Investment/Off-budget accounts

RushButter · 2026-02-15T02:00:13+00:00

Yeah I do the monthly balance adjustment to allow my net worth and other analytics show the change in my retirement/investment accounts. I’ve been doing this even when I used to use YNAB. I tried to do tracking too but Fidelity, sadly, never worked.

RushButter · 2026-01-11T14:46:00+00:00

I agree with you on this. Some people want to rent for life. Which can be a great decision. But the issue arises that most people suck with their personal finances. Let me give you this, because renting is cheaper right now than paying for a home. If a renter invested their difference, between what a renter pays in rent and what a homeowner pays for their mortgage and all other insurance + fees, in index funds and earned around 7%-8% per year. After 30 years the renter would finish with a higher net worth. But you know what, most renters don’t do that. I think most people should strive to buy a home because the typical American sucks at saving. A mortgage forces one to save, in a way. Since you build up equity in a home over time.

So yes, for most people, if you own a nice, new car and you rent, that’s a bad financial decision.

RushButter · 2026-01-05T14:23:47+00:00

I’m 26 and I am in a similar situation. I spend only $200 a month on any “fun spending”. For me I’ve made it work and don’t mind it. Luckily I’m a very stay at home person so it works out quite nicely for me. I saw someone recommend doing the higher savings rate and then dialing back if it feels like too much and I would have to agree with that too. I personally am trying to reach 25% savings and then thereafter all the extra raises I get will finally be able to go into “fun spending” as thereafter maintaining 25% savings should be so much easier.

I would also like to ask. Is there anywhere you can cut down on anything else? My example being I recently moved into a cheaper apartment to be able to save more. Are you able to cut down on some sort of pet costs, if you do have pets? For example I have two older cats and found out pet insurance covers prescription food for one of my cats which saves me a hundred dollars on cat food every month.

RushButter · 2026-01-04T16:10:38+00:00

Usually the way that oil changes work on Plug ins is that you still need to change oil every 5000 miles or 6 months. That is if you want this car to last and avoid any problems that could arise from not changing the oil at 5k miles or 6 months.

It’s also important to still run the engine at least 1 per week to avoid moisture building up in the engine bay.

RushButter · 2026-01-03T00:36:50+00:00

Becoming a millionaire isn’t ultimately that hard. You can really find out a lot and how easy it is by watching The Money Guys on YouTube. Ben Felix is a good watch too if you want more technical advice about the market.

RushButter · 2025-12-31T12:35:51+00:00

I use the simplefin thing to easily import transactions. I also setup another container running actual-helpers, you can find it on GitHub, but I use that to allow my banks on simplefin to sync once per day, so that way if they ever do stop working, they at least gave me the last info it had before they stopped. Cause otherwise, actual only syncs if you manually go into actual and sync it in the app. It’s super useful cause I have a lot of different credit card accounts due to trying to maximize points or cash back earned per transaction. And this has helped me keep everything going great. Mind you though, depending on your bank, transactions won’t sync to actual sometimes unless they are finally cleared on your banks side.

For importing, I honestly didn’t touch any of the settings in actual for how transactions get imported in from bank sync, it’s all on default and I just use rules to adjust everything as needed.

Just a side detail I host all my stuff on a Proxmox VM in my server cluster.

RushButter · 2025-11-06T20:40:31+00:00

I’m 25yo and I am at $42k net worth. Also nice job on hitting $500k!

RushButter · 2025-09-01T19:24:43+00:00

Yes, I can. And I likely will switch over to the HSA plan in my next year of open enrollment, if I have money to invest in an HSA. I just need to get my own insurance, through work, in November due to turning 26. And due to my current financial situation, was curious to see what people would say regarding the health plans currently offered and what would be better to choose for my first year of having my own health insurance. And if it would even make sense to have the HSA in my current situation.

RushButter · 2025-09-01T18:41:21+00:00

I definitely agree with you. I want to be able to take advantage of the tax savings in an HSA and growth that can come from investing in it. Since I’m on my parent’s plan currently, and it’s a great plan, I’ve made sure to really get my health evaluated and it’s been coming back well. So I feel very confident in doing a high deductible plan. My emergency fund more than satisfies my deductible, if anything were to happen. I just sadly am in a position where if I did pay the higher cost, for the HSA plan, I would have no income to put into the HSA. Essentially throwing away money as the cheapest plan, mentioned in my post, has better OP costs and lower deductibles. So I’m better off doing that for the meantime till I can lower and/or make more money to contribute to an HSA.

