Pay off a mortgage in five years

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , , ,

Thanks to some circumstances where somebody knew somebody who knew somebody, I found myself tonight at a seminar where John Cummuta was speaking. He’s the guy who you may have heard on the radio hawking a system called Transforming Your Debt into Wealth. From him, I learned how to pay off a mortgage in five years.

Hopefully I won’t get into too much trouble by presenting the simplified version of his plan.The secret of credit is that creditors will not extend you more credit than you can conceivably pay off in a fairly short length of time (like, less than a decade). The secret is to make that work for you, rather than for them.

His system is simple enough that you can plug it into an Excel worksheet. Mine has three equations in it. Here’s what you do.

Take 10 percent of your monthly income and use it to pay down debt. Pick the debt you can pay off the fastest. Forget interest. Pay the minimum monthly payment on all of your debts except the one you can pay the fastest. Add that 10 percent of your monthly income to the debt you’re working on. So if it’s a credit card balance with a minimum payment of $22, and you make $2,000 a month, you pay $222 towards that credit card.

Then, when that credit card balance is paid off, you take the debt you can pay off second, add its minimum monthly payment to that $222. Keep cascading the payments until you’ve paid everything off.

Using that formula, I can have my car paid off in a year and two months, and my house paid off in five years and two months after that.

The more money you can plow into paying off debts, the faster it goes.

He said the interest rates are pretty much irrelevant because you are paying the debts off so quickly. So it doesn’t make sense to refinance or consolidate debts or anything like that because you won’t recoup the closing costs.

The formula is a bit crude because it doesn’t take into effect the minimum monthly payments you are making, nor the accumulated interest on the on which debts you’re making minimal progress. But he said those numbers pretty much end up in a wash. Following this crude formula, you’ll be within a couple of months or two.

Also, he suggested putting off investments until you have your debt eliminated. The exception is 401(K) or similar plans where employers match your contributions. The logic is that the compound interest on your debts will almost always be larger than the compound interest your investments can earn.

However, he did not say you should empty your bank accounts to pay debt. If you have enough money in the bank to be able to take half of it and pay your smallest debt, go ahead and do it, but otherwise leave your existing bank accounts and investments alone, suspend contributing to them (or do the minimum), and then, when you have the debt paid off, you can afford to contribute to them very aggressively. Remember, at the end of the plan, you no longer have those monthly house and car payments to make.

Someone who makes $40,000 a year and works 40 years will make $1.6 million over the course of that career. The idea is to pay as little of it as possible in interest, so that money is working for you instead of your creditors.

It seems to me that debt ought to be like college. It ought to be something we do for a few years in order to get something we need, but after a few years, it’s over. And if we have to make a few sacrifices along the way, just like we did for college, we ought to do them.

Update: It worked. Thanks to finding better paying jobs and applying that, we were able to pay the mortgage off ahead of schedule.

Troubleshooting a Compaq Proliant 1600

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , ,

I still work on a lot of Compaq Proliant 1600s. In their day, they were a very versatile server, packing lots of drive bays and open expansion slots into a 5U package. They were also very reliable.

Now that they are five years old or even older, they are less so. But I’ve collected some good suggestions from Compaq and HP technicians about working on them.The biggest problem with the 1600 is that so many parts are socketed. Over time, socketed components tend to work themselves loose. So, when a 1600 crashes a lot but will pass its built-in diagnostics with flying colors, the best thing to do is to completely disassemble it and put it back together.

If it seems to be having memory problems, don’t just reseat the processor board and/or replace the memory. I had one 1600 exhibit memory failures that would not go away until I replaced the PCI board, of all things. Why? Beats me. The HP technician was as stumped as I was. So reseat that board too.

It never hurts to clean the connectors when you have the system apart. Get some zero-residue contact cleaner from a hardware or auto parts store. Be sure it’s zero-residue. A lot of contact cleaners contain oil, which isn’t going to help intermittent electrical connections at all. If in doubt, skip the contact cleaner entirely and clean the contacts with a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol instead. Need I also mention you need to stay grounded at all times while doing these procedures?

When replacing the PCI and CPU modules, you have to use a lot of force. Don’t rely on the plastic releases on the back to put them in. Whenever I’ve seen a veteran Compaq technician reinstall one of these modules, he’s slammed the module into the back computer with so much force that it moved the system. If you don’t think you’re going to break it, you probably aren’t doing it hard enough.

Newer Proliant servers have many fewer socketed components, so their long-term reliability prospects are higher. They also usually have LEDs that indicate failed components, making diagnostics virtually irrelevant and system repair much more straightforward. But when replacement isn’t an option just yet, it’s nice to know there are things to do to return a 1600 to life.

