino counting cards.

Importantly, this behavior is not driven by anything inherent to the principles of blackjack advantage play. In blackjack (if the dealer is using a “shoe,” or box of cards that are shuffled only once and then dealt out in order), each shoe is a new randomly ordered sample of cards, so the player’s result from the current shoe cannot have any effect on the probability of winning the next one. That means the player’s advantage, if any, is the same regardless of the number of shoes played. In other words, the player can stop at any time without affecting in any way the expected value of the hours they do play.

And yet, people who claim they have an expected advantage over the house of $100 per hour are willing to work for 20 hours in a row before falling asleep in their cars, all in order to save a few hundred dollars on a hotel room.

Conclusion

Lest anyone suggest I’m being snobby when suggesting most people can neither play blackjack with an advantage nor travel hack successfully, nothing could be further from the truth. Neither requires any special aptitude or gift.

Most people cannot do it because most people do not want to do it. If you try to talk to them about it, they may pay attention for a longer or shorter period of time out of politeness, and then they will lose interest and seek to change the subject to something that interests them instead of something they find tedious.

This is good and proper, not because it “preserves the opportunities for longer” or any hogwash like that, but because people should go through their lives seeking out things they find interesting and rewarding, not be lectured to by pedants about how they’re leaving money on the table by not doing whatever that particular pedant happens to believe is best for them.

The flip side is that when a nice online personality tells you something is easy, fun, and profitable, there’s a good chance that it is: for the person trying to get you to participate, against your better judgment.

Don't sleep on the Better Balance Rewards forced product change spending bonus

One of the interesting things about Bank of America credit cards, historically, has been that they were pretty indifferent to how many of the same credit card you carried. Bank of America’s credit card portfolio isn’t terribly impressive, but they had two gems where this indifference really shone: the Alaska Airlines suite of personal and business credit cards, with their generous annual companion tickets, and the Better Balance Rewards card, which offered $30 in cash per quarter, per card, as long as you simply paid off your card’s balance each month.

Knowing Bank of America’s willingness to let you carry multiple copies of the same card, many people used the Better Balance Rewards card as a target when requesting a product change from a card they’d already met the signup bonus on and didn’t have any more need for. $30 per quarter may not sound like much, but once you had a system set up to charge and pay off the card, it was also free money, which folks in our hobby are typically fairly interested in.

Back around May, 2023, those cards were forcibly product-changed into Unlimited Cash Rewards cards, which can be as good a way as any of earning 2.625% cash back on all purchases if you have Platinum Honors status with Bank of America. Of course, there’s no reason to have more than one 2.625% cash back card, so it wasn’t unreasonable to bemoan the loss of your cache of Better Balance Rewards cards which provided a steady flow of quarterly income.

Sidelined in that conversation was the fact that alongside the loss of passive income, the new Unlimited Cash Rewards cards came with a bonus of $200 when you spend $1,000 on the card by September 30, 2023. Since there’s no reason to put actual spend on more than one of these cards, I suddenly worried that folks who had more than one Better Balance Rewards card may have forgotten about the little glossy sheet that came in their new card’s envelope describing the free money they were entitled to.

So, since September is not all that far away, be sure to score the $200 product change bonus before you cancel your new Unlimited Cash Rewards cards or change them to a more valuable product.

Cross-post: My So-Called Gig Economy

[Dear readers: this is the first and only post from my new blog about the app-based delivery economy you’ll find here on the main Free-quent Flyer Blog feed. You can read or subscribe to that blog at its own home, My So-Called Gig Economy.]

I recently decided, due to a combination of boredom and poverty, to try to break into the gig economy racket before it’s too late, as rising interest rates are set to destroy the ability of the existing delivery companies to continue to finance their operations through endless inflows of venture capital.

Since I think the subject will be interesting to some, but not all, of my existing travel hacker readers, and some people who have no interest in travel hacking, I am breaking my experiences with app-based delivery companies out into a separate blog, which I’ve tentatively titled “My So-Called Gig Economy.” I’m hosting the blog so I reserve the right to change the title at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. Suggestions welcome.

Before I get into my usual way-too-specific specifics, I thought I’d run through some preliminary material first.

Why work?

I’ve been fortunate enough to live a pretty interesting life so far, accumulating degrees and qualifications like a good Millennial all along the way, but after getting fired from my last job in March, 2020, I’d frankly assumed I’d never work for anybody else again. And, judging by the astonishment of my friends and family when I told them I was looking for a job, nobody else did either.

But as my long-time readers know, I have an unfortunate literal tendency and even more unfortunate longing to prove people wrong, so when the pages of our national newspapers were filled, day after day, week after week, with pressing news of the “labor shortage,” I had to find out for myself what all the fuss was about.

So I started applying for jobs, everywhere and anywhere I could think of. I applied at the little grocery store I shop at 3 times a week. I applied at the medical cannabis dispensary down the street. I applied to be a front desk clerk at the Washington Hilton. I applied for every job in the DC government. I almost signed up for the National Guard but had second thoughts just in time.

No takers. Having proven my point, to myself at least, that the problem is an unwillingness by employers to hire, rather than an unwillingness by workers to labor, I was ready to consider my work done. That would have been the end of the story, but for a critical intervening factor.

Why app-based delivery work?

That factor is that I have unlimited free bike and scooter transportation. Once you remove the profit (or, in the case of delivery apps, the loss) taken by the middleman, app-based delivery work has essentially three inputs: social capital, time, and transportation.

This calculation is conducted differently depending on the context. Often, you’ll see people take their total income from a day or week of deliveries and then deduct a blended fuel/depreciation rate for the use of their private vehicle. This allows them to calculate a crude “pre-tax” hourly pay rate.

