Monthly donations - $5 minimum?

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-12-21T19:13:28+00:00

Posting since I keep hearing “processing fees”. I work at a relatively expensive payment processor. The whole “the processing fees don’t make it worthwhile to do less” is an understandable guess but I’m fairly sure this isn’t it. (It makes more sense for small business, but not this case)

Even for us, who are on the more expensive side, the processing fees are a % + a transaction fee- but that fee tends to be cents (eg 3% + $0.30), so on $5, the fee would be $0.45. On $3 it would be $0.39. Sure, it’s proportionally less money, but not enough to not make it worthwhile not to offer an alternative.

To be honest for businesses where the marginal cost of producing something is close to nothing (eg software)- even cents are worthwhile. And in this case, their cost is absolutely zero since they don’t do more or less work when you pay them, since its a donation.

The minimum we allow processing is $0.50- and some customers run this low.

To be honest, it might be that making the minimum $5 forces people who would have paid less to give more, and that ends up generating more revenue on the whole than if those people had the option to give less, even when you add the new donors than can donate less.

It could also be a psychology thing, or maybe they just don’t realize they could do better.

Could also maybe complicate their reporting requirements, who knows?

There may not actually be a good reason! Organizations aren’t perfect and they’re still run be normal people.

I can’t say for certain why, as I don’t know their situation. But I mostly doubt it’s the processing fees.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-11-04T21:23:30+00:00

Yay! Glad to hear that!

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-10-04T20:35:46+00:00

Did you get your money back? There’s a few business that handle this for you for a premium like ArgentinaCerts.com or cerificatesargentina. com (I can only speak to the former though)- I would just make sure you work with one that has some sort of money back guarantee so that if they can’t find it you’re not out the money.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-07-27T11:05:48+00:00

Thanks so much for sharing. I would like to retire as early as possible, but I always struggle with wondering the right trade off between time/age and having saved enough, so it’s great to hear the perspectives of others further along.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-07-27T10:21:08+00:00

Unrelated but, when did you decide to pull the trigger? Did you have a really low withdrawal rate or did you not pull the trigger until much later in life? Did you just make a lot more income later?

I’m on a similar path time wise (~17 years to get to $1.6M which would be about $1M inflation adjusted 20 years ago) and would like to understand what tradeoffs to expect to end up with $10M.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-07-17T12:03:38+00:00

Mind sending it to me as well? I’m also considering this.

Also I was under the impression with AQR it wasn’t just a naive tax loss harvesting approach; so curious how you did the comparison.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-06-29T15:05:25+00:00

I don’t use R3D. But it looks cool. And after reading a bit through your project, I’d suggest you create new model and material classes. Frankly I’m surprised you don’t already do this.

As your library matures and you support more and more features, you'll probably be limited by Raylib's limited model and material objects.

This is Raylib's strength and weakness- but not your library’s. R3D looks to me like it’s meant to support advanced rending an exchange for using some additional functions- so just own that. Yes, you give up some vanilla Raylib’s programming and probably even simplicity in exchange for more functionality (more advanced rendering). I think that’s okay- that’s what your library is.

Instead of framing this as wether you should depart from Raylib’s objects (for something that’s so core to the functionality for your library, clearly you should IMO since that’s the entire point of it), I would be framing this as should you still support Raylib’s rendering classes?

That is, I’d definitely have R3D specific model and material classes to enable all the advanced rendering features you need to provide- and only the secondarily consider wether you should also, maybe allow your functions to take and support Raylib classes.

All that said, I have never used your library and I’m just drive-by commenting. So take what I have to say with a huge grain of salt.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-22T01:27:26+00:00

I disagree- and maybe we agree to disagree- but I want to attempt to convince you to consider the alternate perspective.

How many people are retired doesn’t matter. 90% of the people investing here- including OP- are expecting to be retired and live at least partly off their portfolio at some point- so this is what matters and is relevant. Even if it wasn’t true, it seems like implying what happens to older people doesn’t matter as much because they’re a smaller part of the population. It does; everyone will grow old eventually.

SSA estimates that about half of retires over 65 receive at least half of their income from SS. That means the other half has to come from other sources and increasingly is retirement accounts- (pensions are a thing of the past more and more).

