My wife and I work. We are blessed that we make enough that we buy ~anything reasonable we want, have 2 kids in private school, and max out our 401k/roths/backdoor every year.
What is the value in detailed tracking of personal finance? We audit ~every credit card bill when it comes in for oddities, but don't really pay attention where everything goes as long as more comes in than goes out.
For me I wanted to know how much I'm spending spend in different categories - not just for the phone bill where you can just see what it is every month, but for more irregular expenses: travel, repairs, appliances etc.
So why is this interesting to know? It gives you a better picture of where your money goes, what your bur rate is, how much of your spend is on mandatory stuff (food, rent/mortage etc.) and how much is on things you could potentially cut if need be. It makes it possible to know how far you are from various levels (/lifestyles) of financial independence. I have a pretty good idea that I could make it to retirement even if I permanently lost my job and I know what that lifestyle would roughly be like.
This also makes it possible to do proper budgeting by setting aside realistic amounts even for irregular expenses, so you're essentially 'saving up' for the irregular expenses. Done right, your "expenses" (money set aside in budget) are exactly the same month after month even though your actual money outflows in some months may be much higher. This is both true for the irregular expenses like travel, but also for semi-regular expenses that may come due only annually or every three months (mortgage etc.).
For me personally, it made me feel much more comfortable about spending larger amounts on travel etc. because I've already saved up the money via budgeting and I've never seen it as savings that goes away. Savings are per definition the difference in monthly income vs month set aside in budget. I make sure to be a bit conservative, so I actually also build a buffer on the savings account, usable for truly extraordinary expenses.
But your current situation sounds healthy - and if you have amble cushion, and you're confident it will continue that way and you have no desire to change it yourself, the above is of course less relevant.
> Normally an old, used CPU for a dead platform will go for a small fraction the MSRP.
True in general- used CPUs from discontinued platforms sell for a small fraction of the original MSRP.
Buuuut, the final flagship part on nearly every platform is an exception to this rule. They are generally sought after as the definitive 'End Game Upgrade' because they provide users with the simplest, most cost-effective performance boost—a single component swap—bypassing the need for a costly migration to a successor platform (which requires new RAM and a new motherboard).
It tends to happen every generation swap, 5800X3D is just the latest.
I'm down to ~10m of battery life on my i7 11" - any pointers on battery replacement? Laptop worked great otherwwise (retired it last year due to battery life)
I tried eBay like 4 times. But they were all fake or defective. At least one of them was dead on arrival.
I finally bought one from iFixit.com. Far more expensive than eBay, but the battery actually worked great for about a year. Then about a month after the 1-year warranty expired, it degraded noticeably (maybe to 80%) with only about 100-200 charge cycles. Even iFixIt cannot source a battery as good as the original Apple.
Right now, it's at 65% capacity after 584 charge cycles, after 4.5 years of service. I will probably go back to iFixIt. At least I'll get one year of full capacity from them, instead of the fake or DOA ones from eBay.
Learn Ansible or similar, and you you can be ~OS (OSX/Linux/even Windows) agnostic with relatively complex setups. I set mine up before Agentic systems were as good as they are now; but I assume it would be relatively effortless now.
IMO, it's worth spending some time to clean up your setup for smooth transition to new machines in the future.
Because 'sometimes' doesn't mean you should needlessly handcuf yourself the other 80% of the time.
I personally haves an ansible playbook to ~setup all my commonly used tooling on ~any cli I will use significantly; (almost) all local installs to avoid need for root. It runs in ~minute - and I have all the Niceties. If it's not worth spending that minute to run; then i won't be on the machine long enough for it to matter.
> I personally haves an ansible playbook to ~setup all my commonly used tooling on ~any cli I will use significantly;
^^ Yep. Totally this. I've become entirely too accustomed to all the little niceties of a well-crafted toolchain that covers all my needs at any given moment. It was worth the time invested to automate installing and configuring all the fancy newfangled stuff I've built up muscle-memory for. :)
> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.
on my work computer - there's a sep. 365Copilot app that is tied into Teams,Sharepoint, outlook, and I believe our engineering wiki. Probably other stuff I'm not aware of.
I'm honestly shocked how often I use it now.
If I get a random Pipeline failure; I'll copy/paste it into the o365 Copilot app - and it points me to an email I didn't notice ~3 months ago about a new policy change, and then points me to discussion thread I wasn't on ~2 weeks ago about how to get in compliance with direct links to EngWiki 'how to fix..' documentation, and an Teams link to join the breaking teams Office Hours.
Just off a single ~1 sentence prompt and a stack trace
What is the value in detailed tracking of personal finance? We audit ~every credit card bill when it comes in for oddities, but don't really pay attention where everything goes as long as more comes in than goes out.
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