zurch1818

I feel I'm in the same place you are now (9.5 years in)...but without the dropoff in satisfaction in the last 2 years. I have thought about what I would do if your situation happened to me and I'd probably feel the same way. I have told myself if the company (especially the culture) went downhill, I would look to jump ship. Just because the company treated me fairly in the past does not mean they deserve my current loyalty. The part that is scary thinking about is the grass isn't always greener and trying to chase the largest pay may actually make the situation worse. Culture is so important to me...and so difficult for me to pick up on in an interview. When I started (first job using my degree after college), I was the third person on our team. Seven months in, the two people that were in the group when I started left. Luckily we hired another stamping engineer and another junior engineer right at about the time those two people left. It was awkward when I was only 7 months in and being responsible for training the new employees. It was especially even more awkward when I was training my superior...the one in charge of reviewing my work. Luckily, I was about to mold a lot of the culture of our group at that point. Now I'm the leader of this team of 7 others. If the owners decided to start demanding quantity of projects at the cost of quality, there is no doubt that I would push back...and if that didn't work, I would definitely look for other opportunities. Our company has grown quite a bit since I started, so I'd be shocked if something like this won't happen in the future. It seems the bigger the companies get, the more you feel like a number and less like family. Good luck on whatever you decide to do. Just remember that you should stay for you...not the company. If you feel you have been baited and switched, I'd recommend discussing with them (obviously after the bonus kicks in) and then look to leave if you don't pick up any chance of changing.

My work computer updated itself to Windows 11 without me approving it or even knowing it was going to do it. I was planning on avoiding updating as long as possible to avoid the every other Windows version curse. We have an outside IT firm that runs all of our updates and I'm guessing they just let it slip through the cracks and approved it. Luckily after moving the start button to the lower left hand corner, the transition has been OK. I'm just happy all the AutoIt programs I wrote to automate Windows still work in the Windows 11 environment.

Here are my numbers for a $175k loan on a 15-year fixed load at 4% refinanced to 2.75% last October. [attachment=0]Screenshot 2022-01-18 071437.png[/attachment] First line is current mortgage schedule (+25k payment payment in last month), Second line is my current mortgage with only making minimum payments (+25k payment payment in last month), Third line is if I didn't refinance at all but did the first line and the last line is minimum payments only with no refinance over all 15 years My payoff period is going to be about 4 years. Good old conventional extra principal payments is going to save me about $40k in interest. I have no idea how a tax deductible payment HELOC would have saved me any sort of significant money. Sure, the 107k extra in payments has saved me a whopping 3k in interest to date. It will eventually pay off. The reason banks give HELOCs out are because they can make more interest (plus a typical higher interest rate) on the equity in your house.

Interesting. That is genius if the interest rate is lower than what is on the mortgage. If the mortgage rate is lower than the HELOC, I don't know if I agree. Plus it saves you the closing costs.

I agree with a lot of what LouisEly said above. The only thing that I don't think people take into account when renting vs buying is property taxes. I feel like what I am paying in property taxes now is equivalent to what I was paying in rent. Because property taxes are increased with the home value, these also get increased. Now at least it probably is going to be a little more predictable than what the rent rate goes up or down. However, it is an expense that needs to be considered. I think we may be saying the same thing in different ways and I may have typed it wrong. All I can say is my monthly mortgage interest is calculated solely off the remaining principal balance. [Principal balance]*[interest rate/12]. It does not take into account any previously paid interest. Therefore, this technically makes it simple. https://www.thetruthaboutmortgage.com/are-mortgages-simple-interest-and-compounded-monthly/ I also still think because you are borrowing money on your equity, that makes it a type of second mortgage. I agree that it works much differently than a conventional mortgage. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/mortgages/heloc-home-equity-line-of-credit I still don't quite follow what you are doing. Are you taking the heloc money and putting it directly on the house? Or are you investing that money in another account and using the proceeds from that investment to pay off the loans? I also am not sure if your heloc has a fixed or variable interest rate. Variable interest rates scare me. It sounds like with your mortgage, you completely figured it out. I don't know if that would have worked with how mine is structured. I also probably am not as disciplined as you. It bugs me when my credit card bill gets above $3000 and I don't really even like having my checking account get below $4000, so I don't know why I worry so much. I do sort of diversify in the fact that my company match and profit sharing is put in as traditional. Outside of that, everything else is Roth. I just don't want to mess around with having a huge amount of non-retirement outside investing until my mortgage is paid off or trying to figure out what tax brackets will be in the future. Once that is done, I can then move to aggressively saving (and giving) in taxable non-retirement funds as I won't have any risk.

