Flying out of Madison recently I saw so many people bringing cases of Spotted Cow as their stowed carry-on. There’s a store right by the gate with a pile of cases for exactly this purpose of course

I love the one time they didn’t like the hard drive expansion bay with vents in my laptop but decided it’s okay because it can’t be opened by hand but didn’t care about the screwdrivers in my carry-on bag that I forgot about which would allow me to access the expansion bay in flight if desired

Hilariously my 1200 sq foot 125 year old home is much less energy efficient than my in-laws 3000 sq foot 3 year old home due to the greatly improved insulation and sealing practices in modern structures. On the other hand my house is so drafty I don’t have to worry about things like mold growth due to improper vapor barriers nor the air becoming too stale due to insufficient circulation

There were recently a couple of bad gas leaks locally and it was an interesting reminder that there’s these natural gas lines laid crisscrossing the northern US that are just explosions waiting to happen. There’s been some nasty ones too

The unavoidable conclusion in today’s world is that we need to be phasing out natural gas. It can’t be cleanly turned off and back on, it’s wildly dangerous if it leaks out due to poor install/maintaince or natural disasters, it can explode if someone happens to drill into a gas line (I know a guy who did internet installs and at the time he joked about how “yeah you just drill holes into folks homes to poke the cables through and hope you don’t hear hissing after drilling”) during a house fire it just feeds more extremely potent fuel into the fire until turned off. About the only benefit is when it’s extremely cold out, such as when the destabilizing polar vortex whips through, natural gas is probably the most energy efficient option to keep homes and businesses inhabitable

I want to counterbalance the hate with something cool. Do you know what the fastest growing demographic of gamers is? People over 50. People are legit taking the time they have now that their kids have grown up and picking up video gaming. Its honestly cool and speaks to both the accessibility of gaming these days and people’s general desire to try new things

Granted a subset of these over 50 year old gamers may have been gamers their entire lives, but gaming was pretty niche in the 80s and 90s, and didn’t really become mainstream until the early 2000s, and even then it was seen as pretty dorky and geeky

Don’t forget the current crop of kids which is Gen Alpha. Gen Z are all adults now

With iOS 12.1, Apple has brought its controversial “performance management feature” (aka, throttling) to the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and iPhone X. This functionality dynamically throttles the phone’s processor as its battery degrades over time to stop the handset from randomly shutting down

Better source

Its literally a feature to improve the longevity of the device. And if you really hate it you can either replace the degraded battery (in which case it will automatically return to the factory clock speed) or disable the feature and experience device instability. Would you rather your phone randomly crash and shut off on you or would you prefer to keep 50Mhz of clock speed?

This is literally a GOOD THING. They made it so their phones would reduce their boost clocks slightly if the battery is degraded to the point where the battery can no longer support those clocks in order to prevent unexpected power offs/faults from the processor trying to pull more energy than the battery can output. The underclock is not noticeable in day to day usage and prevents instability due to a worn out battery AND it automatically reverts to the factory clock speed if the battery is replaced and therefore the underclock is no longer needed!

Would you rather your several year old phone be slightly imperceptibly slower at times or crash randomly because that 50Mhz of boost clock was so critical to you?

Always remember to remove the bloated French language pack folks!

rm -fr

Basically its the application of an airbag upon a human body positioned in a way no vehicle was ever designed to accommodate forcing the body to bend in half in ways it shouldn’t. Basically, never put your legs over the airbags while in a moving car and you’ll probably never suffer injuries like this

This is good advice but far more technical than I was trying to give. I was trying to give very easily actionable advice for the average person who doesn’t know much about personal finance and may not be a numbers person like I and maybe you are. The kind of person I was aiming for isn’t going to be contributing more than 10% of their income to retirement and probably has a couple of car loans and some credit card debt and/or personal loans floating around that they should sort out but might not ever get fully sorted.

If they’ve worked jobs with 401k retirement accounts but don’t work there anymore, they should go to the bank and ask about meeting a retirement advisor to roll that into a IRA or similar and probably make a small monthly contribution to their IRA as well as their current job’s 401k retirement account. That’s the gist of my advice. If they want to actually put in the work to learning more about personal finance and fully take the reigns your above flow chart is brilliant, but I think that’s far more complex than who my advice was aimed at.

Exactly! Some folks simply do not have the financial discipline/knowledge to fully pay off their loans, and for them if they waited until their loans are paid off they’d never have a retirement savings. If they start squirreling away money now they have more options in 10-20 years than they would in 10-20 years without it

If I’m remembering correctly IRA is pre-tax money and rothIRA is post-tax money, and you can do a Roth conversion on a traditional IRA if desired, pay the income taxes now then have no income tax to pay on it when you pull out at retirement and it’s gained quite a bit through compound interest

Edit to add: I mentioned rolling 401ks into a rothIRA or IRA because I see it as incredibly risky to leave your retirement in a 401k account controlled by a previous employer. Employers get to choose what financial institution holds the 401k funds, as well as manages employee and former employee access, so they could choose to cut costs and transfer the 401k funds to an institution with higher account fees for you for example. Also many 401ks when you depart an employer get automatically converted into IRAs and may be converted into an IRA populated purely with low return CDs/bonds and high fees (one of mine did exactly that actually!) so rolling it into a (roth)IRA with a financial institution you trust and can control the trajectory of those funds is both safer and financially smarter! I’ve even heard of folks having their entire 401k drained by fees from the IRA it got automatically rolled into when they left the organization

High interest savings accounts are still offering 3-4% or more. It’s a good spot to park your emergency fund. $600/year just for storing 15k ain’t bad at all plus it’s all FDIC insured (and you can also invest some of it into CDs if you’re willing to lock that money away for a couple of years in exchange for a higher interest rate)

To build off of this, the best thing an average (American) Jane/Joe can do is pile money into their 401k and when they switch jobs move the money from the 401k into a (Roth)IRA

Individual investors can basically never beat the market no matter how smart they are nor how many hours the pile into their research. Best to just pile the money into diversified fund containing a solid mix of stock indices and bonds. If you want to be extra smart, deposit more while the market is down/super unstable so you can ride the wave up when the market grows again.

There’s generally advise to not invest if you have high interest debt and to instead pile your spare cash into paying that down. My personal opinion is that if you’re someone who has a consistent revolving balance of debt just start shoving spare cash into a retirement account (and don’t touch it!) because that can at least build up while you slowly get your debts under control and while maybe you won’t pay off your debt as quickly, at least you have something already saved and compounding 10 years from now once everything is stabilized and paid off