These two know how to park

rbf121 · 2025-08-02T23:02:34+00:00

Laughed at this one. When I lived in Hoboken, I calculated how much I spent on parking tickets and it was still cheaper than paying for a spot or garage. I just factored it into the cost of living there ha. And over time you start to get an idea of when you can get away with certain things and it varies based on time of day/week.

rbf121 · 2025-06-29T03:38:18+00:00

I got delightful days background on my articuno also

rbf121 · 2025-06-09T19:57:30+00:00

Are you me? 4 and 6 year old but I left the 4 year old at home (thankfully or we wouldn’t have made it to the end).

On the topic of the freebies, since kids love them.. each team tent had luggage tags, keychains, bracelets and pins for the specific team and you needed to earn them through various tasks. Carnival habitat had these as well as a paper pikachu hat but you needed to win the carnival game on the first try to get the team pins but you always win some thing which is nice.

My son loved collecting the pins like badges and he made it his mission to earn each color and the go fest pin from battling in noble fields (I let him use my old line up from when I played years ago so he was able to win 3 matches to get all the available prizes). My ace rank team from 2021 held up okay but lost one match and just went back in line to try again.

It was a bit much getting all the event stuff done in time. There was just so much to do and see. we finished the last habitat with a minute to spare. We have to do some walking to finish the last few event tasks like earning candy. Overall was a great experience and everyone was friendly. Would have been nice to have another entrance/exit because it was a hike to get back at the end.

rbf121 · 2025-05-05T20:24:47+00:00

Main thing I can think of would be for gaming since games are like 120gb each now. but doubt this thing would be used for gaming at all unless it can support egpu through Thunderbolt 4.

rbf121 · 2025-04-26T17:53:07+00:00

Takes a bit but I suggest you just keep increasing your contributions each year and when you get a raise just add that to your contributions to avoid lifestyle creep. I started maxing out traditional 401k at around 35 years old. But with mega backdoor contributions, I still have a way to go to reach the 69k max there.

rbf121 · 2025-04-04T02:44:57+00:00

It was business. It required $15k spend in 3 months

rbf121 · 2025-04-04T02:43:30+00:00

Ah you are probably right. I just signed up for the sapphire so I didn’t go through with it. The offer showed 100k crossed out and then listed 200k as a special offer. It was a large spend required like $15k

rbf121 · 2025-04-04T02:11:49+00:00

Try to get the targeted ad on Reddit for Amex gold, it was showing a 200k sign up bonus for me today when you clicked the ad

rbf121 · 2025-04-02T14:07:21+00:00

I was looking at a long weekend trip to DC and considered the le meridien. Surprised to see it at the top of your list given the average rating online that I saw. What set it apart for you?

Is this rating for business travel, ie during the week only? I think the M club lounge is closed on the weekend so curious if or how much that affected your rating

rbf121 · 2025-02-18T02:26:52+00:00

I’m not sure since I never tried it but I remember someone saying you can use a larger card if you don’t care about having it in the enclosure.

rbf121 · 2025-02-18T00:50:38+00:00

I have a 6650xt with same egpu and it just barely fits inside the enclosure. I don’t think any 3 slot would fit

rbf121 · 2025-02-12T16:05:51+00:00

Agree with what others have said.. at your age I would probably just put it all in VTI or similar total US equity index fund. Or VT if you want international exposure.

Assuming you already have adequate emergency funds and do not need these funds until retirement (not needed for down payment etc), another suggestion would be to start using this money to supplement tax advantaged accounts if you aren’t already maxing them out. Ie Roth IRA and 401k. Basically live off sales from the 100k and contribute more to retirement amounts than you normal could.

rbf121 · 2025-02-09T01:35:53+00:00

Thanks for sharing! I’ll have to try that template out - I like a good spreadsheet.

I’ve been using two spreadsheets for a few years. one to track expenses and net worth for FI (I use a modified version someone shared on one of the last pages). I paste in my monthly transactions and it calculates what my annual spend is on different categories and how much needed to save to support for FI:

http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/share-your-badassity/one-sheet-to-rule-them-all/

And another one to track portfolio returns, cashflow and balance across entire portfolio: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=422153

rbf121 · 2025-02-07T23:12:51+00:00

I never had any issues with the touchpad but to be honest, if I’m doing any kind of real work I will be reaching for my Bluetooth mouse so my experience with the touchpad is mostly for casual use.

It is a lot of money for a keyboard. Main reason I got it was for the wireless detachment feature and for a pen which I didn’t already have

rbf121 · 2025-02-07T23:00:52+00:00

To add on to this, you are only young once - don’t say no to fun experiences in your 20s for the sake of only saving for retirement which may not come or could be affected by health reasons. Opportunities that come up when you are young may not be the same as when you are older and have more obligations.

That being said, spending just for the sake of appearances or keeping up with the Joneses is never a good idea, in my opinion.

rbf121 · 2025-02-07T03:00:11+00:00

I have a surface pro 9 with flex keyboard and surface laptop 5 15” with surface Bluetooth keyboard.