I am 100% on board with Google WiFi too. We actually bought it for my wife's parents for Christmas. It is super easy to set up. There are a few things I don't like about it: 1. I don't have as much control as what I have had in the past in terms of settings. It also has to be managed through your phone. There is no PC interface anymore. 2. It doesn't support WiFi 6 (802.11ax). This probably isn't that big of a deal as we don't have that many devices, but they say that in the future there will be way more devices that would attach. Google occasionally has these go on sale. They just recently had a Nest router and once access point sell for $180 (normally $270). I saw this when I was trying to get my coworker to buy one after I found out he was renting a router from Spectrum. That is a whole other topic to rant about. I don't know why anyone rents those things. Unfortunately, it looks like this sale stopped a few days ago.

The rule of 72 boggles my mind. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/what-is-the-rule-72/ This helps me rationalize investment growth over time. It's all about just keep chunking money in the account and don't look at what it does year in and year out. Since my work offers Roth retirement accounts, I have also decided to do that instead of traditional. That way, I get tax-free growth. Otherwise, I have to pay taxes on withdrawals in retirement and there are also minimum distributions that you need to take out. Sure, my tax bracket may be lower than what it is now, but I have just decided that I want to know what my nest egg actually is and not say it is this and then find out it is 20% (or my worse fear, 50%) less. I have no idea what tax brackets will be like in 30 years when I retire (or hopefully sooner). I just want to get to a point where I decide to retire because I want to and not because I have to.

Congrats GAME05. I bet that is a great feeling to finally be debt free. I think all the readers of this thread are officially unicorns as we Brewer fans reading about investments on a Brewer fan forum. It's like going to a fish fry and ordering the chicken. I'm happy to share my experiences for anyone that wants to hear me on my soapbox. Although I am super conservative when it comes to money, I really enjoy hearing the prospective from all the other unicorns reading this thread.

I don't understand that method. Aren't mortgages calculated with simple interest based on the principal balance? The difference between that and the minimum payment is what goes to principal. Maybe it's about leveraging your equity? If that is the case, if your house is worth $300k, does it make sense to leverage a million dollar mortgage/2nd mortgage (HELOC) off it? My risk-averse self said no despite the possible gain. This is why when I ran the numbers, on my mortgage with minimum payments the 30 year mortgage had almost 2.75x the interest. When you look at a 15 year mortgage, the interest number doesn't make you want to cry. For me renting and getting a big down payment was the safer and faster way to home ownership and wealth. I also rented a cheap apartment ($9.6k a year) and was able to save and aggressively invest the down payment. I figured what ever money I was "losing" to rent, I was gaining in taxes saved. For the record, my property tax bill in Madison is about $8k (yikes!) and my homeowners is $1.1k, so basically a wash. Plus my down payment fund was growing at a higher return rate that what houses typically appreciate in value each year and I had no yard to mow. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052015/which-has-performed-better-historically-stock-market-or-real-estate.asp Obviously if you borrow more money, you have the potential to leverage greater returns, but that is a risk I didn't want to take with my family and highly variable income. I have maxed out my Roth 401k the last 4 years first. Any extra bonus/other income I received went straight to the house (or down payment fund prior to closing). In the years before, I was the only saving enough for retirement to get the company match and growing my down payment fund more aggressively.

