Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

I haven't even caught up with my backlog of blogs from our trip to Italy last week (they're held up on my time to deal with touching up photos) but already I'm ready with a retrospective. Here are Five Things:

1. Despite a few frustrations around the edges of the trip and a few things that went wrong with the parts my company planned, I very much appreciate being named to Club and getting to go on this trip. There were times I grumbled (privately), Maybe I should skip this trip and plan my own. Well, that would've been expensive. Just the flights alone would've cost us $5,000. The three hotel nights that were included plus the food and misc. expenses were worth another $2,500.


2. The highlight of the trip was our 2½ days in Rome. This was a side-trip we planned— and mostly paid for— on our own. (The Company let us book a stopover on the flights they paid for.) We hired private tours for the Colosseum, ruins of Caesar's palace, the Roman Forum, and Vatican City (the part that's still in my backlog), and augmented that with trekking to the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and the Pantheon (also in backlog) on our own.


3. Hiring private tour guides was expensive, eye-wateringly expensive in the case of the Vatican tour, which cost us over $1,200, but there's real value in it. With guides we saved the time of having to do lots of research and planning ourselves, we avoided waiting in lines and wandering around trying to figure out where to go, and we had someone who helped us ensure we saw the best things we could. Yeah, we could have cut the costs maybe in half by booking group tours instead, but we've had mixed experiences with even smaller, 12 person sized group tours. When time's limited, when it might be years, if ever, before you go back to that place again, go big.


4. Our "beach" resort stay, the part paid for by the company, reminded me that when you're at the beach there's an enormous different in really being at the beach. If you can't just walk out the door of the building, across a pool area, and be on the sand, you might as well stay a few miles away and drive to the beach. At the resort in Chia, Sardinia, it literally was a drive; the beach was 4km away from the resort hotel! As a consequence we went to the beach just once. We could have had more fun going back to our favorite splashy pool resort in Phoenix instead.


5. As much fun as visiting Italy/Rome was, and as little a fraction of the whole as we saw, we're kind of done with it. We're definitely not feeling, "Ooh, let's plan another trip to Rome!" Partly that's because we saw the highlights we cared about; partly it's because there's so much else in the world we want to see, too! I could see returning to Italy specifically for Pompeii, to see the ruins; Venice, for its unique canals; and maybe Florence, for its Renaissance architecture. But I don't think I'd want to spend more than a few days in each.

You know your relationship with someone is bad when you find yourself doing the math to answer the question, How much longer until I can quit these clowns? In this case the clowns are my mortgage company, and "quit" means pay off my mortgage so I can be done with them.

I've noted before that I don't like my current mortgage company. My loan has been sold a few times, starting from the originator, whom I genuinely liked. Then it was sold from Originating Lender A to New Bank B. Bank B worked fine when everything could be automated but was a pain in the neck to deal with every single time the computers kicked out an exception that required human intervention. Now Scumbag Debt Collector C— yes, my new mortgage servicer is a scummy debt collector— pisses me off with every single communication they send me because, well, they're a debt collector. All their processes as they try to move into mortgage servicing still read like they're a debt collector, treating me like a deadbeat borrower who's fallen behind on payments.

The answer, BTW, is 6½ years. In another 6.5 years of steady monthly payments I'll have this loan paid off.

Could I be done with these clowns sooner? Oh hell yes! I could increase my monthly payments to retire the debt sooner. Hell, I could just write a check to pay off the balance. The whole balance. It's not that big anymore. I've been paying down the mortgage for 20+ years and have never taken cash out on refinancing.

Of course, just because the balance "is not that big" doesn't mean I have that kind of cash sitting around. I'd have sell a few things from my investment portfolio to pay it off. But the thing is, investments are investments. They earn money. And the cost of this mortgage— the financial cost— is small. I have a rate below 2.5%! It's financially a loss to sell assets that return way better than 2.5% APY to pay off a loan that costs less than 2.5% APR.

