Money making mailing stuffing envlopes
internet justice at its finest
2010.11.04 19:59 MusicAndLiquor internet justice at its finest
2024.05.07 21:07 wiifitboard [Request] Cheering up my partner from a major surgery! [US]
hi all, let me know if this request is not allowed. A few days ago my partner had major back surgery, and will be recovering for the next 8-10 weeks. I'd love to cheer them up since they can't return to normal activities/ work or do things outdoors for a while. They see all the cards I get in the mail and I would love to make them feel excited during their recovery!
They like: Nature (plants / outdoorsy type stuff like mountains, rivers, etc), cartoons, space, cats, baking, stickers, books, and cute things. Their favorite colors are: green, orange, and pink!
submitted by
wiifitboard to
RandomActsofCards [link] [comments]
2024.05.07 21:06 InternalPea1198 My neighbor is a lunatic
Hi! So I have a neighbor that I don’t know what to do about and maybe I just need to vent. This lady has stalked me for 2 years. By stalking, I mean she literally follows behind me around town. She walks past my house and tries to peek into my backyard. Most recently she has started signing me up for the Mormons and jehovah witnesses to show up at my house. She calls animal control if she sees my dog in my front yard, she calls the police on me for WAVING at her. She has made my 9 year old daughter cry by making fun of her clothes. She was wearing a ruffled dress thing (think ridiculous boutique dress. She’s little and she loves them 🤷🏼♀️) and she laughed in her face, asked wtf she was wearing and asked if she was from little house on the prairie.
To be clear, the ONLY thing I’ve ever done to her was have a differing political opinion, which I have never shared bc she made it very clear early on that anyone who didn’t agree with her was wrong, and she’d argue til death. So I don’t discuss that. She told another neighbor she doesn’t like how I spend my money, and buy my kids “too much stuff”, she felt like the vacations I took my children on were a waste of money and she’d never spend her money on that. She said I needed to discipline my kids by beating them and stop letting them explain themselves, and said that children should be seen and not heard. She’s made comments to another neighbor that I have offended her and that I do things to irritate her and apparently I’m an idiot bc I have no idea what she’s talking about. I have never gone out of my way to offend her in any way.
She has done so much more than what I have listed and I’m just at my wits end. I don’t engage her. I don’t even look at her, and she will not stop. I don’t know what to do about this crazy bitch and the police will not help. Moving is also not an option. This lady does not work, she’s mid 30s, and she spends her entire day sitting at the window, watching my house. She’s set up security cameras and records my house non stop as well. Help. 🥺
submitted by
InternalPea1198 to
neighborsfromhell [link] [comments]
2024.05.07 21:04 superdstar56 Setup Mobula7 & Radiomaster Pocket - First Time + BT2.0 and Bluejay upgrades
I got my Mobula7 1s about a week ago, and I've spent every waking hour trying to get it to work. I finally got it up and flying and I flew about 40 packs, broke 2 motors off the frame and broke the antenna. I have more screws and a replacement antenna in the mail. It is even more fun than I was expecting.
If I was more weak of heart, I would have given up on the setup process. I am in IT and my job requires a lot of research, trial and error, and tech research. I was following YouTube videos, but so many settings and things have changed on new updates, I wanted to give my exact setup directions so someone like me can find this and see what I did to get mine to work. Looking back I probably spent...15-18 hours trying to get it all right. I set up and re-set up a lot of things.
**Starting out in FPV Takes a LOT of knowledge and setup of equipment. Follow along and watch ALL of the videos, sometimes multiple times. I found myself finding an answer by re-watching and going over the steps multiple times and catching something I'd missed. This is a time commitment, setting up your quad and your radio is going to take A COUPLE OF HOURS AT LEAST! So get comfortable.
