Uber
Robert

Saw this article on USA Today about early retirement. The article hits on a lot of really good points that I've felt for a few years now. I personally believe that all the retirement mumbo-jumbo out there is a little wrong, or at least non-optimal. My personal goal is not so much to retire early but to be finished saving for retirement early so I can maximize the value of compounding (and have a lot of fun after its off the list). For example finish saving by 35 then just topping up for fun as I get older from there.

The basic nature of compounding or from the article "nest-egg mathematics" (sorta) easily allows for this. Each $1 saved while young equals a lot more than $1 when you finally decide to retire. For example if you are retiring at 65, each $1 saved while 25 would equal roughly $8 at retirement at 65 while someone who is a little behind the game and playing catch-up at age 55, each $1 saved would be roughly $2 at retirement; a huge difference!

This compounding math that makes a dollar worth more going forward can also be dialed backwards to see what that nest egg would require earlier. Using this number as soon as you hit the desired growth line you can take your hands off the retirement nest egg and let it grow on its own for the rest of your life while you do what you want with the rest of your money.

Lets look at some numbers. Note these are rough napkin numbers, nothing official. They assume an account doubles in 10 years which is roughly 7% interest.

First, how much do we want in retirement. I'm setting an arbitrary $100k a year, I think this would be enough for me to be pretty comfortable. Assuming 7% growth, if you withdraw 4% a year your savings will still grow by 3% a year, allowing you to increase payments throughout your life to keep up with inflation. So following this 4% rule we'd need $2.5M to retire (100k/4*100). So based on 7% growth, 100k income and $2.5M nest egg; here's the table of goal numbers we want to try to attain.

Super! So if we can save roughly $312.5k by the time we hit 35 then we're done! I'm around 25 (just to keep the numbers easy) so in order to attain this savings amount by 35 I'd need to put away roughly $3,654 a month or $43,848 a year. This is roughly the same as maxing out two 401ks and IRA accounts (46K) for 10 years. From here each contribution over this amount pushes the day of retirement closer to us, if we can hit $625k then retirement is just 20 years out instead of 30.

I know these numbers are way simplified. If I get around to it I'll write more in-depth blogs on the analysis of the retirement numbers and the figures required for early retirement. If you have any questions comment or shoot me a line and I'll work to expand those areas out.

Finally, if you want to really help your child out, forget the college savings plan. Put $39k into a savings account for them at age 5, retirement = done.

I just found this tool recently and have found it extremely useful. It is called OneTab and it’s so simple that it's brilliant. I personally am an avid browser, but not a great reader, of the web. So I often open up tabs of interesting articles for later consumption, usually once I'm home and have a beer in hand. This often leads to 50+ tabs open in Chrome. Luckily my MacBook has gobs of ram so this isn't a pressing issue, but it is hard to find the tab I'm looking for. Not to mention that if my Chrome crashes I get this sinking feeling in my gut.

OneTab easily solves this by collapsing all your tabs into a single list for later consumption. From here you can open them individually or as a whole set. OneTab also lets you do some minor organization and dragging tabs around. One of the neater features is the ability to share a set of sites as a list for others.

All together this makes a pretty great little service that I'm excited to use. So go give it a try!

A few days ago I moved my hosting off of Amazon EC2 and Rackspace and onto my local Comcast connection. Sure, I've lost a lot of reliability but hey, can't beat free. I was running into space issues and needed more RAM and my local PC has and i7 with 24GB of RAM so it sounded like a better solution.

So I spent a little bit setting everything up again on a VMware instance (blog about that coming soon...) and finally setup port forwarding on my router. But it didn't work!! So to troubleshoot I setup another forward rule for port 8080 to see if it was blocked. Sure enough port 8080 worked fine but 80 was timing out. So after a quick Google search I see that Comcast does block some ports although 80 wasn't listed a few other search results showed others with similar issues. Thus began my Comcast game of phone tag.

First I tried Chat. They were kind enough to give me the line for Signiture Support (1-877-480-1344). But that’s not free. So I tried the regular technical line, and after multiple calls they all forwarded me to Signiture Support too. After about 3 hours of technicians dodging my questions I made a deal with the Signiture Support salesman: I'd accept the premium account signup and if it was my issue then I'd pay for the first month and signup fee, but if it was their issue they'd refund me my dough.

Deal done. Comcast support tech hops on the line and sets up a remote session. I show him my site on local and that it works on 8080. Then we hop into the firewall config and he instantly goes "hey, you've got two configs for port 80!" Grrrrr.... Sure enough I had forgotten to uncheck an old port forward rule for port 80, and he found it in nearly under a minute on the line.

Now I won't say I'm not unhappy with needing to pay for support from Comcast. But I will say the guy I talked to was smart. And for the amount of time I'd spent, and likely would have kept spending to fix the issue it was totally worth the money for a second pair of eyes.

I just saw an amazing little video on the Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter. This thing is so cool! I am going to try to talk the wife into getting one. One of the neatest things is that they are open source and moddable so you can change it's mechanics and software to what you want.

I'm curious if you could control it with a Raspberry Pi to increase mobility. Or even have two of them carry a Raspberry Pi with a pre-programmed route and do some long range reconnaissance missions.

Oh and here's a video.

Sometimes technology is totally frustrating. I spent a couple hours today fighting with my monitor and power at my desk. The external monitor, a Dell 2405, kept flashing "can not display this mode" as though my laptop was sending a bad signal. I searched around and found a lot of posts with others having the same issue.

The best solution I've seen is moving away from the apple adapter, lol. You'd think that with making the best laptop money can buy that Apple would have their external monitor adapter down pat. From what I've seen though this thing dies quickly and costs way to much.

In the end the bandaid I've found was unplugging the monitor from the display adapter while the adapter was plugged into the laptop. This brought up the Dell "Self test feature check" color bar screen. This seems to resets some of the display adapter/external monitor settings and after plugging the monitor back in again it was redetected properly and works again. Note that unplugging the display adapter itself or rebooting did nothing. Bah.

Hopefully it stays working now!