Ted's Blog

I started thinking about retiring to another country and there are a handful of Latin American countries that seem like good alternatives to Europe which has a higher cost of living. The countries I have looked at are Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica. All have stable democractic governments with good scores for human rights. All three offer retirement visa programs open to people from the US who can show some kind of passive income, which I have from my pension. While it is easy to visit any of those countries with just a valid passport, living there longer than 6 months requires a temporary residence visa, usually a first step to a permanent residence visa, and possibly citizenship. The temporary residence visa for Chile is valid for two years. The requirements sound pretty easy: valid passport, proof of pension, clean criminal history, a passport type photo, and $200.

Back in January I was renewing my library card and one of the benefits of having a card was free online language lessons from a service called Mango. That got me looking up the best ways to learn language and Mango did not fare well, one site saying it teaches language in the most boring way possible. There are better alternatives that you pay for, sometimes a lot. But there was also Duolingo, which is incredibly popular and can be free, though I very quickly decided to get a 1-year subscription for $60. It does a much better job of keeping things interesting and is more interactive, though I don’t think it is that good at listening. Still, it is a good way to learn vocabulary, grammar, and practice listening. Lately the company has taken heat for trying to do too much with AI tools instead of having voice actors read scripts, and I think their AI stuff is definitely lower quality even though I am learning their most popular language.
Continue reading “Visa Application”

Today I heard from a member of the Doris family in Missouri. He had seen some things I put on Family Search about the Doris family of Augusta and asked about where I got the information. One of my great grandmothers on my father’s side was Catherine Doris who married Thomas O’Leary. One of their children was my grandmother, Barbadee. The information I had concerned where in Ireland the Doris family came from. I went looking for the source of that information, going to a FOPAB article Uncle Edward wrote, and then also a folder of papers I got that had a xerox copy of Patrick’s 1880 funeral program that stated he was from “Dungamon, Rock County, Tyrone, Ireland” which I think means Dungannon Rock, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

Also in this folder were some very old letters (1925, 100 years ago!) to Barbadee from her brother William Doris O’Leary who was a doctor, priest, and president of Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. I haven’t even read the letters entirely yet, but one seems to concern Barbadee’s engagement to Papa. That one was in an envelope from St. Charles College in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, which is where William went to seminary. But handwritten in the return address area it says “Author Leary” and gives an address in East Boston, Massachusetts. The other letter does not have an envelope (and the date given on the letter is “Sunday”) and written on the letterhead of Charles Gilmore Kerley, M.D., New York City (signed “Your Buddy”). Reading the letter, he says he had just attended a college football game the day before in New York between Columbia and Williams and that Columbia won 27-3. The internet says that game happened on October 25, 1924. Before he became a priest, he was a doctor, graduating from the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta in 1922, with an internship in Boston. So this was a critical juncture in his life. He must have been working with Dr. Kerley in New York. I found an article that said that William was “associated with” Dr. Kerley for four years. Kerley was a prominent pediatrician in New York and wrote a textbook on pediatrics. In the letter William also writes that it seems like he wastes a lot of time getting through traffic to make housecalls (!). I wonder how many doctors were working in Dr. Kerley’s practice at the time? That name seemed possibly familiar.
Continue reading “Genealogy Research”

When I had my deferred compensation plan at work (like a 401k, but technically a 457b), I would think of an investment mix I wanted and rebalance every quarter. I wanted some exposure to foreign stocks, so I might put 30% in that. Then I would want something in cash or bonds so I might put 20% in there. The rest would be US stocks, so I would 40% in large cap stocks and 10% in small cap stocks. That was a reasonable diversified portfolio. Then by rebalancing you make sure you stick with that mix, but I also like that if foreign stocks did really well, you would end up selling some of that at a high and distributing it to the others that didn’t perform as well, so it was kind of a way of doing market timing, which I was never able to do successfully otherwise. The fallacy of that was that investing 100% in stocks always seemed to do better over the long run than watering it down with bonds or even foreign stocks, which seem to generally underperform domestic stocks. I never liked bond mutual funds because rather than really getting nice safe fixed income, it seemed like you were actually betting on interest rates, which would fluctuate.

This past year I did a rollover where I put all of my deferred comp funds into a conventional IRA at Vanguard. Both accounts are funded with pre-tax salary and will have taxes when I withdraw the funds, so no taxes were due because of this transaction, but I will still pay taxes later.