Here's what I started with:
Happymodel Mobula7 1s - Analog 0802 20k X12 ELRS
Radiomaster Pocket (I wish now I had started with a Boxer, but I will probably save for a Boxer Max. For $65, the Pocket has been great, and now I'll have two when I get the one I want, sweet)
EV800D Goggles - For $100, these are useable to start out
BetaFPV BT2.0 Pigtails - get that juice
Soldering Iron (I got a 60w all in one kit and I wish I got the TS100
8x Tattu 1s BT2.0 450mah HV batteries - charge to 4.35v
ViFly Whoopstor 3 - highly recommend, charges 6 batteries quickly
64gb SD card for goggles
Skyzone USB OTA Receiver - does every new fpv pilot buy one of these so other people can watch?
2x Meteor75 Pro Frames (everyone and their dog recommends the M75P frame as the most durable, I got extra to build a slightly "larger" build for outdoor - You can use 45mm props with the Meteor75 Pro
Gemfan blades - mine have chipped already, but these don't really break
**After flying for 2 days, I'm ordering
100 M1.4x3 screws ($7) because the motor screws break off from the frame when flying/crashing. They give you extra but I've used them up and I'm on the last ones. I'm also ordering these
75mm u.fl antennas because I've broken the ceramic tip off of the antenna and if I go behind a wall I lose signal.
No big deal, a few bucks. UPDATE - after flying about 20 packs, the antenna is better than nothing but not as good as the flimsy original one, but i did bend it a lot. I have a truerc singularity in the mail.
Lets start with the radio:
Radiomaster Pocket - (I'm sure this same thing works with Radiomaster brand radios, I followed along with people on the boxer and zorro - also if you don't have a radio I have to vote against the zorro for the small batteries)
Follow Captain Drone explain and setup switches (STOP at 8:30, where he starts binding. Betaflight update lets you bind from your computer. Start watching again when your drone is connected and the firmware is updated. Later he will walk you through setting up the "arm" switch and flight modes.
Download the
ExpressLRS Configurator from Github
**I struggled to bind my Mobula for a long time until I realized that the video and the walkthrough on Github both failed to mention the "packet rate" setting in the radio menu when you press the ELRS lua script. The default is D500, and MOBULA WILL ONLY BIND on the 500hz setting. Anything with a letter in front and you will wonder what is wrong.
Update your Radiomaster internal ELRS lua script to have your binding phrase. Follow
these exact instructions, but set the correct packet rate!
Plug in your quad and connect to betaflight (explained in Mobula section)
Go to the Receivers tab, set SPI reciever mode, with CRSF, and the binding phrase you put in the lua script. Save and reboot
Either press "bind" or go to the CLI and type "bind_rx"
Run ELRS lua script and press Bind. There should be a C in the top right corner. Your radio is bound.
Mobula7 1s - Setup and bind to Betaflight
Soldering BT2.0 connector - (gives you more power and more amps, highly recommend) This was my first attempt with a soldering iron. I watched
Bardwells 30 minute tutorial and it helped tremendously. I started at 300C and it was too cold, I got the positive off but not the negative. The thru holes are difficult and so small. You have to hold the ground for quite a while for it to come out. I was holding the board and it got very hot, to the point I thought I messed it up. I tried again later with a hotter iron and doing quick 1-2 second bursts and it went much smoother. Take your time, line everything up. I successfully did it, but I should have practiced first.
Download Betaflight configurator (the web version didn't work for me on my Windows machine)
Plug in your quad and let Betaflight (BF) find it.
**SAVE YOUR CONFIG - go to the "presets" tab and Save Backup to someplace you will remember. After you flash the firmware, you have to reload the backup
Go to firmware flasher - Auto detect or the Mobula7 is CRAZYBEEF4SX1280. It should match the target in the top left.
Load Firmware (Online) and then Flash Firmware. You might have to save and reboot or unplug and plug back in.
