blackoutdore

Camback
Vandy beating Alabama in football in 2024
Stephen F Austin beating Duke in Bball 2019

I will be recieving a large check in the next few weeks that will substantially improve my financial situation.

The question is, what to do with it - invest or pay off debt? The likely answer is a bit of both, but I'm trying to determine a cut off interest rate at which anything above that rate should be paid off, and the remainder of the check should go towards investments.

I can cover all debt payments via my normal cash flow, so this is really just an opportunity to acclerate paydown on some of these accounts.

Various Debt Interest Rates below - in order of interest rate (highest to lowest):

Student Loans #1 (federal) - 6.35%
Student Loans #2 (federal) - 5.75%
Student Loans #3 (federal) - 5.06%
Car Loan #1 - 4.99%
Car Loan #2 - 3.99%
Student Loans #4 (private) - 3.32%
Mortgage - 3.25%

Conservatives win in the Fall. A anti-weed agenda gets developed as a reaction to undoing everything the dems have done. Weed is outlawed. Your bet goes to zero.

I’ve used personal capital for the last several years, and used Mint before that. I’ve had minimal contact with Personal Capital’s reps. I find their interface very nice and intuitive, although it does suffer from some of the same account log out issues that Mint did.

It also does a bit more advice on investments and less on budget analysis. I would say for this stage in my life investments matter more than making sure I keep my entertainment budget at $500 for the month or whatever.

My family was in the dry cleaning business for ages. My great-grandfather started it, my grandfather continued it by opening his own plant in a different city, and my father worked there for a large portion of his life before doing something else.

My grandfather made good money several decades ago, and expanded into a higher-end men's clothing store as the margins were better there. He made some ill advised business decisions and shut down the clothing store and focused on the cleaning business. He worked there until he was 81, but it is what he knew and loved.

During my conversations with him, he always lamented the fact that business casual killed the dry cleaning business. People just don't wear clothing that needs dry cleaning as much as they used too. Part of that is due to more informal standards in the work place, and the other part is due to advances in clothing technology (i.e., Brooks Brothers has dress shirts that can be washed/dried and are non-wrinkle coming out of the dryer, there's no point in taking those clothing pieces to the cleaners). He retired before COVID, but I would assume work from home and tech's influence on an even more informal dress code has further reduced the demand for dry cleaners. Plus, I'm sure there have been even more advancements in clothing technology.

If one were to do open/purchase a dry cleaning business, I think you have to adopt a hub/spoke model. The spokes are small store fronts that collect items that need dry cleaning, and hold cleaned items. The hub would be your actual plant, and would be placed in a cost-efficient location (no need to locate the plant in expensive, middle of city locations since they are not customer facing). I'd be interested in a cost/benefit analysis of going entirely spokelesss, and using pick-up/delivery vehicles to transport clothes to/from the plant. You could develop a simple app to schedule pick-ups and deliveries.



Side note about my gradfather since it has been right at a year since his passing and I'm reminiscing... He lived another 11 years until age 92. He was exceptionally active and sharp for a person that age, which I attribute to him standing at the counter 12 hours a day for most of his life, retrieving clothes, and taking them out to customers cars. Even during his final year of life, he was "diving" (it was more of a belly flop) into the water at the family vacation home he bought when he was making good money. By chance, I went home the week before he died for an engagement party and visited with him, and he was just as sharp as ever and no one would have expected he would be dead one week later. I even facetimed him the day he died (we knew it was the end) when he was in the hospital, and he was still very much with it up until the end. Literally, on his death bed, he asked me for advice.
How does one give advice to a dying man?!?! As the palliative drugs were administered, he quipped to the family members in the room "Ok, meeting is over". I miss him dearly.

Why in the world would you need $50k sitting in a safe? It’s way more than what you need for most common emergencies, and not nearly enough for unique emergencies (need to disappear for “business” reasons, ransom money, etc.”)

I keep about $1k at home. That’s usually more than enough and helpful to have when I don’t have a few bills to tip the delivery people.

I bank with Ally and am fairly new to having excess cash that I can actually “save/invest”. Ally’s HYSA yields 3.85%, whereas their money market account yields 4.15%. I use fidelity for a few other services and noticed their VMFXX fund yields 5.15%

Current, I keep about 1 month of expenses in checking, and have 2 months in savings, split evenly across Ally’s money market and HYSA. I’m pretty good about limiting withdrawals from the money market or savings accounts unless absolutely necessary, which is few and far between.

Should I switch all of my emergency fund to the highest yielding account, the Fidelity VMFXX?

Are there any risks I’m not seeing? I would like to separate out “typical” risks for this move vs. risks deriving from a potential US default given the debt ceiling negotiations.

You can ask Google to "no index" your site. Ask the IT/Tech team that manages your website to do this, they should be able to figure it out pretty easily.

All kinds of companies "no index" various webpages on their site that they don't feel are applicable to Google searches - like internal portals, tools, etc.

You can also manage your "Google My Business" profile, which is the card that appears on the right side of pages w/ your address, website, star rating, etc. You may want to delete your profile, but it will make ppl (legitimate clients you would want and the clients you don't want) to contact/find you.

There's a whole industry of "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" companies whose entire job is to increase google/bing visibility, as that will generally result in more customers/traffic. You are basically taking an anti-SEO approach.

Work uses Bitwarden. It's ok, but it's not as easy I would like.

Personally I used 1Password. Super easy and just works. Would recommend to anyone else.

Assuming a sellers mortgage means you assume their current balance and interest rate.

If the seller’s mortgage rate is less than what you can get, it’s a good thing to pursue. The “downside” of it is that you have to be able to fund the sellers equity in some other manner.

Example- say the seller refinanced their mortgage/initiated their mortgage at 3% a year ago or whenever. The house is currently selling for $400k, and the mortgage balance is $250k. You can take on their 3% mortgage or $250k. However, you have to somehow cover the other $150k. You can do that through a combination of down payment, cash, or another loan. If a loan, you probably won’t be able to finance that remaining $150k at the 3% rate. Most likely you’ll have to do it at the current market mortgage rate.

Given the general increase in housing prices, that means most people have to cover all the excess equity in some other manner. That is really hard for most first time home buyers…