But that crude calculation makes no sense in my case: I don’t own a private vehicle and don’t pay to operate, store, or fuel one. Likewise, since I don’t have a job, I don’t have any benchmark with which to compare the hourly income from my delivery work. This is not to say my time is “worthless” (I like my time!) just that there’s no monetary rate to usefully compare it to, since no one will hire me to do anything else.

So I decided, once and for all, to figure out what the deal is with the gig economy, specifically the app-based delivery gig economy.

Prospectus

My usual approach is to go all-in on new projects all at once, but it’s remarkably difficult to find useful information about getting started in the app-based delivery economy, so I’m making an exception and am instead going to proceed one app at a time, and hopefully end up creating the kind of objective, unaffiliated, unsponsored resource I myself have been looking for the past few weeks.

I’ve tentatively decided that my first app to experiment with is DoorDash, so if you have a driver referral link, please leave it in the comments or send it to my usual e-mail address: freequentflyer@freequentflyerbook.com (there’s no way I’m creating a new e-mail address for this blog).

In my next post, I hope to cover signing up (with or without a referral link), figuring out what gear I want or need, and hopefully my first delivery.

My short, boring COVID-19 infection, treatment, and recovery

Since the beginning of the pandemic, my family has taken the novel coronavirus just about as seriously as anybody we know. In one way this was made easy since the United States imposed virtually no restrictions during the entire course of the plague, and we were already used to working remotely, so office closures didn’t make much of an impact on our day-to-day routines. And, at least in the period since rapid testing became free and easily available, we managed to avoid contracting the virus to the best of our knowledge.

Until now! For readers who have similarly been dodging raindrops since 2020, I thought a quick breakdown of my infection and recovery might be interesting.

Background: vaccinated, boosted

Since the initial rollout of vaccines, I’ve been eager to get to the front of the line, and received Pfizer doses on March 13 and April 13, 2021, plus a Pfizer booster on November 19, 2021. I had no reaction to my initial dose and booster, but the second dose left me with aches and pains and a very low fever for around a day afterwards.

Infection: possibly Saturday, August 27, 2022

As I said, my family is extremely diligent about wearing high-quality masks indoors, and if I had to guess I’d say mask wearing indoors in our area is roughly 30-50%. On Saturday I went to a crowded, hot, outdoor farmers market, and while I wore my mask much of the time, essentially no one else did.

First symptoms: Monday, August 29, 2022

I’ve been spending a lot of time at our outdoor community pool lately, since it is scheduled to close today, and on Monday started to feel pretty rough. I thought it was some combination of dehydration and heat stroke, and when I got home my partner seemed worried I was a bit out of it. Overnight I began coughing, and woke up with some chest pain.

First positive test: Tuesday, August 30, 2022

It didn’t occur to me to test Monday night, but on Tuesday morning I took one of the dozens of rapid tests in my linen closet, and it came back an immediate positive. It turns out you don’t really need to wait the full 15 or 20 minutes to get your test result: if you’re positive, the test will show it almost right away.

Since I had a pantry full of tests, I promptly took a second one, which if anything came back even faster. I had COVID-19.

Paxlovid telemedicine appointment: Tuesday, August 30, 2022

My city has contracted with a telemedicine provider to prescribe Paxlovid, the anti-viral medication that’s under emergency use authorization from the FDA to treat COVID-19 in high-risk adults. After a few minutes of fretting, I decided to go ahead and request an appointment. The nice lady on her couch in Arizona asked me a few questions, confirmed I was eligible, and said she’d send my prescription in to the pharmacy of my choice. Within 15-20 minutes I was notified my prescription was ready for me at my nearby Safeway pharmacy.

Now, you may have already foreseen an obvious problem here: the pharmacy is inside the Safeway. But I’m a highly infectious carrier of the novel coronavirus. But because this is America, there was nothing to do about it. I walked into the pharmacy, asked for the prescription, and the pharmacist recoiled in horror: “You cannot be in here! You are putting all of our lives in danger!”

Well, no shit lady, that’s why I need the pills. She ended up relenting, and thus my Paxlovid journey began.

(Failed) quarantine

During the first 3 days of my positive tests, my partner and I did our best to maintain an in-house quarantine. We knew I was positive, and we knew she was exposed, but she was still testing negative, so our logic was the more we could do to isolate, the higher a chance we could keep it that way. On Friday, 3 days after my first positive test, she finally tested positive as well. Given the near-certainty I was the source of the infection so we weren’t risking any radical mutations in the virus, at that point we broke down the quarantine and started a Lord of the Rings marathon.

Paxlovid treatment: Tuesday PM - Sunday AM

The Paxlovid treatment is pretty simple: 3 pills, twice a day, for 5 days. I only had two side effects, diarrhea on the first two days, and Paxlovid Mouth the entire time. For obvious reasons, I’ll focus on the latter.

Paxlovid Mouth is strange because it began almost as soon as I took the first evening’s round of medication, and is only completely wearing off now (about 30 hours after my last dose). If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s an extremely widely experienced side effect of Paxlovid that gives the entire inside of your mouth a single, rather unpleasant, bitter flavor. I compare it to the moment after you swallow a bite of grapefruit, when the sweetness is gone and your mouth is left tasting only the underlying bitterness.

It’s not that bad to begin with, if you’re expecting it, and after a while you get used to it, but it doesn’t really go away the entire time you’re taking the drug — except when you’re eating and drinking. If it bothers you a lot there’s not really anything to do but have a range of sweet and savory snacks lying around to suck on, since as long as you’re eating or drinking, the sensation goes away entirely.

First negative test: Saturday, September 3, 2022

As I said, since I have a closet full of rapid tests, I didn’t see any reason not to test every day. Between Tuesday and Friday all my tests were positive, but Saturday morning I got my first negative rapid test, and had the same result Sunday and today, so my total tested positivity period was just 4 days (although if I had tested Monday, August 29 I’m sure it would have been positive as well).

