vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"(Disclosure - PeerStreet was at FinCon, a financial blogger conference I attended last month. I had the chance to briefly meet a couple people from this company. Also, I recognize a number of the names of their financial backers. This doesn't guarantee anything, of course, except the people behind the scenes are no slackers.) The same way Prosper and Lending Club have created a market for personal loans, this is a company that offers real estate loans.  The ""too good to be true"" aspect is what I'll try to address. I've disclosed in other answers that I have my Real Estate license. Earlier this year, I sold a house that was financed with a ""Hard Money"" loan. Not a bank, but a group of investors. They charged the buyer 10%. Let me state - I represented the seller, and when I found out the terms of the loan, it would have been a breach of my own moral and legal responsibility to her to do anything to kill the deal. I felt sick for days after that sale.  There are many people with little credit history who are hard workers and have saved their 20% down. For PeerStreet, 25%. The same way there's a business, local to my area, that offered a 10% loan, PeerStreet is doing something similar but in a 'crowd sourced' way. It seems to me that since they show the duration as only 6-24 months, the buyer typically manages to refinance during that time. I'm guessing that these may be people who are selling their house, but have bad timing, i.e. they need to first close on the sale to qualify to buy the new home. Or simply need the time to get their regular loan approved.  (As a final side note - I recalled the 10% story in a social setting, and more than one person responded they'd have been happy to invest their money at 6%. I could have saved the buyer 4% and gotten someone else nearly 6% more than they get on their cash.)"
If you arent sure what field you want to be in, then accounting is your best bet by far IMO.  It's applicable to investment banking, investment management, and corporate finance and just in general it's incredibly useful to understand accounting rules. Even if you end up in Sales one day, it's useful to know exactly how to read a P&amp;L properly or how revenue recognition and return accruals work, for example.  My recco would be for financial accounting if you havent done those courses yet. Cost Accounting can also be very useful, especially for corporate finance jobs.  If you do more accounting courses, basically what will happen is you will become a more well-polished Finance candidate.  Now, if you are trying to keep more options open and think you might want to have options in more general business fields (i.e. Consulting, Brand Management, etc.) then branch out and take Marketing, Stats, etc.  What I would again not recommend though is taking a programming class. There just arent many jobs where knowing a little bit of Java or Python helps that much. Most companies prefer to have business specialists (e.g. people with finance/accounting/marketing knowledge) and IT/software specialists. If you want to be some kind of Product Manager for a tech company or a quant I suppose you could try to go all in on the programming- take 4, 5, 6 courses to really develop a noticeable background. Taking 1 Java class just has a low marginal return because you wont know anything meaningful to participate seriously in engineering/tech discussions and you will have missed an opportunity to become even more useful as a business specialist with deeper finance/accounting/marketing knowledge.
That's actually pretty sad. Seems like he may have gotten tangled in with the wrong people, probably to deal with his debt, and ended up being killed for it.  Word to the wise, don't take on debt to basically launch your business. Taking on a loan AFTER you've shown your model works and you have a real (sustainable and stable) cash flow in order to grow is more acceptable.  Edit. Apparently his wife died a few years ago from breast cancer too. I think he had a lot to prove, and followed his dream in a misguided direction.
"I'm a mathematician, not an accountant.  But my feeling has been that the distinction between Asset and Liability is mainly a sign convention, and comes from a wish to avoid negative numbers. Suppose you take out a loan for $1000 and deposit the proceeds in your bank account.  Under normal accounting conventions, your bank account is an Asset and the loan is a Liability.  After the loan, Bank has a balance of 1000 and Loan has a balance of 1000.  You can compute your net worth by adding all Assets and subtracting all Liabilities (so in this case your net worth remains 0). If you treat Loan as an Asset account, then after taking out the loan, you should give it a balance of -1000.  Under this convention, you have lots of negative numbers to deal with everywhere, which I suspect early accountants would have found inconvenient.  The Asset/Liability convention means you only need to deal with negative numbers in unusual situations (overdrawn bank account, overpaid loan, etc). Likewise, in theory you could treat Expense accounts as negative Income. But I'm not sure why you feel the need to reinvent the wheel by ""simplifying"" double-entry accounting like this.  The standard conventions are not that complicated, and their major advantage is that they're standard: other people will be able to understand your books if they ever need to.  (Say you want to hire somebody to do your taxes at some point: if your books are kept in your own idiosyncratic system, their job will be at best error-prone and at worst impossible.)   It's a bit like a proposal to simplify English spelling: shur, a sistum waar yu rit lik this mit bee simplur in sum abstrakt sens, but if nobudee els can reed it eezulee, it izunt ackshyualee veree yusful."