Thanks. I think any little bit makes a huge difference in the long run. With how mortgages are structured, I feel like how they make you want to make minimum payments. I just took your extra $200 a month and put it in my spreadsheet (as if it were me on my mortgage, your milage may vary). It would have saved me about $12k in interest (20% of the total) and shaved off almost 3 years from my 15 year note. Crazy how little of an effort can have such a big effect. Slow and steady wins the race. Keep doing what your doing!

I'm turning 35 this year and my wife and I are scheduled to pay off our mortgage this year (4 years). Granted, we saved money like crazy to put a huge 60% down payment and have been aggressive on paying down our mortgage while still contributing to retirement enough to where we aren't ignoring it. For me, it's all about cash flow. I look at it as getting an under the table (taxes have already been paid on it) $1500 raise per month. It just frees us up to get more aggressive with our investments or go on a random trip while not having to worry about losing a job or some other unforeseen issue. We also should be able to be more generous in causes we believe in too. I feel the group that talks about always having a mortgage doesn't account for risk as much as I do. Sure you can in theory make more money, but you can also lose it if the market crashes right when you lose your job and now you can't make payments. No thank you for me. With having no mortgage and reduced expenses, I won't need as much money to be happy. I think as people say though, as long as you have a plan, you should be good. The bottom line is you need to save money for retirement. If you don't save any money and keep refinancing, you will end up chasing your tail and will work forever. Because of the nerd in me, I am going to miss tracking our mortgage. I will say that I'm shocked how little it has saved us in interest to date, some $3k over making only minimum payments. However, over the life of the 15 year loan, it will save us a whopping $41k over making minimum payments. Oh the refinance that we did last year is going to save us about $300 (including closing costs). Seems like a waste for all the effort that went into it now. Oh well, it bought us security by severely reducing our minimum payment as my income at the moment is highly variable in a given year.

Just do a selective sync (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/choose-which-onedrive-folders-to-sync-to-your-computer-98b8b011-8b94-419b-aa95-a14ff2415e85) and upload all the files you want on the website and not through the file explorer. The other thing you could do is buy an external hard drive. (https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-t7-1tb-external-usb-3-2-gen-2-portable-solid-state-drive-with-hardware-encryption-titan-gray/6408299.p?skuId=6408299&ref=212&loc=1&extStoreId=59&ref=212&loc=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAw9qOBhC-ARIsAG-rdn4mmg8XWqpXCFA3tmrnbTHNPjs96ro6S5zz-IOljAyY5IIalbcrFEMaAtL_EALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds) I think an external is probably the easier option. The only nice thing about OneDrive is the data is basically backed up automatically. The one I listed is a good rated one and is solid state (no moving pieces) and has a theoretical long shelf life...definitely longer than a spinning disk hard drive. Solid state drives are also seemingly infinitely faster at moving data (assuming you have a port that support it's fast speed). If not now, your next computer (whenever that may happen) should.

I like to think that me pausing my membership was what pushed them over the edge. I have since reactivated it. My only complaint is I had to log into my parents spectrum account to watch the championship women's volleyball match...and the ESPN app doesn't have any dvr functionally. Its weird because the NHL ESPN+ content (exact same app) has dvr functionality. Oh, and I'm also not happy that all the Disney channels on YTTV are no longer sorted the way I had them, but that can be fixed.

I just paused my YouTube tv membership in protest. It was supposed to renew in 4 days.