I’m now feeling fine, although mindful of the possibility of a “rebound” like Biden and Fauci experienced after their own courses of Paxlovid treatment.

Conclusion

I am perfectly aware that it’s impossible to say anything apolitical about the pandemic, and I am not going to try.

I got vaccinated and boosted as soon as possible.

I wear high-quality masks indoors and on transit.

I began Paxlovid immediately after testing positive.

I quarantined.

I had a short and uneventful experience with the disease.

Other people who took none of those steps had the same outcome.

Other people who took all of those steps died.

But I’m happy I took the steps I did and happy I had the outcome I did.

Interest rates are starting to get more interesting

One of my favorite resources is DepositAccounts, which performs the simple, essential function of aggregating interest rates across a vast array of savings products. As you’d expect, the site is financed by ads and affiliate links, but in my experience the data is extremely accurate, so they’re a great first-stop when you’re exploring what’s the best place to put your money. All of that is just to say, most of the datapoints below come from DepositAccounts, not any original research of my own.

Yes, higher interest rates are passed along to (vigilant!) customers

There’s a stale cliche that when oil prices rise, gasoline prices jump immediately, but when oil prices fall, gasoline stays elevated. Of course there’s no mystery there: when gas prices rise satellite vans park outside gas stations doing live interviews with regular folks complaining about the price of gas, and when gas prices fall the media move on to the next crisis.

Most people are even less conscious of how prevailing interest rates change over time. If you only buy a few houses in your lifetime, your awareness of mortgage interest rates is limited to may four or five snapshots in time. Even someone who replaces a car as often as every 3 or 4 years has much less awareness of auto loan interest rates than they do the price of gas.

Finally, most people don’t shop around for higher interest rates on their savings even as much as they do for lower interest payments on their loans. That’s why whenever I hear people complain that banks don’t pay anything on savings anymore, I ask them, “have you checked?”

Series I Savings Bonds are already interesting

A lot of folks have written about this deal already (myself included), but to summarize, Series I bonds have their interest rate for the next 6 months set twice a year, in May and November, but each reset is known several weeks in advance. For example, we’ll know the November, 2022 interest rate on October 13, 2022, when September’s consumer price index reading is announced.

This creates two opportunities, in April and October, to know the interest rate you’ll earn on new Series I bonds for an entire 12-month period. My favorite tool, although I’m sure there are many others, for tracking these interest rate adjustments is the very primitive Tipswatch. There you can see the rate you’re guaranteed to earn for 6 months on all Series I bonds purchased through October 31, 2022 (9.62% annualized), and the 4 known monthly components of the November rate adjustment, which you’ll earn for the second 6 months of your first year.

I have mixed feelings about long-term holding of Series I bonds, but I have unalloyed positive feelings about using them for medium-term savings in April and October, when you know the interest rate you’ll be paid for the entire initial 1-year holding requirement.

Rewards Checking accounts for high rates, benefits, and liquidity

While I was cruising around DepositAccounts I checked, as usual, what rates they were reporting on Rewards Checking accounts. These are federally-insured, fully liquid checking accounts that, when you perform a series of requirements each month, offer elevated interest rates and usually a few other potentially-valuable benefits, like refunded ATM fees (which can be worth more than the interest during months you’re traveling extensively!).

I was immediately confused because my beloved Consumers Credit Union Rewards Checking account, which has been at the top of the list as long as I’ve been checking it, no longer appeared at all!

Thinking I might have missed an e-mail announcing they were no longer offering those accounts, I hurried over to Consumers’s website and immediately discovered the reason for the omission: the site had been updated with new, even higher interest rates, and the new page must have broken the scrubbing tool DepositAccounts was using.

The highest rate is now 5% APY on balances up to $10,000, which is not quite as high as the 5.09% on up to $20,000 the account could earn when I first opened it, but still higher than any other accounts we’ll be looking at today. The requirement for 12 debit card transactions and $500 in ACH credits or mobile check deposits, plus $500 or $1,000 in Consumers credit card spending for the highest two rates, remains the same.

The next highest rate listed is 4% APY on up to $20,000 at Elements Financial. Besides the usual gimmick of requiring 15 debit card transactions, there’s one huge asterisk: you’ll only earn that rate for 12 months, before it drops in half to 2% APY. If you have $20,000 you want to keep liquid and an easy way to automate your 15 monthly transactions, that may be worth doing for a year (no direct deposit is required), just be sure to set a calendar reminder for 12 months from the day you open your account!

Certificates of Deposit are on the verge of being interesting

Next I scooted over to DepositAccounts’s CD page, which besides scraping rates off countless bank websites, also groups them by term. You can see how obviously helpful this would be when building a CD ladder, since it makes it instantly obvious which CD-issuer you should choose for each rung of your ladder. One thing to note is the system does group CD’s into approximate terms. This is important because many of the highest-earning CD’s are of odd durations, but DepositAccounts engine sensibly lumps a 49-month “special term” CD in with the 4-year CD’s instead of breaking it out separately.

With all that said, let’s look at what’s going on with CD rates by looking at the highest rates offered in each of the DepositAccounts term buckets:

• 3-month: 3% APY at TotalDirectBank (note the very high minimum)

• 6-month: 4% APY at Sun East FCU (9-month also available at same rate)

• 1-year: 3.14% APY at Lafayette FCU

• 18-month: 3.75% APY at NASA FCU (15-month CD)

• 2-year: 3.59% APY at La Capitol FCU (26-month CD, includes option of one-time interest bump)

• 3-year: 3.55% APY at Bread Savings

• 4-year: 3.85% APY at NASA FCU (49-month CD)

• 5-year: 3.65% APY at Bread Savings

• 6+-year: 3.25% APY at Marcus, Evansville Teachers FCU, and Discover (terms up to 10 years)

A few obvious things jumped out at me here.

