Category: Uncategorized

Last year I put my Roth 2014 contribution in to Vanguard’s Total International Stock Index, which wound up losing money. International stocks haven’t recovered as quickly as the US market, so last year I figured they were due, but instead the US continued to outperform the rest of the world. As I watched all of this unfold, I started to realize I was probably too heavily weighted in international stocks anyway. Still, in a market lull during October, I took a little money I had in a short-term bond fund (cash, essentially) and put it in Vanguard’s European Index. This went up about 10% almost immediately, but by December was back down to near where I bought it. I wound up selling it as well as my domestic small cap value fund to buy Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index fund, which invests in the whole US stock market (instead of just the S&P 500 large caps). Some of that is too late because small caps dragged in 2014 as well, but now I have only two Vanguard investments: total US market and total foreign markets. So that’s everything! I still have more than I should in the international fund, so I am putting some of my 2015 contribution into the domestic fund.
Continue reading “Roth 2015”

I sort of got overly involved in buying precious metals this year (gold, silver parts 1, 2, and 3). I don’t think there is anything wrong with having some precious metals in a portfolio, up to a few percent of total investments, but I probably haven’t been doing it that well. It’s hard to know whether prices will go up or down, but realistically prices would have to go up quite a bit before I could realize any gains by selling physical silver and gold somewhere. Maybe a 40% increase in price to realize a 20% gain. I also put some money in exchange traded funds that you buy like stocks that are much more efficient, allowing a 20% gain with maybe a 24% increase in price. But the price has continued to slide and is down to around $16 per ounce whereas it was $19 when I first started buying and as high as $21 at one point.

Continue reading “Silver, Part 4”

I’ve been wanting to upgrade my 6 year old Dell Vostro 1400 for a little while now, though it wasn’t urgent since the Vostro works pretty well, especially after reinstalling everything back in February. I bought a ultra portable Transformer T100 which can also be used as a tablet if you remove the keyboard, but it was too small for me. I thought maybe I could get a powerful laptop that I could use to replace my ancient desktop computer and also take it with me when I needed to, but I find myself using the laptop a lot while watching TV, so I’m not sure I would use the laptop as a desktop very often. Plus I wanted to support two monitors, but I’m not sure how that would work. Maybe I could just get one very large monitor to take the place of two separate monitors.
Continue reading “Dell Inspiron 15 3000”

Earlier this year I wrote about considering upgrading my internet and cable to AT&T Uverse from my currently separate packages consisting of AT&T DSL and Dish Network TV. Ultimately, even though I wanted to upgrade my internet speed, I decided that once I included all of AT&T’s add-on fees, the package was just too expensive to justify.

So the other day two salesmen came by the house pushing me to sign up for Uverse. They were able to put together a package that was going to cost about $105 per month, but right now I am paying about $80 a month, and the $105 was just the introductory rate: after 12 month it would go up substantially. The salesmen said the answer to that was to call AT&T and tell them you wanted to keep the old rate and they would leave it alone. I wonder about that. I ended up sending them on their way without agreeing to anything.
Continue reading “Time for Uverse”

When I wrote about my ancestors, the McCords, last year, I mentioned a great website where a guy had assembled information from pretty much any family bible that had information about births, deaths, and marriages of people named McCord. One of the bibles quoted there originally belonged to my great, great, great-grandfather, William J. McCord. William McCord had done a great job of recording everyone in his family before him, going all the way back to Scotland, and then everyone that came after him, which his descendants kept adding to until the 1930’s, including the marriage of Mom’s parents and the birth of her two older brothers. Part of the bible information included the indians killing William’s own great-grandfather in Pennsylvania in 1756.

Anyway, that page was a great resource and there were a couple of other bibles there from other family members as well. When I went back to visit the site recently, it was gone. I found the email address of the site owner and he said that he hadn’t had much interest from people in the site and the web provider had gone up on prices recently, so he just let it expire. I asked him if I could host the site on my own server, which I’m already paying for, so it would cost me nothing. He wasn’t sure he had all of the original files, but he started working it. He is a retired doctor and had kept a lot of records. At one point he thought I could scan all of the printouts of the old web pages and post those to my website, so he wanted me to have hard copies of everything. Luckily for me, he wound up finding the electronic files along with all the physical file folders for the 31 different family bibles he documented and mailed me a box of all of this stuff, which I got this week. There is a lot of neat stuff in there, including transcriptions of letters from one of Mom’s aunts or cousins in Birmingham about the McCord family.
Continue reading “Orphan Website”