What would change that calculation? One thing is if the emotional cost of keeping the loan with these clowns becomes too expensive. The first time these clowns screw up in a way that's more than just passively irritating, I may just pay them off and be done with them.

I saw a news article today about moral panic over BNPL. Apparently discussions have exploded on social media recently about people buying tickets for SXSW— the annual South by Southwest music/film/pop tech festival in Austin— using Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services. The tenor of the discussions, which are really more like opposing rants, seems to be  Kids These Days are being fooled into spending money they don't have on things they don't need vs. Old Fogeys who can't open their email without downloading at least 3 viruses. That prompted me to think, What is BNPL— and is it good or bad?

I've been vaguely aware of Buy Now, Pay Later schemes as a way of buying things online for a while now. I say vaguely because I know they're out there but I've never looked into them. And yes, lurking within my terminology is a value judgment. I've thought of them as them schemes because I've been suspicious from the start that they're come-ons that snooker uneducated customers into overpaying, in the form of high interest rates and service charges, on luxuries they maybe shouldn't be buying in the first place. But it's not just stuff like travel and pricey concert tickets; nowadays even DoorDash offers BNPL. If you can't afford a Chipotle burrito without financing it, maybe you shouldn't be eating out so much!

Okay, so what is BNPL? It's micro-credit. When you go to purchase something online, instead of charging it to a credit card, you can charge it on a BNPL plan. There are lots of fintech (financial technology) companies out there— many startups, but also bigger companies now— that offer these short-term loans and are integrated into various e-commerce sites. You go to checkout, you see the BNPL offers, and maybe you pick one of those instead of entering a credit card number. BNPL sets up a small loan specific to the thing you're buying. The merchant gets paid right away, your item ships right away, and you pay for it in installments.

See? Put that way, BNPL is not so foreign. It's kind of like a credit card. But it doesn't require opening a credit card in advance. This makes it accessible to the "under-banked": the socioeconomic group of people who find it hard to use banks or who are under-served or rejected by banks. The modern technology and interface for setting it up BNPL in a way that's way more familiar to younger generations, so there's a definite age gap involved in "Wow, BNPL is great!" vs. "What's this new-fangled thing that's trying to steal my money?"

Okay, but is it stealing anyone's money? Part of my initial suspicion about BNPL was that it seemed to good to be true. Companies have to make their money somehow. How does BNPL earn money? In particular, are they like another credit provider for the under-banked— payday lenders, who charge outrageous interest rates and fees?

A bit of research shows that BNPL generally does not charge high interest rates. In fact it seems that a lot of offers extend short-term credit to buyers for free. For example, a customer purchasing a $1,000 plane ticket may be offered a plan to pay $250 now with another $250 due each of the next 3 months. BNPL makes its money, as credit card companies do, by charging the merchants a fee. And, also like credit card companies, they make money by charging fees to the borrower if they miss any of their payments. If you're a few days late with one of those $250 installments, you may find all your remaining installments going up to $260— plus a $7 late fee.

A lot of the moral panic around BNPL is that it encourages people to overspend. I'll just point out, that's been a concern with credit cards for decades, too. I remember when I was a kid watching a family TV show in reruns, a well known older show that was in Black-and-White, where in one episode the teenage characters were getting themselves in all kinds of trouble because one of them had a new credit card and could not understand that he still had to pay for things, eventually. "Really, the moral of this TV show is 'People Are Too Stupid To Understand Credit Cards?'" I thought to myself. And I was a pre-teen then! The point is, what was a moral panic of 1960 seemed foolish by the 1980s. Similarly, much of today's hand-wringing about BNPL seems like people choosing to be frightened by a new technology they're unable or unwilling to understand.

But that said, it does seem wrong that you can finance a burrito on DoorDash.

