vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"Bitcoin payments involve by far the lowest fees.  For pure bitcoin-to-bitcoin transfers you have the option of not paying any fee at all, while if you want to avoid the risk (currently very small) of miners ignoring your transaction you can pay a small transaction fee.  Currently no more than 0.0005 BTC is ever required ($0.01 at $20/BTC). Bitcoin also does not support ""chargebacks"", which is an advantage for the merchant (no risk that Paypal will freeze your account, as it did in with a Burning Man nonprofit), but more risk for the consumer. Popular sites for exchanging bitcoins with other currencies charge rates of 0.65% or less.  The primary barrier is that it typically takes a few days to get funds into your account from bank accounts etc.  Given the volatility of the bitcoin exchange rate you may want to treat bitcoin like cash, and only keep a small amount on-hand. A variety of shopping cart interfaces are supported. The obvious downside is that only a small fraction of users would be likely to go through the steps to use this option since bitcoin is new and immature, so your investment in adding support may be hard to pay off.  On the other hand, just advertising that you accept bitcoin payments would give you a bit of free advertising. Another downside is the risk of government intervention.  In NPR's 2011 story a law professor said it was ""legal for now"" in the US, but that could change. I'd say that given the sizable current fees and other barriers to international commerce and micro-payments, if bitcoin doesn't succeed, something else will."
"BLUF:  Your question is subjective and as such, the answer varies from person to person.   The rent you ""should be"" paying is the tricky part.  Minimum is whatever is the least you can find.  Maximum is the most you can afford.  To be financially responsible, you would live as close to that minimum as you can bear.  However, this can cause stress if you are trying to subsist on lower than you can actually bear. You have certain expenses that are required to survive.  Housing, clothing, food.  These are your needs.  Everything else is convenience or luxury. Best way to develop a budget is to list the categories of everything you have spent over several months.  Figure out a monthly amount for each one.  Divide them up into groups of things you need, things that make life bearable, and things you can do without.   Then start with your income and figure out how much you bring home each pay period.  When you get paid, allocate the money to your needs until they're all covered.  If there's anything left, fund the second group, then on to the third.  Continue tracking your spending and adjust where you allocate the money.  After 2-3 months, you'll start having a decent idea on how much you actually spend on each category.  You'll probably find areas where you're spending a lot more than you realize.   The method I've just described is the one advised by ""You Need a Budget"" software, but you don't need the software to use the method.  Though it does help. Also, if there's any debt, that goes in with the 'needs' because we all need to pay our bills."
Don't worry about minimizing taxes too much - worry about maximizing post-tax income.  Keep in mind that if you just got a job then it's likely that the taxes being automatically withheld are based on the assumption you've been earning this much all year, which could mean that you're likely going to be due a refund come April (basically, if you're making 100k/year, but only actually getting 20k this year, they'll still take taxes out as though you were making the full 100k).   If you're maxing out your 401K, you can also contribute to an IRA to reduce taxes (or contribute to a Roth to invest more if you max it out).   For investment I like Betterment, it's well diversified and avoids many common investment pitfalls.  Much better than a savings account, but you should also consider the need to have readily-accessible money in case of emergencies.
Note that I left out the matching contribution from a 401k. That would help both those options. I assumed that the marginal tax rate would be 25% on the Traditional IRA distributions. It might be only 15%, which would increase the advantage of the Traditional IRA. I assumed that the 15% rate on capital returns would still be true for the entire period. If that is increased, the TIA option gets a lot worse. Inflation could be higher or lower. As stated earlier, the TIA account is hit the worst by inflation.
Get a job, if you don't have one right now. Take deductions from your paycheck for an IRA or 401K if the company has one.
"If you have already maxed your TSP contributions, the ""401k"" for military folks, you could consider a Traditional IRA contribution. They are tax-deductible, based on some limits, so it may reduce your tax liability. Many online services (Vanguard, Fidelity, etc.) offer quick and free setup of Traditional IRA accounts. If you have already maxed the Traditional IRA as well, you could look at making taxable investments through an online service. Like homer150mw, I would recommend low-cost funds. For reasons why, see this article by John Bogle."
"Sometimes 403b's contain annuities or other insurance related instruments.  I know that in many New York schools the local teacher unions administer the 403b plan, and sometimes choose proprietary investments like variable annuities or other insurance products. In New York the Attorney General sued and settled with the state teacher's union for their endorsement of a high cost ING 403b plan -- I believe the maintenance fees were in excess of 3%/year!  In a tax deferred plan like a 401k, 403b or 457 plan, the low risk ""insurance fund"" is generally a GIC ""Guaranteed Investment Contract"". A GIC (aka ""Stable Value Fund"") is sort of cross between a CD and a Money Market fund. It's used by insurance companies to raise short term capital. GICs usually yield a premium versus a money market and are a safe investment. If your wife is in a 403b with annuities or other life-insurance tie ins other than GICs, make sure that you understand the fee structure and ask lots of questions."
