Here's a condensed May 2013 update for my Beat the Market Experiment, a series of three portfolios started on November 1st, 2012: $10,000 Passive Benchmark Portfolio that would serve as both a performance benchmark and an real-world, low-cost … [Read the rest]
Here is my May 2013 update of the trailing total returns for selected major asset classes. Passive ETFs are used to represent major asset classes, as they represent actual investments that folks can buy and sell. Return data was taken after market … [Read the rest]
I'm now nearly halfway through the Live Below the Line challenge, and here are some pictures and additional cooking/eating commentary about my $1.50 a day menu. Please also refer back to my menu and ingredient list and my nutritional information … [Read the rest]
While doing research about getting the most nutrition for my dollar, I ran across an interesting report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture called How Much Do Fruits and Vegetables Cost? [pdf]. The overall goal of the study was to better … [Read the rest]
I'm taking the Live Below the Line challenge this week, which means eating for 5 days on just $1.50 a day. I plugged all the ingredients from my $1.50 per day Sample Menu into the food diary at MyFitnessPal.com, and below is a screenshot of my … [Read the rest]
Stephen Wolfram, of Mathematica and WolframAlpha fame, used his natural language analysis tools to crunch through a huge set of Facebook data. The results are some interesting visualizations, including a series of charts about how the popularity … [Read the rest]
I'm taking the Live Below the Line challenge, which means eating for 5 days on just $1.50 a day. After a shopping trip and a few cooking experiments, here's my menu for next week (4/29-5/3). Rules Even though the challenge rules allow it, … [Read the rest]
WiseGeek has an interesting article on What Does 200 Calories Look Like?, where it photographs the portions of several foods that equal 200 calories and sorts them by weight. Here's broccoli next to peanut butter on the same plate: I thought … [Read the rest]
I recently learned about Live Below The Line, an annual anti-poverty campaign which challenges people to feed themselves on the equivalent of the extreme poverty line for five days. According to the World Bank, that works out to spending less than … [Read the rest]
Time for fun with charts! A famous chart in the early retirement community is The Crossover Point from the book Your Money or Your Life, which shows that you've reached financial independence when your investment income equals your monthly … [Read the rest]
AFter calculating the new savings bond rate, I noticed that from March 2012 to March 2013 the inflation rate per the Consumer Price Index was only 1.5% over the past year. Whenever you see the government announce a relatively low inflation numbers, … [Read the rest]
New inflation numbers for March 2013 were just announced, so it's time for the usual semi-annual update and rate predictions. New Inflation Rate September 2012 CPI-U was 231.407. March 2013 CPI-U was 232.773, for a semi-annual increase of … [Read the rest]
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