I decided to
estimate my Net Worth. My checkbook program (Moneydance) already keeps
track of my bank account, credit card, and long term debt. I just had
to add stocks and assets. I treated stocks like assets because I've
tried to keep track of stocks as Investment accounts and it's a bit
complicated. Most of my Net Worth is my house and my stocks (not
surprising), even if you substract my mortgage. My car is worth about
$7600, another $4100 in computer equipment, $8000 in games and $4000 in
CDs, DVDs and videos. Those are all sell prices and I assume I could
get real close to my estimated sell values given a year to sell the
items.
All this gives me an estimated Net Worth of just under $200k. Not bad.
CNNfn says it should be your base salary times your age divided by 10.
For me that would be $270k. I guess it means I should save more. One
thing I've been looking at are IRAs. I didn't know that Traditional
IRAs are for modest incomes ($44k or less for a single person). Roth
IRAs which I remember being a big deal when they were introduced, are a
big deal. For Roth IRAs the limit is $109k for a single person. It
gives me somewhere to invest money in a place where I get a tax break
(for Roth, you get taxed at the front end, not at the back end). Now I
just have to save $3000 by next April.
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I'm starting
to backup my VHS tapes to MPEG using EyeTV. Surprisingly, High Quality
produced a lot of weird errors (I was taping music videos, which have
garish colors that constantly change). Standard Quality was fine. As I
suspected, with a clear signal the recording quality is almost perfect.
Even converting stuff I taped at SP and EP was very good, with the
occassional error once an hour or two. As a side benefit, I can start
putting up videos on Tartan's site.
Writing of which, I'm serving up 200 MB a day from my web site, mostly
from Tartan's sites. That's 1/5th the maximum bandwidth I can send up
in 24 hours using my 128kb uplink (and that's assuming the link is
going full speed with no problems). If I add more stuff I'm going to
have to find some solution to packet shape the network so that web
serving doesn't hog the uplink (I probably need to do it now since
Fulton complains at how bad the lag gets with mangband, but without an
good sniffer tool I don't know why it's slow sometimes).
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