Much like K Mart, it's also cheaper.    I have an amazing knack for getting the most bizarre Uber / Lyft drivers.  Honestly it's a huge part of the experience for me too. If someone could guarantee me a weirdo everytime, I'd choose my service on that criteria alone.
"You're not making any sort of a persuasive argument why predatory HFT should be allowed to levy a tax on the system. Yes, computer trading is heck of a lot better than paper trading. You're citing an article from 2010 that states things I'm not even arguing against as somehow supporting this ""tax"", the mechanisms of which the author was not even aware of at the time.   There is no valid argument for why this tax is necessary or good for anyone but the firms profiting from it. I'm all for lower spreads and near instant order processing, but that doesn't excuse some greedy prick from scalping my 401k a point or two of compounding interest every year."
"Invest in productive assets and by that I mean companies.  Edit: I'll elaborate on ""productive assets"": any asset that produces something; whether it produces cash or a commodity, you'll automatically accumulate more of its byproduct in the future. The rest is self explanatory"
I'm not a financial guy, but I handle decent amounts of money. I don't care how much money you take in, money only makes so much money. Sure, $1 million throws off decent interest (at least it used to), but it doesn't generate enough money to ever sustain a Ponzi scheme. Don't be fooled by what $20 million generates everyday in an account. It's never enough to pay back investors a fair return on their money.
"Here is, from Yahoo Finance, the S&P 500 over the last ~60 years (logarithmic scale):  The behavior since ~2000 has been weird, by historical standards. And it's very easy, looking at that graph, to say ""yes! I would have made so much money had I invested in March '09!"". Of course, back in March '09, it wasn't so clear that was the bottom. But, yes, over the last 10 years or so, you could have made more money by adopting a rule that you'll accumulate cash in a FDIC (or similar) insured savings account, and dump it into an S&P index fund/ETF when the index is n% off its high. Of course, if you look at the rest of the chart, that strategy looks a lot less promising. Start in the early 80's, and you'd have held cash until the crash in 2000. Except for the recent weirdness, the general trend in the S&P 500 (and stock markets in general) has been upward. In other words, to a first-order approximation, the S&P 500 is always at an all-time high. That's just the general trend."
You can fairly simply make a spreadsheet in your favorite spreadsheet application (or in Google Docs if you want portability). I like to make an overview page that shows how much I take in per month and what fixed bills come out of that, then break the remaining total into four to get a weekly budget. Then, I make one page per month with four columns (one per week), with each row being a category. Sum the categories at the bottom, and subtract from your weekly total: voila, a quick reference of how much you can spend that week without going over budget. I then make a page for each month that lists what I bought and how much I spent on it, so I can trace where my money's gone; the category total is just a summation of the items from that page that belong in that category.  Once you have a system, stop checking your bank balance except to ensure your paycheck is going in alright. Use the spreadsheet to determine how much you can spend at any time. Then make sure you pay off everything on the card before the end of the month so you don't incur interest.
"I have a quick question about statement of cash flows and how Account Receivable (Net) and Prepaids affect it (I've already asked the accounting subreddit but was wondering if anyone who does fundamental analysis etc would have a take on it).   It stems from a homework problem where I have to reconstruct a cash flow statement using two comparative balance sheets (end of period 2013 and end of period 2014) and a change in retained earnings statement.  The following transaction took place in 2014   ""The firm wrote off accounts receivable as uncollectible totaling $16,300 in 2013 and $18,500 in 2014. It recognized expired insurance of $4,100 in 2013 and $3,900 in 2014.""  My understanding is that the write offs have already been subtracted in order to yield Account Receivable (Net) and therefore I can just take the change in that account and make the appropriate entry.  For the recognition of expired insurance I can simply take the change in the Prepayment account and record the appropriate cash flow entry.  Am I correct in assuming this? Or did they give me those amounts in order to figure out Accounts Receivable (Gross) and take the change in that?"
Good points. I'm sure twitter has data on the value of Trumps account, but IMO the data for how much value Trump keeps away from Twitter is much less readily available. Anecdotally, I know many people that have either not gotten a twitter account or quit using the service altogether because of him. And I live in a red state. I'd think if the investors proved the economic value of the account was actually damaging to twitter user growth, they could have a case. One way would be to see where people are going for news, or creating new accounts, or time spent on the platform vs others like Facebook.