**This is a huge part where I got stuck (I don't remember if it was before or after firmware). The radio and quad weren't binding. Finally, on the BF Welcome tab there are links to drivers. Download the
ImpulseRC Driver Fixer. It is a tool which automatically fixes the incorrectly assigned driver for STM32 BOOTLOADER (FC in firmware update mode)
Move your quad around and make sure the model on the screen matches with what you're doing, and that the arrow points to the front of the quad.
Go to the Receiver tab and make sure your radio is bound with your quad. Move the sticks and make sure they correlate with throttle, yaw etc.
Betaflight Setup - go back to the Radiomaster section to the Captain Drone video. Start after he binds at 8:30. (You will use "bind_rx" in cli tab) It walks you through setting up arm switch and flight modes, etc.
Presets - this is especially useful because you can use someone else's information to get you started. I used the UAVTech Whoop preset, I believe it sets the master multiplier at 1.6x, and it works for me.
Bluejay Firmware - Everyone should have this. It enables bidirectional dshot and rpm filtering and makes the quad run way better with longer flight times. It's an online configurator that flashes the flight controller built into the Mobula
This OscarLiang post describes how to flash your Mobula perfectly. The only changes I made were: both common parameter sliders I moved ALL the way up. I saw 2-3 YouTube videos and posts where they upped the startup power min and max to the most allowed and it runs perfectly. (When you are on the "select target" page, the default leaves it at BLHeli_S, you have to choose the drop down of "Bluejay")
I chose the latest version firmware, and 96khz pwm frequency is recommended for tinywhoops and that it what I used. Definitely play with the startup melody, they have super mario and star wars tones that your quad will make every time you power up. Every time I plug in a new battery I get the super mario bros theme song.
Go back to BF, on the Configuration tab, my gyro update was 8khz and pid loop frequency was 8khz. After I setup the OSD, my controller was running at about 75%+ (you can see the cpu load in bf) which is about the cutoff for being too high, according to my research. Setting it at 8khz gyro and 4khz pid loop was the smoothest running for me.
**Please setup your BUZZER - I did, and the captain drone video he walks you through setting it as a switch. This saved my drone countless times already. Once you crash into a bush and take your goggles off, you completely forget where you were flying. The buzzer helps track it down more than you would expect. Flip over turtle mode is a lifesaver also, that is mandatory.
On the Motors tab, turn on Bidirectional DShot, make sure dshot300 is selected. The mobula7 has 12 motor poles. You can test each motor individually to make sure they are spinning the right direction.
**At this point, I could see the video in my goggles, and I could power up and arm the quad, but it kept jumping, twitching, and cutting power every time I gave it throttle. After lots of things, I checked each motor. Run each one individually and feel if air is blowing above or below, if it's not below, then it's the wrong direction. The solution to this was the checkbox under quad x "motor direction is reversed". I turned that on, and it worked perfectly.
I moved throttle expo to .30 and I like it quite a bit, everything else I left the same.
Closing - I'm sure I forgot/confused a few crucial steps, I'm going to be updating and fact checking these steps to hopefully help someone who was stuck like me. I hope I described each problem I had well enough so that if it happens to someone else, they can figure it out.
Since starting to write this two days ago, I've ordered a couple more things:
TrueRC Singularity 20mm locking u.fl antenna (best antenna, fits under canopy)
Extra set of HM RS0802 20k motors. Mine are champs but if one breaks I want to swap it.
TBS Trimph Antenna RP-SMA male ($20) - Huge upgrade to omni antenna on EV800D, if I find a cheap patch cable that would be cool but I'm saving for digital
Extra Runcam Nano 3 Camera (I want to try the TW Pinch)
2x Mob7 v4 frames - mine has pretty bad road rash (tinywhoop.com has cool colors)
New canopy with camera mount (the first few times you take it apart, the tiny foam piece is a pain to keep under the camera
Have fun flying!!
submitted by
superdstar56 to
fpv [link] [comments]
2024.05.07 21:03 funkfeezy Can anyone help me merge my vehicles ps5 GTA?