I understand your process. I just don't think many people on Reddit have put together a $100M loan. Hell not a lot of people period have done that. I'd think the council or banks you are working with would have that experience.   When in doubt, just do what I do. Find something for a $1M loan and add a few zero's to it!   You mentioned the cold storage business - something I am very interested in.
Hard to give an answer without knowing more details (interest rates, remaining principle on loans, especially how soon the new roof is needed).  Maintaining the value in your home (unless you are planning to walk away from it or short-sell or something) is of paramount importance, and the cost of a leak should it happen can be substantial. If the roof is a few years out, and you have loans with interest rates about oh I'd say around 6%or more then I would pay off those loans and take the money you were paying there and start putting it into a fund to pay for the roof. I am also a huge fan of doing whatever you can to max out your 401K contributions.  Money put into a 401K early has a LOT more value than money put in later, and since you don't pay taxes on it, the cost out of your pocket is much lower (eg. at a 20% tax rate it costs you only $80 out of pocket to put $100 into your 401.. (look at that, you just made like 25% return on that $80) Paying off loans is pretty much equivalent to making a risk free return on the money equal to the interest rate on the loan.  But to REALLY make that work, what you need to do is in a virtual sense, keep making the loan payment just now pay it to yourself, putting that money into a savings account, or towards your 401K or whatever.  If you just torn around and start spending that money, then you are not really getting as much value to paying off the loan early.
"You're in good shape as long as your income stays. Your only variable-rate debt now is your private student loan.  I think you'd be wise to pay that down first, and you sense that already. Worst-case, in the event of a bankruptcy, student loans usually cannot be discharged, so that isn't a way out. Once that loan is gone, apply what you were paying to your other student loan to knock that out. You might investigate refinancing your home (to another 30-year fixed).  You may be able to shave a half-percent off if your credit is stellar.  Given the size of the mortgage, this could be several thousand out of pocket, so consider that when figuring out potential payback time. Consider using any ""free time"" to starting up a side business (I'm assuming you both have day jobs but that may not be a correct assumption).  Start with what you know well.  You and your wife are experts in something, and have passion about something.  Go with that.  Use the extra income from that to either pay down your debts faster, or just reinvest in the business so that you can offset the income on your taxes. Again, you're in good shape.  Just do what you can to protect and grow your income streams."
I would just ask him plain and simple for a shadow opportunity. Just as you said, he has an open door policy and what better way to show it to his employees. And to really hold him to the policy.   As for what questions to ask it depends on what you want out of life. This person is at a very high level so they obviously know a good bit, or at least how to achieve that level. One thing I'd say to do is to not make all of your questions about business. Mix it up and ask him some personal things like his hobbies, but nothing to personal. Try to build a relationship with him in what time you have and maybe this will lead to further opportunities.
I would recommend that you take out a loan large enough to cover both your Capex requirements AND give yourself a cash buffer.  Depending on the simulation and how aggressive you want/need to be (are you competing against other teams?), you may just want to leverage as much as you can and use high amounts of cash for all expenses and projects.
"I started a business a few years ago.  At one point it wasn't going so well and my father ""loaned"" me an amount not too dissimilar to what you've done. From a personal perspective, the moment I took that loan there was a strain the relationship.  Especially when I was sometimes late on the interest payments...  Unfortunately thoughts like ""he doesn't need this right now, but if I don't pay the car loan then that is taken away"" came up a few times and paying the interest fell to the bottom of the monthly bill payment stack. At some point my wife and I finally took a hard look at my finances and goals.  We got rid of things that simply weren't necessary (car payment, cable tv, etc) and focused on the things we needed to.  Doing the same with the business helped out as well, as it helped focus me to to turn things around.  Things are now going great. That said, two of my siblings ran into their own financial trouble that our parents helped them on.  When this happened my father called us together and basically forgave everyone's debt by an equal amount which covered everything plus wrote a check to the one that was doing fine.  This ""cleared the air"" with regards to future inheritance, questions about how much one sibling was being helped vs another, etc.  Honestly, it made family gatherings more enjoyable as all that underlying tension was now gone. I've since helped one of my children.  Although I went about it an entirely different way.   Rather than loan them money, I gave it to them.  We also had a few discussions on how I think they ought to manage their finances and a set of goals to work towards which we co-developed.  Bearing in mind that they are an individual and sometimes you can lead a horse...  Given the current state of things I consider it money well ""spent""."
