My family and I have been planning our summer vacation that involves visiting three countries in Europe with family members that live in different places. Initially we were having trouble coordinating all the activities day by day until I came across this video. My family and I started using Monday.com to plan our travel and…
Month: July 2024
Financial Regrets: FSA Account
One of my family’s biggest challenges are taxes. We often keep getting pushed into higher tax brackets and now we hover between 24% and 35% depending many different variables each year. To help drive down some of my W-2 income, I opened an FSA account this year and it has been the worst mistake of…
Zepbound: My Health Journey – July Edition
I have now completed six months on Zepbound. Initial results the first 6 months were great, I lost 21.2 lbs. In July, I had to travel for work then vacation and while I still kept taking the medication, I had little control over my food/dining environment so my weight loss slowed. Staying in hotels with…
How I’m Conquering Inflammation & Back Pain
I’ve had periodic lower back pain for 3 decades now. I’ve gone to doctors, therapists, chiropractors, and masseuses to help find the cause or alleviate the pain but the pain has rarely gone away until now. So what was the magic trick? Tiny Health I wrote about starting a journey into a parallel medical ecosystem…
Diversification Is A 2024 Theme: Banking, Health, Tech, Everything
Literally a little over a month ago, I wrote a post titled, “Banking Diversification & Frozen Funds” warning of the dangers of putting all your “eggs in one basket” and this week we’ve had total chaos with airlines, banks, hospitals and just about any thing else that runs on a computer because of too much…
Will Boomers Moving Overseas Ruin Low Cost Options?
I came across this article on Yahoo Finance entitled, “Boomers are leaving America to retire abroad in droves because the U.S. is just too expensive” and my immediate thought was will they ruin the whole point of moving overseas? According to the article, there were 400,000 people receiving social security overseas in 2000 and that…
Investing or Gambling?
I watch a lot of YouTube videos and what I watch is mostly focused on investing, finance, taxes, or related material but I’ve noticed a disturbing trend lately some of the YouTubers I follow to be pushing what I consider to be gambling “investment” opportunities. Masterworks The first site I saw from a reputable YouTuber…
Are You Prepared For A Lost Decade?
The stock market has been on a seemingly never ending tear. It’s given people a sense that nothing can go wrong and the market will always go up but there is a precedent for a potential lost decade. From 2000 to 2009, the S&P 500 (via SPY) returned -39.53% and while after 2009 things lost…
Morgan Stanley Nightmare
I have some shares that are vesting soon and I wanted to find out the vesting schedule and plan for a sale of company shares. My company has switched from provider to provider and the latest one is Morgan Stanley. It should be straight forward enough to log on to Morgan Stanley, check my shares,…
Book Review: The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
I’ve been researching places to retire overseas and part of that research is to understand the culture and compatibility we (wife and I) may have with different countries. To that end, I picked up a copy of Erin Meyer’s “The Culture Map” to understand what we may encounter in different parts of the world. It’s…