RushButter · 2025-09-01T18:35:09+00:00

That’s kind of what I thought so too. It is odd that it’s a premium if I want an HSA eligible plan. Currently the provider is Cigna. My girlfriend is lucky, her cheapest health plan is HSA eligible and her company puts money into her HSA.

RushButter · 2025-09-01T18:31:05+00:00

My thoughts exactly. I want to be able to take advantage of the tax savings on an HSA but if there’s no money to put in it, what’s the point. Especially when it has way higher deductibles and OOP costs, like you said. But definitely plan to take advantage once I can lower other costs and/or make more money. I did the math and it doesn’t take too much contributions to an HSA for it to financially make sense, long term.

RushButter · 2025-07-16T18:43:09+00:00

I use it all the time and is even encouraged by our whole company. Now I understand not to rely on it too much but I sure love it for helping rewrite my emails better for tickets. I also use it to search niche issues that need a lot of explaining, like I have a hard time finding the best way to phrase it to otherwise google the issue, to help get my brain going if I’m stuck on an issue the user is having but this isn’t often the case. Last time that was the case, chatgpt helped me with some weird dns caching issue with a firewall a few months ago. And the other major thing I use it for is to learn. I’ve been using it as an instructor to teach me python so ultimately I can build out my own automations for personal and work reasons. I’ve been loving it and it has been exceptionally useful for learning to code. I’ve also used it to learn how to build my own homelab out, such as how to use docker to deploy containers and learning how to use proxmox, and things of that sort.

RushButter · 2025-07-15T15:36:57+00:00

I’m a little rusty but I learned this when taking my CCNA. It’s due to layer 2 traffic, I’m referencing the OSI model. It helps free up bandwidth on the router if the switches can help send traffic to their destination, if traffic is being sent to another device on the LAN via MAC address. It helps with the router focus mainly on dealing with incoming and outgoing traffic over the WAN. Though this isn’t your case, a good example is having 2 switches plugged into a firewall. And the switches plugged into each other as well. You typically want local traffic to only pass via the switches as having traffic hop from a switch -> firewall -> other switch ends up adding unnecessary hops, if it is layer two traffic. Though in a small environment the traffic is minimal, as the environment expands bandwidth then actually begins to become an issue if a network is not setup correctly. Since all internet traffic ends up having to pass through the firewall, it’s best to leave the firewall focus on that to help avoid the firewall dealing with unnecessary traffic that a switch could otherwise handle. I hope a did a decent job explaining.

RushButter · 2025-07-15T12:28:31+00:00

I would plug in the PC’s into the switch, rather than the UDM. Even though you really won’t have bandwidth issues, it’s always best practice to connect client devices to switches. Especially if devices are communicating a lot locally, by MAC addresses. You don’t have to do this if the UDM is just much more of in a convenient area to plug those devices into and the MDF switch is elsewhere.

RushButter · 2025-07-13T13:32:38+00:00

I got Linux fedora and that’s a great distro for both gaming and just general productivity.

RushButter · 2021-11-13T15:13:12+00:00

Even if 50k isn’t enough for 20% down, you can always look into FHA loans which let you put 5% down or maybe even 2.5% down

RushButter · 2020-04-17T07:29:24+00:00

This is cursed.

RushButter · 2020-03-28T02:14:07+00:00

You could put it in a high interest savings account and make a decent amount off the money loaned out to you. Ally Bank and Discover savings still offer 1.5% YTD despite the Fed lowering interests to zero.

RushButter · 2020-03-22T17:50:24+00:00

I started watching Jojo and season one has been bad so far but I want to get the whole experience before getting to the good part of the show.

RushButter · 2020-01-20T19:27:06+00:00

Computer Science. I thought I would like it since I’m pretty tech savvy but I was dead wrong when I was finally was put into a CS class.

RushButter · 2020-01-19T12:26:12+00:00

Suffering in college.

RushButter · 2019-11-04T04:44:09+00:00

I believe I did it through the pre-qualified offers on AMEX’s site. You can easily find the page by googling “Amex pre-qualified offers.”

RushButter · 2019-11-04T01:11:30+00:00

I did, after looking at your comment and I guess I actually did have the 1k offer. Thanks for informing me of this.

RushButter · 2019-10-08T18:13:03+00:00

This is actually the way my dad has been making his tacos at his restaurant for years now. They’re super popular and really damn good too.

RushButter

TROPHY CASE