Bogleheads.org

Subwoofer running in the living room? That's for strange attic noises :) In all seriousness, the first order of business is to compare the meter reading on the bill to the current reading on the meter. You need to make sure the bill was accurate. Rather than chase down what might be drawing power, ...

I just want to know how you have retirement fully funded, but yet can't cut back on work?? The two don't jive. Either you have a lot of money which buys you financial freedom or you don't. Which one is it?? Like I was saying work is complicated. 95% of my business comes from 5 companies. I have bee...

My main question has to then with how can I further reduce my AGI? Get a job that has a 401k, 403b, 457, or TSP plan. You could then defer $17,500 and reduce you AGI by that amount. If you get one that offers a 401k or 403b and also offers a 457, you can defer $35,000. Contributions to a 457 do not...

We bought a house with a low-down-payment FHA mortgage. At this point we owe about $330k on it, which thanks to the market drop is pretty close to what it's worth. Are you paying the FHA monthly mortgage insurance premium (MIP)? Did you pay the FHA upfront mortgage insurance (UPMIP or "funding...

As to the hours of work I am self employed and work 7 days a week. Long term I am working on some ideas to get me more time off maybe hiring more help, etc but for now there is not much I can do about it. Work is complicated and pretty much all of our business comes from five clients and we can't r...

I don't' understand the argument that an advanced degree would push back your date at all. My wife and I both have MBAs and it only accelerated accumulation. There are smart ways to get an advanced degree. The time commitment to get an MBA is vastly different than the time commitment to get a Ph.D....

I think this poll would be more interesting if people posted their household income at the time their household net worth, including their home, hit $100k. Are bogleheads great savers or do they just have above average incomes? It would be interesting if people included how much of that could be at...

Banks understand this, and that's why they offer cashback credit cards, as bait, because the banks know that the vast majority of people who sign up will end up falling into the "A" category I'm a 20-something and I don't have a credit card for this reason. I know that the reason that cre...

By the end of the year, barring any unforeseen large expenses, I'll climb out of the red commas and into the 1-comma club. I'll still be horribly underwater on my home due to buying in 2007, but the rest of my assets will finally cancel out the 2-red-commas in the house line of the net-worth spread...

I think there is a category D: people who fool themselves into thinking that the bonuses from their credit cards are bigger than what they would save by paying cold hard cash. Plenty of research to back up that people spend 5-10% more on credit card purchases than they would with cash. Doubt that m...

To Mudpuppy: From wikipedia: According to research published in Insectes Sociaux in 2009, it was discovered that ants from three Argentine ant supercolonies in America, Europe, and Japan, that were previously thought to be separate, were in fact most likely to be genetically related. The three colo...

It's difficult to rent a car or a hotel room without a credit or debit card. I would be hesitant to use the latter in those situations unless you use a dedicated account with very little in it and no overdraft. Haha, I do have a debit card--why should I not use a debit card to rent a car or hotel r...

personally i'd rather see that as the contest benchmark rather than Vanguard Total Stock market (VTSMX) probably because I am beating VMNFX but not VTSMX! :) cheers, Ah, but it's not about winning. It's about having fun and showing just how often the law of averages has random stock selections end ...

By the end of the year, barring any unforeseen large expenses, I'll climb out of the red commas and into the 1-comma club. I'll still be horribly underwater on my home due to buying in 2007, but the rest of my assets will finally cancel out the 2-red-commas 6-red-figures in the house line of the net...

I am very chemically sensitive, plus I have a lot of fish tanks, so I don't have any pest control chemicals sprayed inside. However, I have on occasion had a massive American roach ("water bug", but don't let that euphemism fool you, it's a roach) population explosion in the neighborhood. ...

Thank you all for these thoughtful suggestions. I took my Honda to another mechanic who is a member of my wife's church group and he has done work for me before. He said that the struts weren't too bad, only leaking. The radiator needs new hoses top and bottom and I agree that all this is to be exp...

