T-Bills are very close to CD rates right now, and are far more liquid than CDs.

Money market funds (another unloved investment) are paying around 4.3% compared to 4.65% for T-Bills, and are not only as liquid, they are immune to interest rate risk.

LPT: periodically review your vehicle titles to make sure they reflect your current reality. I was preparing to sell my oldest car to one of my adult children, and when I got out all three of my vehicle titles I discovered that:

A.) two of them still had liens from lenders that had long since been paid off, and

B.) two of them were still in joint name with my wife, who was deceased.

Took all three titles, both lien releases, and my wife's death certificate to the BMV to apply for clean titles for all three vehicles in my sole name. When it's time to sell the other vehicles I won't have to wait for clean titles.

Max the 401(k) and an IRA first.

The trick to saving and not succumbing to lifestyle creep is to automate saving. Open a taxable brokerage account and put part of your pay in it. My employer uses ADP and I have a Schwab brokerage account. Schwab gives your account a standard ABA routing number and account number, and I have it set up in my ADP portal to direct deposit a fixed amount into the brokerage account every payday, and the "remainder" deposited to my everyday bank account. It's amazing how quickly it adds up.

If you don't have a good emergency fund, use the brokerage to start building one. Invest in T-Bill ladders and a money market fund like SWVXX until you have six month's living expenses. After you have that much in your e-fund, start investing in a total market ETF like SCHB.

Your dad was likely a contractor, working for himself. He's allowed to deduct the operating expenses of his truck, BUT he has to pay ~15% self-employment taxes PLUS normal income taxes on the net profit. $20K in SE and income taxes is consistent with right around $75K - $80K of net profit, i.e. gross revenue minus documented business expenses.

My wife passed on a Wednesday morning, the same day of her SSDI direct deposit. The deposit was reversed at 9:00 a.m. Friday morning, and I had to "apply" to receive her final benefit payment several weeks later.

Schwab has a better website, but Fidelity seemingly has a better mobile app.

Schwab has an excellent selection of in-house index ETFs; Fidelity has a good selection of in-house index mutual funds but doesn't seem to have any in-house ETFs.

This is weaponized incompetence.

Every time I've compared the cost of getting somewhere, flying was both cheaper and faster than Amtrak (and until today, more reliable).

If you intend to set up a buffet for termites, you don't need a floor.

Also, your woodshed should be thought of as a facility for seasoning your wood, not just storing it. So it needs excellent ventilation and protection from ground moisture.

They are literally the same fund. Different share classes of the same, underlying Vanguard fund. If you have at least the minimum $3K buy-in for the mutual fund, it is six in one, half dozen in another.

That said, I would suggest the mutual fund as the better choice because: a.) mutual funds are designed for fractional shares, so you never have a few dollars of uninvested money sloshing around like you would if all your investments were full shares of an ETF, and b.) mutual funds only post an updated NAV once a day after the markets are closed. If you are the sort of investor that monitors your investments too closely, seeing the ETF dropping in real time can be disconcerting. You probably should choose the mutual fund.

> I thought about just subtracting the total from my next HOA payment

That's a good way to bring on late fees, and eventually a lien on your house.

Just be a gadfly, and bring it up every year. Then, when you're ready to move away, sue the HOA in small claims court for the damages. Keep records and screenshots.

Jumping back and forth to try to maximized gains and avoid losses is called "market timing," and it is a bad thing. Mostly because for market timing to work, you have to accurately guess when the market hits the top, and accurately guess when the market has hit bottom (so you can buy back in). Getting either one of these guesses right is extremely difficult, getting them both right is impossible.

If you're young and have decades for your nest egg to grow... stay mostly in stocks. If you're close to retirement you should be invested in a roughly 50 / 50 split between stocks and bonds.

If you haven't heard the story before, you should meet Bob, the world's worst market timer.

It's illegal to consume alcohol in public in Kentucky, so I'm surprised the officers didn't arrest "Cousin Eddie" and take him to jail.

Life is rigged, all right. Just not in favor of anyone reading this post.

At your level of drinking, stopping cold turkey can be dangerous, even fatal. Consider seeking out a medically supervised withdrawl management program (they used to be called "detox"). These clinics are physician supervised and usually use low-dose benzodiazapines to wean your brain off addiction.

A lot of these programs like Fairbanks are expensive and require either good insurance or that you have the means to self-pay, but others like Salvation Army Harbor Light Centers will pretty much take all comers.

This sounds like a gimmick with hidden "gotchas."

I remember a post here about somebody asking about investing in owning intermodal shipping containers. My first thought was, "somebody's trying to transfer liability and risk to the 'investor.'"

Conventional loans (generally) require the equivalent PMI if your down payment is less than 20%. Most of them allow you to drop the PMI once your loan balance is less than 78% of appraised value, or in some cases, the original purchase price.

I originally financed FHA in 2007 (only did 3.5% down) and in 2020 refinanced into a conventional loan at 2.5%. No PMI or MIP now.

Money Market Mutual Funds (MMMFs) are yielding slightly more than HYSAs right now, examples SWVXX, SPRXX, VMFXX.

$800 month principal and interest payment on a $96500 loan is a rate of 9.35%, much too high given your credit score and the current mortgage market.

However, you're putting down less than 20% on an FHA loan, so you are going to be paying Mortgage Insurance Premiums (MIP), the FHA equivalent of PMI (Private Mortgage Insurance), and that may account for the difference. MIP on FHA mortgages stays for the life of the loan, there's no way to have it removed short of fully refinancing.

What state are you in? Google <state> insurance board commission and something should come up.

Of the average daily volume of stocks traded, retail investors account for around 1%. Not even a drop in the bucket. Large, institutional traders account for nearly all of trading volume.

>good set of tires will last significantly longer than the cheap ones

I once paid $750 for a set of Michelin HydroEdge all season tires with a 90K mile warranty. They lasted 120,000 miles, making them the cheapest tires I had ever purchased - on a per-mile basis.

Do you not provide a poop knife for your guests?

The file extension is just a suggestion to the OS what application should be used to open the file, and you can change the file association if you want. On Windows, you use the Default Apps applet to change specific file extensions to be associated with specific applications.

The real format information is in the metadata of the file itself, the first few bytes of the data. For example, if the first two bytes of a file are MZ the file is a DOS/Windows executable file (MZ are the initials of the guy who designed the file format).

JPG and JPEG files have, for some time and for the most part, been saved in the JFIF format internally. If you open a JPG file in a hex editor or programmer's text editor, you'll see somewhere around byte offset 0x7 the characters JFIF indicating that the file is actually in that format. Likewise PDF files have PDF in about the same position.

"Let's ask for user-submitted content!!! What could go wrong?!??!?"