Wake up your Backup Exec remote agent

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking

Usually when a Backup Exec remote agent refuses to respond and stopping and starting the service does no good (verifiable by creating a new job and attempting to connect to the remote server, only to find the drive selection boxes greyed out), the solution is to reboot.

There’s a last-resort method more appropriate for production servers.Telnet to the remote server on port 10000. As in:

telnet 192.168.1.2 10000

When I did it, I got a bunch of garbage characters. I closed the window, then tried to connect again. This time, the agent was awake.

I have no idea if Veritas sanctions this or not, but it worked for me, and I like the answer a lot better than rebooting.

R. Collins refuses to concede the election

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire

R. Collins Farquhar IV, aristocrat, scientist, and next president of the United States

To the voting populace.

Greeting:

Be it known that this past election was so close that I refuse to concede it.John Kerry’s rapid concession of the election proves that he is not an aristocrat. Unlike him, I did not marry my aristocracy. George W. Bush’s rapid proclamation of victory proves, well, nothing, because the votes are not all in. Unlike him, I did not marry my education.

There was one candidate who was qualified for the job of most powerful man in the world, and time will tell that that candidate was R. Collins Farquhar IV.

Unlike that pretender Kerry, I will not concede election until every vote is counted and either my manservants, lawyers, or myself have had a chance to personally tampe… er, examine, each and every ballot.

If anything, the events of the past week prove that the time is right for R. Collins as president. The political unrest in France and Palestine proves it.

I will not rest until we have conquered France and turned it into a training ground for our other wars, and I will not sit and watch as the jobs for our peasants get outsourced to foreign peasants. Our rabble need jobs just as much as the foreign rabble. If the foreign rabble want our jobs, they can get it the old fashioned way: Get an aristocrat to sponsor them and pay their way over here in exchange for a pre-agreed amount of indentured servitude. And when that time has expired, they can apply for a peasant’s job, or remain a manservant.

Or become a soldier. We will always have job openings there.

I like Firefox 1.0

Dave Farquhar Software

Big surprise, huh? Seeing as I’ve been running it since the very first version, back when it was called Firebird, and the version number was probably 0.1.

And I really liked 1.0PR, so it was a given that I’d like 1.0. So there’s no big difference, right?

I’m not so sure about that.Maybe it’s just me, but I think 1.0 renders pages faster. Quite a bit faster. And there are some bug fixes, some minor and some less minor, but nothing we haven’t gotten used to from living with IE for all these years. If you were using 1.0PR, there’s no reason not to upgrade to the gold release code.

I see from my logs that 25% of my site’s visitors use some flavor of Mozilla. That’s good. If you’re not in that group, you owe it to yourself to try it.

Believe it or not, you can get excited about a web browser again.

So there is a benefit to running Windows Server 2003 and XP

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , , , , ,

One of the reasons Windows Server 2003 and XP haven’t caught on in corporate network environments is that Microsoft has yet to demonstrate any real benefit to either one of them over Windows 2000.

Believe it or not, there actually is one benefit. It may or may not be worth the cost of upgrading, but if you’re buying licenses now and installing 2000, this information might convince you it’s worth it to install the current versions instead.The benefit: NTFS compression.

Hang on there Dave, I hear you saying. NTFS compression has been around since 1994, and hard drives are bigger and cheaper now than ever before. So why do I want to mess around with risky data compression?

Well, data compression isn’t fundamentally risky–this site uses data compression, and I’ve got the server logs that prove it works just fine–it just got a bad rap in the early 90s when Microsoft released the disastrous Doublespace with DOS 6.0. And when your I/O bus is slow and your CPU is really fast, data compression actually speeds things up, as people who installed DR DOS on their 386DX-40s with a pokey 8 MHz ISA bus found out in 1991.

So, here’s the rub with NTFS compression when it’s used on Windows Server 2003 with XP clients: the data is transferred from the server to the clients in compressed form.

If budget cuts still have you saddled with a 100 Mb or, worse yet, a 10 Mb network, that data compression will speed things up mightily. It won’t help you move jpegs around your network any faster, but Word and Excel documents sure will zoom around a lot quicker, because those types of documents pack down mightily.

The faster the computers are on both ends, the better this works. But if the server has one or more multi-GHz CPUs, you won’t slow down disk writes a lot. And you can use this strategically. Don’t compress the shares belonging to your graphic artists and web developers, for instance. Their stuff tends not to compress, and if any of them are using Macintoshes, the server will have to decompress it to send it to the Macs anyway.

But for shares that are primarily made up of files created by MS Office, compress away and enjoy your newfound network speed.

Flash drive durability vs. microdrives

Dave Farquhar Hardware

The Inquirer dropped a bombshell today: Microdrives are less reliable than flash memory.