First, in nine term buckets, there are nine unique institutions, so if were purchasing CD’s for multiple terms from a single issuer, you would be virtually certain to be leaving some interest on the table.

Second, these interest rates are almost high enough to begin looking competitive with rewards checking accounts. Earning 5% APY on $10,000 in liquid cash is great, but if you have somewhat more money you’re unwilling to risk losing, and are willing to give up just a little liquidity, earning 4% APY on 6-month and 9-month CD’s from Sun East is at least worth thinking about long enough to decide if it’s the right move for you.

Third, this combination of terms and rates has a peculiar feature: the longest-term rates are lower than the shortest-term rates, while the medium-term rates hover in a tight range. I say it’s peculiar because commonsense would say that long-term deposits are more valuable to a bank than short-term deposits, so banks should be willing to pay more interest to lock in those funds for longer. Instead, over the longer term we see rates collapse.

The reason is simple: when banks guarantee interest payments on a deposit, they’re not just betting that they’ll be able to make a profit while paying that interest rate today, but that they’ll be able to make a profit paying that rate across the entire term of the deposit, in other words, on the future course of interest rates.

Since the cost of your money is fixed (the interest they pay you), the profitability of the deposit depends on how much it earns them (the interest their borrowers pay them). If interest rates go up, the cost of the deposit remains the same, but interest revenue and profits increase. If rates fall, then your deposit earns the bank less money, but costs them the same to hold.

Limiting the premium they’re willing to pay long-term depositors is a way of hedging that bet on interest rates. If banks expected rising interest rates over the medium and long-term, they’d reduce their hedge and be willing to pay more to lock in long-term deposits at today’s (compared to the future) cheap rates. The more worried banks are about falling interest rates, the shorter a period they’re willing to commit to paying today expensive rates for.

Treasuries may already be interesting in high-tax states

I was glancing over the Vanguard Fixed-Income page and was genuinely a bit surprised at how much rates had risen recently:

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Over the short-term these rates are already close enough to compare favorably to CD’s, especially if you prefer to keep all your fixed-income in one place like a brokerage account rather than scattered all over the country.

But even over the longer term, remember that the interest treasuries pay, unlike CD’s, is taxable only at the federal level. In a high-income-tax state, a slightly lower interest rate may leave you with more disposable income after taxes.

Conclusion

To offer some quick takeaways:

• Both higher and lower interest rates are passed through to customers.

• Shop around. No one financial institution is going to have the best version of every product.

• The interest rate structure shows that banks are betting on flat and falling interest rates in the long term. If you think they’re wrong and that rates will rise instead, then keep your money in higher-interest shorter-term accounts to take advantage of those rising rates. If you think they’re right and that rates will in fact fall, then lock in today’s relatively high rates for as long as possible.

Background and review of my week living an all-scooter lifestyle

Over on my personal finance blog I wrote about the range of programs offered by the so-called “micromobility” companies to provide free or reduced cost access to the scooters and e-bikes that clutter the streets and sidewalks of even the nation’s small- and mid-sized cities. Having experimented with the programs for a little over a week, I want to share my experience using dockless scooters for virtually all my errands.

Experience applying for access programs

Here’s a quick rundown of my experience applying for each of the micromobility access/equity programs:

• Capital Bikeshare for All (online signup appears to be unavailable right now): our local docked bikeshare system is actually administered by Lyft, which also administers their "Capital Bikeshare for All” program. The only program that’s not free to sign up for, once approved you’re eligible for a $5 annual membership which allows you unlimited rides up to 60 minutes. This is actually more generous than regular $95 annual memberships, which offer unlimited 45-minute rides, presumably to reduce the risk of low-income riders accidentally incurring overage fees.

• BIKETOWN for All: I spend a lot of time in Portland, OR, and happened to be there when I started working on this project, so I looked into whether their docked bikeshare program had an accessibility program. Sure enough, BIKETOWN for All, also administered by Lyft, offers an identical benefit of unlimited 60-minute rides, including ebike rides (excluded from Capital Bikeshare for All). I created a BIKETOWN account and applied for BIKETOWN for ALL on June 27, 2022, and later that evening I received confirmation I was eligible and told to sign up for an annual free membership.

• Lime Access: I applied for Lime Access on June 23, 2022, and didn’t hear anything in the “couple of days” promised, so sent a follow-up e-mail to access@li.me on July 1. Finally, on July 8, I received an e-mail confirming I’d been approved. Instead of free rides I was given discounted pricing of $0.50 per unlock and $0.07 per minute. I appreciate the gesture, but I’m not here to pay money.

• Helbiz Access: I wasn’t able to apply for Helbiz’s accessibility program online, but after e-mailing access@helbiz.com with my ID and eligibility documents on June 27, 2022, I received a prompt reply on June 29 confirming my enrollment in Accessibility+, which includes 100 free 30-minute trips per month.

• Bird Access. Like the other micromobility companies, Bird offers a confusing array of discounted and free programs depending on the city you apply from. I started by submitting a support ticket for Bird Access online on June 23, 2022, and less than an hour later received a form e-mail explaining the process of enrolling in Community Pricing (their version of Lime’s discount program). I replied by e-mail that I wasn’t interested in Community Pricing, but rather the free Access program. Again after less than an hour I received a reply correctly explaining the Access program, and asking me to send a photo of my proof of eligibility, which I did the next morning. On July 6 I sent a follow-up e-mail, and less than 30 minutes later received a confirmation that I’d been enrolled for unlimited free rides.

The rest of this post will be dedicated to my experience using Bird scooters, so I’ll just offer a few remarks on the other programs first.

