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Hi! ERs are a bit odd in that we can control our income to play various tax games. 2023 seems like an interesting year for these games. So I just bought a Tesla that ostensibly qualified for a $7500 tax credit, but I only get that credit if my tax liability >= $7500, and usually it's less...

Sorry for the weird title: Exercise in ER. Some people seem to get into the habit effortlessly. This thread is not for those people. You already know that it's good for you, so pep talks are useless. You're thinking "can't," "I'll get hurt," "I don't enjoy it?" Right? Or maybe you're...

This blows my mind. NFT = non-fungible token. I.e., bitcoin-like things that can't be used as currency. Anybody can mint one. And then you can associate it with some digital asset, like a GIF. The idea being that you "own" it and then can sell it to somebody else. One just sold for >...

My spouse and offspring both like to use Zelle and Venmo -- those newfangled payment systems that suck money right out of your bank account. That makes me nervous. So my plan was to create separate accounts for each of them, with limited balances, that they could easily refill post-Zelle as...

Honestly, it's been years since I paid much attention to valuation metrics, but it seems like a good time to take a peek at a few. Got any favorites? Everybody loves Tobin's Q, right? Just checked, and it's indicating the market is a bit overvalued. OK, way overvalued. The most...

I'll show you mine if you show me yours. I have several (because time + money + obsession + tone!!11!) I've only built a few instruments. Last one was a Martin OM clone a couple years ago. (Sorry for auto-rotation. Any easy solutions to that?)

You thought this was going to be my "good bye" post, didn't you? :) What does the "Thanks" button do? Nobody ever thanks me, so it's a bit of a mystery. Likewise, if I "befriend" somebody, is it like facebook where I get notified every time they say something clever? Obviously, I have no...

So your out-of-the-money covered call gets assigned. And then the stock dips below your strike price, like the next day. If you've already made peace with the idea of selling, are you tempted to rebuild your position? Do you sell some naked puts? Do you simply repurchase? Do you blow...

Back-story: a friend I worked with 25 years ago still keeps in touch. We talk finances once in a while. The last time was after the housing bubble popped (yeah, a while ago). I suggested he consider income-producing property if he wanted a "job." Well, he's now a lot richer than I am...

I tried to create a new thread with a poll in the covid containment zone. It didn't seem to get created, so I suspect either 1) there are special rules for that area that I'm not aware of or 2) it was related to the browser I'm using (with pop-ups and other things disabled). Or it could just...

So I lost weight on a low-carb diet a while back, mostly kept it off for years now, but I like to pretend that any weight I gained back is pure muscle mass. :) I got curious about the mechanisms involved, both for weight loss and for health improvements. I have an old never-used degree in...

A bit of a Rip Van Winkle question... After using a couple different spreadsheet plug-ins to scrape quotes from Yahoo finance over the years, that plug was finally pulled during the period I had finances on auto-pilot. I've since migrated my spreadsheets to google sheets and use google's data...

Back-story: my investments have been on autopilot for over 10 years, so I'm currently in the process of mental rust removal. I've been blindly dumping money into an HSA for a long time, because a long time ago I analyzed them for nearly a minute and determined "looks like yet another...

When I was writing code for a living (a long long time ago), I was getting a little burned out. But I could still remember when coding was fun, and I was sure I'd find that fun again once I retired. I surprised myself by having no urge to code. I took up other hobbies, and found them quite...

Is it just me, or are those crusty old EE savings bonds suddenly very sexy? $10K per year per SSN, including minor kids. Guaranteed to double after 20 years. That's 3.5%/year. (OK, not as exciting as bitcoin, but I'm getting old.)

Hello, ER Forum! Man, has it really been nearly 9 years since I last logged in here? For those who don't remember me, I retired in June 2002 at age 40. Initially, I thought of it as a sabbatical. But it was such a beautiful stress-free summer that I started thinking about extending it...

A neuroanatomist describes her stroke experience: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

Google Finance Blog: Introducing the Stock Screener Not very rich in terms of search parameters, but it has a quick and easy interface. Completely web-based -- not a stand-alone app.

The thread on portfolio survival during a depression got me thinking. How would "living off the yield" have done during the bad years? It's not really the yield you care about, but the actual dividend amount. So assuming you retired in 1929 or 1968 and decided to forget about stock prices and...

Good blog article on our current meltdown: Economist's View: How to End the Fear? We live in interesting times. We have the usual recessionary slowdown. The usual asset bubble popping. The usual insolvencies and bankrupties. But an unusual widespread liquidity problem that the fed hasn't...

Time to shine the bat signal! Tobin's Q now indicates that the market is fairly valued. I think. The fed just released 2007Q4's flow of funds report, so I decided to calculate Tobin's Q according to this site: The Q-Ratio: Valuing the Stock Market Q recently reverted to its long-term mean...

Heard on the Street - WSJ.com After suffering a beating from their exposure to home loans, banks and securities firms are about to take their lumps from office towers, hotels and other commercial real estate. And the losses could last longer than those from the subprime shakeout. This isn't...

Whole ZIP codes defined as 'high risk' -- themorningcall.com Critics call it the new redlining: Many of the country's largest mortgage lenders are imposing loan restrictions in entire counties or ZIP codes that they rank as risky or ''declining.'' Enter your zip code here: ResCap Market...

Mine are a fear of heights and fear of surgeons. I'm not convinced either is really an irrational fear. The fear of heights is really more generalized as a fear of catastrophic single points of failure. I don't understand why everybody doesn't have that same fear. How can you walk across...

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