- Uop past midnight. 3am feeding. 5am hurts. Back to bed? #
- Stayed up this morning and watched Terminator:Salvation. AWAKs make for bad plot advancement. #
- Last night, Inglorious Basterds was not what I was expecting. #
- @jeffrosecfp It's a fun time, huh. These few months are payment for the fun months coming, when babies become interactive. 🙂 in reply to jeffrosecfp #
- RT @BSimple: RT @bugeyedguide: When we cling to past experiences we keep giving them energy…and we do not have much energy to spare #
- RT @LivingFrugal: Jan 18, Pizza Soup (GOOOOOD Stuff) http://bit.ly/5rOTuc #budget #money #
- Free Turbotax for low income or active-duty military. http://su.pr/29y30d #
- To most ppl,you're just somebody [from casting] to play the bit part of "Other Office Worker" in the movie of their life http://su.pr/1DYMQZ #
- RT @MoneyCrashers: Money Crashers 2010 New Year Giveaway Bash – $8,300 in Cash and Amazing Prizes http://bt.io/DQHw #
- RT: @flexo: RT @wisebread: Tylenol, Motrin, Rolaids, and Benadryl RECALLED! Check your cabinets: http://bit.ly/4BVJfJ #
- New goal for Feb. 100 pushups in 1 set. Anyone care to join me? #
- RT @BSimple: Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow"— Robert Kiyosaki So take action now. #
- RT @hughdeburgh: "Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now." ~ Sophia Loren #
- Chances of finding winter boots at a thrift store in January? Why do they wear our at the worst time? #
- @LenPenzo Anyone who make something completely idiot proof underestimates the ingenuity of complete idiots. in reply to LenPenzo #
- RT @zappos: "Lots of people want to ride w/ you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus w/ you…" -Oprah Winfrey #
- RT @chrisguillebeau: "The cobra will bite you whether you call it cobra or Mr. Cobra" -Indian Proverb (via @boxofcrayons) #
- RT @SuburbanDollar: I keep track of all my blogging income and expenses using http://outright.com it is free&helps with taxes #savvyblogging #
- Reading: Your Most Frequently Asked Running Questions – Answered http://bit.ly/8panmw via @zen_habits #
Daytrading Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency
For the past 6 weeks, I’ve been playing with Bitcoin and Litecoin.
I can hear you from across the internet. You’re asking, “What the hell is Bitcoin?”
I’m glad you asked. It’s a cryptocurrency.
And now you know as much as you did before.
Cryptocurrencies are anonymous internet-based money. You spend it just like money, though granted, there are fewer places that accept cryptocurrency.
The big name in cryptocurrency is Bitcoin. In second place, trying to play silver to Bitcoin’s gold, is Litecoin.
So what do I mean by “playing with” Bitcoin and Litecoin?
I’ve been daytrading, which is generally a horrible idea…when you’re doing it with stocks. Daytrading is gambling. It’s the art of doing short-term flips on a stock. You buy it today to sell tomorrow, hoping it goes up. With stocks, I play a long game. I buy and hold. I buy a stock that I believe has long-term value, and I hold it for months or years.
That’s not the game I play with BTC and LTC. I play a short game, rarely longer than a week. When the coins are at a low price, I buy, then I immediately sell when they price is higher. When it’s high, I short the coin, essentially selling coins I don’t own to trade back when the dollar-price is lower. When I’m paying attention, I make money as the coins go up and I make money when the coins go down.
Why is this a good strategy for cryptocoins?
Because they are extremely volatile. As I’m writing this, Litecoin has had a 10% swing today, from $4.03 at midnight, to a current price of $4.16, with a peak of $4.36. On Thursday, it was floating around $4.60 all day. In the last 30 days, it’s been as high as $8.65 and as low as $3.18. Go back to May and the low is $1.29.
Traditional wisdom says that volatile investments are bad. In traditional investments, that’s true. But when a stock is this volatile, nearly every bet is a good one, as long as you’re patient. If I buy LTC at $4.20 and it drops to $3.90, that’s bad. I lost money. But, if I wait a couple of days, it’s almost definitely going to climb back up. Except for large-scale sell-offs, it’s usually going to bounce 10% in a given day. You can buy in the dips and sell at the peaks all day long, turning 5-10% profits with each time. If you’re brave or stupid, you can short at the peaks and make 5-10% on every downturn, too.
For example, today started at $4.03. Buy. Today’s peak was at 7:15AM at $4.36. When the graphs start swinging down, sell short. Two hours later, it bottomed out at $4.20 for a 4% return. Then, buy while it’s low. Ninety minutes later, it was at $4.31, another 3% return. Short it again, then close the position at 7PM for $4.13.
Let’s walk through this.
Buy $10 worth of Litecoin at midnight, sell at 7:15AM. You have $10.81.
