Schwab has tons of no-load, no-fee mutual funds that aren't Schwab, none of them are vanguard. The mutual fund screener can help find them if you're looking for a particular strategy.

No specific books, but savings is more about other goals and not specific to money - start with the other goals and their timelines, costs, etc and work backward from there.

"I need $1M in 20 years so that I can retire..." Or something like that. (You'll need to figure out your own numbers, but you could start with 30x what you expect to spend). Or shorter term goals "I need $x for a house down payment ..."

By "overall" I mean "if you view your total income and rent between now and the lease end" instead of viewing it in terms of each month.

One way to look at it is "can you afford it overall between now and then" rather than looking at each month independently. Another question is what's the hit from breaking the lease early?

Future life lesson - don't rent an apartment with a girlfriend if you can't afford it alone. (Good advice for both sides of that - you really never want to be dealing with a situation where either person feels stuck for financial reasons.)

Confirmed... That turns up porn (had to look - word on the internet for years has been that you have to use bing to get good porn results)

Update your w4 for next year if you still have two jobs.

I wouldn't be shocked if there were some supply chain issues tied to the EMV chips that all modern cards have. They're the kind of low grade semiconductor that ends up being made in China so lockdowns + outbreak could be a big issue. Also, chip manufacturing requires neon and the largest world supplier of neon was Ukraine.

https://www.pcbb.com/bid/2022-07-19-what-the-lingering-chip-shortage-means-for-cfis suggests that this might be a big part of it.

Sounds like you're doing a great job. Now you need to teach safely climbing, staying in, and descending from trees!

Oops...you're right on the number. Was thinking about 3 things at once and trying to decide whether to word based on $100k of loans or amount of loans for $75k of pay or average loan size or something... Then crossed wires in my head.

Refi is in the tank right now - anybody who bought more than a year ago could pull cash out and have their payment go up significantly, and most people who were paying attention refid into a <3% loan at some point in the last few years. Last year you could have gone through the existing loans and called them up saying "hey... We can put some cash in your pocket AND lower your payment", now the equivalent monthly payment has about half the buying power it had last year.

HELOC... Maybe? Though those are going to be much smaller credit amounts.

Ah. A monthly breakdown would be interesting on that. The rush of new purchases and refinancing went up to about February or March and then slowed down a bunch (though there was some "rates are rising so buy now before they go up more" pressure carrying into mid year.) There's definitely a bunch of seasonal variation in that field (nobody wants to move in the winter, families prefer to move when school's out, etc)

That kind of role seems like it's really important to have a buffer of cash available to get through the leaner periods. You said 0.75% commission. With a median sale price in the US of $400k, you're looking at something a bit less than $750 per loan on average (people will have some down payment etc.)

I'm curious what kind of sales job comes with licensing requirements?

I'd also be really curious what the income distributions of the existing sales people ends up being/what kind of turnover they typically see due to people not selling enough or soon enough after they flip to commission to survive. Without knowing the industry, it's hard to say how much time is spent cultivating clients before you get a sale. (My experience with sales people is that they often have their book of clients and basically make it their job to be the first call a client makes when they need something, but any given client might make one big order every couple of years.)

>Huge compiles incoming on 32gb of ram.

Lol... I don't know who tells you that is "huge", but I think they may not have experienced one that is truly huge!

I think the "car makers haven't sold it very well" is more of the issue than building one physical model and enabling/disabling bits with software to meet customer needs.

I don't need a <5 second 0-60, so the option to not pay for it makes sense. There's definitely some people who would pay for it. With gas motors you get the difference between the base model and the performance model, with electric - it's software and not a bigger motor. Seems fine to me. you need to have that base model spec available.

The issue prior to that fix was that the phones shut down mid day due to running out of battery. Lowering performance on a phone with batteries degraded to the 80% level or worse in order to not have it shut down before the end of the day makes sense.

When the feedback you're getting is that people are complaining that their phones are shutting down and you then task some engineers to fix that, you get a fix. Apple said early on that it was a small number and it probably was, but lithium batteries have somewhere between 500 and 2000 charge cycles before they degrade to that level so over time more and more of the older phones would start falling into that mode.

But the accusations early on were "you're making my phone worse to force me to buy a new one" which wasn't the case. From an engineering perspective the change made the useful life of the phone longer (fixing the battery life issues).

That's true. But also, you have hardware in your data center that can be turned on and off with a phone call to IBM (and assorted monthly or one time pricing). The maintenance contracts etc are tied to what you're licensed to use. Software licenses tend to cost way more than hardware, but in all of it you only pay for the things that you use. (Or ... You pay for the things you want to use, but they can be dynamically enabled or disabled.)

Other industries are trying to go a similar way. I've heard that some heavy equipment companies want to sell some sort of uptime/operating guarantees and not necessarily specific equipment. That might mean you need 5 trucks but they ship 6 to your site and some spare parts etc because that gives them the flexibility to have spares and deal with downtime/repairs while still hitting the contract requirements. If you put that 6th truck in service, those numbers might be missed or if you want to have 6 operating then the contract goes up.

Eh... Users complain and file suit or whatever and even if you fix it they still pursue the case. They had fixed the issue with additional controls by 2018, the settlement happened in 2020 based on a case filed in december 2017.

The states were charging that apple was making changes to cause people to buy new phones, apple was contending that they were trying to prevent unexpected shutdowns due to old batteries losing capacity over time.

Mainframes are often delivered with more CPUs in the box then you're licensed for. You can call ibm and have them enable more at any time and only pay for them while you use them. The machine is sitting in your data center with double the power that you can use.

This has been how IBM does things for decades.

You can win but it's going to take months and millions of dollars to litigate - it's a distraction and not worth fighting. Doesn't mean they did something wrong, just that they got to a number where it was cheaper to pay than to fight.

Can you explain how people aren't constantly paying for features that they use only during the duration of their use?

If it costs more to fight it than to pay the fine, you pay the fine and move forward. It's not worth wasting the resources on the fight, learn from it and improve the UX moving forward. They didn't break anything with the update, they just re-tuned some operating parameters.

Just because the courts got it wrong doesn't mean the choice was bad. Also doesn't mean it was illegal, just means someone found a court that would listen and it was cheaper to just pay something than to fight it.

When a reasonable person could flip a coin and come up on either side of the outcome is an indication that it's not wrong. We'll have to disagree on this. Later updates, I believe, better tuned things and gave more options, right? The first version of the feature is rarely perfect.

Sure... I could make the case either way - the fact that I think someone doing UX research on the experience of having a phone run out of battery before the end of the day could reasonably find that a majority of users would prefer a little slower but not running out and make a product case that the best way to ensure people are happy with their phones longer would be a software update that does that.

The fact that it's a reasonable outcome makes it hard for me to say they did something wrong. The fact that I can also see how someone might disagree doesn't change that.

Iphone getting slower made some sense - there's lots of weird considerations in UX, but getting slower to ensure that the battery lasts through the day makes a ton of sense as a default.

That might be, but would you be upset if you walked in and they were like "we have this car ... It's $80k, or we can install the performance software on it and sell it to you for $100k"? Or would you prefer "you can pay $80k and if you decide you want the performance upgrades you can have that for $100/month and take it for the months where you use it" or similar.

Or maybe you buy it and the fact that you never licensed that option helps maintain your resale value due to less overall wear, but the next person could have the option to turn it on if they wanted.

People do all the time. Look at cloud computing pricing, or old (even modern) mainframe stuff. Customers demand compute with burst capabilities that they only pay for when they use.