If I can do the PP myself anybody can, and save a lot of money on fees in the process. If you follow HB's advice you just check it once a year so what are those people you are paying going to be doing for the other 364 days? Sometimes there is a lot of money, scattered among various personal, corpo...

*** Another kind of funny thing I learned is that there is a "jam room" on board the ship where sailors can book time to play on Navy-provided guitars, drums and amplifiers.  Over the course of a cruise, several different "bands" will typically form, mostly with a heavy metal st...

It's a useful idea--Manywhich means you'll be dissuaded at every turn from doing so. Brokerages charge a steep fee to transfer securities from street name into your name.  It varies from broker to broker, but $30 - $75 are familiar fees for doing this, per security.  You might be able to eliminate a...

Thanks for the advice, Buddtholomew.  I should take up weight training, so relating it to the PP has given me some insight.

Gumby wrote: A collapse of a power grid, for whatever reason, would instantly make the Bitcoins untradeable and a fairly useless currency in an emergency.

An important point to remember.  It would seem obvious, but lots of obvious things are hard to grasp in the middle of a bubble.

Did anyone else grab any gold today? Seemed like a good day so I pulled the trigger on some coins. Hopefully they get here instead of being lost/stolen like all of my other coins that I don't have. Do you use a signature delivery from a big coin dealer or a local coin shop? Or are these lost to Dav...

buddtholomew wrote: I cropped and uploaded the avatar. Thanks!!

LOL.

Actually, doodle, my main issue with Pinker is his use of violent death, especially during war, as a proxy for all forms of violence (lethal and nonlethal) that may have ever happened on Earth over time--especially without acknowledging that this is a major shortcoming of his thesis.  That's a lot o...

Is it worth saving one life if it has the side effect of causing 5 rapes? Or 20 birth defects? Or 50 maimings? These are ridiculous examples of course, but I think it's always important to look at things like substitution effects and unseen consequences. Thanks, Pointedstick; actually these are com...

Governments have improved aggresive violence to such a high degree that if you truly want to express your violent tendancies there is no better place than in the government. Armies, police, you name it.....liscense to kill. So few even oppose it they can do the most insane things.....and it just ke...

This looks like a great plan.  The 2-coin version. ;) If you put the cash in a CD and keep rolling the CD over, you might have to pay a penalty when the time comes to rebalance.  I would do that only after you've been running the portfolio a few years, and only put "deep cash" into a CD (s...

When I get the time (really distracted right now by life events) I'm going to drum up a petition to require the Dept of the Treasury to provide, at least twice a year, an optional paper statement listing all of an owner's electronic treasury securities holdings, including Savings Bonds (I and E) and...

If you have spare cash outside the ROTH, or have some miscellaneous things around the house or the business that you can sell for cash, or have a spare car or two that you can sell, it's better to do that than dip into the IRA to pay off the business debt.  One way to make debt less stressful is to ...

Keep in mind that we live in a society where universities, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC/CNBC, PBS all tout the party line and condition people to view things as they do and do exactly what happened in this thread whenever something happens which disagrees with their view of reality.  You forgot to include FO...

Unless they are carefully moderated most forums seem to deteriorate into rant-filled fests of name-calling, slurs (ethnic, gender, age, dental integrity, size, etc.), auto-posted sales pitches for viagra, and the like. There are a few I participate in, primarily through lurking (May seem contradict...

Unless they are carefully moderated most forums seem to deteriorate into rant-filled fests of name-calling, slurs (ethnic, gender, age, dental integrity, size, etc.), auto-posted sales pitches for viagra, and the like. There are a few I participate in, primarily through lurking (May seem contradicto...

Newsletters can have lots of value, especially if they have a well-performing portfolio and offer lots of information about how they decided to pick particular securities for the portfolio.  They can take the time to educate their readers about investing. Some newsletters, however, are just rants (a...

If you invest, what's your exit plan?

There are several lists of companies like this floating on the internet.  Just Google "dividend kings", "dividend elite," "dividend aristocrats," and you'll see them. The companies are picked by various criteria, but usually they have to do with: longevity, pays dividen...

Thanks for the reminder.

Why do you think KO will perform as well over the next 20 or 50 years? Aren't you worried about increasing consciousness about the negative health effects of sugary drinks eroding their core business? What makes you so sure that the future will be like the past? ;) Their future will not be like the...

Of course, if Congress DOES change the law to actually put teeth into the penalty, all bets are off. Congress can't sign such a law today, not with the criticism of the launch of Obamacare.  But in the future, when comes along the right mass news event--the kind of event that gets round the clock n...

Fix it how? If it required a law to put the mandate itself in then logically it would require a law modifying it so that wages could be garnished, assets liened, property seized, etc. Good luck getting that sort of law through as long as the Rs control at least one house of Congress Have you forgot...

Apparently if you arrange your taxes so that you get no refund, the IRS cannot collect the "mandate" from you (if you get a refund, they can just deduce it from your refund). They'll fix this right away, before anybody can actually game the system like that.  The US government is lax and ...

In response to the anticipated flood of new insured patients looking for appointments with the same number of doctors, my doctor decided to set up a $2,000 annual paywall if you would like to continue seeing him. Since I only go to the doctor once or twice a year, the $2,000 fee was a nonstarter fo...