I wrote about this a while back: http://blog.investraction.com/2006/10/mutual-funds-dividend-option-or-growth.html In short: Growth options of a mutual fund scheme don't pay out any money, they reinvest the dividend they receive. Dividend options pay out some money, at different intervals, based on the surplus they accumulate. In India, the options have very similar underlying portfolios, so HDFC Equity Fund (Growth) and HDFC Equity Fund (dividend) will have the same percentage allocation to each stock. Update: I also have a video you might want to see on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx8QtnccfZk
"An accounting general ledger is based on tracking your actual assets, liabilities, expenses, and income, and Gnucash is first and foremost a general ledger program. While it has some simple ""budgeting"" capabilities, they're primarily based around reporting how close your actual expenses were to a planned budget, not around forecasting eventual cash flow or ""saving"" a portion of assets for particular purposes. I think the closest concept to what you're trying to do is that you want to take your ""real"" Checking account, and segment it into portions. You could use something like this as an Account Hierarchy: The total in the ""Checking Account"" parent represents your actual amount of money that you might reconcile with your bank, but you have it allocated in your accounting in various ways. You may have deposits usually go into the ""Available funds"" subaccount, but when you want to save some money you transfer from that into a Savings subaccount. You could include that transfer as an additional split when you buy something, such as transferring $50 from Assets:Checking Account:Available Funds sending $45 to Expenses:Groceries and $5 to Assets:Checking Account:Long-term Savings. This can make it a little more annoying to reconcile your accounts (you need to use the ""Include Subaccounts"" checkbox), and I'm not sure how well it'd work if you ever imported transaction files from your bank. Another option may be to track your budgeting (which answers ""How much am I allowed to spend on X right now?"") separately from your accounting (which only answers ""How much have I spent on X in the past?"" and ""How much do I own right now?""), using a different application or spreadsheet. Using Gnucash to track ""budget envelopes"" is kind of twisting it in a way it's not really designed for, though it may work well enough for what you're looking for."
Like others mentioned you need to look at the big picture. Personally I'm not a fan of insurance based investments. They tend to have horrible track records and you're locked it and paying way to much money for them. I had one for a number of years and when I finally cancelled it I pulled out almost the exact amount I put in. So it basically grew at either zero or negative interest for 5+ years.  I ended up buying Term Life and took the difference and invested it in a Roth 401K. Much better use of my money. The reason why insurance people push these policies so hard is that they make insane commission on it over 2-3 years (I asked my insurance guy about it and he admitted that, plus doing some research you'll find that out as well). Hope this helps somewhat.
Also don't need as much of an emergency fund though. The risk of having all of your assets tied up in a 401k is way higher when you're out on your own.  But yeah. I would hope that anyone living at home is saving aggressively.
If you are off by coins, how can you be sure that you only made a typo and didn't miss a transaction?  To start off, I would strongly you find a way to be precise.  It doesn't matter so much in the accounting, but the habit of doing a thorough job will pay off in other dividends down the line. Basically, do the pennies now.  Tryout some free online software to save the headache of data entry. But........ Since my primary goal is to get you to do the budgeting, and if you really hate the coins, just be consistent in how you fudge the debits and the credits. Always round down to the nearest whole in income, and always round up on expenses.  You won't overspend this way, and your back account should have a little bit of padding because you will assume less money in and more money out. Honestly, I do tracking in both Quicken and Mint.com, so the transaction size is no big deal to me.  If I did it all in Excel, I would round to whole notes.  You didn't tag your question with a country, so I don't know if or similar is available to you.
This article was garbage.  I don't disagree with the overall premise that kids from elite colleges may not be better candidates for a job, but the article's delivery and proof was shit.  My argument would be that not all kids are equally mature in high school to the point where they can accumulate the resume necessary to get into a Harvard or Yale.  But in general, if you hire from Harvard or Yale, you know your getting someone of likely high intelligence and good work ethic.  The difficulty of getting into Harvard, excludes most deadbeats.  The deadbeats who do get in, have connections that would be beneficial to your company.  So, yeah, all else equal, I'm hiring the Harvard kid over the UMass kid.  But I wouldn't exclude a UMass kid because they went to UMass.
I've used OFX quite a lot for international transfers. They are much faster than a normal international transfer from your bank. Instead it ends up being a local transfer on either end which just works a heck of a lot quicker. They also claim lower exchange rates. In the past we have compared and sometimes found them lower and sometimes found them a little higher. Their fees certainly are lower though. Only thing is I think there was a lag setting up the account initially (they need to contact you by phone), so if you're in a hurry this may be problematic. And yes, you will need internet banking to do this. Since the question is specifically about how to do this in the cheapest way possible, I think the answer is to use internet banking.
the way I see it, capitalism only works when you have people with good civic values involved. people like carnegie, warren buffet, etc. who not only accumulate wealth but then direct it for the benefit of society as a whole as well as for their own benefit. i believe that many capitalists use their wealth to create dynasties - this leads to aristocracy which is undemocratic, and also spoiled rotten trust fund babies, which are the worst people in the world. capitalism without values is horrible, just like any other system. i'm a business man, but I'm not interested in getting ahead by screwing other people and I certainly give back to my community in my own small way. it's good for business too - people like to patronize businesses that give back.
