There’s a ton of interesting articles on BiggerPockets about House Hacking. But I hear people saying it doesn’t actually work, or its not worth it, or you can’t literally live for free. So here’s the real-life numbers from my very first house hack, back in 2015. Numbers at a glance: Purchase Price: We bought the property for $300k with […]
Yesterday I was automating updates between GitHub repos via CI, and I wanted to automatically open a PR against a repo. GitHub’s hub CLI is the perfect, obvious candidate. But how do you easily install it in Ubuntu? A long “one-liner” to download and install a specific version of hub as a pre-compiled binary: curl […]
The funny thing about increasing your income in a household that’s pursuing Financial Independence is that it works so differently than other households. If you start a side hustle that earns an extra $500/month, normally you may think “I’m already hitting my savings goals, so I’m free to spend this ‘bonus’ money however I please!” However, because you’re […]
Have you ever looked at a chart on a website and you want to export the raw data? Maybe you even poked around Chrome Developer Tools and realized it’s not coming via an API. But you did notice they’re using Highcharts? You’re in luck! Just open up the Developer Console and grab the data series […]
Last week I had the free Personal Capital consultation. My “advisor” had run a portfolio analysis based on my aggregated information in the PC dashboard for me and wanted to share the results. I was a bit intrigued with their so-called “Tactical Weighting” portfolio allocation approach and wanted to discuss it here today. Personal Portfolio Review To set […]
A couple of weeks ago I converted a mongodb collection to a capped collection. This is for an event archive which we only need to keep the last month of events stored locally. The issue is that this data grows unbounded for a long time until we manually free up disk space. Enter capped collections, which create a […]
Many companies use an internal PyPI server for storing their proprietary python packages. This makes managing python libraries and application dependencies so much easier. But unfortunately this also makes it easy for people to accidentally upload their private code to the public PyPI unintentionally. Lucky for us, there’s a cool extension to setuptools called restricted_pkg! […]
A common requirement is to have a backup service or script that uploads objects to S3 for storage. Since its good practice to scope user permissions as narrowly as possible, this leads to creating separate “api users” in Amazon for each service. Each user is only given permission for the buckets it needs to access. […]
One of our sysadmins recently taught me that we can see the environment with which a process is launched by looking in /proc. Whoa! That’s helpful. Unfortunately, the environment file is null terminated so not pleasant to read or pipe together with other commands. So here’s a handy one-liner to print them “properly” for easier […]
The New 2018 Tax Law and You
The internet is full of discussions about the new tax law that went into effect for 2018. In particular, people seem to really dislike the new $10,000 cap on State, Local, and Property Tax deductions. The thinking is that this amounts to “double taxation” on anything over the cap, and that’s just not right. But we should put this in context […]
Personal Finance Comments (0)