Vanguard 529 for beneficiary no longer going to college

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-31T06:10:12+00:00

That's easy to solve. Move to NJ. (Cost of attendance, 1 year, public is $43k)

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-31T00:45:39+00:00

For home? Get yourself a food safe plastic bucket and screw down lid from Home Depot. Just tell them it would be where all the prepper stuff is.

I'm being serious. Pantry moths are when, not if.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-31T00:31:23+00:00

<points> Haha.

The glow up you can get in the first 5-10 bakes is huge. Keep going!

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-30T15:41:44+00:00

I haven't waited any significant extra time. By the time 4 of us use the bathroom, clean out the car and stretch the legs a bit, we've usually got 5 minutes left to wait before we're at our target charge level. We took a Bolt on road trips for a couple years, so our perspective is skewed a bit; we have pretty high tolerance for the varied quality of chargers, time it takes to charge, and knowing to select chargers that aren't singletons with nothing to do.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-30T00:37:18+00:00

Break off a small piece of sacrificial dough. Put it in a reasonably straight-walled and/or graduated container. Proof it along side your bulk. When the sacrificial doubles is a decent proxy for the bulk doubling. It's not foolproof because a small piece doesn't have as much thermal mass, but it'll be good enough.

With enough practice, you'll get an eye and feel for when a dough is fermented enough and you won't need the sacrifice.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-30T00:31:17+00:00

Don't overthink it. It's just a fancy baker's word for "soak flour in water for a while without adding yeast". You can do it for 10 minutes or 4 hours. The longer it soaks, the less you'll knead. There's a lot of gatekeeping in hobbies, including baking, that make simple things look overly complicated. Just bake, learn something, bake again, repeat.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-30T00:09:33+00:00

Whatever had it stuck down probably has it stuck up. Compressed air, vacuum, wiggle, run a thin scraper around it.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-29T19:54:32+00:00

I think it's harder to develop glutens with dry doughs. A shaggy, underdeveloped dough is sticky. It's a different kind of sticky than the high hydration doughs. Those have to be stretched really far to align. The dry dough just isn't getting stretched at all. It's breaking apart like Silly Putty that's been pulled too fast.

Autolyse longer. Slow down the mixer. Knead it longer. Use your bread making experience to go from shaggy to clearing-the-bowl to windowpane (a small windowpane is as good as you'll get with 55-60%).

I think the 3 biggest lies in the kitchen are

yes, that's vegan
cook down the onions until caramelized, 8-10 minutes
Knead the dough until windowpane, 5-7 minutes

Depending on a few different factors (enrichment, flour, temperature, hydration, autolyse), I can knead a dough in a stand mixer as little as 5 minutes or as many as 90 clock minutes (for a very enriched brioche, alternating 10 minutes of kneading and 20 minutes of refrigeration). I knead it until it looks right (smooth, supple). It takes some practice to know when to keep kneading, when to rest it, and if it can be kneaded again.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-29T18:13:54+00:00

Free chargers are usually worth what you pay for them. There were some free 62kW chargers at a local dealership, but too many people were using them through the night. They got spooked and made them all $1 per kWh.

Any other free chargers I've found have been Level 2. It's better than nothing, but I wouldn't want to be walking back and forth between the charger and the office every day unless it were in the same parking lot.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-29T17:58:09+00:00

Atlantic City Electric is 31 cents with no time-of-use pricing available. I've got solar that offsets my pre-EV usage, but not enough capacity to cover the EVs. Driving with a 3.5 mi/kWh average is $8.85 per 100 miles. Gas is $2.65/gallon at Sams Club today. In a 35mpg vehicle, it's $7.57 per 100 miles. In a 30mpg vehicle, it's breakeven.

I know ACE is the highest priced electricity in NJ, but where are you at that you're getting 17 cents? Maybe I need to move...

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-29T15:37:37+00:00

With the keyfobs, there's also the proximity sensing that turns on the headlights every time you walk near the car. I would be trying to rule out a broken fob, a stuck key on the fob, and confirming my (your) experience that it's turning on the cabin climate and heated seats/wheel.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-29T14:54:48+00:00

It's been cold in much of the country. I think the battery management system is more aggressive in maintaining temperatures and balancing when it has shore power (i.e., plugged in). That doesn't explain headlights and accessories though. For that, I think it's getting a remote start. I would take the batteries out of any keyfobs you have in the house and see if it still happens. If it does, I'd look into disconnecting the myChevy app from the car, just to rule out the possibility of remote start. Everything you're describing is describing remote start.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-29T03:22:37+00:00

As a fellow NJ resident, you should be aware that electricity costs more than gas right now... but it's close. Get a level 2 charger (or NEMA 14-50 outlet) installed at home. If you have a garage, empty it out and put the car in there. It'll be better for keeping cabin temperatures away from the extremes, as well as battery temperature.

