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Showing posts from May, 2018


Light Bulb Idea: Does it make sense to switch your home's Light bulbs to LED?

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My power company just sent me free LED bulbs. If your power company has offered this, and you haven't taken advantage of it, DO IT! If I had traditional incandescent bulbs in my house to begin with, there would be 720 watts of power in just the lights. The LED bulbs brought that number down to 92. That is effectively 1/8th the power. I wrote a paper about cost savings on a government housing project for switching to LED lighting. If you want to apply this to just yourself, add the government benefits to the tenant benefits.  TLDR version: No matter what type of light bulb you have, its better by a significant amount, to switch to LEDs. The numbers are below. As I will explain below, the numbers are based on my apartment complex, but I also have between 200-400 consistent readers of my blog, so if every one of my readers changed to LEDs, it could have a net 20 year benefit of $400k-800k for all of them, or a $2,000 20 year benefit per person (all based on today's dollars). The

Dealing With Collection Agencies

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Collection agencies are a pain to work with. Essentially they make money by buying your debt from different places, like doctors, credit cards, or other similar places. They make it their full time job to get you to pay. There are a few tricks to saving as much as you can with these clowns though. My wife and I recently went through this. Here is what happened. When my wife was 18 she had kidney stones, and a tonsil surgery. There was also an emergency room trip in there. She keeps the doctors busy. Needless to say, these sorts of trips are expensive. Fast forward a few years. A couple months after we got married, we went to go get a credit card together. I was going on a trip and wanted to have another line of security or funding in case I got stranded in Europe. When we were at the bank, they ran our credit. I had nothing on my credit history. Literally, nothing. I was pretty proud of that. I worked my butt off to not have student loans, bought my vehicles with cash, and hadn'

Dividends for Days: Is Robinhood a Good Idea?

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I have two main investment strategies.  1. Monthly dividends 2. Index funds I've transitioned all my investing over to Robin Hood. I've tried a few investment apps, but I'm currently in love with Robin Hood. This app allows you to trade without fees. No fees. No monthly fees, no trading fees. I like free. Its great. This allows people to really customize their trading. Here's my plug, get the app with this link and you'll get a free stock. Its random, so it could be a biggie like apple, or it could be some penny stock. It'll probably be a cheap stock. I didn't use a link. I didn't get a free stock. If you want to get a freebie, use a referral code, even if its not mine!   https://share.robinhood.com/lancem129 I'm going to be focusing today on monthly dividends. There are several stocks, bonds, and other funds that will pay a dividend every month. This got me really curious. I've thought about buying a rental property some day, and I was