Stil N D Nile is stil in d lead, but New Deal Hedgefund (BHCadet) is breathing down the D Nile brothers' necks. Who knew Best Buy would turn it around so dramatically? Well, who other than BHCadet.

Glad to hear this is mostly resolved. I just wanted to point out a couple of things. I forgot to say that if you decide to have her work and take a few classes at the local community college, there is a way to be more involved with her grades and information. She just fills out a "FERPA" f...

Three questions on Printers: 1. How do you know if your printer has a hard drive ? 2. If it does, how do you find it ? 3. How do you erase the hard drive ? Consumer-grade printers (e.g. the cheap ones) tend to have volatile memory for print queues, not hard drives. So unless you have an enterprise-...

I'm sure you're trying to help and I appreciate it but you're making quite a few assumptions: Keep in mind that these "assumptions" I am making are derived from over 15 years of experience as an IT person, a system administrator and a security researcher. 1) How can Parallels and Dr. Web ...

Let me simplify this as much as I possibly can. In response to points 1 and 2: Parallels and Dr. Web are software companies. That you called them and they did not have your email in your system is irrelevant. It's like calling Microsoft because someone put your email in a Word document. There's noth...

I read this article in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/your-money/forgotten-in-estate-planning-online-passwords.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hpw. It covers estate planning issues now that we are in the internet age. Nothing particularly new or helpful. However I have a question. My que...

My personal take: You know with absolutely certainty that the $8000 will eliminate the student loan. You are not guaranteed that prepaying $8000 on your mortgage will eliminate PMI. Being able to cancel PMI with prepayments depends on the type of mortgage you have. FHA mortgages will not cancel MIP ...

The seller of this home paid for a similar policy which also covered the AC/heater unit and the duct work for said unit. It was mostly worthless. They only agreed to do a repair for one of the three calls made, when the controller for the AC/heater unit shorted out. For the other two calls, I got a ...

Kaiser has a large market share in CA but in other areas they are not competitive. In the MD/DC/VA area their rates are significantly higher than every other company, especially on family plans. Sure not true in the Boulder/Denver market. Kaiser is much cheaper than virtually all other carriers. Fo...

Ooops--it was not something simple and benign like the wrong email address. It's exploit.drop.gs which is particularly nasty. Malware Bytes says it has been removed. I sure hope so. The only way I can think of that I might have gotten it was watching a Power Point presentation on my doctor's websit...

Look, I don't quite understand why there is so much defensive posturing on this. Nobody is saying people aren't capable or aren't appreciated. It's just that, in my view, usage has far outgrown it being ok to be hosted in the back room of a small business with consumer-class Internet connectivity. ...

I'm just not seeing where any suggestions/criticisms etc. are warranted based on a few minor incidents of downtime that have had no detrimental effects on anyone. When things go wrong, some people offer money and other people offer time and expertise. It's a pretty human reaction to issues such as ...

I'm surprised that the supermarkets haven't tried to do something. They would capture the entire sale, be able to include lottery tickets and other non-grocery (high profit) items they carry, and I think that could work if they targeted places like senior citizen complexes where you could deliver m...

Interesting. My wife had done at rotation at the hospital as part her RN degree, so she knew that the FP serving covering OB was a poor service. We were in the area as visitors now for a weekend. She specifically told the FP resident to their face we wanted to be on the OB service. She was transfer...

FYI, if you have something valuable being shipped that you don't want left at your door and there is no Locker service in your area, look at the UPS will-call option. Once you have the tracking number and UPS has picked up the package, you can log on to their website and ask that it be held at your ...

Related hard pulls for auto, home, and student loans are considered to be just a single hard pull for purposes of the FICO score when they happen within 2-6 weeks of one another (time period varies by version of FICO algorithm), so people can shop around without getting a major ding in their score. ...

EVERY time I log in to Treasury Direct it says that my computer is not registered and that it will email me a one-time passcode. EVERY time, I use the passcode, tell it to register my computer, and it does not issue any error messages or complaints. I can then log in again for some short period of ...