Yes I do. I think it's irresponsible to not pay back your debt. Your response was the definition of millennial entitlement and why so many of you are socialists (think it's moral to steal from someone else).  Why is it responsible to take out a huge amount of debt and cross your fingers you get a job with a degree in gender studies?  Even if they did get a good major/school - what if they didn't work hard to network or add experience?  And even if they did get a job - what if they spent it all at the bar instead of living cheap and paying off the loan?  Why do they get a break and I don't for being responsible and living cheap?
I think people are conflating two orthogonal sets of terms. Unsecured/secured and good/bad are not synonyms. Debt may be secured or unsecured. If I take a loan against a car or house it is typically secured, so the object is collateral against the loan. Bad debt in financial terms is a loan that is not expected to be recovered. A bank might write off a loan or a portion of a loan as bad debt if the borrower goes bankrupt or into administration for example. Both secured and unsecured loans may be considered bad debt. I think the context in which the question is being asked is how to distinguish between sensible and inadvisable borrowing. An extreme example of inadvisable borrowing would be to buy a PC on a store card. PCs devalue very quickly and a store card may charge 30% APR, so paying the minimum off each month would mean paying  more than twice the sticker price for a product that is now worth less than half the original borrowed amount. On the other hand, a 3% mortgage when borrowing less than 60% of the value of a property is a good bet from a lender's perspective, and would be a good debt to have (not as good as no debt, but better thhan a high APR one).
If you can't sell it, refinance the bugger.  Even if you can knock the interest rate down to 8% and take out a 3-year loan, you'll save about $100 per month.  Or really kill the payment (but pay more interest) by taking out another 6-year.  A 6-year at 9% on $12k is only $215/month. My credit union routinely advertises specials on car loans.  It shouldn't be difficult to get out of the usurious loan you have now. As for others' advice about getting another job, having been a PhD student I hesiate to suggest that you get another one, because your job is probably your life right now.  But can your wife (or even you) start a blog on a subject that interests you?  A few posts a week add up over time, and pretty soon you have a real asset that can be another basket to put your eggs in.
"&gt; My uncle ran a horrible pizza shop downtown. The trick was the heroin business on the side.  I have often wondered about stuff like that.  Especially when I see strip malls out in the middle of suburban/rural areas with stores like ""Candles, etc"" or ""GitUrWallpaperHere"" -- I mean I can understand that in some large metropolitan shopping mall they *might* generate enough walk-in traffic to support a specialty candle or wallpaper store...   But in a rural town with a total population of maybe 5,000 people (and possibly 10,000 if you include every home in the townships around it) well I just can't see the numbers working out... especially since you never see anyone else IN the store, and the clerk always seems so totally uninterested in even trying to sell anything that it's kind of creepy.  On the other hand if you posit it as a ""cash"" based retail money laundering front, for some drug business... well then it suddenly makes sense.  EDIT: and with a pizza shop... well, they can even have a delivery service... right out in the open."
Because giving someone a loan and paying them to take it isn't a loan anymore.  I'll grant you, some of the treasury bill auctions did slip below 0% -- people paid in slightly more than what the bill would pay out. In as much as this was done by actual investors (and not afore-mentioned helicopter Ben Bernanke keeping the printing presses running hot all night), it was major accounts fearful of the euro disintegrating and banks crashing, and so on, and needing a safe spot to stick their cash for a couple months.  Where the Fed is concerned, that interest rate he's referring to is lending they do to banks. So, how much would you take if you ran a bank and the Fed offered to pay you to take their money? A billion? A trillion? As much as you could cram in your vaults, shove in your pockets, and stuff down your favorite teller's blouse? Yea, me too.
Again, that is NOT YOUR BUSINESS. I never have given out such info and I never will. You calling me a coward will not change that. Please move on from the topic.   I have not read the Koran, but if you'd like to go down that path, there's some pretty gnarly shit in the Bible. Maybe you shouldn't open that can of worms if you're not trying to look dumb in this argument.   I really am tired of you and your ignorance. Do you have anything of value to say, or just more racist ramblings of a lunatic?
I boycott a lot of overseas products. I think it's bullshit if you want to take your business out of the U.S to avoid taxes than don't expect to sell in the U.S.  You cannot have your  cake and eat it too.
