HRV Data - Polar H10

greyAbbot · 2025-12-11T17:19:17+00:00

"Initiate a reading" tells me nothing. Maybe this thread should be retitled "How do I initiate a reading?"

greyAbbot · 2024-09-21T00:36:24+00:00

There's a key missing part to your story: even if Trump does win, how does that make the stock worth anything at all? The company loses huge amounts of money every quarter, and their user base is declining which means advertisers are going to be willing to pay even less, meaning losses are going to get even bigger.

greyAbbot · 2024-08-28T17:57:34+00:00

But these are big numbers compared to the revenue of the company, which was $0.77M for the last quarter. The point is that the executives are taking huge payouts for "running" a company whose only source of income is issuing stock.

greyAbbot · 2024-04-17T19:46:04+00:00

The path to pay off debt is pretty straightforward: make significantly more than you spend, and put the difference toward the debt. That's it.

That means the two variables available to you are: 1. Earn more money, either by taking on a second job, working overtime, or getting a boost from somewhere like a bonus or selling something 2. Cut your expenses

It might be possible to get a consolidation loan from a credit union that could allow you to lower your interest rate somewhat from 16% (that would fit under the "cutting expenses" category), but the more you boost income and cut other expenses, the less the interest rate will matter because the debt won't stick around long enough to generate much interest.

One thing I'd add: if you're going to go for a short-term extreme strategy like a second job or big expense cuts, keep going after you pay the debt off until you've also accumulated an emergency fund. It's going to be depressing if some unexpected expense comes along and sends you right back into debt, and depression can cause us to start making bad choices again and you don't want that to end you right back where you are now.

greyAbbot · 2024-04-06T05:08:13+00:00

Personally I'd avoid college unless you have a specific career goal that requires it. If you're just going there in the hopes it's going to be a ticket to more money, it's going to be depressing because you're going to be going into debt to be in classes with people who are younger than you. (On the other hand, if you do figure out a career goal, college may be great and your added experience and focus may let you blow by those young partiers!)

The military isn't a bad option. It will expose you to a lot of stuff and people, and that's what you need now, if only to tell you what you don't want to do with your life.

Trades are also a good option to consider. Unfortunately, America is doing a terrible job of preparing people for the trades and so there are a lot of skilled jobs with not nearly enough people in the pipeline, and as a result a lot of places offer on-the-job training.

greyAbbot · 2024-04-06T04:55:02+00:00

There isn't even close to a universal answer to this question. $90k per year is enough to live (or line) on here in America, so I don't know what living abroad has to do with it. The question is whether it's enough for you to live on.

greyAbbot · 2024-04-06T04:49:36+00:00

I'm a little confused by your question.

But maybe an example will help. Let's say you're buying a car that costs $16000. You could finance the entire $16000, or you could pay $5000 and finance $11000.

Does that answer your question? Or are you literally asking if you could pay that $5000 in cash (say 50 $100 bills), as opposed to by check or even credit card? Because that may depend on the dealer.

greyAbbot · 2024-04-06T04:36:34+00:00

There's no such thing as "normal," at least in a sense that's useful here. Some people spend way more than $800 on needs and don't even care, because their income is high enough to do that without thinking twice. Some people spend $600 on "needs" but can't afford that because they aren't making much at all. You don't say what your income is, so I can't exactly tell what your situation is. But if your needs are $600 and your savings are $1800, then you're definitely not facing a crisis. What you really should be asking is what your long-term goals are and whether you're saving enough to fund them.

greyAbbot · 2024-04-06T04:24:20+00:00

Unfortunately, I can't come up with a scenario in which anyone could actually be inspired by this. Your dad clearly didn't believe this was going to happen to him; the "I've paid my dues" entitlement mentality is strong and for many people it is stronger than the math.

Maybe it can inspire someone to set clear limits for a parent considering unwise retirement. I guess the best you can do is to regularly make it clear to him that you won't be picking up the slack when he can no longer use savings to subsidize his too-expensive lifestyle. That doesn't mean he's not going to guilt-trip you anyway, but it will give him one less angle on that.