Turn around and short the same amount until 9AM. You have $11.22.
Buy that same amount to sell at 10:30AM. You have $11.51.
Short it again before closing out at 7PM and going to bed. You have 12.01. That’s almost a 12% return in 12 hours, assuming you guessed all of the major swings right. If you guessed some wrong, you’d just have to wait until the next time it swung your way, and it will. Did I do that well? No. I bought in at $4.008 yesterday and sold today-once-for $4.32. I will not complain at an 8% return over 12 hours.
The only exception to that is during major buying and selling streaks. On July 5th, a major buying run started. By July 8th, the price was run up to $8.65. A huge sell-off happened then, dropping the price to $4.36 on July 9th.
If you bought at $8.65 you’d be hosed.
The lesson there is, don’t buy at the peak. I’ve had a number of trades that could have been huge scores if I would have held onto them longer, but I’m a wimp. I sell as soon as I’ve gotten enough money to make me smile, then I refuse to regret the decision. That also prevents me from holding on to my positions too long. I avoid all of the crashes that way. That giant buy-in happened while I was on vacation, so I wasn’t paying attention. When I’m not paying attention, I leave my money in US dollars, so there’s no risk…and also no reward.
Also, an important caveat: while I am learning the cryptocurrency ropes, I’m playing with a non-critical amount of money. I put $75 into the exchange in June. Not enough to cry over losing, but enough I can play with all of the different investment options. As I said, I’m a wimp, although a 30% return in 7 weeks is pretty sweet.
Next up, I’ll show you how to get started investing/gambling with Bitcoin.
Decision Making Made Easy
Have you ever had to make a difficult decision? Not necessarily a decision that’s difficult because it’s life-changing, but a decision that’s difficult because there are two phenomenally wonderful, yet mutually exclusive options?
For example:
- Should you put caramel or strawberry sauce on your ice cream?
- Should you go to Disney Land or Disney World?
- Should you subscribe to Live Real, Now by email or RSS?
- Should you take the job with the stellar benefits package or the higher salary?
These are all real decisions that you may be called on to make.
For most decisions, there are some alternatives that are easy to discard.
MadDog 20/20 isn’t a good alternative to caramel sauce on your ice cream. The local BDSM museum probably isn’t a great choice for a family vacation. Sending me hate mail is obviously worse than subscribing.
Then you’ve got some choices that are both okay, but one is clearly better. You’ve got free airfare and hotel. Do you go to Topeka, or Paris? Neither is horribly, but I think the choice is obvious. You’re going out to dinner. McDonald’s or…nevermind, this fits the first category.
After you’ve discarded the obvious bad choices and the okay-but-not-great choices, how can you decide between what’s left?
This is the point that starts to cause stress. What if you make the wrong choice? What if you regret it forever? What if you’re still not happy? Gridlock.
The reason your stuck is because it’s not apparent which is the better choice. All of your experiences and knowledge are telling you–on some level–that the options are identical in terms of your life, happiness, and goals. It truly does not matter which one you choose. You will probably be equally happy, either way.
Given that it doesn’t matter, you have two choices for making the final decision:
- Pick the one you want. The rational decision is a tie, so make it an emotional one. Does one job match your dreams, but with a bit more risk? Has one vacation destination been a goal since you were little? Do it!
- Flip a coin. If the decision doesn’t matter, leave it to fate. That way, if it doesn’t work out, you can always blame the quarter.
The one thing you don’t want to do is wait. Failing to decide is still a decision and one that is guaranteed to keep you from being satisfied with your choice. Don’t wait until you have all of the possible information, because that kind of perfect world doesn’t exist. Get to about 85% of fully informed and run with it. You’ll usually be happier making a decision–even the wrong one–than sitting back wondering “What if I had done that?”
How do you make hard decisions?
Budgeting Sucks
Budgeting kind of sucks.
Filling out a budgeting spreadsheet, putting in all of your expenses, listing all of your income, tracking all of your spending. Yuck.
Balancing the fact that you may have $200 to spare, but if your gas bill is a bit lower one month then you have a some more money, but if your electric bill’s a little bit high, then you have a little bit less. It’s too much work.
Here’s the new plan:
I just opened up a new credit card. This credit card’s got a fairly high limit, not that I care since I’m never going to come close to the limit. It’s got an okay interest rate, not that I care–it’s going to be paid off every month. It also has a good travel rewards plan, so our family vacations can, to a large extent, be paid for.
Now, with this card, I’m taking all of my regular bills, and setting them up to be automatically paid by the credit card. It’ll get automatically charged every month. I won’t have to think about it. Once a month, I’ll just log on and pay off the card. All I have to do is make sure the balance stays under my monthly budgeted amount. I already know what I have to be paying each month, so, no problem.