Whenever we travel I look to use points to reduce the amount we have to pay in cash. As I've got a lot of points (2024 EOY inventory) I'm always looking for opportunities to use them. But I'm looking for opportunities to get worthy value for them. Alas that's why I have so many points sitting in my accounts.... Opportunities to redeem them for shitty value abound; opportunities to redeem them for decent value, let alone great value, are fewer and farther between. Thus on our trip to Georgia last week, like most, we chose to pay for some things with points and others with cash.

• Our five nights at a hotel in Savannah I got on points. The key factor tipping that in favor of points was Marriott's standard bonus of redeeming a 5 night award for the price of 4 nights. If I'd had to pay points equal to 5x the single night rate it would've been a tie for value between that and cash. Getting 20% off the points price made points the winner.


• For our two nights in Dawsonville we used points for the Holiday Inn Express. IHG, their parent company, has moved to a mostly rate-based system for awards, so screaming deals on points are very rare to find anymore. This was at least a fair deal on what we consider the points worth. As I've noted before, you've got to know what points are worth to make good decisions about when to use— or not use— them.


• Oh, and Hawk used her points for those two nights in Dawsonville. Yes, she has points, too! For IHG, both of us get most of our points from lucrative credit card sign-up bonuses.


• For our 1 night at ATL airport— the one we got that suite upgrade on— we paid cash. The hotel's cash rates where low enough that the points rate wasn't worth it. And it was also Hawk's elite status, again from a credit card, that got us that upgrade.


• For the flights on Southwest I paid cash. Southwest's points awards follow a formula relative to the cash price so there really aren't deals to be found there. It comes down to a question of "Do I want to earn points and thus get nearer to earning/renewing elite status right now, or redeem points and gain nothing toward elite status?" I'm in status-chasing mode with Southwest right now, so I bought the tickets with cash. Though it wasn't cash, per se, but travel credit. Meaning, there was no hit to my budget this month because it's money I spent months ago on tickets I had to cancel.

The only other part of this trip that was a hard cost, as in money out of pocket this month, was the rental car. And there I'm glad I got pissed at Avis's clusterfuckery and canceled my first car reservation because it turned out we totally didn't need a rental car in Savannah. As we chose a hotel so close to where my sister and her family live, they were okay with driving us around. When we did rent a car for the cross-state drive up to the mountains, it cost just $190 vs. the $575 it would've cost to have a car for the whole week. The difference, almost $400, is what we would've paid just for the 5 day local part of our trip. That's so not worth it I'm surprised I even signed up for it in the first place!

Pasadena Trade Show Travelog #3
At the hotel - Fri, 7 Mar 2025, 6am

A few blogs ago I mentioned the decision to fly rather than drive on this trip to Pasadena. When I'm traveling to the LA area I always consider driving vs. flying. Usually flying wins for business trips, though not always. Years ago I chose to drive on a business trip to Calabasas, which is also in the LA area, and I created a humorous comparison chart driving vs. flying. But underneath that chart is a series of calculations. And the answer I reached depends on what I'm solving for in my calculation.

Calculation? Yes, calculation. And because it's me, you know I always do the math. 😅

With any math problem, you're solving for "x". (If there's no letter like "x" then it's not math, it's arithmetic!) What's x? On this trip I decided x is "How much time and effort I have to spend traveling." That's the variable I want to solve for. ...Okay, it's more like a multivariate equation— two things being solved for, time and energy, so it's like solving for f(x,y)— but I'm trying to keep this example to high school level algebra, not second-year college calculus. 🤓

Anyway, the point is I decided I'm solving for time and energy... as opposed to something else, like cost. On a personal trip I'm more likely to solve for cost— though not always. Time is valuable on leisure trips, too, especially when we're constrained by how little time off from work we have.

Here's how these factors looked:

• Time: SJC and BUR are both small enough airports that they're easy to navigate, plus I wasn't checking a bag. My door-to-door time was just 3.25 hours, pretty much a record in my 1,100+ flight history. If I had driven the 351 miles it would've taken at least 5.5 hours, possibly more like 6 with traffic— and that's just the driving time. Probably I would have stopped for a quick dinner along the way, to let evening traffic in LA subside if nothing else. I would've gotten to my hotel after 8pm.