Continue reading “Asset Allocation”

For many years, I have used My Yahoo as my start page. It kept up with stock prices, sports scores, news, weather, and Yahoo mail. They kept changing the design of it, but I kept trying to keep it looking the same as it ever did, which is heavily text focused and in three columns and minimal ads. I could copy and paste the stock quotes into my investment spreadsheet in order to update all of the prices of my stocks and mutual funds. A week or two ago they put in a banner that they were discontinuing it in favor a new improved page, which of course is terrible. It had none of what made My Yahoo great. Today My Yahoo actually went away.

The first problem I had was how to get stock quotes into my investment spreadsheet which I do at least a few times a week and sometimes every day, around 6 PM when the mutual fund prices would post. Yahoo Finance already has my My Yahoo portfolio, but you can’t copy and paste the text because the stocks are now little widgets instead of text. I went looking for web portals like My Yahoo and found one called ProtoPage that was supposed to be decent, but it didn’t do everything that My Yahoo did and it didn’t seem to let you set up a portfolio of stocks and funds. Somehow I found out that Google Sheets, the spreadsheet web app, has a function that pulls over all kinds of information about a given stock or fund into a spreadsheet. So that would be really easy to copy and paste from anyway. I set that up, which took a little doing for gold and silver spot prices, since that isnt built in to the googlefinance() function. I even thought maybe I could convert my investment spreadsheet from Excel to Sheets. But then tonight I noticed that the mutual fund closing prices weren’t coming over. They still haven’t come over and it almost midnight. That’s not very helpful. In doing this, I also learned about the Google Finance page, which has some neat things going for it, similar to Yahoo Finance. But it didn’t have updated mutual fund prices either. I thought maybe Microsoft would have a finance page and they do via MSN. It lets you put in a portfolio and they were updated at least by 9 PM when I started messing with it, plus I could copy and paste all the quotes at once to dump them into my spreadsheet (from the manage list screen).

MSN might not be a bad portal replacement for My Yahoo either. It has weather at least. While it lets you enter your favorite sports teams, it still shows you a bunch of scores of random teams. I will still need to check my Yahoo Mail though. So what I’ve done is now bookmarked a bunch of different pages that do most of the things separately that My Yahoo did all at once: sports, headlines, weather, stocks. I can’t believe Yahoo would blow this and nobody is ready to take their place.

As I started figuring out last year, Black Friday as a shopping event for getting blu-rays on sale was in real danger. During this past year Best Buy stopped selling movies altogether. Target has cut way back with some stores having nothing, but for the holidays some had a cardboard stand out at some stores with blu-rays and DVD’s, including recent titles, but unfortunately, no 4k movies. The prices weren’t great either, about $15 for a blu-ray, but you could get it down to $10 potentially with the Buy 2, Get 1 Free sale they had going on. There are so few new movies I would want on blu-ray (as opposed to 4k) that it doesn’t work and even $10 is steep for a blu-ray when in the past Best Buy would sell them for $5-$10 and I could reduce that substantially with reward certificates. I hoped Best Buy would get shippers like Target did, but, nope, they are completely done with movies. I had $40 in certificates for Best Buy so I put those towards a new Samsung phone instead. Last year Walmart’s blu-ray deals were actually through Gruv, an online store run by Universal. This year, again, they had no deals in the stores. Dollar Tree used to put out a shipment of movies around Thanksgiving, but they haven’t put anything new out in a year.

Gruv still has decent deals on things from Universal and Warner Brothers mostly, so I picked up 4k’s of Oppenheimer¹ and Dune: Part Two² for $12.99 each. But as of January 1, all online and even purchases of digital movies now have Georgia sales tax. No wonder Georgia has a revenue surplus: they have secretly passed the biggest tax increase in Georgia history just by closing those loopholes. Gruv had a 3 4k for $30 deal on some titles, but I had a hard time picking three from their list. I thought about getting Puss in Boots (which I have on blu-ray already, but would go with my 4k of its sequel), The Color Purple (1985), and Tar. I started watching Tar, but it was slow and I wasn’t crazy about it. I have Color Purple on HD digital, which is probably fine for a movie that age. I could get E.T. instead of Tar, but some people said the 4k doesn’t look that great. I already have E.T. on blu-ray and a 4k digital copy.
Continue reading “Dark Black Friday”