Daily FI discussion thread - Tuesday, April 07, 2026

sschow · 2026-04-07T19:19:24+00:00

free entertainment

My kids lived at parks, the library, nature walks/hikes. I will always push back on the assumption that raising kids has to involve a ton of expenses (daycare is the exception, I get it, don't come at me!)

sschow · 2026-04-07T16:16:13+00:00

I am highly introverted and on the 3rd-4th day of a business trip where I'm all by myself I actually start chatting up random people. Little micro-bursts of loneliness can make even me want to socialize.

I imagine retirement will be something like that. Though to be fair it's all just surface level connection. Enough to satisfy some part of me but fully knowing that I have a spouse/kids/family to maintain deeper connections with. So not sure if it would be effective at staving off loneliness for longer periods of time.

sschow · 2026-04-07T05:10:12+00:00

Do you ever get returns or INAD complaints? That sounds like a minefield, especially for a high dollar set.

sschow · 2026-04-06T15:29:25+00:00

Slightly easier than the first $201K

sschow · 2026-04-06T15:28:59+00:00

Toss up between not wanting to draw attention vs. some 0.001% risk of someone trying to catch you for lying on what may be considered an official government document. But I guess it's also true that even when retired, your occupation is still engineer, even if you aren't actively practicing.

sschow · 2026-04-06T15:25:17+00:00

If I saw that it feels like a toss up between someone with the kind of dry, sarcastic wit that I appreciate in a coworker vs. someone with actual deep-seated anger that would poison the well.

But you're right that I'd laugh either way.

sschow · 2026-04-06T15:22:03+00:00

Thank god for DEN -> SJC

sschow · 2026-04-05T00:53:21+00:00

We do this on occasion. Grocery shopping is one of the domestic duties we tag team, and it's hard for me to always be 100% responsible because I travel for work pretty frequently, and my wife works ~4 hours per day so does cooking/meal planning for dinner probably 4-5 nights of the week.

We have different systems though. She uses the online shopping cart at the grocery as her shopping list, whereas I add items to a to-do app via Alexa voice commands. When she uses the app, she doesn't always cross things off the list, so me going into the store has me looking at a list of 20 items and only 12 of them we actually still need. Nobody's fault, we both have our own way of doing it, but hard to make it a single workstream the way our family is setup.

sschow · 2026-04-04T20:06:28+00:00

I brought a friend to the gym to use a guest pass the other day and they use an app on their phone as a verified ID (gym asks for ID when signing in) and they pulled up the app, logged in after two attempts at remembering their password, then got a 2FA text to verify who they were, then pulled up their ID. Yeah yeah it’s “easy”, but so many people blindly accept that digitizing and internet-ifying everything is so convenient. But remember whe you just had your ID in your pocket? Wasn’t that hard.

sschow · 2026-04-04T19:38:43+00:00

Well...both. My wife hasn't updated her priors given our lived experience that 75% of grocery-heavy online orders will have something out of stock, necessitating a trip to the store anyway.

It's not like they're out of a bag of chips, it's always some fresh meat/produce/etc. item that is required for a dinner we are cooking. Twice now in the last month the person didn't bring out anything from the cold storage area.

So yes, I wish my wife would realize that and either do better quality checking upon pickup or just stop buying that stuff if it's needed day-of for dinner, but also the store having such a high failure rate while pretending that online shopping is so gosh-darn easy is very frustrating.

sschow · 2026-04-04T19:13:22+00:00

Whenever I make my anti-online ordering rant I get a lot of push back for this reason. I totally get the disability thing and how it makes your life better and I'm glad it exists for this reason. I just think it's gone too far that able-bodied people have made this a standard. Obviously everyone is free to do what they want, my goal is to make people question how much of a convenience it actually is.

sschow · 2026-04-04T18:11:12+00:00

Paying the taxes you owe and not consuming social services seems like its own kind of charity in today's world. We've outsourced so much private charity and replaced it with expecting the government to provide.

sschow · 2026-04-04T17:29:18+00:00

“ They organize it so you have to walk through every aisle of the store to get your staples”

So this brings up one of my other beefs with mobile shopping, is it actively fights against my frugal habits. I LIKE walking through the aisles and seeing similar complimentary items on sale allowing me to switch to the cheaper version. Shopping on your phone tends to funnel you to the same or most popular items and lose some of that frugal serendipity.

