Tony K's Blog

I'm hopefully about four years away from retirement. I have a good salary and, looking out to 2023, I think I'm in good shape overall. There will be three main sources of funding for the retirement years. 1. Wife's and my 401ks and IRAs 2. A lump sum retirement contribution from my employer 3. Social Security 1 and 2 are about equal right now, 3 is a fixed future monthly payment. The stock market has been hot since the crash of 2008. The Dow is now around 25,000. How much higher will it go? Is it going to crash? Would it be wise to transfer some funds from stocks into cash or bonds? My first thought was Yes, of course! But, I did a little digging on this and one piece of advice was that people approaching retirement should have a couple years worth of cash in their accounts so they don't have to sell stocks in a down market. That makes a lot of sense, I have seen literature that shows how a stock market decline immediately following retirement can demolish ret...

This video is amzing and inspiring. If you watch it you will come away a better person. Guaranteed.

This one is aimed at Cooper and Will as they prepare to go out on their own, and also so that I have it archived. Being able to fold a t-shirt in 2 seconds is a good thing.

Merlin Mann of 43Folders fame has a philosophy called Inbox zero. He gave this talk at the Google campus in July 2007. It's worth a listen, but if you don't have time, his advice boils down to dealing with your inbox everyday. Every mail gets one of 5 things done to it: Delete (or Archive) - Don't spend a lot of time on building archive folders. Use built-in search capabilities to find things Delegate (Forward to someone else) Respond (keep it short) - Appropriate response length is good. My comment is to put important content into the subject. Defer (Put into a pending folder) - something that you check periodically to see if it has resolved. I use flags in Outlook to keep track of my deferred actions Do or capture a placeholder for it (such as a calendar or a task) General principles: Do email less (unless of course your job is real-time) Do email on a schedule. Turn off mail arrival signals, then once per hour process it using the above five actions. Go back to work. Fi...

I work with portfolios of real assets. One of the basic concepts of portfolio analysis and management is that you must know what you value. Very seldom does an organization have one single goal that it pursues to the exclusion of all others. It is a useful framework for looking at the mortgage problem that I wrote about earlier. If your single goal in life is to minimize the amount of interest you pay in your life, paying off your mortgage early may be a good strategy. For most people their house loan is the biggest loan they will ever get, typically paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest over the life of the loan. These are big numbers, exagerrated by the size of the loan and the time period. However, most people have goals besides minimizing the interest paid. If you take it up to a higher level, most people want to maximize their wealth, which in simple terms is simply money in minus money out. Money in that equation can represent any form of value including house appr...

The pay-off-a-little-more-each-month-on-your-mortgage fallacy has been around for a long time. The deal is that the numbers are big, so they are really impressive. Yes. It builds equity faster. (But it's just converting your cash from a flexible form of equity into a less flexible form.) Yes. You pay less interest over time. (But you lose opportunity to invest). Yes, you pay off your house sooner. (How many of us will live in our house for 20+ years though?) There are several ways to look at this prolem though. First, from a strictly financial perspective, the right way to look at this is to consider the alternative uses of the extra money you would be putting into the equity. For example, a 6% loan has an after tax 4% rate. Instead of putting the money into your house, why not put it into a SP500 index fund? It will get you 8% over time (5.33% after taxes). So by putting $1000 into your house, you lose $13.33 each year. Put it into the IRA that you haven't been funding and it ...

We all know this. There are sayings, e.g. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." "Stand up for yourself," "Fight for your rights." It is nice to see some reinforcement of this though. Here are a couple of recent examples from my family. Not long ago, we went to a restaurant in Dublin, California called Stacey's at Waterford. (Scott Adams of Dilbert fame is one of the owners). During the course of a very pleasant meal, everyone had basically finished but one. The waitress came to remove the plates and took all but the one plate. Etiquette 101 says not to do this because the slow eater in the bunch then feels rushed. After we got home, my wife called the restaurant back to point this out to the manager (we did not want to make a fuss at the restaurant). We weren't looking for anything, but at the end, the manager ended up sending us a coupon for money off on our next visit. This worked for us, because we got some cash equivalent, and it worked for them...

The title says it all. What the heck is that about? You see it a lot in third world countries and bars in the first world. Do people really think that mothballs can take the place of the urinal "breath mints"?

My name is Tony and I am a Macaholic. I own a few shares of Apple stock and have been a Mac User and owner since I bought my Mac Plus in about 1986 or so. I have reviewed software, supported computers, worked with user groups, and am an advanced user of most of the standard programs. There is little doubt in my mind that even since the first days of the Lisa, Macs have represented not only a better product, but also a better value. When Macs first came out they were not cheap, but the beauty of them is that they came in a single package with just about everything you needed. PCs on the other hand were much cheaper, but... If you actually wanted to use them you were stuck with plunking down a whole lot more money to get up to the same capability of a Mac. This holds true today too. I'll write more about Macs later.