No, I don't have to 'deal with it'. In fact, there's a whole class of people who refuse to 'deal with it' and simply structure their businesses so that their profits are untaxable and accumulate in fun places like Bermuda where thieves such as yourself can't touch it. You might want to consider that perhaps the world would be a better place if you and yours learned to take care of your own rather than expecting others to do it for you.
I have heard of this, but then the broker is short the shares if they weren't selling them out of inventory, so they still want to accumulate the shares or a hedge before EOD most likely - In that case it may not be the client themselves, but that demand is hitting the market at some point if there isn't sufficient selling volume.    Whether or not the broker ends up getting all of them below VWAP is a cost of marketing for them, how they expect to reliably get real size below vwap is my question.
As a longtime customer of Scottrade I want to say that I'm very happy with it. Now, to answer your question: they do give you a nominal cash interest rate but it is VERY low -- this past month it was 0.01% APYR. The interest that I earned in my Scottrade account in August (31 days) on average credit cash balance of $729.36 was $0.01. I don't know if or where they publish the rate, but you would get a much better rate from an average savings account. However, you can purchase CDs/bonds/tbills through Scottrade if you want cash/safe investments.
"I am not sure about transferwise and how they work, but generally when I had to transfer money across countries, I ended up using a foreign currency/transfer company who needed the destination account details i.e. a GBP account in the UK in your case, and money from the source account. Basically that means your father would need to open an EUR account, probably in an EU country (is this an option?) but may be in the UK is fine too depending on transfer fees. And a GBP account in the UK, perhaps see if there is a better business account than HSBC around, I have used them as well as Santander before. The only FX transaction done in this straightforward set up is the one performed by the specialised company (there are a few) - and their spread (difference between interbank i.e. ""official"" and your price) is likely to be around 1.0 - 1.5%. The other expenses are transfer fees to the FX company account, say a flat fee of $25 for the SWIFT payment. The full amount less the spread above then goes to your UK GBP account. There are still the running costs of both EUR and GBP accounts of course, but here the advice would be just to shop around for offers/free banking periods etc. Point being, given the saving in FX conversion, it might still be a better overall deal than just letting HSBC deal with it all."
Your best bet is probably to limit the amount of money in the account. If there is never more in there than he would normally spend in a month, that limits the losses. I am curious why he writes cheques. Most people I know write only a few a year. Simply having another person hold the chequebook for him, and bring it to him when it's needed, wouldn't be a big deal for the people I know. Say he pays bills twice a month and needs it then, fine, but why does he need it when he's just going for a walk? But if this would be an argument then just move most of the money into an account he can't write cheques against, and put each month's expenses into the chequing account each month.
Thank you for your service.  My first suggestion since your car is a planned for the near future is keep that amount in savings and just pay cash. There are plenty of attractive offers to entice you to finance your vehicle but there really is no compelling reason to do it considering the savings you have.  Second I would keep an additional portion of savings as a rainy day emergency fund. How much is based mostly on what you feel comfortable with. The number of possible emergencies that can come up is limited and your expenses are limited which is normal given your age. This fund might be for something such as emergency travel for a sick family member, cover a deductible for an auto accident, whatever unforseen event might occur (hence the name emergency fund). What investments you are comfortable with will be determined by risk tolerance. While in the military individual stocks that are aggressive risky investments may not be a good idea because of the extra attention they require and you can't really babysit a portfolio while deployed but there are many good low or no cost mutual funds or ETFs that you could get into.  I would look into setting up a recurring purchase with a set dollar amount monthly so you will continue to accumulate whatever option you are investing in regularly even if you are deployed. Which fund or ETF you pick will depend on your goals and risk tolerance but you could very easily pick several for diversity. Good luck and thank you again for your service.
This afternoon I used an ANZ ATM inside the Branch on Lane Xang Avenue. The ATM tells you the maximum. Pro tip: If the wad of bills is too thick you can change it at the teller to bills of 100,000 kip each to slim it down a little. I read on a forum that most other banks' ATMs in Laos have a maximum of 1,000,000 LAK but that ANZ's fees are a bit higher than the other ATMs.
The safest, quickest and cheapest option would be to do a wire transfer from your HK account to an account in a US bank. You can contact HSBC and ask them if it would be cheaper if the US bank account is at HSBC as well, but I doubt it would be a significant saving. Check the rates in HK about a wire transfer, in the US, on the receiving side, the fees are not dependent on the amount and are about $10-$15 per occurrence (shop around).