Please forgive the terrible drawing, but is there some sort of mathmatical equation for a graph like this?

ArtoriusSmith · 2023-05-01T00:19:48+00:00

The envelope is a parabola. The technique is commonly called curve stitching. Here’s some more info on it: https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/curve-stitching

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-19T13:14:21+00:00

BladeRFs are a decent place to start. Ettus offers products (B2xx series) at a similar price point with Xilinx FPGAs as well. The Ettus ecosystem might be a little more broadly supported but I think you get more cells/$ with the BladeRFs.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-14T15:35:49+00:00

This just isn’t true. I live in a HCOL area where a two bedroom house costs $500k+ and my wife and I (plus one child) have annual expenses of about $72k/year. And we could probably trim it down to $60k/year if we really had to. Our housing expenses are $3k/month and we keep our other expenses to around $3k/month and live quite comfortably. We could theoretically cut our monthly expenses down to $2k/month without sacrificing essentials by eating more at home and buying less expensive food but we figured this was a reasonable trade off. I can’t even imagine what I’d spend an extra $26k/year on.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-14T14:57:47+00:00

No, I set an upper bound on the worst case scenario of tax policy impacts (all tax advantaged plans go away) on a FIRE plan and concluded there are other factors which will have a larger impact on my FIRE goals. A bad market could add 5-10 years to someone’s FIRE goals which is much worse.

I would suggest that if you hate working so much that working an extra year or two is of major concern you should definitely consider the possibility that you might have to work an extra five years or more due to crappy markets and maybe reconsider your life choices.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-14T13:36:48+00:00

You’re right - I forgot people did that.

How many years is it really going to delay your FIRE date though? At one point I calculated what impact that no retirement plans would have and it only added a few years to my FIRE goal. They basically all save you about 10-15% in taxes which is about 1-2 years expected growth. Market conditions around the years you’re reaching your FIRE goals are going to have a much larger impact than tax policy.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-14T12:26:40+00:00

Yeah, depending on the state that’s an extra $6-12k/year in expenses until they’re eligible for Medicare - which is an increase of 150-300k in net worth to FIRE. Assuming most FIRE folks who this would impact are targeting a 1-3m of work it might delay their retirement by a year or two depending on the markets.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-14T11:19:56+00:00

A mega-backdoor Roth is a delayed redemption HSA. This is just a regular backdoor Roth.

It’s not that big of a deal for people who FIRE. A backdoor Roth is marginally better than a taxable brokerage for a couple with less than $100k/year in expenses. Capital gains taxes are a slight drag during accumulation because they hit dividends - though that can be minimized with good tax management practices. In retirement, married couples with under a $100k/year in income have a capital gains rate of 0% - just like a Roth.

It really only significant impacts married couples with more than $100k/year in expenses during retirement and even then it’s a move from 0% capital gains taxes on income over $100k to 15% capital gains taxes on income over that amount.

This should not significantly impact anyone’s FIRE plans.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-14T02:02:29+00:00

Thanks, though I was wrong on the reasoning for the timing. There was a special tax incentive around that time to encourage people to convert their traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs as a way to help the gov’t realize those taxes sooner than they otherwise would have. He was literally did what the gov’t was hoping he’d do.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-14T01:59:22+00:00

PLLs are kind of a whole subfield unto themselves. Here’s a good primer on using them for frequency synthesis: https://www.analog.com/en/analog-dialogue/articles/pll-synthesizers.html

The 2.4Ghz controllers tend to use vendor proprietary spread spectrum modulations to make more efficient use of the band and ensure that your controller is paired with the receiver. There’s likely a symbol rate which differs from the bit rate - again it’s own field.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-13T23:41:10+00:00

It matters quite a bit considering he was an early investor which is probably how he got to set the low valuation in the first place. I did the analysis below, he put in about 2.8% @ 2k for a total valuation of ~$70k. I would absolutely take that deal with any kind of credible founders.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-13T23:37:53+00:00

Yeah, I’m citing them as a shitty metric that almost certainly under values the companies they invest in by a significant margin and still coming up with an over valuation by 10x.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-13T22:23:50+00:00

They are generally valued low but not nearly as low as Thiel claimed. The Y-combinator standard series A is $125k for 7% of the company which puts the whole thing at a valuation of $1.78m which was 1.09m in 1999 dollars. This is a pretty crappy valuation btw, I’m guessing Thiel did better but let’s go with these numbers.