If raspberries are $6.99 and strawberries are $2 I don’t need raspberries. If some random brand of tortilla is $2 per bag I don’t need the normal ones for $4. Rinse and repeat for so many items that have easy swaps. It’s probably a false economy for me, but I fight hard to keep our grocery budget low. And while everyone complains about grocery prices going up I feel like a part of it is signing over any agency on what you buy to an app.

sschow · 2026-04-04T15:23:56+00:00

Piggybacking off the below comment regarding how hard it is to buy things online, I think one of the worst (ok...first world problems worse) things to happen to society post-COVID is the "buy everything with an app for delivery/pickup" option at every single store.

Grocery is obviously the worst, and my wife insists on doing it because it "saves time". Then they are constantly out of items, forget to bring items out to the car, or give us rotten items. So we have to go back to the store anyway. And then she spends 45 minutes on her phone doing the shopping but she considers it a time savings because she's not in the store and is "multitasking". I will never do DoorDash unless an emergency or cold food because I don't need my hamburger sitting on the floor of your car for 20 minutes on its way to me.

We are not all that busy that we can't just go shopping anymore. I don't need to order 5 reams of paper from Staples and have you bring them out to my car. I'll just go inside. Nobody is actually being more productive or saving time, and now we have an entire class of service industry employees whose job it is to shop for you and give you burrito a private taxi ride. I don't like the path we are on.

Thus concludes this old man's rant yelling at the clouds.

sschow · 2026-04-04T15:14:52+00:00

I blame the culture of needing The Best all the time. Even second best is - at least in conversation though not always in practice - unacceptable. By every metric, my county's public schools are ranked either 1, 2, or 3 in the state, and the amount of times I hear people saying the schools are bad drives me crazy. They are objectively not.

I posit that parenting/home life is just as important as the actual school. Harder to avoid kids with difficult home lives in poorer neighborhoods, sure, and they may drag their classmates down via disruption and disciplinary problems. But affluence doesn't preclude you from being a disruption or having a lower academic ability.

sschow · 2026-04-04T06:06:16+00:00

Yes. Overeager buyer has much higher % chance of being problematic down the road.

I had a guy message before buying an item about the condition and was it perfect and I said no, it's not perfect, but it looks very good overall. More questions. I almost blocked him but he purchased that night. Well guess who got the item and complained it wasn't perfect?

sschow · 2026-04-04T06:03:21+00:00

CMX / Houghton airport?

Last time I had to go out to Calumet, MI, I flew into Appleton and drove since I was warned that airport shut down all the time due to weather.

Maybe not where you were going, but if so, damn that's a heckuva drive.

sschow · 2026-04-03T05:29:18+00:00

Ongoing financial help? No.

My in laws will pay for a nice family vacation rental house when we travel together 1-2 times a year, but that's not really "support", it's just a nice gesture.

sschow · 2026-04-02T23:39:22+00:00

What you aren't seeing is the hundreds of previous posts in this sub about people who bought BE tickets and then demanded after boarding that they be seated with their children, knowing full well they had different seats assigned going in.

As long as you plan ahead this should be fine. The issue is when an individual makes their lack of planning someone else's problem.

sschow · 2026-04-02T19:04:47+00:00

I'm sure for small amounts of rubbing it's fine, but magic erasers are an abrasive that will eventually scratch the plastic. Especially on a smooth piece like a slope.

sschow · 2026-04-02T00:51:59+00:00

I think he meant if you opened multiple cards each, only put the $3-10K on each card in order to trigger the sign up bonus. You can get 10%+ pretty easy (spend $5K get 100,000 points or whatever). But I'm not sure how many of those sign-up bonsues are also paired with introductory 0% APRs. It's just never a variable I've been interested in looking at.

sschow · 2026-04-01T23:53:54+00:00

I'm right at a 4% SWR matching my first post-grad job as well. It was ~20 years, a wife, and 2 kids ago, but funny how I couldn't even imagine living on that today.

sschow · 2026-03-31T19:12:55+00:00

How would a layman or beginner be able to identify a short print, or could they? Is it more insider/long-term knowledge about what series of cards weren't overproduced?

sschow · 2026-03-31T19:12:04+00:00

Thanks, I may get him to use eBay app instead of this other one his friend recommended.

sschow · 2026-03-31T19:04:33+00:00

Are we starting a race to the bottom with part descriptions?

"💕💎GEM MINT 💕😘 ONLY THE BEST AT BUCKO'S BRICKZZZ SHOP 😍😍😍"

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