unpleasant chores

I did one of my least favorite chores this week.*

I went to the dentist.

The dentist thing happens 4x a year. Egregious plaque buildup due to mouth chemistry and thin gum tissue. Runs in the family. Our holiday gatherings don’t discuss politics or BTC but the latest travel water pik someone’s using or new mouth excavation tool.

I’m not using a water pik these days. Just an arsenal of floss, proxabrushes, rubber tips and the electric Oral-B. Which the dentist reminds me to hold with a light grip because the very act of brushing my teeth wears away my damn gums. Anyway, the dentist trip was fine. It’s been a few years since a deep cleaning and my gums have actually been improving since I started going 4x a year. I haven’t had any gum bleeding in several years as well so while a cleaning is never a treat, I used to dread the cleanings when I was going only 2x per year.

I always think about Yglesias’ Dentists are bad post because like anyone with a set of eyes you can sense that it’s a bit of a racket. I have both a dentist and pediatric dentist in my family so we cross-check all the treatments and prices with them so I feel that I’m only a victim of the baseline scamminess of dentistry and mostly avoiding the upsell.

[Dentist and veterinary services check out as fields where you’d expect PE firms to rollup because they are cash machines mixed with information asymmetries which lend themselves to increasing margins aggressively thru upsells. My sister is a vet but since I have no pets I don’t need to cross-reference her on if I’m being scammed. One of my BILs sold his practice to PE. He used to do a fair amount pro-bono dentistry for people who couldn’t pay in his community. Guessing the new owners won’t have time for that unless it can be deducted as a virtue marketing expense].

*Actually I did 2 of my least favorite chores. I reviewed all my expenses for 2024 too. The last time I did this in great details was probably 7 or 8 years ago. Yinh refers to that weekend as “The Audit”. It’s a giant joke in my family because I was so jarred. And it showed. It actually turned out to be a good thing, because Yinh, being more detail-oriented than I, proactively made some adjustments.

I should emphasize that it was also out of character for me to do an audit. I don’t keep track of spending or bills or frankly daily money matters stuff in any way. If our annual nut is within some general range I don’t sweat the rounding. I’m not a fancy spender in general, so splurges aren’t slippery slopes.

Choosing the “upgrade” hurts for a second for Pavlovian not rational reasons. I counted pennies more when I was younger but by the time you’re older your portfolio vol probably swamps your budget if you continue to be a net saver so if your not a compulsive spender you’ll probably gain some mental health if you stop micromanaging your finances. Although, as I discovered this week, you should probably self-audit occasionally just to catch the recurring charges leeching your bank account.