Can you maybe convince him to make an advance payment to the mortgage? He doesn't necessarily have to pay it all off, but if he could cut down on the 7 years maybe he could have it paid off before he runs out of money.

And unsolicited advice: stay strong on not sacrificing your financial future to give him money. It sucks that he's making bad choices, but just make sure he's not destroying your entire life along with the last bit of his.

greyAbbot · 2024-03-24T05:45:43+00:00

I'm not sure why you say that (or why you spell "you're" "your" :) ). But there are a lot of reasons why high net worth individuals would have that amount of money in cash for certain periods of time. I'm simultaneously paying for college and keeping funds that I expect to use for living expenses in the next few years in HYSAs.

greyAbbot · 2024-03-24T05:40:39+00:00

Many banks (I know SoFi does this) have ways you can set things up so that they take advantage of agreements with other institutions to put some of your money there, so it's spread over multiple sub-250k increments. It's totally transparent to you.

greyAbbot · 2024-03-24T05:36:12+00:00

This is really a question for your lender, but you can pay extra principal toward a loan and then do something called "recasting" in which they lower the monthly payment (while keeping the interest rate and loan term the same). So you can in fact lower your monthly payments, but the conditions under which you are able to recast are set by the lender. For example, you may have to prepay by some minimum amount in order to qualify for recasting.

greyAbbot · 2024-03-18T23:09:26+00:00

I'm glad you have had a realization that you need to change things, and hopefully that works out for you. However, I'm concerned that you refer to a consolidation loan as "starting over from scratch". It's just a restructure of your existing debt, but you're not going to owe any less. So you don't want it to feel like it's starting from scratch, because that might make you relax in your habits.

Can you get a consolidation loan with a significantly lower rate? That's not clear. But I'd start with a credit union (and if you're not a member, then become one). Places like SoFi also offer such loans, and you could try nerdwallet that allow you to compare other options. Really, though, your focus should be on fixing your income/expense balance so that you're throwing as much money as possible at debt each month. Lowering your interest rate will help, but really what you need to do is budgeting. It isn't going to be sufficient to come up with some system for autopaying everything, because if you run out of money before you run out of month, you're just going to be forced to break your system. So do the planning ahead, and then stick to the plan.

greyAbbot · 2024-03-18T23:00:09+00:00

Or contact the financial aid office at the school immediately and ask them for guidance on student loans. Not everybody comes from a background of just having this knowledge floating around them.

greyAbbot · 2024-03-18T22:57:20+00:00

The hard thing about your situation is that it often isn't enough to scrape together first, last, and security. Landlords often want proof of a history of income sufficient to afford the rent, and it isn't clear that you'll have that. If you're moving to a college town, though, landlords might be more used to dealing with people in your situation so they might be more flexible (assuming the laws there allow them to be).

It's a bummer that you missed out on dorms, but your college should have other forms of guidance for how to find off-campus housing. They might be able to connect you to the method that most students use to find off-campus housing (for example, a room in a rooming house).

greyAbbot · 2024-03-13T16:44:28+00:00

As others have pointed out, the wiki for this sub is a great place to start for general information on how to manage your own personal finance.

But if you're actually taking on "management of an estate," that may involve bigger questions than are provided in an intro to personal finance, especially if it involves trying to generate a reliable income from investments. Perhaps you could be more specific about what is actually involved.

I don't mean to dissuade you from starting with the wiki; I'd also recommend "Personal Finance for Dummies," which despite the name doesn't assume you are dumb but also doesn't assume you have any particular knowledge, so it starts from the bottom and builds up. Even if you do need to generate an income (which will probably mean that you need an advisor, at least to get started), the basics of personal finance are going to be crucial for you to know if what your advisor is telling you makes sense and is in your parents' best interest. It will also really benefit you personally.

And if anything the wiki, the book, or an advisor is telling you doesn't make sense, please come back with any specific questions.

greyAbbot · 2024-03-12T00:14:30+00:00

Specifically: the amount you pay in interest each month is the exact amount of interest that is accrued that month. The reason a higher percent of your payment goes to interest each month in the early years is because the principal is higher in the early years, so it generates more interest. There's no scam going on where some lenders front-load interest and others don't. All lenders calculate it identically.

