I have been in a world of mental anguish the past few days. It started with setting up my home lab for developing my own apps. So far I have had tremendous success building apps with Gemini and ChatGPT so I decided to take it a step further and build a more robust platform to…
Category: Financial Odyssey
Final Thoughts For 2025
It’s been a wonderful year for me and as I reflect back on my posts for the year I realize there are a few themes at play. Travel My first post for 2025 was a bit of a rant about over tourism in Europe. That post foreshadowed a key them of 2025 for me, international…
Inflation Is The #1 Killer of Quality of Life
On of my “secrets” to eating out cheaply has been to visit overlooked ethnic restaurants in my city. I am blessed to have access to many different types of cultural restaurants and one of the place recently visited is one in which I keep detailed receipts because what we order is not actually on the…
AI: What Are My Stupid Financial Mistakes?
After using AI to test some portfolios for ETF income, covered call ETF income and inflation, I decided to ask about the most common things that can derail and investment portfolio. The response was interesting and surprising because I saw my own actions and behaviors in the list. And that’s the great thing about AI,…
How To Prepare For A War Economy?
We’re in a whole new environment now after the recent actions taken by the U.S. against Iran. I won’t get into the politics of that decision and situation since this is a personal finance blog so the prudent thing to talk about here is how to prepare for a war economy. With the help of…
Got My Severance Payment
I got my severance package payment today. It actually came a bit faster than I was expecting but I’m not going to complain. It came at the perfect time, I’m getting ready to head out for the summer on holiday. This reminds me that I may not be posting frequently given I will be visiting…
Unemployment Benefits
Now that I’m unemployed, I signed up for unemployment benefits and it’s an interesting experience. First, there are many hoops to jump through to get started but after going through the gauntlet I finally got my benefit statement. It seems the state makes it as hard as possible to collect benefits. Evidently I am entitled…
I Got Laid Off
Well today was my last day at work but don’t feel sorry for me as I got a generous severance package. And it came at the perfect time, right before summer so I can take a very long vacation traveling South America where it’s nice and cool. It’s strange but the three times I’ve been…
Retirement & Sacrificial Lambs
As I get closer to retirement, I’m getting really excited but there will be some “lambs” that will need to be sacrificed to make retirement work and last. So I’ve been taking inventory of things that I/we are willing to go without. Here’s a partial list: Sacrifices Gains There are other things we’ll miss but…
Why Leave America?
When I tell people I plan on leaving the United States I get two types of responses: incredulity or affirmation. The people that are incredulous don’t want to accept that anyone would want to move outside of the United States. After all why would anyone want to leave the greatest country on earth? I often…