Matt Wood, my excellent insurance broker, apologizes for the crappy $30 chair he seats me in yesterday:
But these are on back order.
Matt, 28, invests in two ways. He does dollar cost averaging with standard S&P 500 index funds. Every month he puts some of his salary into the funds. Without fail.
He also buys stock in the insurance companies he deals with, and puts his happy clients (like me) into.
Here’s five years of them. Most impressive!
I love this way of investing — buy the stocks of companies you deal with. Buy stocks of the companies whose products you like and buy regularly.
Peter Lynch wrote a famous book about this:
Buy it here.
Stuff learned:
+ Watch for big price increases. Especially on auto-pay items.
+ The best iPhone app is WAZE. It gets you from A to B, changes your route if it hits traffic. Its latest trick: It accesses your calendar and tells you how to get to your appointment — without you even asking. Saves huge time. It also tells you when you exceed the speed limit and by how much. It alerts you to police. And it tells you where you you parked. It’s not foolproof. But it’s much better than any pricey navigation system that comes in a new car.
+ The “push” in laptops is towards thinness and long battery life. Great idea if you like thinness and long battery. But it comes at the cost of decent keyboards with decent key movement. The thinner ones are much slower to type on. Moreover, many of the newer, longer life laptops are very slow. They have slow processors. Intel has lost the plot on laptop processors.
+ Microsoft Outlook can run very slow, especially as your emails and their large attachments pile up. Delete stuff. Scanpast your Outlook.pst file. Scanpst is called the Inbox Repair Tool. Use it once a week. Stop using Word as your email editor. Word really slows things down.
More reasons not to use Bounce (or other dryer sheets):
From reader Pam Long, Don’t use dryer sheets. Excellent advice!
Dryer sheet residue builds up on lint screen blocking air flow, which makes clothing take longer to dry, thus making your dryer work harder.
Clean lint screen at least once a month with soap and water. Remove lint from filter after each load, especially towel loads.
A dose of white vinegar in the ‘softener’ cycle of washer works better to kill static cling than dryer sheets.
Funny.
Boris fails at PC (political correctness)
New British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson says it would take far too long for him to apologize for the “rich thesaurus” of rude comments and insults he has directed at world leaders over the years.
Harry Newton, who watched a little of GOP Convention. I get bored being told why the world is falling apart and why I should be afraid of my own shadow. The world where I live is dong just fine.
Meantime, you wonder about the “little things.”… Here’s a picture of stalled bridge construction near Princeton, N.J., on Route 518.
Construction began in early July but Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, at impasse with lawmakers on a gasoline-tax increase, stopped road work around the state. I bet they resolve this when the highway construction season is officially over — some time around December!
Meantime in Turkey.
More than 50,000 people have been rounded up and either arrested or suspended from their jobs as the Turkish government continues its purge of the country after last week’s failed coup attempt. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pictured) claims the coup was organized by Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based cleric who Ankara wants to extradite to face trial in Turkey. Gulen was a former partner of Erdogan and helped significantly in Erdogan’s rise to power. The United States has thus far refused to extradite Gulen, citing a lack of evidence. Like none. On Tuesday, the country-wide purge expanded to include journalists and academics who the government claims are disloyal to Erdogan. That includes almost 17,000 teachers, educators, and university deans.
“We will dig them up by their roots,” Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said about Gulen supporters in a speech to parliament this week.
Erdogan was once democratically elected. He came to power in 2003 and has gone increasingly nuts ever since. It’s fascinating to watch. All my Turkish friends in New York tell me they wouldn’t go back while he’s in power. Too dangerous. Turkey is a member of NATO and is trying to get admitted to the EU. They want the right for Turks to freely immigrate to EU countries — one reason for Brexit.
