Finance – TheBoohers.org

I want my amazon data

January 21, 2025 by tim

Tracking and categorizing financial transactions can be tedious, especially when it comes to Amazon orders. With Amazon’s new data policies, it’s harder than ever to retrieve detailed purchase information in a usable format. Amazon is so broad that a credit card charge could be for a digital or physical product, a whole foods purchase. The … Read more

Quick(ish) Price Check on a Car

February 21, 2025March 26, 2023 by tim

So, is it a good price? With my oldest daughter heading off to college soon, we’ve realized that our family car doesn’t need to be as large as it used to be. We’ve had a great relationship with our local CarMax over the years, and we appreciate their no-haggle pricing model. My wife had her … Read more

Protected: 2019 Travel

January 4, 2020 by tim

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Some tax-time automation

January 12, 2016 by tim

I often struggle to find the right balance between automation and manual work. As it is tax time, and Chase bank only gives you 90 days of statements, I find myself every year going back through our statements to find any business expenses and do our overall financial review for the year. In the past … Read more

How much do IMA reservists make?

June 21, 2015 by tim

It is not easy to quickly decipher military pay tables for us IMAs. In order to do some recent financial planning, I had to calculate my pay. I’m an O-4 with between 14 and 16 years of service. Here is what I did. IDTs You can find the official military pay tables from the DoD … Read more

CY2014 Quarter 1 Financial Review

June 12, 2014 by tim

Chrissy and I review our spending on a quarterly basis. Updating every 90 days isn’t too long to correct mistakes and remember purchases, but it also allows for the busy multi-week sprints that life presents us. While we have used every financial management program available, I’ve found the most straightforward and flexible solution is to … Read more

OFX for USAA via Ruby

February 11, 2014 by tim

My wife and I have been through roughly 10-15 different budget/financial tracking systems. We started with every penny in MS Money, used several different spreadsheets, spent several years in Mint and have pretty much dropped all of that for a top-down strategy that has us budgeting savings, non-discretionary spending, and a rainy day buffer and … Read more

TelexFree — Higher fidelity model

January 9, 2014 by tim

My previous post on TelexFree was the result of a quick spreadsheet model that assumed a geometric growth rate that was uniformly assumed for all members. On a recent flight, I built an object oriented model in MATLAB to more realistically show how telex works. This is a really fascinating system.

TelexFree — A quick business case assessment

December 30, 2013 by tim

Ever wonder why fund managers can’t beat the S&P 500? ‘Cause they’re sheep — and the sheep get slaughtered. I been in the business since ’69. Most of these high paid MBAs from Harvard never make it. You need a system, discipline, good people, no deal junkies, no toreadores, the deal flow burns most people out by 35. Give me PSHs — poor, smart and hungry. And no feelings. You don’t win ’em all, you don’t love ’em all, you keep on fighting . . . and if you need a friend, get a dog . . . it’s trench warfare out there sport and in here too. — Gordon Gecko

I built a much better model with more realistic constraints available here

Outside of generating new information or product, risk, diversity and time horizon are only variables I’m convinced an investor can control. This means invest broadly over long time horizons and keep taxes and expenses low. If you want outsized returns, you must take on more risk or make something people want to buy. Most wealth is created by businesses making real products, but wealth can still accumulate from appreciating assets (real estate, land, gold, internet domain names, etc). However, both these methods take a lot of time and effort. Can you make a lot more quickly through selling VOIP services, posting internet ads and joining a Brazilian-focused multi-level marketing (MLM) club called TelexFree?