Finance on traviscj/blog

loan trickery

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 10:36:04 -0500

I have this “American Express Blueprint Business Loan” product to have a line of credit for the rentals if I’m ever in a pinch.

They allow up to $21,700 with this very easy application process, you basically just slide a slider to the amount needed & select between 6, 12, 18, 24 months:

This shows a schedule like this:

Looking at this, there’s a lot of temptation to think

38 and Grateful

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:03:37 -0600

It’s been a while since I’ve written an update – 2.5y! – and a long time since I wrote very frequently. On top of all the crazy ways the world has changed in the last five years, a bunch has changed for me personally in the last five years as well, along a bunch of different axes.

I think part of the reason it’s been hard to post is wanting to avoid coming across as bragging about the high points of this journey and also not really wanting to admit some of the low points, but I feel I’ve had a lot on my mind that doesn’t really make sense in blog form without the greater context; I’ve decided that I’d rather just share a lot of what’s been going on in the hopes that some part of it is relevant to someone out there or gives them some fortitude for whatever low spot they’re going through or can learn something from it.

personal finance resources

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to say a tiny bit about personal finance stuff, as I feel like I have gotten a fairly good feel for it.

Some great resources to start getting up to speed include:

r/personalfinance, especially
- the common topics
- the wiki

index investments

Ideally you want to own a lot of different companies, so you’ve diversified your asset ownership. One of the easiest ways to do this is through index investing, where the index “tracks” a broad swath of the market, like “All S&P 500 Companies” or “All stock market companies”.

espps are free money

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

ESPPs give employees an opportunity to buy the company stock at a discount. In both of the examples I’m aware of, the companies give a 15% discount on the LESSER of the price on the grant date and the price on the purchase date. The purchase dates are every six months, while the grants I’ve seen are either 12 or 24 months.

We can analyze this mathematically by breaking it into three cases. For concreteness, let’s look at ADBE for a grant date of 2019-01-02. The stock is trading at $224.27/share currently:

extracting the last few dollars from Visa/MC gift cards

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Once in a while, I get a prepaid gift card like this:

They’re – like money – great! But they do have one downside: it’s hard to spend the change once you’ve bought off most of the value.

Originally this was going to be a quick “just redeem it with Amazon’s gift card” post, but a bit of study revealed that it isn’t quiet that simple:

the authorized amount can prevent the full transaction from going through, so if it’s the first transaction at Amazon, you might need to leave $1.00 to cover the reserve.
the article mentions a $5 minimum, but the initial amount & card selection on Amazon doesn’t seem to have a problem with lower amounts, so YMMV I guess.

The article also mentions a different solution that I should have thought of: apparently some banks will redeem the value of the card into your account. You just need to show up at a branch of your bank with proper identification.

idea: transaction ordering in ledger-cli

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I love ledger-cli but keeping it in sync with my bank statements drives me crazy. The problem is that the transactions can end up with an essentially arbitrary ordering, and the order they clear (and even the date they clear) is not necessarily under my direct control.

One answer to this is: stop caring about the ordering of your transactions! That’s a decent answer, except that not addressing the ordering issue means that you can only ever have “end-of-day” consistency. This means you need a different report to reconcile the transactions.

stocks and options from 30k feet

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of my friends at work asked me if I had any book recommendations for learning about stocks and options. Mentally, I break trading down into two general classes of trading: index-type and “exotic” trading. By exotic trading, I mean picking individual stocks/options and actively trading. This runs counter to the more conservative buy-and-hold, index-based, hands-off approach.

For the exotic trading, I learned most of what I know from a class with Professor W.E. Olmstead and his book, Options for the Beginner and Beyond: Unlock the Opportunities and Minimize the Risks. For the option-uninitiated, the basic idea is that instead of buying or selling stocks directly, you buy and sell contracts that give you the right (but not obligation) to buy or sell the stock at a particular price by a particular date. That’s a mouthful and options are indeed subtle beasts, but they allow the flexibility to either hedge risks you want less exposure to, or increase/leverage exposure to risks you do want to take.

inspired by magicmirror

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 18:45:00 +0000

I’ve been really inspired by the MagicMirror project. The basic idea is getting a piece of mirror glass and putting a monitor and computer behind it, then having a status page show some pertinent information about the day (like weather, calendar, news, etc). So it looks like a regular mirror, but when you look closely, it shows the extra information.

I’d like to put one in the bedroom to replace our tall mirror. That’ll be pretty cool, but it requires a bit of extra thought because our magicmirror setup would replace a tall and skinny mirror, so we’ll probably just want a monitor behind the top part of the mirror. That will require some extra bracing to hold the monitor up in the frame. I’ll need to think about that a while.

car is paid off!

Sat, 16 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I finally sent the last check for my 2013 Ford Focus a couple of weeks ago, and finally got the title in the mail today. It also came with a “congratulations for paying off your car!” letter, which was a nice touch.

I opted to pay it off early, despite the (moderate) financial disadvantage it put me at. The loan was only 2.4%, so the cost of carrying the loan actually wasn’t super significant. I had started paying the loan ahead of schedule during graduate school because I was worried about whether I would have the cashflow available to keep making payments during the time between graduate school and real paid work. Then when I did get a job, I just kept making the higher-than-required payments.