Ted's Blog

When I had my deferred compensation plan at work (like a 401k, but technically a 457b), I would think of an investment mix I wanted and rebalance every quarter. I wanted some exposure to foreign stocks, so I might put 30% in that. Then I would want something in cash or bonds so I might put 20% in there. The rest would be US stocks, so I would 40% in large cap stocks and 10% in small cap stocks. That was a reasonable diversified portfolio. Then by rebalancing you make sure you stick with that mix, but I also like that if foreign stocks did really well, you would end up selling some of that at a high and distributing it to the others that didn’t perform as well, so it was kind of a way of doing market timing, which I was never able to do successfully otherwise. The fallacy of that was that investing 100% in stocks always seemed to do better over the long run than watering it down with bonds or even foreign stocks, which seem to generally underperform domestic stocks. I never liked bond mutual funds because rather than really getting nice safe fixed income, it seemed like you were actually betting on interest rates, which would fluctuate.

This past year I did a rollover where I put all of my deferred comp funds into a conventional IRA at Vanguard. Both accounts are funded with pre-tax salary and will have taxes when I withdraw the funds, so no taxes were due because of this transaction, but I will still pay taxes later.

Continue reading “Asset Allocation”

For many years, I have used My Yahoo as my start page. It kept up with stock prices, sports scores, news, weather, and Yahoo mail. They kept changing the design of it, but I kept trying to keep it looking the same as it ever did, which is heavily text focused and in three columns and minimal ads. I could copy and paste the stock quotes into my investment spreadsheet in order to update all of the prices of my stocks and mutual funds. A week or two ago they put in a banner that they were discontinuing it in favor a new improved page, which of course is terrible. It had none of what made My Yahoo great. Today My Yahoo actually went away.

The first problem I had was how to get stock quotes into my investment spreadsheet which I do at least a few times a week and sometimes every day, around 6 PM when the mutual fund prices would post. Yahoo Finance already has my My Yahoo portfolio, but you can’t copy and paste the text because the stocks are now little widgets instead of text. I went looking for web portals like My Yahoo and found one called ProtoPage that was supposed to be decent, but it didn’t do everything that My Yahoo did and it didn’t seem to let you set up a portfolio of stocks and funds. Somehow I found out that Google Sheets, the spreadsheet web app, has a function that pulls over all kinds of information about a given stock or fund into a spreadsheet. So that would be really easy to copy and paste from anyway. I set that up, which took a little doing for gold and silver spot prices, since that isnt built in to the googlefinance() function. I even thought maybe I could convert my investment spreadsheet from Excel to Sheets. But then tonight I noticed that the mutual fund closing prices weren’t coming over. They still haven’t come over and it almost midnight. That’s not very helpful. In doing this, I also learned about the Google Finance page, which has some neat things going for it, similar to Yahoo Finance. But it didn’t have updated mutual fund prices either. I thought maybe Microsoft would have a finance page and they do via MSN. It lets you put in a portfolio and they were updated at least by 9 PM when I started messing with it, plus I could copy and paste all the quotes at once to dump them into my spreadsheet (from the manage list screen).

MSN might not be a bad portal replacement for My Yahoo either. It has weather at least. While it lets you enter your favorite sports teams, it still shows you a bunch of scores of random teams. I will still need to check my Yahoo Mail though. So what I’ve done is now bookmarked a bunch of different pages that do most of the things separately that My Yahoo did all at once: sports, headlines, weather, stocks. I can’t believe Yahoo would blow this and nobody is ready to take their place.

As I started figuring out last year, Black Friday as a shopping event for getting blu-rays on sale was in real danger. During this past year Best Buy stopped selling movies altogether. Target has cut way back with some stores having nothing, but for the holidays some had a cardboard stand out at some stores with blu-rays and DVD’s, including recent titles, but unfortunately, no 4k movies. The prices weren’t great either, about $15 for a blu-ray, but you could get it down to $10 potentially with the Buy 2, Get 1 Free sale they had going on. There are so few new movies I would want on blu-ray (as opposed to 4k) that it doesn’t work and even $10 is steep for a blu-ray when in the past Best Buy would sell them for $5-$10 and I could reduce that substantially with reward certificates. I hoped Best Buy would get shippers like Target did, but, nope, they are completely done with movies. I had $40 in certificates for Best Buy so I put those towards a new Samsung phone instead. Last year Walmart’s blu-ray deals were actually through Gruv, an online store run by Universal. This year, again, they had no deals in the stores. Dollar Tree used to put out a shipment of movies around Thanksgiving, but they haven’t put anything new out in a year.