• Effort: As frustrating as air travel can be at times, there are also periods of downtime I enjoy. Waiting in the seating area at the gate is downtime. Sitting on the plane is mostly downtime. Riding in a Lyft or Uber is downtime. Downtime I can use, e.g., to read news, email, and texts on my phone. Now, plane seats aren't as comfortable as my car's seat, but driving is very much an active activity. I've got to be "on" for the drive; I can't just sit there and veg. If I'd driven last night I would've arrived after 8pm, tired and ragged. Instead, by 8pm, I'd gotten an extra bit of work done, had a lot of time to unwind, and enjoyed a casual dinner plus the gentle exercise of walking.


• Cost: By flying I spent about $500 of the company's money on flights, plus there'll be about $150 on car services. If I'd driven, the government rate of $0.70 on 702 miles round trip would cost $491. Plus parking at the hotel, which is a smidge pricey at $30/day for overnight use. So $581 for transport costs if I'd driven vs. $650 for flying. Likely I could have saved money vs. the $491 mileage rate by renting a car, though then there'd be costs for gas and transport to/from the rental location. Plus added time and effort.


• Flexibility: I said there were three factors, now I'm adding a fourth. That's because there's a Z axis here, something that's often not thought about in the tradeoff between time and money. Driving usually offers way more flexibility than flying. There's the ability to travel on my own schedule plus the ability to go... wherever... once I'm there. On some trips that's super-important. Here, not so much. Flight schedules are convenient, and once I'm settled in Pasadena I really don't need to go anywhere more than 1/2 mile away until it's time to go home.

So, cost favored driving on this trip. But the point is that cost is not the only factor. Especially when traveling on business, cost has to be traded off vs. time and my ability to get the job done— which is what the company is paying me for. It's worth the cost difference to be more efficient with my time and effort. Especially when I'm willing to work through the weekend for this trade show.

Over the past several years I've made a habit of using New Year's as a time to reflect on, and take stock of, the year just finished. It's time for the 2025 edition, looking back on 2024.

It's always a question how to title these annual reflections. Last year I struggled for weeks over how to frame the malaise that dominated 2023, the sense of doom about to arrive that never did yet made it hard to appreciate the good things that happened. What I came up with then was 2023: The Year That Was. Alas, 2024 felt like more of the same. There were some good things in there, some moments of near greatness even, but most of them were coupled with setbacks and worry about the future. Thus I'll title it 2024: Another Year That Was.

Travel & Experiences: Positive

As I break it down to understand what was good or bad about 2024, one aspect of 2024— like in 2023— that I feel warm about is travel and experiences. 2024 was another strong year for going places and having fun. In 2024:

• We visited New Zealand on a two week trip, spending time on both main islands. It was our first trip to NZ. Heck, it was our first two week trip anywhere. I hope this is a sign of more things to come, soon.


• We visited Panama for 8-9 days. There were many frustrations on that trip, but I try to think of it as overall a positive experience overall. Certainly I'm happier having gone, however far from perfect it turned out to be, than staying home or traveling anywhere domestically.


• We had a mostly expenses paid trip to Mexico for Club. We stayed in two nice hotels— so nice that we didn't even want to leave our rooms.


• We dropped our pace on weekend trips during the summer. That's on us. Though we did pick up toward the end of the summer again with Friday Night Halfway trips.

Friends & Family: Slightly Negative

2024 was another year of seeing my count of family and friends dwindle. It's not as severe as 2023 when I had to fire a few people from the position of being friends. I did lose one elderly relative, my Aunt Carol, to the infirmities of old age. She was 87.

