Money on traviscj/blog

loan trickery

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 10:36:04 -0500

I have this “American Express Blueprint Business Loan” product to have a line of credit for the rentals if I’m ever in a pinch.

They allow up to $21,700 with this very easy application process, you basically just slide a slider to the amount needed & select between 6, 12, 18, 24 months:

This shows a schedule like this:

Looking at this, there’s a lot of temptation to think

personal finance resources

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to say a tiny bit about personal finance stuff, as I feel like I have gotten a fairly good feel for it.

Some great resources to start getting up to speed include:

r/personalfinance, especially
- the common topics
- the wiki

index investments

Ideally you want to own a lot of different companies, so you’ve diversified your asset ownership. One of the easiest ways to do this is through index investing, where the index “tracks” a broad swath of the market, like “All S&P 500 Companies” or “All stock market companies”.

espps are free money

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

ESPPs give employees an opportunity to buy the company stock at a discount. In both of the examples I’m aware of, the companies give a 15% discount on the LESSER of the price on the grant date and the price on the purchase date. The purchase dates are every six months, while the grants I’ve seen are either 12 or 24 months.

We can analyze this mathematically by breaking it into three cases. For concreteness, let’s look at ADBE for a grant date of 2019-01-02. The stock is trading at $224.27/share currently:

big-ish personal storage

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I was curious what it would cost to have something like 5-30TB of storage space on hand. The obvious choices are between buying some hard drives and paying for an S3 bucket or something.

The amazon costs are pretty straightforward: you pick a region, they tell you the cost. Starting with their pricing table:

aws = [
    {"level": "standard", "c_millidollars": 23},
    {"level": "infrequent", "c_millidollars": 12.5},
    {"level": "one_zone", "c_millidollars": 10},
    {"level": "glacier", "c_millidollars": 4}
]

we can say

dancing bull pricing structure

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 00:10:00 +0000

Dancing Bull is a great Korean BBQ restaurant that opened nearby recently. They have this pricing scheme:

Note that the unlimited bulgogi is \$23/person, but the bulgogi a la carte is \$25/grill (with each additional orders after that costing \$9). This raises an obvious question: which is the better deal?

Spoiler: it depends on both how many people you have and how hungry they are.

First, we had to clarify how it actually worked. It’s not clear from the menu, but the “\$25/grill” includes the first order of bulgogi. Introducing $P$ for the number of people, $G$ for the number of grills, and $O$ for the total number of orders, we would pay $$UL = 23\cdot P$$ for the unlimited price scheme vs $$ALC = 25\cdot G + 9\cdot ( O - G)$$ for the a la carte scheme.

extracting the last few dollars from Visa/MC gift cards

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Once in a while, I get a prepaid gift card like this:

They’re – like money – great! But they do have one downside: it’s hard to spend the change once you’ve bought off most of the value.

Originally this was going to be a quick “just redeem it with Amazon’s gift card” post, but a bit of study revealed that it isn’t quiet that simple:

the authorized amount can prevent the full transaction from going through, so if it’s the first transaction at Amazon, you might need to leave $1.00 to cover the reserve.
the article mentions a $5 minimum, but the initial amount & card selection on Amazon doesn’t seem to have a problem with lower amounts, so YMMV I guess.

The article also mentions a different solution that I should have thought of: apparently some banks will redeem the value of the card into your account. You just need to show up at a branch of your bank with proper identification.

idea: transaction ordering in ledger-cli

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I love ledger-cli but keeping it in sync with my bank statements drives me crazy. The problem is that the transactions can end up with an essentially arbitrary ordering, and the order they clear (and even the date they clear) is not necessarily under my direct control.

One answer to this is: stop caring about the ordering of your transactions! That’s a decent answer, except that not addressing the ordering issue means that you can only ever have “end-of-day” consistency. This means you need a different report to reconcile the transactions.

stocks and options from 30k feet

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of my friends at work asked me if I had any book recommendations for learning about stocks and options. Mentally, I break trading down into two general classes of trading: index-type and “exotic” trading. By exotic trading, I mean picking individual stocks/options and actively trading. This runs counter to the more conservative buy-and-hold, index-based, hands-off approach.

For the exotic trading, I learned most of what I know from a class with Professor W.E. Olmstead and his book, Options for the Beginner and Beyond: Unlock the Opportunities and Minimize the Risks. For the option-uninitiated, the basic idea is that instead of buying or selling stocks directly, you buy and sell contracts that give you the right (but not obligation) to buy or sell the stock at a particular price by a particular date. That’s a mouthful and options are indeed subtle beasts, but they allow the flexibility to either hedge risks you want less exposure to, or increase/leverage exposure to risks you do want to take.

life pro tip curb rampant consumerism by identifying actual needs

Sun, 23 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A while back, I realized that I wanted a nice digital SLR camera. Before I bought it, I made a list of all the things that I wanted to do with it. Ultimately, this ended up being a sort of self-justification for buying it, but it did serve one deeper purpose: I now had a list of about 20 things that I had committed to doing with my new camera. So while it didn’t actually prevent me from being rampantly consumerist, I did have a whole set of worthwhile things to do with my new camera!

car is paid off!

Sat, 16 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I finally sent the last check for my 2013 Ford Focus a couple of weeks ago, and finally got the title in the mail today. It also came with a “congratulations for paying off your car!” letter, which was a nice touch.

I opted to pay it off early, despite the (moderate) financial disadvantage it put me at. The loan was only 2.4%, so the cost of carrying the loan actually wasn’t super significant. I had started paying the loan ahead of schedule during graduate school because I was worried about whether I would have the cashflow available to keep making payments during the time between graduate school and real paid work. Then when I did get a job, I just kept making the higher-than-required payments.

14 vs 1499 vs 15

Fri, 22 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes, it is tempting to see 14.99 and say “about 14,” even though we all know better. The problem with this is that by giving a 0.07% discount (14.99 vs 15), they have made you estimate a 7% discount (14 vs 15).

Nice trick!

My Hint for Foreign ATM Machines

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to write this tip up for quite a while, but now that I’ve finally gotten some closure on it, I guess now would be a decent time. While I was in Brazil, there were two ATM machine clusters across the street from eachother, both between the beach and the hostel we were staying at. The CITIbank ATMs were more reliable, but the HSBC ATMs were a bit cheaper. At first, it always seemed worth the small extra, but since I never wanted to get much out at a time, I was racking up the bank charges. Also, several people had been using the HSBC ATM without issue, so I figured I would start using that one instead as well. This worked well the first couple of times, but one of the days I went in to get some cash out, it didn’t dispense. Undeterred, I went to one of the ATM machines someone else had just (successfully) used and tried there, and withdrew the money. This time it worked.