Early Retirement Extreme Forums

P.S.

Seems my journey is about finished. Hope everyone else finds success in theirs.

Jacob, five years ago I would have probably agreed with the hypothesis of your first paragraph. The degree of rage that can arise from an alternate opinion is truly something to behold. Preexisting anger is not a necessary condition IMO. Edit for clarity: by preexisting anger I meant preexisting ang...

It's a good episode. Most are. It's been a good sanity check for me during all of the crazy lately. I feel like there are two options ... either try to signal along with everyone else to stay in the good graces of the most vocal or avoid signaling in any situation. Expressing independent thoughts, ...

Q2 2020 Check-in Pretty good bounce back for invested assets. In total I'm up about $30K for the year, all attributable to contributions on top of a negative return of under 2%. I'm finally hitting the crossover point in my modified FI Graph (adapted from YMOYL). For 5/6 months in 2020 my baseline ...

jp, I was planning to watch that one later this morning while I'm doing my quarter end bookkeeping. There's sometimes an assumption that social capital is more robust than financial capital. It's certainly a diversifier but depending on how it's arranged it's potentially volatile and subject to tail...

Hey Scott, I believe the premium is accurate, what I wrote down was within $5 of what they gave me in writing. It also agrees with what they tell current employees about the cost of the plan. As a retiree/COBRA I would pay 100% versus 30% now. I think the biggest difference is that the pool for empl...

Some other miscellaneous items. Illinois has "comprehensive" balance billing protections (although in general it appears to apply mainly to facility-based providers). Minnesota has partial. Interestingly, there the protection appears not to apply to emergency hospital treatment, but does for non-eme...

Here in Alabama there is still a surge of sorts. On my weekly shopping trip the large majority of folks (80%-90%) still seem to be wearing masks and doing the right things. But I'm seeing more-and-more "selfies at the bar" type photos on FB, albeit mostly outdoor seating. No indication the powers th...

I've never read the blog, but this saddens me. I despise "cancel culture".

I'm really spamming the ol' journal lately. Yesterday I tipped the scales below 180 for the first time since 1999 I believe. I've often set a goal to get to the 170-175 range (@ 6'0"-6'1") but usually fall a little short. This time I bet I'll make it. The message that overweight men are disproportio...

7Wb5, you are riffing on what I meant by slovenly and reckless. Personally I suspect that will be the fate of the species, and it saddens me, but I'm not going to let sadness about the future rule my life.

Wow, quite a lot has happened since I last checked in yesterday afternoon, too much for me to engage everything! I'll just add a couple things/comments. Yes, there's an aspect of what I call the engineer's dilemma (cheap, fast, good: pick any two) to the medical care problem. I don't know that it ha...

A turning point for me is when I realized that "man vs nature" is sort of a false dichotomy. We tend to place ourselves above and outside of nature, at least in our more developed civilizations, often codified in religion and mythology (or ancient astronaut theory) that we have a supernatural (i.e.,...

Apologies if this has already been discussed, but have you looked into the cost sharing reductions available against the silver aca plans? https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/cost-sharing-reduction/#:~:text=Get%20Answers-,Cost%20Sharing%20Reduction%20(CSR),to%20get%20the%20extra%20savings. Also, wi...

RockyMtnLiving, Thanks for the kind words. I'm flattered to be considered in some small way a role model, but I'm not superior to anyone and in most ways inferior to the vast majority--and that's before factoring in the blood guilt bestowed on me for being a male of European descent. Anything that ...

Just have a second to throw an item in. There's an entire field of "Behavioral Finance" that appears to have application in investing. Two names that come to mind are Kahneman and Tversky (hope I spelled those correctly). I dunno if any attempt has been made to apply any of it to the human component...

For consideration: SEE 1:04:12 - 1:13:32 https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-s096-topics-in-mathematics-with-applications-in-finance-fall-2013/video-lectures/lecture-16-portfolio-management/ Forget the school. A more important question is who is speaking and is he worth listening to? I have ...

RockyMnLiving, one quibble: self insurance means no insurance but the means to pay the bills. I'm a little uncomfortable with out-of-the-box solutions too, but for people that can make them work, awesome. There's a fair amount of medical tourism to the US, despite the cost, so one would have to prob...

cL, thanks, yeah, the $1500 was just a made up number for a fictional procedure to illustrate the one type of balance billind I'd encountered. Maybe $500 is more reasonable. Appreciate the clarification. A colleague shared a story of a man who racked up $1M in hospital costs for a protracted ICU sta...

Good read. I believe you have clarified my sentiments regarding how indexing is equated nowadays with "optimization" (back-testing, monte-carlo etc.) to mean it's somehow safer or better, as this is where I pointed out my reservations. https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?p=218884...