One of the side effects of getting older is that most of your relatives and friends get older, too. Those who were the elders when I was young, my grandparents' generation: they're long gone already. Now many of my parents' generation are gone, too. Well, I still have my mom, though she's got many issues. And my wife still has both her parents. But for how long.

Finances: Positive, despite a Setback

2024 was another good year financially. Our savings for (early) retirement grew by about 16% due to market improvement, plus we continued to save aggressively to grow our portfolio even bigger. Our savings rate was less aggressive than the past few years, though, as Hawk lost her job early in the year. If not for that, and her difficulty in finding a suitable new job (she's been job-searching for 9 months), we might be at our early retirement goal already.

I do need to point out that, under the heading of money, 2024 has felt like a Dickensian situation of, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." In 2023, widespread belief that an economic recession was perpetually just 3-6 months away overshadowed positive actual economic figures, creating social anxiety about the economy. In 2024 widespread anxiety continued, though the bogeyman changed from an expected recession that never came to concern over inflation. A few years of elevated inflation after a historic 10+ year run of near zero inflation has people freaking out— somewhat rightly— about the future if prices continue to rise like that.

One of the aspects of "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" is that not everybody experienced the pain of inflation or benefits of the rising market equally. In 2024 the rich got richer, the extremely rich got way richer, and everybody else got squeezed. 2024 is hardly the first time that's happened, of course. In fact in the US it's pretty much par for the course.

Which camp am I in? Honestly I've got one foot in each. I'm well off enough after years of working hard and saving prudently that I benefited from the growth of the stock market in 2024. But I'm also still close enough to the working class / middle class my wife and I grew up in that we're very well aware of the struggle of people lower down the ladder than us. And we feel the pains, too, of seeing our health care costs, for example, grow by more than $20k year-over-year as health insurers find ever more ways to cut back on what they cover. At least we can afford that $20k increase without it forcing a dilemma of, "Do we see the doctor or buy groceries this week?"

Career: Mostly Negative

I enjoyed a bit of job recognition early in the year when I won nomination to president's club at my company. That provided a fun vacation to Mexico but alas not the stepping stone in my career I was looking for. I.e., I've been angling for a substantial increase in job title, to recognize the level of skill and capability I demonstrate, but that didn't come. And with yet-again new leaders in my department since then I've now actually fallen backward a few steps yet-again as the new managers yet-again expect me to start over at square one in proving myself.

New management is also frustrating in other ways. I won't elaborate specifics here as I'm keeping this blog open, but let's just say multiple signs are telling me it's past time to leave. Hint: the sacking of the whole rest of my team earlier this week is one example. That's sad because I've been with this company for over 7 years and have had some good times and done some great work here.

The notion of it being time to find a new job is complicated by the fact I'm looking to retire soon. I really don't want to start a new job just to work it for a short period of time. When I decide I'm done here, am I done-done? As in ready to retire?

I've been holding on in this deteriorating job for a few years now, telling myself I'm on a glide path. I've swallowed my frustration at numerous things for a few years, telling myself I've just got to keep gliding a little longer. Early in 2024 I thought I was ready to walk over management bullshit. The glow I enjoyed from telling off my boss died a few days later when Hawk and I learned that her job was being eliminated. So I've held onto my job a bit longer. How much longer now? I'd like to say this is the final year, perhaps even the final 4 months, but I'm not sure. Meanwhile the frustrations mount.

"So, I see Southwest is changing to assigned seats," many relatives and friends of my inlaws' family prompted me during our Thanksgiving visit.

It may seem an odd conversation starter to you, but it makes sense to me as many of these folks know me as the one in the family who's always flying somewhere. And when they inquired how we got to Harrisburg, PA from San Francisco and I mentioned flying Southwest to BWI— where there's a nonstop to/from OAK several days a week!— they free-associated the one thing they've heard recently about Southwest.

Yes, it's true. Southwest is moving to assigned seating. It's a change from Southwest's "Open Seating" policy that no seats are assigned and passengers are free to choose any seat once they board. Open Seating has been their policy, and even part of their brand identity, for their entire 57 year history, making Southwest unique in the industry.