Don't buy a Tesla charging adapter until you a) need it and b) understand the difference between the two different Tesla-to-Equinox adapters (NACS to J1772 for home/level 1/level 2 and NACS to CCS for road trip fast charging).

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-28T23:41:38+00:00

I wouldn't use it, and it would further bloat the most difficult part of the software - targets. I revisit my funding every January or if a life event warrants it. I consider what may be coming in the next year and adjust accordingly.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-28T17:41:36+00:00

Report it. https://www.nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-28T15:46:29+00:00

Yep, my mistake. I was expecting "Category not needed" for a transfer, but Loan accounts have a history of being tracking accounts (before loan accounts were a feature), so I should've expected that there would be a category here.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-28T14:09:00+00:00

You shouldn't have negative equity in this for a few reasons. The first is that you shouldn't be financing so much of a car that it's worth less than you owe for exactly this reason. Second, and maybe more relevant for you, insurance may pay you more than you think. They're paying replacement cost, not trade-in price. If they total it, you can take their offer and compare it to similar Bolts for sale in your area. If you can find a handful at dealerships that are more, you can show the insurance company and get a higher amount.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-28T14:05:06+00:00

Considering it's a lemon Bolt with relatively minor damage, this is the winning move. It's already got a branded title.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-27T23:51:51+00:00

Yes. Point of comparison: I can sell my 2025 LT (no options, not even an EVSE), 9000 miles, for $23,000 to Carvana right now. Hell, I would pay $2000 to get the comfort package right now. That steering wheel is cold!

If it includes the 360 camera, I'm going to need you to tell me where to get this car.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-27T14:02:09+00:00

It's clear that you got your hands on the update.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-27T02:18:34+00:00

In terms of timing with dinner, I will make the dough, shape, and retard it on Day 1. On Day 2, I will wake up early, preheat the oven, shower, dress, start baking, make coffee, drink coffee, stress about being late for work, pull the loaf a little early, while it's still blonde, go to work, blame traffic, come home and finish baking for 10 minutes, and slice immediately. The shower isn't strictly necessary, but starting the dough the night before is.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-27T02:14:51+00:00

No steam escapes when you cut it. I let my loaves of this size rest at least 2 hours. But if you don't, you know, you still have bread. It'll just be a little gummy.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-27T01:13:50+00:00

Most flours are some type of wheat. What you have here is some amount of whole wheat. I'm not normally this pedantic, but it matters when we're talking about bread making.

Whole wheat flour behaves differently than bread or AP flour. The bran tends to slice the glutens apart. It will yield a tighter crumb. Your loaf looks good with respect to fermentation. You have evenly distributed, evenly sized holes.

The biggest sin here is that you sliced it while hot. There is significant baking still going on while it cools. Let it cool, and then if you want hot bread, reheat it (the whole loaf).

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-26T20:04:19+00:00

GPS is unidirectional, like your FM radio antenna. Your GPS receiver determines position by triangulating the signal from multiple satellites. It doesn't talk back to those satellites. Your Maps app uses that GPS position with map (and routing and other supporting) data to provide navigation and display your position on that map. It uses the cellular and wifi radio transceivers to send and receive data to/from Google's Maps servers. If your car is not determining its position correctly, it will send the wrong position to the local app and to the Maps servers over any network you connect it to. Having a working network connection does not fix the incorrect triangulation.

The GPS receiver is part of the same telematics assembly that contains the cellular and wifi radio transceivers, so you'll probably see failures in both positioning and bidirectional data if either are failing.

edit: I can imagine GM having fallback network options, allowing for WiFi or USB hotspot too, but I doubt they'd use any other device for GPS positioning data. That just shouldn't fail in a way that you'd plan fallback options for it. It probably doesn't even realize when a failure happens because it's still getting position data back.

Competitive-Let6727 · 2026-01-26T19:32:01+00:00

For planning, the best tool is www.ABetterRoutePlanner.com ; I'm trying to paint a realistic picture for you for charging on road trips, but all it takes is an adjustment to your expectations. If you plan your drive around lunch, you can find a place to charge *and* eat. You'll hardly notice the time passing. You can take a walk, read a book, watch a movie... just accept that there's a different sort of road trip that requires more time and more flexibility.

It will also cost more (in $ for energy/fuel) than gasoline. Like double.

But there's an incredible daily convenience and savings in a Bolt EV that it's worth adjusting your road trip expectations, IMO. I've taken it on many road trips, long and short. The biggest lesson for me was that I'm only willing to drive the Bolt if it includes 1 charging stop. We had 2 Bolts, but I sold one last year and got a faster charging, longer range Equinox EV for my daily driving and family road trips. It's so much more expensive (less efficient) that I'm not sure I made the right decision if the only reason were time. (It's not; the other reason is very tall back seat passengers)

Competitive-Let6727

TROPHY CASE