I paid the $5 Capital Bikeshare for All membership fee and did a little tooling around the neighborhood, but I don’t own a bike helmet so until I get one I’m not comfortable doing longer-distance rides (subscribe to the blog to support my newfound biking hobby!). I didn’t get a chance to take any BIKETOWN rides before I left Portland.

Lime is the only dockless scooter I’d ever used before, and I thought it was “kind of neat,” but the problem is that it’s very expensive. The $1 unlock fee (plus per-minute fees) means that for rides of any length whatsoever the bus or subway will be cheaper by an order of magnitude. Obviously a discounted fare will be cheaper than a full-price fare, but for almost all trips I’d rather walk or take the subway.

I have nothing to say about Helbiz because I have never been able to unlock the cable lock now required by DC on all dockless bikes and scooters. I can start a ride, I can push the unlock button, and nothing happens. If anyone has ever successfully unlocked a Helbiz cable lock, please, reveal your secret in the comments!

This isn’t a Bird ad — let’s do the criticism first

I’ve been deliberately taking Bird scooters everywhere for the last week to get as nuanced a sense of the advantages and disadvantages as possible, and I’ve simply fallen in love with them. Since this is going to be a glowing review, let me start with the downsides, of which there are many!

First, and this is a bit silly, Bird requires you to buy a minimum of $10 worth of “Bird Cash” before you can unlock any scooters. I consider this basically a $10 lifetime membership, since I never plan on spending any of it, but it’s twice the price of a $5 annual Capital Bikeshare for All membership, so Bird Access isn’t exactly free.

Second, while I’ve had a lot more luck with Bird cable locks than with Helbiz locks (0%), it hasn’t been 100%. I would estimate around 15-20% of the time Bird cable locks fail to open, whether for mechanical or mobile connectivity reasons. Fortunately, in my city Bird scooters are fairly ubiquitous, so it rarely poses a problem, but if you’re counting on a particular scooter you see available in the app, keep a backup or two in mind because the lock may simply not pop when you need it to.

Third, and of course this is true of all the scooter companies, maintaining balance with heavy groceries requires some practice and involves some danger. This isn’t a big deal when you’re just out for a joy ride, but if you plan on doing regular grocery or other shopping you probably need to invest in a well-balanced cargo backpack (and a helmet wouldn’t hurt).

Finally, give yourself a few rides to get used to the acceleration and speed of electric scooters. Electric motors famously have almost-immediate acceleration to top speed and if you’re not used to it you will be caught off balance. Start slow, get a feel for the throttle, and drive more defensively than you have ever driven before. In my city scooters are electronically regulated to 10 miles per hour which sounds slow, and would be if you were planning to scoot cross-country, but is faster than you are, realistically, able to walk or even jog. Going uphill I regularly pass bikers, and on side streets either keep up with or beat traffic most of the time. In short, 10 miles per hour in city traffic is faster than you think.

Bird Access has been amazing

With that out of the way, unlimited free usage of Bird scooters has been awesome. The easiest way to describe it is that it lowers the hurdle to doing anything. I’m far from a homebody — I walk 5 or 6 miles a day — but when walking even I consider my direction, elevation, route, etc. Bird Access throws all that out the window.

When a 15-minute walk to the grocery store takes 3 minutes, then forgetting to pick up an onion isn’t such a big deal. When a 30-minute walk to a new takeout place takes 5 minutes, you try new takeout places. When an hour-long walk to the comedy club takes 10 minutes, you try out new comedy clubs. On a purely literal level, easy access to rapid point-to-point transportation makes the tradeoff between space and time much more flexible. Walk short distances, scoot medium distances, take transit long distances, with the definitions of “short,” “medium,” and “long” left entirely up to the reader.

Bird has an interesting feature that I had to figure out for myself, since like most apps these days, it doesn’t come with any documentation: you can “lock” a scooter without “ending” your ride. If you’ve never paid for one of these scooters that might sound like nonsense, but essentially it means you can keep anyone else from taking “your” scooter while you pop into a store to shop, so that when you’re finished shopping you don’t need to pay for another unlock fee. This isn’t terribly relevant if you’re riding for free, but it’s slightly more convenient than going through the rigamarole of “ending” and “beginning” rides every time you want to pop in for a baguette or a stir-fry (as I did the first few days until I discovered this feature).

One thing I was worried about when I adopted my all-scooter lifestyle was that I’d be getting less exercise. If scooting is so easy, surely I’ll spend less time walking. But this is a simple well-known error: increased access to (non-car) transportation on average increases physical activity, and indeed a quick glance at my iPhone’s step-tracking app doesn’t show a blip on the day I started scooting.

Conclusion: Scoot Free or Die

Bird Access has a funny feature: when you end each ride, it tells you how much you would have paid if you were paying. Over the last week I’ve take about 37 rides, which I would ballpark at around $100 (partly because I didn’t find the “lock” function mentioned above until about mid-week). In other words, you would have to be insane to pay money to live my all-scooter lifestyle. The logical, sensible thing to do would be to simply buy a personal scooter: even the high-end models top out at a few hundred bucks, after all.

But I don’t want to own a scooter. I don’t want to worry about it getting stolen, I don’t want to worry about maintaining it, I don’t want to worry about whether I’m over-charging it or under-charging it, and I don’t have anywhere to put it. What Bird Access offers is the best of both worlds: unlimited free access to scooters whenever and wherever I want them, and absolutely no responsibility for their care or maintenance. I hesitate to even call it a “business model,” since none of these micromobility companies has ever or will ever make any money, but as long as the rides are free, I’m scooting.

When did content creators get to be such big whiny babies?

I have a very boring origin story as a blogger: when I was in grad school, I got into travel hacking. After travel hacking for a few months, I realized that virtually all the existing blogs were dealing misinformation to their readers in order to sell credit cards, so I wrote an eBook laying out how travel hacking really works, and launched this website to promote the book (hence the clunky URL which we have all come to know and love).