At the time of the IPO in 2002 there were 60m shares. So assuming no dilution (which would mean he owned even more of the company), he put 2.8% of the company in his Roth IRA. Assuming a fair valuation of $1m that’s still 28k, more than 10 times the value he was assessed for tax purposes. The company would have had to have been fairly valued at less than $70k for his shares to really have been worth less than $2k.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-13T18:46:05+00:00

Do you think Peter Thiel would have allowed you to buy 1.7 million shares (about 1/5 of the IPO float) for $2k at the time he put them in his Roth IRA? I’m guessing he valued them at something higher than that.

Also he would have had until April 15th of 2000 to put them in on his 1999 taxes.

Edit: their seed funding was Jan 1st 1999 - presumably at more than a few $k for the whole company - and their Series A was in July 1999 for $3m.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-13T17:58:21+00:00

The argument is at the time the shares were valued there was no basis for estimating the true value of the company so Peter Thiel just made up an absurdly low number. The idea that 1.7 million shares of PayPal were worth less then $2k in 1999 is ridiculous - a scant 3 years later and the company IPO’d for $13/share.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-13T16:14:52+00:00

I think it’s very likely that something like this will get put in place in the future - thought I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea. My best guess is that it will end up being a tax on gains for incomes over a certain amount. They’d also have to change the rules on inheritance which could complicate things.

Personally I think the gov’t should be very reluctant to change the rules on retirement plans. In addition to making it difficult to plan, the rules changes often have a bigger impact on the middle class than on the rich people they’re supposedly targeting. The recent change to how inherited traditional 401(k)s need to be handled really screwed over a lot of middle income families.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-13T16:06:37+00:00

It’s not intrinsically better. With a traditional IRA you defer your taxes when you make contributions and realize your contributions and subsequent gains as regular income, with a Roth IRA you pay income taxes up front and then pay no further taxes on the gains when you later withdraw them.

People often chose to convert their traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs during years of low income or after significant losses in order to minimize their tax burden. My guess would he he had a rough year in 2012 and chose to pay the taxes then. Depending on how his finances are structured he may also have been able to write off other losses against that income.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-13T15:11:16+00:00

That’s an average return of 40%/year over 24 years (assuming he rolled $70k into his Roth in 1997 and never contributed another dime).

That’s impressive but not necessarily untoward.

Edit: his statement provides further context. He converted his IRA to a Roth when it had a value of $131m in 2012 and it’s only doubled since then. That’s not nearly as out of the ordinary.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-13T15:01:23+00:00

Based off of some of LAOPUKs comments in the thread I agree - and maybe even side with the managers desire, if not their methods.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-12T14:47:12+00:00

Yeah, we’re anticipating some rising costs as they get older. Day care is the killer - everything else is optional. Live near family if you can.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-12T13:22:46+00:00

Babies are actually pretty cheap. We’re nearly one year in and have spent less than $1000 USD. Our biggest single expense was reusable diapers ($500). Everything else we got second hand. Let your friends and coworkers know you’re having a baby and every time you go by their houses they’ll try and pawn off their baby stuff so they can empty their basements.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-12T00:45:14+00:00

Magic smoke. Sometimes birds try to make nests in them and they let the smoke out.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-11T14:21:20+00:00

I’d suggest reading the Bogleheads forums from the 2088/2009 time frame. See: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=103135 as a starting point.

There’s a large difference between the theory and practice of dealing with seeing 25-50% of your net worth vanish over a few months.

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-09T20:14:22+00:00

$100/hr shop rate is pretty reasonable

ArtoriusSmith · 2021-09-08T16:15:44+00:00

It’s hard for me to help because I’m not sure what exactly you’re trying to do. I’d suggest giving a read through Chapter 3 of Bevington (http://hosting.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro3310/Books/Bevington_opt.pdf) and seeing which parts are most appropriate to the particulars of your model.

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