The only downside to Roku right now is there is a major dispute between them and Google. YouTube TV has been pulled a while ago from their channel store and there is talk of also pulling the YouTube channel soon too...but I don't think that has happened yet. I was lucky enough that on both of my Rokus that I have them both channels downloaded already, so I am in the clear. I believe Google added a way to get YouTube TV to work through their YouTube app (which I believe is why they want to pull the YouTube app from their channel store too). Since I am a subscriber to YouTube TV, over the summer they gave me a "free" Chromecast with Google TV. It is true that I didn't pay anything for it, but I'm sure I paid for it somewhere in my $65/month subscription. I will say that the experience on that device is nice. I've got two minor gripes with it. First, I tend to watch a lot of documentaries with closed caption on and some of the channels have the words cut off and I can't figure out how to fix this. It's not bad, but sometimes I have to pause to figure out what the first and last letters are. Second, I miss Roku's go back 10 seconds button. There is a way to kind of have it work that way, but it is more clunky. But overall, it is a pretty neat little device. It's basically a Chromecast that has a remote control and an actual "home" screen. Anyone that uses a Roku probably wouldn't notice that much of a difference. The remotes are nearly identical in size and functionality. There is even a volume rocker in the same spot.

I thought about becoming a teacher, but besides the parents and the students, the politics that are involved was just too much for me to want to even think about handling. I don't know how anyone can be in this profession, especially now. It would drive me nuts. In my current career, I train and mentor junior engineers, which can be very rewarding. It's one-on-one (or sometimes two) teaching with no lesson plans and no parents. Additionally, I also helped hand pick the "student." I think what people are saying is teachers could get another job in those 2-3 months when school is not in session and make more money than what they are making now. However, I'm guessing it is hard to find a job in those summer months that is short-term. I've also heard a stat that teachers are more likely to be millionaires over physicians. They are only behind accountants and engineers. I don't know how true that is, but I guess that slow and steady investment into retirement accounts is a recipe for success. If that is the case, then what's the point of getting that second job? I think those 2-3 months off in the summer are well deserved time off. Thank you teachers. I know I wouldn't be where I am now without them.

I get why people are talking about enjoying taking one of these classes, but I'm guessing nobody would take those classes as stand alone credits. Sure, I had elementary logic which was fun, but it was pretty much useless. I also had a 1 credit wood identification class. This class didn't actually count towards my degree at all. It met 5 times total. Those include a midterm and final exam. Plus the professor brought in homemade treats from his wife for each session. I'm with FV on this one. It's all about being independent. College is one way to be on your own, but it isn't the only way. We need more practical experience training in college and cut out some of the fluff. Give students a chance to see if they actually like what they are paying for. For example, I don't think anyone would buy a brand new $50k to $100k car without being sure if you would like it or not. Using buying a house is probably a better example as it at least goes up in value roughly 1-2% above inflation each year but that gets more complicated as you can sell it if you really don't like it. Regardless, it just seems backwards to me.

That's an interesting thought and I can see where you are coming from. Yea, our drafter engineer doesn't really understand structural engineering theory, but he grasps the concepts once I explain them to him. I guess I'm advocating trying to find ways to make school more affordable and getting rid of those fluff classes could do wonders. In my experience with liberal arts classes at UW Madison (2009 grad), they are more about teaching you what to think rather than how to think. It was very frustrating. For example, in one particular class, I got a D on a paper when I wrote something that was an opposing viewpoint and a B when it echoed what they were teaching. Luckily, I was taking the class pass/fail. Give me calculus or some other logical class any day of the week. I actually found out after college that I liked coding and have gotten pretty good at it in my free time. That may have been something that would have helped over some of those other classes. But I guess as someone else alluded to is they still didn't have any experience with Azure. However, the knowledge of how to loop things is incredibly valuable. It seems learning the first language is the most difficult, then it is just syntax after that...at least for scripting languages. I also had an engineering leadership class. This was incredibly useful for what I do now. I just think you could do a better job and trim out some of the fat. At least with engineering, I think a required co-op with practical experience is a much more beneficial than liberal arts classes. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for classes that don't prep you for actual work, you can get paid to learn how to actually be an engineer and solve real world problems. When I hire someone fresh out of school, they a lot of times lack the practical skills. We also hire co-ops with the hope they want to work with us when they graduate. Unfortunately, we have been losing our best co-ops to the highly competitive market as now they can get a job virtually anywhere.