Does this surprise anyone?Microdrives are conventional hard drives, shrunk down to the smallest size possible using current technology. The problem with doing this should be evident from watching laptops. Laptop hard drives fail more often than desktop hard drives because they get slung around a lot more.

For that matter, desktop hard drives don’t have all that great of a reputation for reliability, and they lead much calmer, safer lives than their portable bretheren.

Flash memory has no moving parts, so its lifespan is measured, generally, in number of writes. A true torture test for flash memory is to put it in a computer and stick a Windows swap file on it (don’t do it). That will kill it much faster than giving it repeated swims in a cup of hot coffee.

The downside to flash memory is its limited capacity in comparison to spinning media, not to mention its sometimes annoyingly slow write speeds, but for reliability in harsh environments, it’s hard to beat something with no moving parts that can get stuck, whether it’s from expansion and contraction due to low temperatures or debris gumming up the works.

Umm, no, as a matter of fact everything isn\’t OK…

Dave Farquhar Personal , ,

The site’s been down again. As far as I can tell it didn’t stay up for very long on Saturday, but by 8 PM last Saturday, my DSL connection was the least of my concerns.

I got the phone call nobody ever wants to get. My girlfriend’s father was in the hospital and wasn’t expected to live.

They patched him together long enough for his closest relatives to get there, but Jerry died at 12:45 Sunday morning.I’ve been there, done that before. Today just so happens to mark 10 years since my own father’s sudden death.

The rest of what I write may not make a lot of sense, but I hope it will be helpful.

If there is anything worse than losing the closest of your relatives, I don’t know what it is. By “closest of your relatives” I mean your mother, your father, a child, or a brother or sister, or your spouse.

As my girlfriend and I drove to the nearest polling place last night to cast provisional ballots, she observed that it was like the aftermath of a breakup: Everywhere she looked, she saw things that reminded her of her dad.

That’s true. In fact, when describing dealing with a death to others who’ve never lost someone that close, I’ve compared it to a breakup. But, as I compare a death with the last breakup I had–which messed me up pretty badly, and I’ve got the therapy bills to prove it–I see two differences. Maybe three.

Difference one: It’s a lot easier for something good to come of a breakup than from a death, from your selfish perspective. It takes some time and effort, but it is possible to convince yourself that with a world population of 12 billion, your chances of finding something better than that b-word who dumped you (or who you just dumped) are pretty good.

But with death, those things that annoy you about that person start to matter a lot less to you. There was only one Jerry. Just like there was only one Ralph (my dad). To her, Jerry will always be the best dad there ever was, faults and all. Just like to me, my dad will always be the best dad there ever was. The best doctor there ever was, too. I will go to my grave believing that my dad could have saved Jerry. The fact that my dad actually was very highly qualified to treat Jerry is a technicality. I would probably still believe Dad could have saved Jerry even if Dad had been a dermatologist.

Difference two: Usually there is some choice involved with breakups. A couple of days, or maybe a week before my last messy breakup, I told a number of people that I needed to break up with her. When the time for the breakup conversation came, I had a list of conditions I wanted to present in order for the relationship to continue. As it turned out, I didn’t present that list because she broke up with me first.

Death is different. When that person’s time comes, there is no room for bargaining. Jerry was a classic example of that. When Jerry died, he had nothing left. There were at least three things that were racing to kill him. What had worked against the North Vietnamese and what had worked against his wounds and physical handicap and what had worked against his cancer didn’t matter anymore. Jerry was fighting to the end though. As he died, I looked down at his hands. They were clenched into a fist.

Difference 3: Death is permanent. With a breakup, there’s always hope, however remote, that it can be worked out and things can be every bit as good as they ever were, or maybe better. Or, to again overuse the example of my last relationship, if it can’t be worked out, you can go find someone a whole lot better who’ll make you forget about that old b-word.

Death doesn’t offer that.

So, since one’s previous experience with the end of a romantic relationship only inadequately prepares one to deal with death, how does one deal with it?

I have some ideas.

Grieve. I can’t tell you how to grieve. I asked a lot of people once how. They said, “Grieve.” Thanks a bunch. I once paid $1,400 for that answer. Hopefully you’re paying a lot less than that for the ability to read this. I’ll see if I can do better than that answer. Don’t stuff your emotions. Let them out. If they don’t come out in tears and screams and other stuff like that, they’re going to come out in other harmful and self-defeating ways that will poison your relationships and the rest of your life. So whatever it is that your body wants to do when you think about that person, let it, and the sooner the better. If a week has passed and you haven’t cried once, or maybe only once, you’ve got a world of hurt ahead of you. I know because I’ve been there. This is no time to be macho.