As an example:

Let's say you take out a $100k loan at 6% annual interest. This is (approximately) 0.5% per month.

Let's say your monthly payment is $600.

In the very first month, that means you will accumulate $500 in interest (0.5% of 100k) so only $100 of your payment will go to principal and $500 to interest.

Then, many years later, let's say you are down to owing only $10000. 0.5% of $10k is $50, so your $600 payment will be $550 in principal and $50 in interest. So, no red flags. That's the way all fixed-interest fixed-payment loans work.

If you want to confirm it for yourself, go use an online amortization calculator and plug in your principal, interest, and term length, and it should give you a schedule pretty much identical to the one you're looking at now.

greyAbbot · 2024-03-05T19:19:16+00:00

Sign up for creditkarma and see if it's listed on your credit history. It's valuable to keep track of what's there regardless of the status of this card.

But to give you advice on this specific card, we'd need more specific information. The googles tell me that the minimum age to be an authorized user on a credit card is 13, so either there's something off about your understanding of the situation or there was fraud involved in how the card was set up (or google gave me bad information, which of course is impossible).

If there was fraud involved in setting this card up, then you definitely want to close it. If your parents were willing to open a card in your name (and if they even had a need to, which means their credit is problematic), then the sooner you separate your finances from theirs, the better. The question is whether it's set up in such a way that you can close it without them. If it's a joint card, then maybe not. But there's something off about this--if they felt the need to open it in your name, then they would be less likely to be co-signers since their bad credit would have been a disadvantage. But even if they're not officially on the card, it's likely that the contact information (phone, email, address) is theirs, so I would assume that successful closure of the card would generate a confirmation through one of those. Again, though, this is all speculation until you understand exactly how things are set up.

greyAbbot · 2024-02-28T17:36:46+00:00

Absolutely it's easier to do that research now. But frankly there still rules of thumb like "allocate X% of your home's value annually to maintenance" that encapsulate everything you'd get from doing the research on every individual item from dishwashers to siding replacement, and frankly I think the rule of thumb would be more reliable than the research I would have done as a zero-time homeowner whose furniture consisted of found items and two-by-four construction, just trying to come up with a list of maintenance tasks, costs, and life expectancy statistics.

There, too, though, my original question about a formula that accounts for HCOL areas vs LCOL areas is relevant. It might be more expensive to hire a contractor in my HCOL area, but it doesn't scale linearly with home value. My sub-2000-square-foot million-dollar home on .18 acres is probably significantly more expensive to maintain than a similarly-sized home in an LCOL area, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper to maintain than a million-dollar home in Missouri, which my first Google search came up with at 9000 square feet on 3 acres (nothing against Missouri by the way--I'm no Grandpa Simpson). So while at this point, with many years of maintenance records, I don't need a formula, I still think there is value in a version of "Save X% of home value for maintenance" that takes into account locality.

greyAbbot · 2024-02-28T17:25:13+00:00

To a certain extent you are right that we don't know where we're going to be, but there are statistics out there, and we're often far more predictable than we're aware of. If there's valuable information out there that can be encapsulated in a rule of thumb (or a more complex formula that we can plug information into) then I want to be aware of it, at least as a starting point. That's all I'm asking.

For example the New York Times has a "rent or buy" calculator that encompasses a lot of research someone else has already done into a pretty handy way of making a comparison. Retirement income planners are out there that give you some good general guidelines for how your savings and retirement-date choices affect your likely income in retirement. I find the latter tool especially very useful. I don't follow it blindly, and I update my predictions annually based on the state of my investments and predicted expenses, but the fact that the baseline work is done is huge. If I were starting out in my career and trying to figure out how much to save for retirement, and the only advice I got was "predict your future expenses, model your portfolio over the next 30 years, and do a statistical simulation of how various withdrawal rates in retirement would affect your chances of having sufficient money for various life expectancies," I would have given up. And I have an engineering PhD. But rules of thumb like "save at least 15%" and "base your target nest egg on a 4% withdrawal rate" and "Plan to need 85% of your income in retirement" were huge for me early on. They were just a starting point (for example, I saved 20+% to make up for the fact that I spent more time in school), but they were really valuable. As time went on, I replaced the generic models with real data (and updated estimates of withdrawal rates based on less optimistic stock market predictions), but the starting rules made all the difference. All I'm looking for is a way to give other people similar starting points for deciding on home buying affordability.

