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There is a Google Fi/T-Mobile dead zone on DWs and my drive to/from our lake home. Lately this has become a concern to her in the event she has a car problem or other issue. There is good Verizon coverage on the route but we do not want to leave FI. So, does anyone offer a plan where we bring...

A couple of decades ago when I was racing sports cars and had a detached garage, my reliable (but dangerous) recipe for oil spill clean up was to dump some oil-dry, add a pint or more of avgas, and push the soupy mess around with a broom. It worked like a champion and I never did burn the place...

With reasonable frequency, posters here recommend independent agents to people who are unhappy with their insurance rates and are planning to shop for themselves. Yesterday I got an email from my independent firm and I thought it might be good to share it just so people can see how this...

[mod edit] wimpy shower heads. While I understand that there are areas of the country where water conservation is critical, DW and I are not in that situation. Quite a few years ago I was successful in modifying one of the wimps into quite a good shower head. With plans to build another...

I have posted/recommended the International Travel News site here from time to time. ITN is unique because almost all of the articles are written by subscribers, who pull no punches describing their experiences with places and attractions. ITN published an excellent travel insurance series...

I have 30 years of data in Quicken, but have been unable to transfer it to another program, maybe because of its size. Only MoneyDance was a candidate and the importation process produced hundreds if not thousands of errors. So I have been stuck. In early November I tried to download my...

A week of two ago I tried to download my Schwab account data and was confronted with a message that Schwab had changed their authentication procedure and that my accounts needed to be re-authorized. Fine. I went through their procedure and, among other things, found that they had created...

I have been an advocate here of having a lawyer as estate executor or as co-executor. This morning I got a somewhat embarrassing email concerning my mother's estate, which closed 17 years ago. This involves transferred the family summer/lake home:When you deeded from your mother's trust to...

With the debate on Amazon's accumulating data on customers, including evesdropping via Alexa, I decided to get a look at what they had on me. The instructions I found were: Go to Request My Data. Select the data you want to receive. Click Submit Request when you're done. Click...

I have been working on de-cluttering lately. At my current rate of progress this will take about 25 years. Below are some things that have better-than-trash-can value but not enough to make me hassle around selling them. So if you see something you want, PM me with a postal address and I'll...

We are building a new lake home and I want to be able to remotely control the thermostat settings. I'm a computer designer by trade but have not kept up with the home automation world, which appears to be fairly chaotic. I recently had a bad experience with Ring. I bought a battery operated...

For those who don't know, Swensen was a kind of stealthy Warren Buffet, primarily an investment strategist, who had huge success running the Yale endowment. Here is the NPR obit...

DW and I have several testamentary trusts in our estate and have named Schwab as trustee. I have noticed posts from others who have done the same. But does anyone have actual experience with them doing the trustee job? This is a relatively new line of business for them. Maybe it is even...

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1nnpcj5q3l8wd/Charles-Schwab-Is-Quietly-One-of-the-Biggest-Banks-in-America-That-s-a-Problem Although I don't think I agree with the click-bait headline, I did find this article to be very interesting, both because I didn't realize how big Schwab...

Using target date funds is a frequent recommendation from folks here. In making such a recommendation, I for one, have been guilty of thinking that all target date funds are similar for a similar target date. Maybe everyone else knew this, but I recently learned that this assumption is wrong...

Phlow Corporation (https://www.phlow-usa.com/), a startup that has apparently never shipped a product of any kind (https://richmondbizsense.com/2020/05/01/new-richmond-pharma-startup-aims-to-shore-up-u-s-generic-drug-supply/) is now the US' lifeline for COVAD-19 vaccine. To the tune of a third...

Not much about the market these days makes me laugh, but this did: https://www.orientaltrading.com/2020-berkshire-hathaway-warren-and-charlie-rubber-duckies-a2-13951097.fltr?categoryId=550222 These are the 2020 Berkshire collector rubber duckies. Who knew? A little more than $12 with...

"JPMorgan set aside a stunning $6.8 billion worth of reserves to insulate itself from loan defaults. That helped send JPMorgan's profit plummeting ..." (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/investing/jpmorgan-earnings-coronavirus/index.html) Why not $7.8B? $5.8B? Do I hear $3B?? The answer is...

I have always felt that Roth conversions were basically tax rate arbitrage with future tax rates unknown. IOW we win if the future tax rates are [-]lower[/-]higher, we don't-care if they are the same, and we [-]lose[/-]win if they are higher. My personal ability to predict the behavior of...

I am not hampered by any facts, but I wonder about the extent that program trading is contributing to this market craziness. It will be interesting to see the analysis when the dust settles. Personally, I think program trading has no public value and should be stopped. I liked Bloomberg's...

I was looking at our portfolio this morning, primarily to see what our AA was doing and I ran across a Schwab "Mutual Fund Report Card" for VTWAX, our primary holding: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------...

@Lsbcal's request, I am starting this thread with a post I made in another thread plus a little amplification. It was a response to a post of his where he seemed to assert that a belief in the random nature of the markets was a sort of religion. ---Quote (Originally by OldShooter)--- Hmm ...

A couple of months ago I jumped through all the hoops to renew my GE. Maybe a month after that I got the notice that my application was conditionally approved and I was cleared to schedule an interview. I jumped through those hoops only to discover that the first available interview was April...

I have no problem at all with those who want to invest in a way that reflects their values. I even have a niece and nephew-in-law who are quite fanatical about it, to the point of completely avoiding mutual funds. This morning I was reading this article...

Lots of people here talk about buying S&P 500 funds. In this article, the author compares total market performance to S&P 500 performance for 18 1/2 years and shows that the total market won. I'm not too concerned about that because I expect that other time periods would probably show...