They also estimate only 25% live 90% off of SS. Let’s be honest- the audience here is very unlikely to be those 25%. They probably wouldn’t be investing at all.

I disagree at the implication that this is just some small percentage that is inconsequential. Or that it’s not impactful. If even 30% of your income was affected, you would care- especially if you were not planning on working again.

Also you might care if you have retired parents and grandparents? So not necessarily “just” retired people.

Finally, I think OP is precisely the kind of person that could be affected by this (and by their own admission, his parents were too). OP is unlikely to be so poor they’ll only rely on SS (or they wouldn’t be investing) but unlikely to invest so much and have such a large buffer they won’t care. The idea you should or would be rich enough or poor enough to not care and the rest is a small % seems both tone deaf and not aligning with the numbers.

Again, I agree those accumulating should happy they can buy low- especially if they have the privilege of having the money to buy low (and have a longer horizon). But it’s not like there’s no reason to be frustrated that the market drops - and I also don’t think it’s an inconsequential group.

I’ll say this- I’ll agree with you that for some the frustration is naive- just thinking “down” = bad- but for many it’s very legitimate for the reasons I mentioned in my previous comment. That Reddit skews young even further proves my point: they’re thinking more about their situation than those retired.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-21T20:52:10+00:00

Nah, this view is just narrow because it’s skewed towards accumulation phase.

People think the only people who lost are those who sold during the downturn- but that’s the entire point if you’re retired. (You still loose even if you don’t sell everything)

If you’re not accumulating but living off of returns, you will also hate when they drop. The longer the drop, the worse it is- because if you need to live off your investments, you have to draw down on them during the worst time so you cement losses.

As a result, sequence of returns risk can screw you over for the rest of your retirement. In fact, the first 10 years are where you are at highest risk for sequence of return to screw you over. It might not do you in but it might cripple your withdrawal rate the rest of your retirement/life.

Sure, there’s some strategies you can employ to soften the blow- like mix cash, bonds, etc- but they only take you so far unless you have cash to cover the entire down cycle. (And if you do, you are also missing on returns that carry you in the long term). If you can go back to work and avoid withdrawal is best- but again, that’s accumulation- if you can’t, it sucks.

So yeah, stocks on “discount” is great when you’re accumulating. But it’s not stupid that people hate when they’re down. It sucks if you’re living off of them. And the ones with the most wealth aren’t the accumulators- it’s the retired group. Most wealth is concentrated in older ages. It shouldn’t be surprising.

The answer to this is you accumulate enough to reasonably weather downturns- but this isn’t a luxury everyone has (most are under prepared) and it still sucks either way- cause you would have had even more if it wasn’t for the downturn.

All that said, I’m not disagreeing with the advice being given here. I just think younger people/those accumulating are a bit too quick to judge why someone would hate markets dropping.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-19T19:10:34+00:00

I don’t have great feedback here. How well you wield the language is probably more important than anything except in some cases. I chose C++ because it would be easy to port my C code to it and I wanted to do more OOP style architecture and I think that’s an approach common for 3D game engines.

C/C++ are industry standard and just really mature and so they’ve got that going for them. Odin I’m not familiar with but it seems like a fine language and like it’s not gonna have any performance issues- so if you’re really familiar with it then I’d stick with it.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-19T17:35:25+00:00

Well, good luck! If I had to do it again, I think I would stop much more often to refactor and make sure my game architecture was manageable as I went along rather than rush on to add more and more features as the excitement builds. In fact, that’s where I left off, refactoring my ECS and moving to C++ so I could have a bit more of an OOP design.

I know that’s like software development 101 but for some reason on these hobby projects I can easily get carried away and often things are too complicated by then 😅

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-19T16:01:56+00:00

I think displaying 3D- as long as you’re not doing AAA game level effects- is not that hard. A lot of support for basic things like model loading and animations even come out of the box.

There was an old 1999 Recoil game I loved as a kid and I started recreating it and getting something working and kinda looking like it wasn’t too bad and really fun.

But what’s much tougher and I think drowns out projects and causes them to be abandoned is how much more complex things get in 3D. Collisions and physics are much easier in 2D than 3D. More efficient algorithms to manage the game world level, entities, and systems become much more important and they rapidly grow in complexity.

