Another vote for Freetaxusa. TurboTax might be marginally easier to use, but it is far more expensive and Intuit is a horrible company. If you hate filing taxes (because of the complexity), that is because Intuit and H&R Block lobby congress to keep things complicated so they can sell you their products.
I use a budget app for tracking income and spending on a transaction basis and then keep the rest of my finances in spreadsheets.
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/how-to-survive-midlife-blues
Depending on how old you are, you might just be hitting the normal midlife low point. It hit me hard in my late 30s and I spent a lot of time reading about it once I found out it was typical. I think a lot of it has to do with the rate at which you’re experiencing milestones and life changes. It feels like you are constantly progressing in your life up to your 20s or 30s and then the time scale suddenly shifts. Things take much longer to advance - saving enough for a house or retirement, that next promotion (assuming you even want one), major family changes, etc.
Understanding that helped me recover somewhat, though it still took a couple of years. I’m still in that lull, trying to figure out what I really even want to do next, but I don’t feel sad about it anymore. I don’t know if this applies to your situation, but I found it really helpful to learn about it.
Like a leveraged buyout, I love it! Borrow all the money, give the debt to the acquired entity, let it pay itself off.
I’ve never asked for time off, only informed my boss that I will be off. I have only had push back twice. Once, when I was in high school my boss said I couldn’t, so I quit on the spot (nothing to lose in a minimum wage job when my parents were still supporting me). A few years later, a shift lead (who was not technically my boss) challenged me, I told him I wasn’t asking for the day off, I was providing advance notice that I would not be there that day.
The irony is that I now manage people who have an attendance policy. I try to make sure people have plenty of opportunity to plan time off so they don’t have to call out. They’re going to take the time either way, I may as well know in advance.
That sounds awesome! I definitely vote for clean, refrigerated eggs.
I like to keep things simple and don’t use any separator at all for time.
If your main concern is the US currency or just wanting your money to be out of US-based assets, I believe Interactive Brokers provides a lot of flexibility to move your money between assets and currencies. You’re still going to pay taxes and be subject to all US laws.
If your concern is US involvement in your personal financial affairs…good luck. The US has tremendous influence over the global financial system and no legitimate foreign organization is going to work with you unless you have substantial assets. The few countries that do not respect US influence are not particularly trustworthy and trying to do business with them will put you at significant legal risk.
You could also try converting to physical gold, but the US has confiscated gold before, so that’s not a sure bet.
I think the point of the post is that they PAID money to the data collectors to get data they themselves don’t want collected, thus becoming part of the problem. That said, I have done the free version of this multiple times with great success!
Start finding names. This can be easy, but if you’re trying to deal with a subsidiary, a private company, or a massive conglomerate, it might be more difficult. You can start with things like CEO & COO. Search for things like VP/SVP/EVP/Head of Customer Service (or Customer Experience). Depending on the problem you’re trying to solve, you might look for more specific job titles like CIO, Technical Operations, Network Operations, Accounts, etc. Get several names for roles that might make sense.
Find the email address format for the company. Common ones are first initial + last name, FirstName_LastName, etc.
Send an email to all of the names you collected in the company’s email address format. Hopefully several of the names are reasonably distinct to make it likely you got the right person. Of course, it’s unlikely that the CEO is John_Smith3, they’re never going to take the numbered address. Be (somewhat) polite, be specific, be as brief as possible; ideally make a reasonable request to resolve the problem. You don’t want to come across as an unhinged lunatic and you don’t (necessarily) need to threaten any specific action. Just ask for their help resolving the problem.
What happens next? They will likely forward the message to someone who has the ability to solve the problem. That person will contact you and make things happen that everyone else said was not possible. You do need to have reasonable expectations though. If you contact your ISP and tell them their outage cost you $1M in lost business, don’t expect much help. But if you tell them you were inappropriately charged $500 for equipment you returned 6 months ago, they’ll probably fix that for you.
Helpful places to find names:
My biggest challenge has been with companies that constantly reorg, so I find a name in a news article from 2 years ago and they’ve already changed roles.
I used to work for a cable company. I remember a coworker telling me a long time ago that one of the challenges they used to have was making sure the caller’s TV was tuned to the correct channel. So, the conversation would go like this:
“Please change the channel to 27” (or any other random number that isn’t a locally used channel) “What do you see?” “Nothing…” “Good, change it to 3, now what do you see?” “Nothing…” “Good, change to channel 4” “It works!”
For those that don’t know, there was a long period of time where the auxiliary input into TVs was tuned to either channel 3 or channel 4. There was a good chance that the customer didn’t know which one was correct for their TV and would have assumed that it was already set correctly if you asked.
I tried to sign up for an Apple TV free trial without an Apple device. It let me create the account, but then I had to “activate” the account, and I couldn’t do it on any of my devices (android, windows, the TV that gave me the free trial). I talked to tier 1 and tier 2 support, they couldn’t get it working either.
Then it gets even more ridiculous. The tier 2 agent asks me to upload screenshots of the errors I was getting for the tier 3 (?) engineers to review. Oh, I need an active Apple account to upload anything. I emailed the images and their email system stripped the attachments from the email. Tier 3 closed the ticket and banned my account. I talked to Tier 2 again and all they could do was put in a ticket to request I be unbanned…it was denied.
Finally, I gave up and asked them to delete my account. They said my account can only be deleted if I log in and use the delete account function. I pointed out how that was not possible and they said there was no other option. The whole situation reinforced my plan to never buy an Apple product.
It’s common in the U.S., especially in apartments, to have rooms with no light fixtures. Instead, there will be one outlet that is wired to a switch by the door. That outlet is sometimes upside down to distinguish it from the other outlets. That gives you the option to connect a lamp to the switch to get the same result as having a light fixture. I would generally prefer that every room has a light fixture on the ceiling, but this is marginally better than having to walk across a dark room to turn on a lamp.
I mean, depending on where exactly you ended up, it could go either way. I’ve watched some British TV over the years and I frequently need subtitles and I assume the actors are enunciating better than the average person.
I hope you’re not using that map to navigate your new home.
Wow, 1st class, I didn’t realize out of context comics paid so well! :)
I’m really impressed with how quickly you’ve made such a huge life change, that takes some serious courage for you and your family. I would love to follow along behind you, but have no path for it, so I’ll have to stick things out and hope for the best (or not worst) here.
I loved this book, so I will definitely check out John Dies at the End. Thanks for the recommendation!
Oh, that sounds like a sweet deal. I should have been aspired to be a corporation instead of a normal person.
Stock “news” is stupid, the Switch 2 announcement has been expected for a year. The only news is that the company confirmed it will launch this year, which was already expected. Real news is when we start hearing what games will be available at launch (or soon after).
I don’t really understand how Walgreens is still in business. I only go there when I need something that the grocery store pharmacy section doesn’t carry and I’m not willing to wait 1-2 days to have it shipped from Amazon. Every time I go, its a ghost town with more employees than customers.
I just saw yesterday that one of my favorite bands is playing nearby this summer with a 3PM start time!
Then I saw there are 6 bands in the lineup and they don’t even tell me what order they are playing in. I don’t want to watch 6 bands in a row, 2 or 3 is plenty, then let me go to bed at a reasonable hour.