Recent content by BigNick

There are a lot of websites out there that will tell you that you need to download a new driver, probably from them or one of their buddies. It is quite often not a driver that you end up downloading. :(

Take money (draft beer starts at $12, pizza at $25) and wet weather gear.

I wrote this blog post on the topic of tipping six years ago and I still stand by it. (I should add that I live in Europe and here we either tip nothing, or a few coins. But when I'm in the US I "tip", i.e., I "add a chunk of money" to the bill, because I know it's expected.)

There was a scam in the UK a few years ago that used a feature (maybe unique to that country) of the phone/landline system, whereby a call is not terminated until the party that dialled the number hangs up. Your bank phones and says "Mr Smith? This is X bank. We've detected unusual activity on...

I'm not sure what a revocable trust is, but this is basically what we did with DW's life policy. It is about $30k short (so would need DD to give DS $15k), but everyone involved trusts each other. When my own parents died I was so glad that I could trust my own sister to execute the will, as I...

Thanks for the suggestions, but this is probably not going to fly with us being in Spain, DS in France, and DD in the UK. :coolsmiley: (Incidentally, Spain has a very logical, but tough, gift/inheritance tax regime. If you give money to your kids and they live in Spain — not the case for us —...

This was our thought initially. But DS really didn't (still doesn't) need $200k, and the capital gains tax hit just to balance things out would have felt like a high price for "evenness". Agreed. In our case, DD and her BF have the same-sized mortgage as they would have done anyway; they just...

DS has a decent job and is living with his GF who makes twice as much, and they are content to rent for now. DD also has a good job, but she wanted to buy a house in an expensive area, so we gave her $200k as a big down payment for that and later about $30k to become a partner in her BF's new...

I remember reading once (in a paper magazine, 20 years ago, can't find it online) that Tony Banks, the keyboard player in Genesis who has got to be worth $50 million, used to take vacations with his wife in a VW camper van, because they enjoyed the simplicity.

I just got the attached error message, which I assume is related to this.

We have a 2017 Toyota Yaris hybrid. It's two feet shorter than a Prius, although it's still not the smallest model that Toyota sells in Europe. Gets *googles translation* 50mpg in town and keeps us nicely under the radar, in more ways than one.

Yeah, this is about it. We live in a large apartment building with a lot of politics and drama (one of the more enlightened members of the neighbours' WhatsApp group calls it "Falconcrest"). We are very probably among the richest 2 or 3 out of 100 apartments, and we don't need this added to all...

Maybe it's a US/Europe thing, but I was totally unable to relate to the author of that piece. If I need something, or at least think that I do, then I buy it. If I don't need anything, I don't go to stores or on Amazon for diversion or entertainment. That just seems nuts, even though in most...

I liked this, from an early post in that thread: >>I know colleagues are complaining about gas prices, food prices and interest rates We buy most of our groceries at a discounter. But it's very nice not to have to worry about the fact that olive oil has doubled in price here in a year (due to...

Quite possibly, but I've just returned to the forum after a very long hiatus. 🙏