Recent content by Unpaintedhuffhines

Google is the one who sells your personal information to advertisers. When I was at MSFT, there was a strict policy to not harvest personal information to sell to advertisers. We all don't use google products, rather we ARE the products. Still not sure I'd want a machine to know everything...

Fitness is a passion of mine, so it gets prioritized. $180/month for the gym I go to (it's all coach-led classes of 5-10 people, and I go at least 4x/week). I buy workout clothes maybe 2x/year, but I'd guess it's $50/month on average. Shoes are more expensive - $150/pair, and maybe 3 pair a...

Haha... I can honestly say that this is one scenario I had not considered. But if that had happened, there would be a lot worse things to be worried about.

"King, eh? Well, I didn't vote for you."

Absolutely. In 2004 I was laid off from my dot com gig (in the US and A). Was a tough time to find a job, so was out for about 9 months. Wanting to avoid cost of COBRA, I applied for private insurance (much cheaper). One question was "have you ever had migraines?" for my 8-year-old son, I...

Well, a big chunk of it is in good old MSFT. Was $230 when I retired. Now $420. That's maybe half of the run up. The rest just spread out in a normal diversified portfolio (but about 80% in stock mutual funds).

Retired 18 months ago with a $4.7M nest egg (just investments). My hope was even if we kept our current spending that we could maintain that $4.7M. Checked on Friday and investments have grown to $6.5M... I told my wife "Since I retired, our investments have grown $100K... every single month...

Wow. I am curious, do you people eat every day? haha. We budget $1500/month for the two of us for groceries (this includes wine and paper products - anything we can buy at the grocery store), and we are right at this number for this year. Last year we were just under (about $1,450/month). We...

I don't know why people are asking you to cut back on the time you spend with friends (the $4K/year eating out part). If anything, I think you should step that up! You've got plenty.

No better time than the day the bonus hits the checking account!

When I started my countdown timer, it was at 256 days. Seemed like a lifetime at the moment, but they flew by. A few hard weeks of work, a few vacation days in there, the odd holiday or two, and before you know it, you're 2 weeks away. For me, the last two weeks were awesome - work was being...

Ha! I use this one all the time!

Overhead Bin Space Anxiety is one of my top reasons for wanting (needing?) to get on the plane first. For the longest time, it was making sure I had the right status (so only fly one airline), and later it was just making sure I was sitting on the proper side of the curtain. Slightly off...

I always know it's Fall in central Texas because it is only 97 degrees instead of 105.

if you stay in your current house, then equity is an interesting but mostly irrelevant figure. I can increase my NW just because zillow updated my home value, but that doesn't mean I can buy more groceries. What makes a difference is accounts you can pull from to buy things you need. You can...