Well, the book was a dud (thanks to all hundred of you who bought and borrowed it from Amazon over the last decade!), but the site took off, and I’ve been writing here ever since. So blogging for me has always been a case of learning by doing, and the same is true when it came to “monetization.” All the blogs I followed had Amazon affiliate links, so I signed up for Amazon affiliate links. All the blogs I followed had Google Adsense widgets, so I installed Google Adsense widgets. All the blogs I followed had credit card affiliate links, so I applied for credit card affiliate links. And, just in case, I also added the option to subscribe to the blog (originally through PayPal “recurring payments” of all things) and receive occasional subscribers-only newsletters.

It turns out, just like my book sales, Amazon, Google, and credit card affiliate links were all a bust. I don’t write about random crap on Amazon so I have nothing to link to. I don’t write about any high-value Google keywords, so Google only pays me once or twice a year when I crack the $100 payout threshold. And my credit card affiliate link provider immediately shut me down when they realized I was scraping the underlying links from their “preferred” ad copy.

Subscriptions, it turned out, were a model that worked great for me. Even after PayPal shut down my account (for unrelated hijinx), over 90% of my subscribers voluntarily migrated over to my new subscription manager, which I thought was very cool of them.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to my point: even if it’s true your users are your product, rather than your customers, doesn’t it still seem awfully rude to throw a big fit when they don’t behave as you demand?

The travel blogger crybaby lost his bottle

All these thoughts came to me as I read Gary Arndt’s elegy on leaving text-space for voice-space. Gary lays out an incredible story arc:

• “I was writing for an audience of real people who knew who I was and had made a decision to follow me. My website was an attempt to entertain and inform them about my travels.”

• “…as social media began to take off, I like many other people jumped on that bandwagon.”

• “This gave rise to clickbait and doing anything possible to grab eyeballs and clicks in competition with every other website on the internet.”

• “This meant a slavish devotion to Google and writing articles optimized for bots and algorithms, not actual people.”

• “My income dropped by 95% within a few weeks in March 2020. Traffic to my website dropped. Affiliate sales went to zero and still haven't really recovered for me. All the contracts I had lined up were canceled. An in-person event I had in the works was canceled. Reader tours I had planned were canceled as well.”

What’s astonishing about this story is the complete lack of agency Gary sees in his “downfall.” His website started off as a passion project for interested readers, but then he was forced to jump onto the bandwagon of social media by the “takeoff” of social media, forced to write clickbait to grab eyeballs, forced to slavishly devote himself to Google, and then forced to confront a sudden pandemic drop in his income.

But nobody did this to Gary. It’s not Amazon’s fault nobody uses my affiliate link, it’s not Google’s fault I don’t use high-value keywords or optimize my website for search engines (although Google also is apparently committing a lot of fraud through their Adsense auctions), and it’s not credit card companies’ fault I refuse to use their prewritten copy. My lack of affiliate income is a consequence of my own choices: that I write for the benefit of my readers.

Nobody ever stopped Gary from attempting to entertain and inform his audience about his travels! Everything that took that initial satisfaction away from him was the entirely predictable consequence of his own choices.

Matthew 6:24

Obviously I’m exaggerating a bit for comic effect. After all, I’m not a “personal responsibility” guy — after his income crashed in 2020, I hope Gary applied for EIDL and PPP loans, I hope he applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, SNAP, Medicaid, LIHEAP, and I hope he got all the social assistance he needed to pay his bills and stay safe throughout the pandemic.

But nobody made him reliant on social media, nobody made him reliant on search engine rankings, and nobody made him reliant on affiliate revenue. I don’t know Gary, I’ve never read a word he’s written before today, maybe he’s been doing dynamite work as a travel blogger for decades. But at the end of the day, he chose to sell his readers to advertisers, instead of selling his content to readers. That’s a choice millions of people make every day, rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely. But please, don’t pretend he or any other affiliate marketer is a martyr for facing the obvious, inevitable consequences of their own actions.

How I would (and might) maximize the current Series I Savings Bond deal

There’s an interesting deal available right now for folks who have extra cash lying around they are sure they won’t need for a least one year, and ideally won’t need for five.

Fixed-rate inflation-adjusted Series I Savings Bonds

When I first learned about this deal at Doctor of Credit I admit I scoffed. The high interest rate he described is on an annualized basis, but you’re only guaranteed the reported rate for 6 months, meaning you don’t even get a full year at that rate; it could drop to 0% for the second half of the year before you’re eligible to redeem your bonds, meaning you froze up to $10,000 in cash in a security earning nothing for 6 months of the year!

But, the more I thought about the deal, the more I came to appreciate the potential possibilities. So let’s take a closer look.

Series I Savings Bonds have 4 curious features:

• When issued, they have a fixed rate of interest that is known at the time of issuance and lasts for 30 years or until the bond is redeemed;

• added to that fixed rate is a variable, inflation-adjusted rate of interest that is calculated in November and May of each year and applied to outstanding bonds every 6 months (so a bond purchased in January has November’s rate until July — this will become relevant shortly);

• bonds earn interest starting from the first day of the month they’re purchased, so bonds purchased November 30 will earn interest from November 1;

• with limited exceptions, they must be held for 1 year, and redemptions are penalty-free after 5 years (you sacrifice 3 months of interest if redeemed between 1 and 5 years after purchase. I’m genuinely unsure whether the 1-year holding requirement is to the calendar date or to the calendar month of purchase — if you know, leave a comment!)

Finally, you’re limited to $10,000 in purchases through Treasury Direct per calendar year. You can purchase an additional $5,000 in I bonds through your tax refund, although which fixed and inflation-adjusted rate you get will depend on when Treasury transmits the order to the “Treasury Retail Securities Site in Minneapolis,” so you may not be able to get November’s rates if you file for an extension or your refund is delayed for any reason.