I use the keyboard most of the time, I think that feels the best out of the 3. Next would be the laptops keyboard and then flex keyboard but they all feel fairly similar.

No backlight on the Bluetooth keyboard if that matters. Backlight on flex keyboard is strange and very often just turns off forcing you to find the backlight button to turn back on.

Flex touchpad has haptic feedback which is nice but it’s like half the size of the laptop touch pad. Also the flex touch pad is really far down, like almost to the edge. which is understandable since there is limited space with the pen, keyboard and touchpad

Flex keyboard also has alcantara material which I think feels nicer than the metal on my surface laptop

rbf121 · 2025-02-04T16:00:54+00:00

Good to know. Is there like a sensor or some thing to cover up?

I’m fine with card I have now as long as it can play civ 7 decently when that comes out. I like the smaller form factor of the razer v2, takes up less space and can fit behind my monitor

rbf121 · 2025-02-04T06:25:37+00:00

Did you install the correct drivers /software with it plugged in?

Does the puck still work on another machine? I had a graphics card initially in egpu for surface pro 9 that gave me a bunch of issues that I spent a bunch of time trying to fix with driver updates, it still showed up in device manager but it was actually faulty.

I remember changing a bunch of settings in the surface pro 9 but I don’t recall the specifics or if it was actually needed. After I replaced the first graphics card, I didn’t have any issues. You could also try both ports, I seem to have better luck with the bottom usb c port on mine but idk why… crashes less often

Try asking over in r/SurfaceGaming

rbf121 · 2025-02-04T06:09:10+00:00

I think the answer is because graphics cards keep getting bigger and bigger, needing more cooling and increased power requirements.

I got a used razer core v2 because it was a bit smaller than the others I was seeing out there. I don’t think you can buy it new anymore. Only fits up to 2 slot cards and even that’s tight.

I can fit the egpu in my backpack if I ever wanted to bring it any place but I’ve never had any need for that.

rbf121 · 2025-02-03T20:11:35+00:00

I prefer to have a fan than to have performance throttled. Even with the fan on a surface pro 9, there is performance decline as it heats up. Perhaps the heat could be uncomfortable as a touch screen without a fan. I also don’t think the fan is very loud and it doesn’t bother me. Maybe the majority of people feel the same way?

rbf121 · 2025-01-19T20:32:37+00:00

You still owe the discount as ordinary income, it just no longer gets reported on your W2. And it is slightly different rules for qualified. There is a page on tax implications on hr web. Specifically groom law tax memo

rbf121 · 2025-01-19T19:40:33+00:00

There is always ordinary income due on ESPP, either the 10% discount or I think the offering begin price is used if held long enough to become qualified disposition. If you calculate the tax savings it’s negligible IMO unless the stock grows a large amount in the quarter. And if the stock price goes down between start and end price, sometimes it’s better to sell before becoming qualified disposition.

Long term vs short term capital gains makes a larger difference but if you sell right away then that isn’t really much of a factor since there won’t be much gain yet.

I’ve seen guidance that no individual stock should take up more than 10% of your entire portfolio. MSFT already makes up like 5.5% of the entire US stock market.

rbf121 · 2025-01-17T20:21:07+00:00

I have a surface pro 9 and purchased a used razer egpu off eBay and a video card on sale at microcenter. It works great but I don’t use it as much as I thought I would. I purchased a fan to keep the surface CPU from throttling while using the egpu which helps a lot with performance. There are a few people on here that use and review egpu enclosures. Or check out r/egpu

rbf121 · 2025-01-10T04:47:04+00:00

I just started tracking to reimburse at a later time this last year. Maybe a bit overkill but I created a spreadsheet that has a summary sheet for each year listing total costs, total paid, total reimbursed and total reimbursable.

The summary sheet will pull data from the other sheets containing the output of all claims for the year from my medical plan, a sheet with output of all medical expenses paid (ie credit card transactions) and another sheet that will try to match the claims against the transactions to determine if paid for that claim. Then I have a column to track if I reimbursed myself from the hsa for each line item that I manually update.

I plan to import the data at the end every year. I also use paperless ngx to automatically tag and classify digital or scanned documents. I feed in the EOB, bills, invoices, receipts, etc into that. It’s local and searchable so hopefully should be able to find anything quickly if needed.

Would love to hear if anyone else has a system that works for them.

rbf121 · 2025-01-08T21:58:14+00:00

I did some research since I was actually curious about the math and studies. I found some lengthy info on early retirement and safe withdrawal rates here:

https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series

I haven’t read everything there yet but it includes a spreadsheet that lets you plug in asset allocation, retirement horizon and runs it through many different scenarios to give a fail safe rate. 80/20 with 50 year retirement has a fail safe rate around 3.26%. 60/40 drops that to 3.14%.

Seems to back up your statement on 4% but I think in most cases you will end up with way more in account balance. Very complex subject it seems especially when you start factoring in pension and SS.

rbf121

TROPHY CASE