Every essay and field note, newest first within each track. Two tracks: essays that trace a familiar feeling back to the mechanism producing it, and dispatches from inside the tax lien work itself.
Essays — understand the systems
A mortgage rate quote that moved for reasons nobody at the desk could explain, traced back through the Treasury market to a financing condition that's held for almost thirty years: near-zero Japanese interest rates. What changes as Japan's central bank starts to normalize, and the handful of signals worth watching instead of predicting collapse.
A printer that suddenly needed a login just to print something I already owned — that's where this one starts. It traces a quiet shift from ownership to conditional access that shows up in more places than anyone's printer, once you know to look for it.
A jar of pennies nobody throws away, even knowing they're worthless — that instinct turned out to be right. This one traces what the end of penny production actually reveals about currency debasement, and the one legal, one-cent way to hold real metal today.
The feeling that the week is already gone before it starts isn't a productivity problem — it's a currency problem. This one is about time as the one asset that can't be recovered once spent, and what debt, ownership, and lifestyle creep actually cost you in hours, not dollars.
I once swapped out of a collapsing stablecoin with no time left to ask what was actually backing it. This one traces what the GENIUS Act changed in how stablecoins work underneath the dollar you already use — and why that now runs straight through Treasury demand and government borrowing costs.
Two days' notice to withdraw my own cash from my own bank — that's what sent me looking for what "liquidity" actually means. This one traces the gap between money you can access and money you actually control, and two lesser-taught ways to hold capital without handing over the keys.
Working Ground — see the systems from inside them
A line in my own loan documents, interest accrues daily, not monthly, led through the Australian offset-account model and back to a version I run against my own mortgage: no bank feature, just routing the paycheck into a HELOC to shrink the balance before it becomes an expense. The real subject isn’t mortgages. It’s how long money sits idle between arriving and becoming an expense.
Fifteen new tax lien certificates this season — and one still unresolved from last year, sitting a full auction cycle later. A look at what winning an auction actually promises, and what it doesn't.
Two years of redemption history on one property, and someone still took the position for less than two dollars a year. A dispatch on what happens once your research becomes visible enough that anyone pulling the same records can reach the same conclusion.
Twenty-one certificates won across three counties — and capital still sitting idle the next morning. A dispatch on where the season actually came from, and the allocation mistake I didn't see until the morning after.
My first tax lien cost fifty dollars at an eighteen percent rate — and the rate turned out to be the least important number on the certificate. A dispatch from inside the auction on why three investors can hold the same rate and walk away with three completely different outcomes.
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