This will make it easier to budget and track my actual spending. It’ll even make it easier to balance my checkbook, since right now, I’m logging into my bank account a couple of times a month to compare it to Quicken. Any budget helper is nice.
After this plan takes effect, my bank account will only have any ATM withdrawals that I need to make–which shouldn’t happen more than once or twice a month–and my checks to day care. There should be just six manual transactions every month plus all of my miscellaneous transfers to and from INGDirect, which should also be minimal– there should only be two of those each month.
This will simplify everything while at the same time giving me the maximum amount of travel rewards I’ve been able to find. Hopefully, it will work as well as I think it will.
How Refinancing Your Student Loans Can Save You Thousands
Students who graduated college in 2015 were said to have graduated with an estimated $35,000 in student loan debt. Of course, some students will have less and some more depending on what you did throughout your time in college. Either way, it is a lot of money and money that must be paid back whether you want to or not.
Student loan refinancing is an available option for many students and it will provide them with some of the relief they need financially. Did you know that refinancing your student loans can save you thousands of dollars? It’s okay if you didn’t – I will show you just how it can save you money and ease the strain on your budget.
Student Loan Refinancing: What the Heck Is It?
Before you can apply for refinancing, you need to understand what it is. When you refinance your student loan, your new lender will pay off your old loans and gives you a new loan with updated terms and rates.
Most student loan refinancing is done through a private lender, which means that there may be eligibility requirements that need to be met before you can actually go through with the refinancing.
How Can Refinancing Save Me Thousands?
There are a couple of different ways that refinancing can help save you thousands. First and foremost, you will receive a new interest rate. The rate itself will often vary depending on your situation, but usually falls somewhere between 2-5% for most students. The jump from a 6-8% interest rate to a 2-5% interest rate it immense. Let’s take a look.
For example, if you have a student loan balance of $25,000 at a 6.5% interest rate and your term is 10 years, you will pay a total of $9,065 in interest over the course of the term. Now, if we change the interest rate down to 3.5%, you will only pay $4,665 in interest payments over the course of the 10 years. That is a savings of $4,400!
The second way that you can save thousands is by adjusting the length of your payback period. Often times, the default is set at 10 years, but students often extend it out to 20 or 25 years. This will increase the amount you pay in the long run because you now need to pay interest over that extended period.
When you refinance your student loans, you are able to shorten the term of your loan, which means you pay thousands less because you do not have to continue to pay interest over the extended length of the loan.
Final Thoughts on Student Loan Refinancing
Student loan refinancing is a great option for students looking to destroy their debt, but it is not always an option for everyone. You do need to qualify, which means you need a good credit score or a cosigner with a good credit score. Refinancing your student loans can help save you thousands of dollars over time, so if you do have the option to do it, you should.
Priorities
I once saw a sign on the wall in a junkyard that said, “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”
Another good one: “If everything is top priority, nothing is top priority.”
Once a week, I meet with my boss to discuss my progress for the previous week and my priorities for the coming week. This is supposed to make sure that my productivity stays in line with the company’s goals.
Great.
Once a day, my boss comes into my office to change my top priority based on whichever account manager has most recently asked for a status update for their customer.
Not so great.
At least twice a week, he asks for a status update on my highest priority items. Each time, he could mean the items we prioritized in the weekly meeting, or the items he chose to escalate later. Somehow, getting a new task escalated doesn’t deescalate an existing task.
Everything is a top priority.
To compensate, I’ve been working a few 12 hour days each week, and occasionally coming in on the weekends.
I’m dedicated and still behind.
Prioritizing is treated as an art, or in the case I just mentioned, a juggling act. It should be considered a science. It’s usually pretty simple.
- Is the problem costing you money? +1
- Is the problem costing your customer money? +2
- Is the problem going to hurt your reputation? +1
- Is there a deadline? +1
- Is it soon? +2
- Is it urgent? +1
- Is it important? +2
- Are there absolutely no real consequences for anyone if it doesn’t get completed? -500
That’s it. Too many times, we get hung up on urgent-but-not-important items and neglect the important things.
The hard part comes when it’s someone else setting your priorities, particularly when that person doesn’t rate things on urgency, importance, and cost but rather “Who has bitched the loudest recently?”
Can I tell my boss that I’m not going to do things the way he told me too? No. A former coworker very recently found out what happens when you do this.
Can I remind him that I’m busting my butt as hard as I can? Yes, but it will just earn me a request to come in on the weekend, too.
Can I ignore the official priorities part of the time, and work on what I feel is most important to keeping our customers happy? Yes, but it’s easy to go too far. “Boss, I ignored what you said, but this customer is happy, now!” won’t score me any points if it happens every week.
Priorities are simple, but not always easy. How do you balance your priorities?