Why do I keep talking about November’s rates?

The fixed rate on Series I Savings Bonds, the minimum rate you’re guaranteed to earn for 30 years, is 0% APY, and has been for most of the last decade. But due to the method Treasury uses to calculate the inflation component of the interest rate, bonds purchased from November 1, 2021 through April 30, 2022, will earn a guaranteed interest rate of 7.12% APY.

Now be careful to understand what’s happening here: APY is calculated on an annualized (that’s the “A”) basis, but you’re only guaranteed to earn that rate for the first 6 months you own the bond. After 6 months, the inflation-adjustment will change to May’s rate, and 6 months after that (when the bond is eligible for redemption with a 3-month interest penalty) it will change to the November, 2022, rate.

Series I Savings Bonds are a highly optioned contingent bet on future inflation rates

One way of assessing a bond investment is to look at its “yield-to-worst,” which refers to the yield you would receive if, for example, a corporation or utility exercised a call option at its face value on a bond to refinance its debt at a lower interest rate before the end of the bond’s term. For a fixed-rate, zero-risk, United States Treasury bond, the yield-to-worst is simply the yield on the bond.

The inflation-adjusted interest rate and possibility of early redemption essentially means Series I bondholders are making a bet on the future of inflation rates, but one in which they have all the power.

You may believe, as I do, that May, 2022’s inflation adjustment will be sharply lower than November, 2021’s. So, what’s the yield-to-worst? Since the inflation adjustment is never less than 0%, and the fixed-rate is 0%, you would earn 0% in interest during the second 6-month holding period. In that case, your yield would be 3.56%. That’s not a shoot-the-lights-out great investment, but it’s a solid return on a completely safe investment. After 12 months, you can pull the money out (sacrificing 3 months of 0% interest) and do something else with it.

But however much you think inflation (technically the CPI-U measure of inflation) will fall between now and May, 2022, it probably won’t fall to 0%. Say it falls to 1.9%, which was fairly common prior to the pandemic — now you’ve earned 4.035% on your investment (after sacrificing the last 3 months of interest), which suddenly starts to look pretty comparable to the rewards checking accounts I regularly write about and use.

Optionality is very valuable

When you take this exercise a bit further, you can see the possibilities are even more lucrative than I’ve suggested, since after one year, you always have three options: “letting it ride,” “trading up,” or “cashing out.”

Every November and May, when the fixed rate and inflation adjustment are announced, you can see what the composite rate will be for the next 6 months:

• Let it ride: if the inflation adjustment remains higher than your other investment opportunities, you can leave the money to earn for another 6 months until the next adjustment, bringing you 6 months closer to the 5-year penalty-free redemption threshold;

• Trade up: if fixed interest rates soar and inflation crashes, then you can redeem your current 0% fixed-rate bonds and buy new, higher fixed-rate bonds;

• Cashing out: if fixed interest rates stay low and the inflation adjustment crashes, you can redeem your bonds and do anything you like with the money.

Obviously this is just another way of saying money is fungible and Series I bonds can be redeemed after one year. What makes this interesting is that this series of options continues every 6 months for 30 years!

What’s the optimal strategy to maximize optionality?

Due to the $10,000 Treasury Direct and $5,000 tax refund purchase limits, I believe the optimal strategy looks something like this:

• buy $10,000 in bonds by December 31, 2021 through Treasury Direct;

• in April, 2022, when the March CPI-U data is announced and the May, 2022, inflation adjustment is finalized, you’ll know the total annualized interest rate you’ll earn (6 months at November’s rate, and 6 months at May’s rate), and can decide whether to purchase another $10,000 through Treasury Direct based on that composite annualized rate;

• finally, by April 15, 2022, decide whether to lock in an additional $5,000 in bonds at the November/May composite rate, or file a tax extension and wait until October, when the November 2022 rate will be finalized, and decide then.

Obviously this represents a lot of corner cases and attention to detail, so it’s not for everyone. November’s rate is so high it would be perfectly rational to just lock it in with $10,000 this year and next year through Treasury Direct, and $5,000 next year through a tax refund. But since the genius of these bonds is their optionality, this is one way you can maximize that value.

Advantages to getting more involved in the travel hacking community

A few weeks back I wrote about some reasons why most people don’t have much interest in the travel hacking game, and why they’re mostly right: if you don’t have the bug, then it’s mind-bendingly boring to keep track of dozens of credit cards, loyalty programs, booking tricks, routing rules, etc.

Nevertheless, I’m quite involved, and if you’re reading this you probably are as well, so I thought I’d explore some of the obvious advantages of not just playing the game, but getting involved in one or more groups, following folks you respect on Twitter (or Instagram or Facebook, if you’re one of those people), and in general building relationships with other people who share your passion.

The most obvious advantage of making friends with other folks in the community is that it allows you to optimize your earning and redemptions over time. This can sometimes be purely transactional, and there’s nothing wrong with that: when I won a Bose sound system through an IHG sweepstakes, I sold it to a reader for a few hundred bucks lower than the list price, so he got a cheap sound system and I didn’t have to go to the trouble of listing it on Amazon or eBay, or dealing with a stranger through Craigslist or Facebook.

Folks like Vinh at Miles per Day have scaled this up a huge degree, going so far as to connect buyers and sellers of in-demand US Mint coins, but you don’t need to go that far to simply get to know people who might have miles and points you need, or might need the miles and points you have but don’t have immediate plans for.

Swapping referrals and signup bonuses

This option is talked about enough that I don’t think I need to go into it at any length, but when large credit card offers come around you may find that you’re not eligible (for example due to Chase’s 5/24 rule or Bank of America’s 2/3/4 rule) but someone else you know in the community is. Instead of sitting on the sidelines, you can ask your friends if they’d like to swap signup bonuses — maybe they’ve been banned from Citi for money order shenanigans and you haven’t, but you’re over 5/24 and they aren’t.