Take care of unfinished business. One of the things the Methodist minister who performed Jerry’s ceremony stressed the most was to bury the things about him that weren’t all they could be with him. Carry the good with you everywhere, but bury that bad stuff. I know for me, one of the things that finally helped was to role-play, so I could finally say those things I wanted to say to my dad but never got the chance.

Remember. Talking about the person helps. Tell those stories, and you might even want to go so far as to write them down. One of the reasons I got into genealogy was to preserve the memory of my dad and what made him the way he was. I only know the basics about his grandparents, but it’s something.

Find the things you both enjoyed and continue to enjoy them. Probably my best childhood memory of my dad and me was setting up and playing with his Lionel electric trains. My dad wasn’t a railroad buff in the traditional sense and I’m not either, but those trains were something we enjoyed together in 1986, and that’s the main reason they’re something I enjoy now. You’ll find things like that too. You’ll find some of them right away. Others will take years. That’s OK.

Honor. This is the one place where I’ll get Biblical. In Genesis, God said (I’m paraphrasing), “Honor your father and mother, so that it may go well with you and you will live a long time on the earth.” We all have our own ways of honoring our loved ones, but one of the best ways is to take that person’s qualities and not only emulate them–that is, make them our qualities as well–but to pass them on.

Take care of yourself. In some cases, it will be clear that some of the person’s personal habits contributed to an early death. I don’t think I need to say that smoking provides zero benefit and does a lot of harm to your body. The same goes for drinking excessively. And it’s very clear that some aspects of diet cause things like heart attacks and cancer. Some families are very prone to these things anyway, but while we can’t control our genetics, we can control our diet. So eat healthier than your departed loved one did, and the next time you see your doctor, mention what you know of your family’s medical history so that your doctor has some clue what to be watching for.

Learn from your loved one’s mistakes. I’ve already mentioned things like diet, drinking and smoking, but most people made other mistakes in life too. If you think about it, you’ll see what that person’s other mistakes were. Don’t copy those mistakes. Make your own. (You’ll have to work at that first part. You won’t have to work at the second.)

How to get a provisional ballot

Dave Farquhar General ,

Since requests for an absentee ballot had to be in by October 27 and my family emergency happened on October 30, I had to use another method.

I voted using a provisional ballot.There isn’t much information on provisional ballots on the Missouri Secretary of State’s web site. So I’ll relay my experience.

First of all, let me say I like provisional ballots. I hope I’m in the minority on this, but in my young life, I’ve needed them twice. Sure, many times when you’re gone on election day, you know in advance and can get a request for an absentee ballot in. That doesn’t always happen. I didn’t get to vote in 1994 because of a sudden death in the family two days before election day. The same thing happened this year.

In 1994, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. In 2004, there was.

To vote provisionally, you simply go to the local polling place where you happen to be, and ask an election judge for a provisional ballot. Be prepared for the judge to not know how to handle the situation and to collect all sorts of information about you. He wanted my name, address, last four digits of my social security number, driver’s license number, and date of birth. I showed him my driver’s license as identification. My girlfriend didn’t have hers, but I happened to have some of her mail in my car, including a utility bill. She used that as ID, and the judge accepted that as well, as the secretary of state’s office said he would. He also wanted to know why I wanted to vote using a provisional ballot. He then called the county courthouse, and came back a few minutes later with two provisional ballots.

He said we got there just in time because they only had two left. So get there early.

The second thing to know about provisional ballots is they will only be counted in the case of close elections. Chances are our ballots were never counted.

The third thing to know is that the provisional ballot doesn’t have a lot on it. I was able to vote for president, governor, lt. governor, state senator, the local U.S. representative, and a statewide initiative. I was not able to vote for my representative (as it turned out, he was the candidate who probably needed my vote the most) or anyone in the Missouri senate or house. I probably could have voted for that district’s U.S. representative, but I left that blank. I didn’t feel like I should be voting in another district’s race. I don’t know if the vote would have counted or not.

With the ballot, you have to fill out an envelope that asks for more information, such as when you registered to vote and where, as well as other information that hopefully is known by nobody else other than you. You sign under penalty of perjury. Not knowing the exact date I registered, or whether it was at the Cliff Cave or Tesson Ferry branch of the St. Louis County Library, I wrote down what I could remember.

I definitely see holes in this system but I see holes in the rest of the system as well and don’t see that provisional ballots make them much easier to exploit, provided someone actually checks out the information written on that envelope. In St. Louis County, it’s harder to get a library card than it is to register to vote.

Provisional ballots or no, if someone can go to the library with convincing evidence that I have moved, he can register as me and steal my vote. Likewise, if someone shows up at my polling place and manages to convince an election judge that he is me, he can steal my vote. To me, those are bigger holes in the system than the provisional ballot.