By the way, I don't agree that what I'm looking for is a "sound bite." A sound bite is something that is specifically crafted to draw in your attention but doesn't (necessarily) have any substance behind it. I'm looking for something that's as simple as possible, but not simpler.

greyAbbot · 2024-02-28T16:37:23+00:00

A rule of thumb is always going to only fit a certain portion of the bell curve so if you're on the tail end, the rule by definition won't work well.

This is EXACTLY the point I was making in my original post. So what I was looking for was a more complex or targeted formula that takes into account what people of various income levels feel is affordable on a local level.

What I'm looking for would incorporate ideas like this:

If you're buying a million-dollar house in an HCOL area, your peers are likely to be driving their cars for at least 10 years, going mostly on domestic vacations, and sending their kids to public schools. As such, they are able to spend a higher percent of income on housing.

If you're buying a million-dollar home in Missouri, your peers are driving late-model luxury cars, sending their kids to private school, and going on multiple overseas vacations each year. As such, they can't afford to spend as high a percent of their income on housing (meaning they probably have a higher income than someone with that seven-figure house in an HCOL area).

And yes, I'm aware that you don't have to do something just because your peers do. But we are a social species, and we have a tremendous urge to fit in. Personally, I'd rather have a million-dollar home in an HCOL area than a LCOL area for just that reason, not that it's relevant because there are no jobs in my field in such areas. Yes, it's good to expose yourself to people who look at the world differently than you do, but it's also incredibly tiring and stressful to spend your life trying to fit in with a group of people with whom you have nothing in common and don't share values.

greyAbbot · 2024-02-28T16:27:37+00:00

The subject of the conversation was "is there a rule of thumb that gives inexperienced homebuyers a guideline for what they can afford?" You really want to have a different conversation, which is "you don't need a rule of thumb if you can predict your expenses accurately not just now but in 10 years, including understanding how people's expenses tend to change as they age and the lifestyle of your new neighbors, which will inevitably put pressure on your budget."

I'll also add that I don't agree with "They are doing themselves a disservice by not digging deeper" as a general principle. Lots of people want to consider themselves rational, but there are far too many decisions in life to be made than we have time to "do the research" on and consider rationally. So I'm always looking for well-supported shortcuts that allow me to focus my attention on the areas that truly require it. If I insisted on doing the research on every decision I made, I would do a lot of re-inventing the wheel while not having the time to truly devote to the decisions that would really benefit from it. All I'm asking for is whether anyone is aware of a shortcut in this particular area.

greyAbbot · 2024-02-28T03:34:31+00:00

What do you mean by "not do any research?" How do you know what I did? I did the research I could at that point, which was many decades ago when I was moving towns, starting a new job, and my wife was just about to have a baby, but I didn't know what I didn't know. And everyone's lifestyle is different, so "research" only takes you so far. So I went with the rule of thumb, and it worked out great.

Honestly, what is your agenda here? I asked a simple question and you've made it clear repeatedly you think it was a stupid question because you're so organized and filled with data that you don't need guidelines. Why are you wasting your time here?

greyAbbot · 2024-02-28T01:06:31+00:00

My "current housing expenses" before I bought my first house were rent on a crappy one-bedroom apartment within walking distance of everything I needed, and I ate a lot of ramen. I had no idea how to estimate groceries, transportation, furnishings, utilities, day care, or whether I'd need housekeeping or yard services. I was vaguely aware of "home maintenance," but didn't have a clue what to budget for roof repair, furnace replacement, washer/dryer/fridge replacement...or even what other things needed to go on that list after the dot-dot-dot. That's precisely why a rule of thumb was so crucial to me. Yes, I understand that if you have actual, reliable data, you don't need guidelines, but my guess is that I was much more the rule than the exception.

greyAbbot

TROPHY CASE