"Why'd they finally change that?" folks asked next. Or sometimes they'd put a sharper point on it: "What took them so long to standardize with the rest of the industry?"

With that I'd point out that the change to assigned seats is not about assigned seats, per se. It's about increasing revenues. I.e., getting passengers to pay more. And the way all the other airlines have gotten passengers to pay more over the past 20 years has been to introduce ancillary fees.

Ancillary Fees

What are "ancillary fees"? They're all those nuisance fees that airline passengers say they hate. Fees for checked bags, fees for getting a marginally better seat, fees for even choosing a seat at booking, fees for boarding with an earlier boarding group, even fees for asking an agent at check-in to print your boarding pass instead of doing it yourself.

Passengers say they hate being nickeled-and-dimed with fees, so airlines were cautious about introducing them 20 years ago. The industry quickly found that all passengers really cared about was the cheapest upfront ticket price, add-on fees later be damned. Plus, when all airlines were charging fees, there wasn't an alternative. ...Except that, all this time, Southwest has avoided most of those fees. It became one of their big selling points.

So, Southwest was virtually alone in charging way fewer fees to customers. Customers, smart customers, might look at that as, "Hey, that's a benefit!" A lot of investors take the opposite viewpoint. To them it's, "You proud fools are failing to siphon as much money as possible out of customers' pockets!"

That's where the pressure to change has come from: from investors. An activist investor has gotten involved, campaigning against the status quo among Southwest Airlines' board of directors. He's been lobbying them to pressure the airline execs to change the policies. But not because assigned seats are "better" or because they're "standard", but to make more money. To make more money by being able to charge passengers more fees.

A Complex Change

Charging people for better seats is one of the most obvious forms of ancillary revenue. To charge for better seats, though, Southwest has to switch to assigning them. Otherwise why pay? The people who board first would just take the better seats for free. So this whole change in long-standing policy and operations, is to support the charging of a new fee.

And it's a major change. Not only will Southwest have to change its data systems to manage seat assignment— a whole new dimension of operations that they never had to in their entire history—but they'll have to refit all their aircraft with the better seats they'll charge more for. No, "better seats" will not be first class. They'll just be ordinary seats with a few inches more legroom, like United Airlines' Economy Plus and American Airlines' Main Cabin Extra. But still, that's a lot of work. Refitting their entire fleet will take time, which means— among many other substantial challenges and risks— there will be a period of probably months when passengers are invited to pay extra money for choice seats but then find they're boarded onto an aircraft that doesn't have premium seats. Oops! 🤬

Bags Still Fly Free

At least one other passenger-friendly policy at Southwest is not changing: Bags Fly Free. Every passenger continues to be able to check 2 ordinary sized bags without charge. Southwest frequent flyers held their breath for a few months once that activist investor started clamoring for more fees, worried that Bag Fly Free might be first benefit to go. It would be a vastly simpler change for the airline to make than refitting all its aircraft and rewriting all its software to manage seat assignments for the first time in 57 years. But Bags Fly Free is still there. For now.

Our Costco dividend check arrived this week. It's for $68 and change. That's disappointingly less than last year's nearly $114 but at least is still enough to more than break even on the $60 premium we pay for Costco Executive membership vs. the basic Costco Gold.



BTW, the way the $68 is figured is it's 2% of our purchases at Costco, excluding gasoline. I figure our dividend is way down this year because we didn't really make any big-ticket purchases. Though we do continue to shop at Costco regularly.

Today, Oct. 31, represents various things for different people. For some, it's Halloween. For others, it's Diwali. For me it's the end of the quarter. My company's fiscal year runs Feb 1 - Jan 31, so today is the last day of Q3.

