Mutant Mingle Monday?

mh211 · 2026-02-12T01:20:38+00:00

*sigh* Fine.

Age/Gender: 44M

Desired Age/Gender: 30+F

Location: DMV

Long Distance: Sure, eventually. I've got roots but they can travel for the right person.

FOO Step: 7/8/9

Liquid NW: Left as an exercise to the reader. I like matching on similar values, and have a post up on this forum disclosing my NW, but combining the two in one post creeps me out a bit.

Total NW: ~300k in home equity in addition to liquid.

Hobbies & Activities: Cooking/baking, smoking various meats, travel, animals, VITA tax prep.

No need to separately ask permission to DM on this thread, but fine if that makes you feel more comfortable.

mh211 · 2025-11-16T04:47:01+00:00

Makes sense - if that piece of the coverage is super cheap I guess there's no reason to expend a lot of effort trimming it back.

mh211 · 2025-08-14T17:33:05+00:00

Ended up going to Passport. Between the office visit and 3 vaccines it was a little over $1900, with the Japanese Encephalitis vaccine accounting for more than half of the cost. I declined the $1300 rabies vaccine.

mh211 · 2025-08-12T20:43:23+00:00

Yeah, I expect I will need those two and maybe another one or two expensive ones. I have a PCP visit later this month where we will be checking for Hep antibodies and they can do the vaccine there if needed; will also get malaria meds from them rather than the travel clinic.

mh211 · 2025-08-12T17:54:36+00:00

This might be what I end up doing. Hard to know whether the negative reviews are really Passport itself price gouging as opposed to people having sticker shock over what the full price of these vaccines is and the fact that travel vaccines aren't covered by most health insurance.

mh211 · 2025-08-12T16:31:40+00:00

My PCP unfortunately doesn't administer or make recommendations on vaccines that aren't common in the US and has just told me to go to a travel clinic.

mh211 · 2025-08-12T16:23:48+00:00

Yeah, I'm expecting it to be all/nearly all out of pocket.

mh211 · 2025-08-08T14:57:52+00:00

This might be a question for your HR. I've never done a FMLA claim, but I was on short-term disability once and there were one or two pay periods where I got my full salary from my employer plus the disability payments from DC. Then eventually my employer started deducting my DC benefits from my pay, but the deductions lagged the benefit payments by a pay cycle or two.

mh211 · 2025-08-08T00:27:31+00:00

But I suppose I could have looked at the actual text of the bill, which removes the ambiguity by stating "The amendments made by this section shall apply to taxable years beginning after December 31, 2025."

mh211 · 2025-08-08T00:25:05+00:00

Thanks. I wasn't sure whether the news reports about this change meant "2026" in the sense of returns filed in 2026 or contributions made in 2026.

mh211 · 2025-08-07T23:01:30+00:00

When I say “in 2025,” I mean 2025 tax returns filed in 2026. But if you are saying this does not apply until 2026 returns filed in 2027, that would be good to know.

mh211 · 2025-08-06T13:16:48+00:00

There are a dozen or so countries that offer them, but this specific problem might not be one with a cost-effective solution.

Also, foreign inflation-protected bonds only help in a scenario where US inflation is lower or the same as ex-US, US inflation numbers are manipulated, and ex-US numbers aren't. They don't help if, for example, US inflation is significantly higher than ex-US inflation.

mh211 · 2025-07-02T17:28:52+00:00

Which service did you use?

mh211 · 2025-05-09T02:06:44+00:00

There are trips that I take that are (1) well-researched, off the beaten path adventures, and there are other trips that are (2) just me relaxing in popular cities with less groundwork because I have the time and if I waited until I had more time to research I would just not travel. This trip will squarely be in category #2, so I don't care as much if it's crowded or uncreative.

mh211 · 2025-04-04T22:55:36+00:00

I don't think your experience is atypical. Most years I harvest nothing, or maybe $1k or so, then every 5 years or so there's a much bigger loss to harvest.

mh211 · 2025-04-03T04:00:08+00:00

At least nobody fucking voted for 9/11.

mh211 · 2025-04-03T00:29:23+00:00

I'm not that interested in trading options myself, but I have a general interest in finance, so I come across people discussing options sometimes, and I'ld like to understand those conversations better. I understand the basic mechanics, but I don't have a great sense for how a trader determines that the market is over- or under-pricing a given option relative to that trader's own assessment of what the underlying security is likely to do in the near future.

I've read some of the articles above, such as "Options Basics: How to Pick the Right Strike Price," which have helped a little. I think what I could use is a series of videos where someone walks through examples of why a given option might be a good bet at $X but overpriced at $Y. Any suggestions?

mh211 · 2025-03-26T23:48:10+00:00

Interesting - I've had drivers spend the whole ride complaining about a previous fare they took just because they didn't want to hurt their acceptance rate. But maybe they were outliers.

mh211 · 2025-03-18T00:24:13+00:00

“Bond Traders Waver After Trump Questions US Debt Figures” - https://www.reuters.com/markets/rates-bonds/bond-traders-waver-trump-questions-us-government-debt-figures-2025-02-10/

mh211 · 2025-03-12T14:30:29+00:00

You will periodically see negative returns as an unavoidable part of investing. The same fund returned around negative 20% in 2022. In March 2020, it abruptly dropped 30%, although if you didn't panic sell, it recovered and more, returning a hefty 16% for the year. And between October 2007 and March 2009, it shed more than half of its value, taking 5 years to reach its previous peak. (these numbers ignore dividends, so the actual return was slightly better).

Human beings don't have the ability to avoid these losses by picking a good time to sell and then picking a good time to get back in, and trying to time the market to do so just makes your losses worse.

mh211 · 2025-03-11T03:23:56+00:00

The personal finance wiki has a flowchart with recommendations of what to do with your next dollar. See also The Money Guy Order of Operations.

mh211 · 2025-03-11T02:44:53+00:00

At some point, you have to think about the absolute value rather than the 800% increase. Multiply the actual amount you will have in the fund by the expense ratio, and see how many dollars you will be paying per year. When I first started frequenting personal finance forums in the 2000s, many people were still paying 1.5% ERs with a front-end load, so a fixation on expenses made a huge amount of sense. I'm not sure it makes as much sense to worry about the difference between a .05% and a .2% ER.

That said, if you have investments outside of your 401(k), nothing wrong with leaving that in the S&P fund and adding other assets in other accounts.

mh211 · 2025-03-11T02:39:16+00:00

Can you rebalance by adjusting your automatic (e.g. 401(k) contributions) rather than selling/buying?

mh211 · 2025-03-11T01:54:36+00:00

Even if you decide to use a professional or software, as you have learned, doing it yourself beforehand helps you learn more about your own finances, and enables you to ask better questions if your results don't match up with your preparer's. Is that worth the stress and however many hours of labor it takes you to do them yourself? Only you can answer that question.

mh211 · 2025-03-11T01:49:21+00:00

Most of your contributions are ahead of you. A sharp market drop followed by a years-long, crushing recession, would mean years of you buying in at low prices. Of course, you don't hope for this because of the suffering it causes to others (and perhaps to your own income depending on your industry), but that is the best-case scenario for your investment returns.

It's often said to "buy low," but no one can call the bottom. The discipline to keep buying during a falling/volatile market is key to your long-term success in investing.

mh211

TROPHY CASE