As you recommend I never use a link in an e-mail to get my accounts. I would not have logged in or given any personal information if this one had requested it. As I said it was just a link to information. It came from an E-mail that has been mentioned previously on this board as being Vanguard and ...

It's not really a hack when the number is skimmed. That's just a risk one always takes when swiping a card. Just keep an eye on the transactions and alert the company if it seems to be happening again and they don't catch it. Otherwise, don't sweat much about it.

NoScript is a whitelisting plugin. Anything you don't specify and which does not come on the very limited predefined whitelist (and by very limited, I mean the predefined whitelist really only lists a half dozen or so sites) will be blocked. You then have to decide if the site is safe enough to add ...

Getting back to food costs - they are definitely up since I last posted, think we're averaging closer to $450-$500 a month these days. The biggest culprits - meat,chicken and fresh produce. Beef is starting to get a bit ridiculous and I'm starting to wonder if I want to spend the kind of money they...

I'm still interested in if the OP's power company ever said how they derived the breakdown for each listed appliance/energy user. If it's just an arbitrary formula applied to an arbitrary concept of "typical", then there's really nothing to get from the report other than the total weekly u...

They are more useful in kitchens or near home entertainment centers, typically. And as wilpat says, GFCI protection is not affected, tho possibly harder to test/reset... Thanks everyone. I have a surge protector strip near my electronics. In the bathroom, I want to have a power failure light, a pho...

Just curious, how does this weekly email determine the electrical usage of the appliances listed? If they are not smart appliances (and likely they are not), then the base usage and appliance usage is probably the "typical" usage for your area, which I have found to be anything but typical...

I use a mix of a dandelion removal tool and spot treating with Weed B Gone, depending on how much time I have to deal with yard work. The removal tool won't work if you don't get the whole root (you'll know if you don't). If you use a removal tool, you might also want to sprinkle a little lawn seed ...

d) the adult child has been estranged from the parent for decades and isn't even aware the parent is in a facility (and it doesn't even matter if there was a very valid reason for the estrangement due to behavior of the parent). I worry slightly about this situation, myself. My parents are spendthr...

A bigger issue I have is with weddings, etc. I usually call the restaurant/hotel and request a special meal. This USUALLY works and saves a lot of grief. I am always amused when everyone at the table asks, "how did you get that?" That reminds me of a personal food pet peeve. I have to tra...

Are you allowed to pay the homeowner/hazard insurance separate from the escrow account even if it's set up to pay from the escrow account? Does the excess money get refunded (with interest)? Having gone through this when the insurance payment sent by the escrow company got misplaced by Allstate unt...

Has it ever happened to anybody to make a request for a special dish preparation and have the request denied? If waiters always say 'yes,' and if the satisfaction of all possible requests is impossible, then some dishes are certain to deviate from the specifications. I've requested pasta primavera ...

There was a mod for this for phpBB v2.x, but I don't know about the current version. Not that it matters, because the mods don't like to modify the forum, as LadyGeek already said. This is also something one could do on the client side using a user script program like Greasemonkey for Firefox or Tam...

Now, I just have in the back my mind something might have been done to my food. I highly doubt that the chef did something to your food. That particular urban legend gets blown out of proportion because it rarely actually happens. Does it happen sometimes? Sure. Does it happen every time someone ma...

I think some folks are missing an important point. The customer is always right, period. When a customer wants food prepared differently or substitutions, then that's exactly what any decent restaurant should and can do without problem. Customers pay the money, so they should get whatever they ask ...

Here in CA, escrow accounts have to be given a minimum of 2% interest. Since that beats anything a regular savings account is offering, keeping an escrow account right now in CA would make more fiscal sense. Check your state laws to see if your state has anything similar before cancelling the escrow...

If there are dietary restrictions (or even just very strong dislikes) which would require extensive modifications to a menu item, call ahead and talk to the manager and/or chef to see if the restaurant will be willing to make accommodations. Make sure those accommodations are noted in your reservati...