The last day of the quarter in sales is often a day of great stress as people are straining to complete deals by midnight. Yes, ordinarily 9-5 types work late into the evening on days like this. Yes, it makes a big difference whether a deal is considered closed at 11:30pm tonight versus a few hours later in the wee hours of tomorrow. It makes a big difference in the quarterly results a company reports to its investors. It can also make a big difference in how people in sales are compensated.

For me and for my team, though, today's a day of relaxation. We closed every deal on the table already in the past few days. We not only closed every deal, we closed a HUGE deal; the biggest single deal ever in the company's history.

"Have you taken a look at the commission reporting tool?" a colleague slacked me yesterday. "I think there's a mistake in it."

"What kind of mistake?" I asked, already having a (happy) suspicion what he was seeing.

"The number is BIG," he wrote.

"Quick, take a screen shot!" I joked. Then I added: "Did you look down in the detail section? Did you see the $11 million deal we closed this week?"

BOOM!

The biggest single commission payment I've enjoyed in my career will be coming in my paycheck in about two weeks.

In the fourth episode of Breaking Bad Walter White comes clean with his family about his lung cancer diagnosis. They react in different way, unsurprisingly. His wife, Skyler, tries to stay optimistic. She first insists he get a second opinion then urges him to pursue treatment with the best cancer specialist around. The best don't come cheap, though. And there's the rub. What does it cost to live? What does it cost merely to die a bit more slowly?

Walt balks at the cost for just consulting with the best doctor. It's $5,000 just for the consult. Walt's family doesn't have that kind of money. Remember, he was working a demeaning second job at a carwash just to meet basic expenses for his family. "I can borrow against my pension," Walt says to stop Skyler's nagging— though instead of borrowing he uses money he took from drug dealers he killed.

That $5,000 was just for a second opinion. Getting treatment is a whole 'nother thing. The doctor estimates to Walt and Skyler it'll cost $90,000 a year. Ninety thousand. For a family that can't afford nine hundred to replace their furnace without stretching payments out for a year or more on credit cards. And oh, by the way, that $90,000 a year doesn't make Walt a healthy person. The treatment comes with a long list of terrible side effects the doctor rattles off. Lack of energy. Aches and pains. Nausea. Bruising. For $90,000 a year* Walt gets to die slowly.

While Breaking Bad is obviously a fictional story, this element of it is starkly real. It's a reality I started thinking about years ago. I don't have cancer, I don't plan to get cancer, but the reality is if I do I'll face a choice similar to Walt's. To get treatment— which only slows death and does not provide quality-of-life— I'd drain my family's savings and/or face bankruptcy.

When I first started thinking about this, the common figure was $80,000 a year. It would cost $80,000 a year to prolong an inevitable death in the face of terminal cancer or similar disease. And again, that's not $80k for a year of good life. It's $80k for a year of suffering. This show uses the figure $90k. It was filmed years after I thought about the $80k figure; costs obviously went up. Similarly, this Breaking Bad episode was written almost 20 years ago now. A quick search indicates that the average cancer treatment in 2024 in the US costs $150,000/year.

My choice if faced with such a diagnosis wouldn't be as stark as Walter White's. I wouldn't need to consider turning to a life of crime to avoid bankrupting my family. We've built decent wealth through decades of hard work and prudent saving. But all that wealth can drain quickly against these types of costs. FWIW, this problem— medical problems costing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars out of pocket— is the primary reason why affluent people in the US don't feel rich.

At some point you decide it's not worth it. If I get a terminal diagnosis, I'd rather die in comfort (e.g., via hospice care) than to piss away hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of dollars of money my family needs for the rest of its life just to buy myself an extra year of suffering.

This is one of the things that makes this story uniquely American, BTW. Imagine what this story would be like set in a minor city in the UK instead of one in the US. Instead of "Mild mannered chemistry teacher turns to a life of violent crime so medical bills don't bankrupt his family" it'd be, "Walt gets a cancer diagnosis in episode 1 and then spends the next 5 seasons getting free treatment at the NHS."