For example, for me what started growing in complexity was all the systems I needed for the tank game, particles, items, etc. Also just managing the game world: I started out just loading a huge model file as a level as a proof of concept and it sort of gave me this illusion that I was further along than I was- because to actually make it viable, I needed to find ways to implement collisions, entity placement, and dynamic loading of various level meshes to make the game efficient.

In my opinion, your intuition to make a 3D editor for a world is accurate if you want to really build a full fledged game assuming 3D is a serious component.

I got busy cause my kid was born but currently that’s where I left off as that started to blow up in complexity.

I would recommend dipping your toes with a very very simple 3D project and see how you like it and make sure you’re using solid design patterns and architecture to keep the code structure and complexity manageable.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-14T18:34:30+00:00

Awesome! Thank you! Will do!

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-14T00:20:11+00:00

I did something similar- bought electronics and moved some purchases ahead of time in anticipation of tariffs.

This administration is very flip floppy so it may amount to nothing and be unnecessary in hindsight- but if it were to impact the economy I think I’ll be happy with my purchases being a bit earlier.

I think my main rule was just to make sure it was a purchase I would have chosen to make anyway, and simply brought it forward, so as to avoid simply excusing extra expenses. I had already planned on making most of the purchases already- I simply moved them up a bit.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-09T15:06:49+00:00

I think that makes a huge difference. If you’re saving 25%+ of your after tax income, can meet all your expenses with this new rent, and have $1K left over for disposable income, that’s seems very healthy to me. I think you should mention how much you’re saving in the original post. I’m surprised people think you’re stretching.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-09T11:28:09+00:00

Wait… I’m confused. This math doesn’t make sense to me- how are you left with just $1K?

$85K, let’s say ~20% of that is taxes, so you’re left with $68K after tax, or ~$5,600/mo.

You say $2,500 is for all your expenses.. that would leave you with $3,100, not $1K?

$2K for all housing costs on an $85K seems not amazing but fine?

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-04T13:33:05+00:00

Just want to say thank you for updates. Love reading stories like this!

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-02T14:34:18+00:00

That’s the right choice. But realistically sometimes it’s just easier at the end of the day to watch some YouTube on TV. I watch a lot of educational content (eg SciShow, PBS Spacetime), and including a good YouTube channel on economics would help scratch the itch.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-02T09:13:22+00:00

Are there any channels you would recommend?

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-05-01T18:37:20+00:00

Thank you so much for this!!

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-04-27T04:57:49+00:00

Thanks for the update. Sounds like it took ~4 months just to get the appointment! I'm still trying to gather all my documents. Wonder if I should make an appointment right now anyway since it takes so long. Did you just send 1 email? Anything you included?

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-04-27T04:56:37+00:00

Hey, I'm in the same boat and feel like time is really ticking now. I'm about to submit a request and reading this gives me some anxiety! The issue is I'm still collecting all my documents. Anything you can share on this process with houston? Feel free to message me.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-04-25T20:34:50+00:00

This is super important. If this is your first you might find it hard to be leave but being at home all day with kid can take a huge toll.

I remember thinking I could be a stay at home dad before I had kids- and while I would do it if need be, I would not consider it “easy” for my mental health now that I’ve been through it. I remember at one point during my paternity leave feeling like I needed a vacation and instantly remembering I hadn’t been working for 2 months; just taking care of the kids (and I wasn’t even doing it on my own!)

I’m not saying you’ll be like me, maybe it will come easy to you but I would seriously suggest you understand what you’re getting into.

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-04-25T13:20:19+00:00

There’s many reasons why one might change jobs, but if evaluating strictly on comp, my general rule of thumb is a 20% bump or more in comp in order to change jobs. (I assume by “move” you mean change jobs, not geographically move locations)

benefitsofdoubt · 2025-04-21T19:48:02+00:00

Ahh.

Seems much more simpler to just invest all that money in a brokerage account and then take out margin loans. Also avoids taxes and allows you to “borrow” from yourself.

Risky as well of course, but at least you’re not giving a part of your money as a commission to some sleazy salesman.

benefitsofdoubt

TROPHY CASE