Gruv still has decent deals on things from Universal and Warner Brothers mostly, so I picked up 4k’s of Oppenheimer¹ and Dune: Part Two² for $12.99 each. But as of January 1, all online and even purchases of digital movies now have Georgia sales tax. No wonder Georgia has a revenue surplus: they have secretly passed the biggest tax increase in Georgia history just by closing those loopholes. Gruv had a 3 4k for $30 deal on some titles, but I had a hard time picking three from their list. I thought about getting Puss in Boots (which I have on blu-ray already, but would go with my 4k of its sequel), The Color Purple (1985), and Tar. I started watching Tar, but it was slow and I wasn’t crazy about it. I have Color Purple on HD digital, which is probably fine for a movie that age. I could get E.T. instead of Tar, but some people said the 4k doesn’t look that great. I already have E.T. on blu-ray and a 4k digital copy.
Continue reading “Dark Black Friday”

At the end of August, Disney announced the end of Disney Movie Insiders, a rewards program that started as a way to encourage people to buy DVD’s by giving out points that could be accumulated and redeemed for more movies or other Disney merchandise. I earned most of my points by buying Disney blu-rays at Disney Movie Club (RIP), but could also get points by buying digital copies of movies and movie tickets, plus they often gave away codes for a few free points. I got a lot more movies that way so it was a nice way to make the Movie Club even a better deal and I wound up getting 42 movies from DMI including a few 4k titles. I also used DMI to get dozens of movie posters for my two backlit frames.

Other studios had similar programs. Sony Rewards had a program where you could buy 5 Sony blu-rays and get one free, but eventually they only gave digital copies of movies with a list of possible free movies that changed every quarter. They were usually horrible movies, but every now and then there might be something worth getting. That program also ended a few months ago. Another similar program was from Universal, which gave you 500 points for buying a movie (blu-ray or digital) and for 1000 points you could get a digital movie from a list that was updated every month. It was fun to see what new movies would come out at the beginning of the month, with some surprisingly good choices sometimes, though it started out kind of rough. I wound up with over 50 digital movies from them. Of course that closed a few months ago too.

I think these are all a casualty of the decline of physical media and even the decline of movie ownership as people get their movies through streaming services or maybe rent movies to watch. It makes sense. Most people won’t watch movies over and over again, so why not rent?

Also there seems to be a general decline in rewards programs. Coke had a program for a while that has gone away. Dr. Pepper has one that has really gone downhill. I got a lot of stuff from Kelloggs for a while, but that is gone too. Microsoft has a neat program that gives you points for searching on Bing and doing other activities and then you can trade in points for a Microsoft gift card that I would use, of course, to get movies. For a while I was able to get 3 movies a month, but they have throttled that program significantly. They would release a new batch of movies to shop from every Monday night, but the quality of those choices seems to have gone down some.

Looking for deals like this along with blu-rays at stores (which have also mostly gone away) occupied a lot of my time browsing the blu-ray forums, but I have an enormous backlog of movies to watch, so I need to change my focus from acquiring to actually watching and enjoying the movies I have.

Back when the blog was on Movable Type, I had rotating taglines underneath where it says “Ted’s Blog” at the top of the page. When we switched to WordPress, there was a plug-in that offered the same functionality and we installed that and I filled it with quotes. Recently the blog site was hacked and we deactivated plug-ins that were old or questionable because they might be vulnerable to hacks. Looking up some discussion on using rotating quotes, somebody suggested just adding some javscript to the the footer.php file of the theme instead of dealing with a plug-in. The correct way to do that in WordPress would be to create a child theme that I would then modify with the custom code. I had done this when we first started with WordPress and I wanted some customizations of the Twenty Eleven theme and created a child of that theme, but for the last couple of years I have been using a theme called Twenty Sixteen without a child theme. Instead Twenty Sixteen has a number of options that you can set in a control panel, including rotating header images. So I started out trying to set up a child theme of Twenty Sixteen first and wasn’t getting that to work because I needed to activate it in the Network Admin panel first. Once I did that, I just got the plain vanilla Twenty Sixteen without my custom settings. So I decided I would just modify Twenty Sixteen’s footer.php file. The danger of that is if anyone else on our blog network wanted to use Twenty Sixteen, they would get my rotating quotes, plus if there was ever a WordPress update that modified the footer.php file, which seems likely, then it would overwrite my custom file. All that means is I need a backup of the script so I can do the modification again. I am not 100% sure it would be easy to do a child theme with WordPress as it used to be, but maybe I will try it at some point.

The only tricky part was converting the quotes to something that could be stored in strings, so I had to use codes for characters like an apostrophe. I used the second code block from this page. I kept a backup of my customized quotes in a file called code.txt that is in the Twenty Sixteen child them folder I made.