I have my BS and MS from Madison in engineering and I feel like my education was just a piece of paper. I bet school only taught me 25% of the stuff that I needed to know in my current position. I also thought all those liberal arts classes (zoology, sociology, etc.) did not make me a better person. I feel like we need to have a 3 year bachelor's degree equivalent that axes these meaningless classes and just teaches you what you need to know. It should make getting a bachelor's degree way cheaper. In my opinion, we should be pushing for tech schools more and remove the negative stigma. College isn't for everyone. Here's an example. We trained a very detail-oriented drafter how to do engineering. Out of everyone on our team, he routinely produces the highest quality work. He outperforms team members who have a 4 year engineering degree. He doesn't really understand all the technical theory behind things, which hampers him a little bit, but he is great at asking questions. He also wants to take zero responsibility and has no desire to be licensed. I believe Wisconsin still allows tech school graduates to get their PE if they have enough experience and they pass the PE exam. I bet with some training, he could pass the exam.

I like this idea. I wonder if it something we could build into our team. I think helping peers is one way to motivate without a huge amount of money.

The owners are all Gen-Xers. It's a little better that the bonuses are once a quarter, but still. Yea, I get what they are trying to do, but I agree with what you said about motivation. I've advocated for increasing everyone's base salary and reducing the bonus system in the past and have been shot down. I don't really like big bonuses because they are just that...a bonus and you can't count on them to consistently be there. If I wanted to be an owner and have a salary that fluctuated, then I would have signed up for that...but I hate taking risk. I basically have just been chucking most of every bonus I've ever gotten at our mortgage and 401k/Roth IRAs and pretended I never got them. I'm hoping that an early payoff on our mortgage will help make it so bonuses don't affect the month to month cashflow.

I had to do that earlier this year and I agree it's no fun at all. I even think I posted earlier in this thread about it looking for advice. I will say that our team has been better since laying off that particular individual. Still, our team still struggles to get employees to increase the number of hours past 40 when we have a huge workload. We are only asking for 45-50hr weeks from time to time, so it isn't completely unreasonable. They are all salary, but our company can pay significant quarterly bonuses when it is profitable quarter for the company (could be possibly 10% of their yearly salary in a quarter). Bonus size potential is something I've been told I can't directly disclose to them either. The owners want people to figure this out on their own and reward the people that are not motivated solely by money. I've been there over 9 years, so I have figured this out. Millennials. Ugh? Wait, I'm a millennial. Ugh to my generation.

This is what I do to get around the Pandora ads on my computer at work with the ad block plus extension. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on a mobile app.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fidjBGyZuv93SFNhyptpanG_u1rXmuIHV7K1TnqtM-Q/edit?usp=sharing Here is what I came up with. It is very crude...but I think it does exactly what you want. I tried to make it very customizable. It is possible to make it more elaborate with dropdowns. Let me know if you have any questions on this.

I'm a little late to the party, but this sounds like the perfect situation for an array formula. They are easier to write and troubleshoot if you export it to Excel first...but they are fully supported in Google sheets. I have completely abandoned doing countif and sumif statements as they are clunky, unintuitive, difficult to troubleshoot (as you can't see what is in the black box) and simply weak and not powerful. I do this sort of this for work all the time and have been dubbed the Excel guru at work. I'm trying to find a good example but am struggling as it requires parts of multiple videos. I think I would be better off just writing it and sharing with you. Let me know if you are interested. I may just do something quick now. These are fun little puzzles for me. The formula will probably entail something like =sum(if criteria...(likely a match is going to be in there,1 (this part only gets activated if the criteria is met)). You can always highlight the criteria and press f9 to see what is going on in the black box when things get complicated. You just would need to enter this with control plus shift plus enter.