"If I understand correctly, your question boils down to this: ""I have $X to invest over 25 years, are guaranteed returns at a 0.6% lower rate better than what I expect to get from the stock market over the same period?"" Well, I believe the standard advice would go something like: Rational investors pay a premium to reduce risk/volatility. Or, put another way, guaranteed returns are more valuable than risky returns, all things equal. I don't know enough about student loans in America (I'm Australian). Here a student loan is very low interest and the minimum repayments scale with what you earn not what you owe, starting at $0 for a totally liveable wage - Here I'd say there's a case to just pay the minimum and invest extra money elsewhere. If yours is a private loan though, following the same rules as other loans, remember the organisation extending your loan has access to the stock market too! why would they extend a loan to you on worse terms than they would get by simply dumping money into an index fund? Is the organisation that extends student loans a charity or subsidised in some way? If not, someone has already built a business on the the analysis that returns at 6.4% (including defaults) beats the stock market at 7% in some way. What I would put back to you though, is that your question oversimplifies what is likely your more complex reality, and so answering your question directly doesn't help that much to make a persuasive case - It's too mathematical and sterile. Here are some things off the top of my head that your real personal circumstances might convince you to pay off your loan first, hit up Wall Street second:"
As a permanent resident in the U.S. but not a citizen, I was told by a representative at Scottrade that I am not allowed to open a brokerage account.
"If Best Buy gets wiped out, that would suck.  Sometimes I like the options of:  * Being able to take-home today * Being able to look at products in the store  I've made 2 recent electronics purchases.  1.  I bought a notebook computer from Amazon.  I have been shopping for a few months, looking at Amazon, and looking at computers in the stores.  I was looking for a few specific things (where the power cord plugs in, if the Function keys were primary or secondary, etc.)  that the Amazon ad didn't specify, so I went to various stores to see how they worked out.  But, Amazon had the best price by about $40 (I have Prime), so I had to order through Amazon.  I feel a tiny bit bad about that, because I theoretically ""used"" the merchandising of other stores to buy at Amazon. 2.  I bought a sound bar for my TV at Best Buy.  One day I decided I wanted to get a sound bar.  It was something I had been thinking about for a long time, but bought on an impulse that day.  It was nice to go into Best Buy and get to look at a whole bunch of options, and then just buy one and take it home.  I never even checked to see if Amazon had the same item available.  I like to think that if Best Buy *did* go out of business, that some other business idea would come along that would make it easy for me to see products in person and have the option for ""buy today""."
&gt; Umm, one of the benefits of creating a corporation is to keep personal money separate from the business.  you missed the key statement from that little link you posted. Here, I'll help you out:  &gt; An owner of a corporation can be held personally liable if he or she:  personally guarantees a bank loan or a business debt on which the corporation defaults  And for a brand new company, you can sure as shit guarantee that as an owner, you'll be held personally liable.
I'm saying that the auto loan thing is worth a few million dollars to a multi billion dollar profit company. It's not a lot of money, and they'll pay a shitload of money in damages to cover it, way more than they ever made off it.  It's disturbing, for sure, but it's not significant to their business.
Most of the time you pay a fee (or interest rate) on whatever you borrow on margin, just like taking out a bank loan, so if you're going to trade on margin, you have to include those costs in your calculations as to what you need to earn from your investment to make a profit. When I short trade, I'm selling something I don't own in the expectation I can buy it back later at a lower price and keep the difference. For instance, if I think Apple shares are going to take a steep drop at some point soon, I can short them. So imagine I short-sell 1000 shares of AAPL at the current price of $112. That means my brokerage account is credited with the proceeds of the sale ($112,000), and I now owe my broker 1000 shares of AAPL stock. If the stock drops to $100 and I ""cover my short"" (buy the shares back to repay the 1000 I borrowed) then I pay $100,000 for them and give them to my broker. I keep the difference ($12,000) between what I sold them for and what I paid to buy them back, minus any brokerage fees and fees the broker may charge me for short-selling. In conclusion, a margin trade is using someone else's money to make a trade, whether it's to buy more or to sell short. A short trade is selling shares I don't even own because I think I can make money in the process. I hope this helps."
I know what you are talking about and this is what students at UC I know usually do in such cases: Talk with the cashier's/registar's office and see if you have been reported to collections. If you had plans to pay via financial aid, this can be a non-issue, but be sure. It's critical to remove your record from collections, if any. Take a loan and find out how the loan will be paid. Most lenders pay the school directly based on what the school bills for the quarter. If you signed up for X units in Fall '10 and plan to take Y units in Winter '12, add X+Y units in your list of courses. Those X units could be anything in your course catalog. Once the school sends out the bill and the lender pays it, drop the X units. This will give you a check and use that to pay out the outstanding amounts. Most schools will include all outstanding amounts in the bill for your current quarter, but I am not sure if your lenders has agreements otherwise. Also, some lenders have agreements in place to send refunds directly to them, but remember, the cashier is king and she can make refunds happen the way she likes, and she is likely to help a student unless you have a bad payment history (collections, bounced checks..)