Expiring or useless free nights

Most folks don’t have too much trouble redeeming the free anniversary night that comes with the Chase World of Hyatt or American Express Hilton Honors Aspire credit cards, but might run into a problem when it comes to free night certificates with worse loyalty programs:

The IHG Rewards Club Premier Credit Card comes with a free reward night (at properties costing up to 40,000 points) on every anniversary, which is certainly worth more than the $89 annual fee to someone, but it might not be worth it to you because of how much more valuable the required Ultimate Rewards points to “fill out” an IHG award redemption would be if transferred to a different partner. Cancelling the card saves you $89, but it also means that no one gets to use the award, while you may be able to sell or trade it to someone who can get hundreds of dollars in value from it.

Likewise the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless (Chase) and Brilliant (American Express) cards come with annual free nights worth up to 35,000 and 50,000 points, respectively. Those aren’t worth their $95 and $450 annual fees to me, but especially in the case of the Brilliant card, you could easily wipe out your annual fee by selling or trading those rewards, when combined with the $300 property credit (Marriott properties used to sell physical gift cards you could resell or trade, although it’s been too long for me to know whether they still do).

Companion tickets

Another annual benefit you might not be able to personally use is airline companion tickets, like those offered by the Bank of America Alaska Airlines credit cards and the American Express Delta Platinum and Reserve cards.

The Alaska Airlines companion fare is the easiest to exchange with comrades because of a curious feature: when booking the companion ticket, any cash component of the reservation has to be paid for with an Alaska Airlines credit card, unless it is covered by funds you already have in your “Wallet.” This provides a simple way to book companion tickets without needing any information from the cardholder: just book a ticket that costs slightly more than the companion ticket, refund it to your Wallet, then pay with that balance.

Meanwhile, the Delta companion tickets have to be paid for in full with the credit card that generated the companion ticket (previously, any American Express card could be used, but that’s now changed in my experience). This makes the ticket slightly less transferable, since you need to place more trust in the person booking the ticket, which is another way of saying it’s good to make friends and connections in the community!

Transferable points and status

Another advantage of having friends in the community, especially ones that do things slightly differently than you, is the ability to pool points and status between programs. My two favorite examples of this are World of Hyatt and Hilton Honors.

World of Hyatt members can send and receive points by filling out the “Point combining request form,” which allows you to make award reservations out of the most advantageous account, and without contaminating either person’s relationship with Chase (there are strict limits on the number and frequency of Ultimate Rewards point transfers to non-household-members). Besides topping up a low balance, the main reason to do this is to make a Guest of Honor booking from an account with Globalist status, giving the guest the potentially valuable benefits like complimentary breakfast, lounge access, and waived parking fees, plus late checkout.

Hilton Honors has an even more streamlined system, with (in my experience) instant transfers after completing the online "transfer points” form. Their terminology is a little bit curious, but you “gift” points when you want to buy someone points with cash, and “transfer” points when you want to reduce your balance and increase their balance. Besides sharing Hilton’s fairly limited status benefits like potential upgrades, late checkout, and the dining credit that replaced their breakfast benefit, combining points in a single account allows you to take advantage of the very valuable 5th-night-free benefit on award stays (for elite members, including Silver elites, so pretty much everybody). This technique recently helped me book 7 nights in Hawaii for the price of 5 by combining 6 award nights and an annual American Express Surpass free night certificate.

Conclusion

Like any community, we’ve got our fair share of jerks, creeps, and affiliate bloggers, but overall I’ve been impressed by how warm and welcoming I’ve found the community to be, both at in-person events and online. There are obvious exceptions to be avoided, but if you’ve got the travel hacking bug, I think the advantages of getting more involved in the community swamp the pain of talking to the occasional jerk. And it always helps to remember that however small fry you think you are (and they don’t get much smaller than me), there’s almost certainly something you know that almost nobody else does, whether it’s a merchant coding error or a bank error in your favor: almost everybody has something to contribute.

The strangest thing about losing your appetite

As long-time fans of the Free-quent Flyer extended universe know, I got pretty sick last year and was diagnosed with “community-acquired pneumonia,” treated with some kind of breathing mask, and sent home with a week’s supply of antibiotics. Then I got fired. I’m fine, I recovered, this isn’t a GoFundMe post or something. But of all the lingering symptoms I’ve had since then, the strangest one is loss of appetite.

A well-known symptom of COVID-19 is loss of smell and taste. But I only briefly lost my sense of smell and taste. I can smell scented candles, food tastes more or less like food again. But what never came back was my appetite. I think of myself as a big eater, always happy to finish somebody else’s plate if they leave anything on it, things of that nature. But since my bout with pneumonia I haven’t had a desire to eat. I put it off as long as possible, then eat as quickly as possible so it’s over as soon as possible.

Loss of appetite is different from hunger in a curious way. I know when I’m hungry; I just don’t want to eat. Of course, our tech overlords call this “intermittent fasting,” which I suppose it is, but I don’t do it in order to perfect my body’s rhythms or whatever they’re aiming for. I’m just annoyed and disgusted by the concept of eating, however hungry I am.

But the strangest thing about losing your appetite is the odd, intermittent bursts of desire. What made me even think of writing this post was that I was walking back home the other day, not having eaten in 16 hours or so, and was suddenly struck by the desire for a cheeseburger from Shake Shack. I headed straight there, with my order entirely planned out, and there was a customer fighting with the cashier about how many burgers she had ordered, how many she paid for, how many she received.

And I immediately lost my appetite.

Get vaccinated, stay safe, don’t get COVID-19.