I hope this post doesn't get taken down given i only merge vehicles I keep and never to do money glitches that would get me banned, now I need 1 player to help me merge my vehicles and if the other person who is with me wants to merge vehicles as well this makes it way easier feel free to dm me
submitted by
funkfeezy to
GTA5Online [link] [comments]
2024.05.07 21:03 chasespaceface i hate my life and i feel trapped
suicide has not left my mind for months now.
i hate my job. i’m likely getting promoted at the interview i’m doing on thursday, and i hate thinking about continuing to stay here. but if i don’t get promoted, i will run out of money almost immediately. my apartment is expensive and i have student loans and i have debt collectors calling me because i couldn’t afford my therapy appointments when i tried to go.
i have a degree is something i can’t do things with. i have no license and no car. i’m incapable of making friends beyond the most surface level relationships. i see people who open up and discuss how they’re feeling and seek support from one another and i am completely incapable of it. it makes me angry at them that they can.
customer service has made me lose faith in the public. everyone is so mean and cruel all the time. i’m been yelled and screamed at, i’ve been grabbed, i’ve been made fun of. every time i have to speak to customers it gives me so much anxiety i dissociate and can’t come back to myself.
i feel like i am always the dumbest person in the room, the ugliest, the fattest. my eating disorder is back full force and i haven’t ate in four days. i feel so sick and sore and it’s sucks because i know i won’t see changes for months. i hate my clothes, i hate my body, i hate my hair and my face. i haven’t brushed my teeth regularly since i was 12 and my teeth are so gross.
my girlfriend is sweet and cares but i don’t know if i’m capable of love or anything reciprocal at this time. i’m constantly thinking of plans to kill myself whenever i’m not too much of a coward to commit and i know it will destroy them. i want freedom and independence and i also never want to be seen or perceived ever again in my fucking life. i’m so distant from my family at this point that when we do see each other it’s so awkward, it feels like we’re pretending to know one another.
i can’t take this anymore. i don’t even know why i’m still here. i don’t see any of this getting better. my entire life i’ve only gotten worse and worse
submitted by
chasespaceface to
SuicideWatch [link] [comments]
2024.05.07 21:03 TightAsF_ck The List Of Almost All UK Refer a Friend Sign Up Offers & Guides For Those Who Do Not Have Time To Browse The Subreddit The Best of BeermoneyUK May 2024 Four New Offers
This is a list of almost every offer available on beermoneyuk, plus a load of guides and other tips for earning and saving money. May beermoney help you when you need/want it
to.
Announcements
New offers from the last month:
- Dibz - some free tickets for football bingo. Might win, might not.
- Pinecone Research - join this product test/survey site whilst you can.
- Rakuten - relaunched their site, and old/new users a like can get a £15 cashback bonus.
- Zing - grab this £20 bonus whilst you can. Offer is only available for one month.
Ongoing Tide Offer: Spend £100, get £75 cash back.
A long-running feature of beermoneyuk. The Tide offer is one of the best cashback offers out there. Open an account with Tide, spend £100 and get £75 cashback.
See the post here here for details on how to get £75
BeermoneyUK Competitions
Throughout the year, we run competitions where we give away some Amazon vouchers. The latest competition saw us giving away a £200 in Amazon vouchers -
see here for the winners
BeermoneyUK Guides
Get Paid To Play Game Guides
More info and chat about game offers happens on Inbox_Pounds
The big beermoneyuk list of offers
Below is the big list of nearly all sign-up offers posted on beermoneyuk. There's a lot of money to be made (usually more than £1000). I originally wrote it so I could easily answer questions like "what offers are available?", and I've just kept it up to date ever since,
Notes:
Search links will take you to a list of all posts on that offer, with the newest listed at the top of the page. Latest referrals are listed in the newest post and in the comments of that post. If you are on the reddit app, you need to sort the search results by "new".
I've tried to include all of the offers commonly posted on beermoneyuk. But no doubt, I have missed some and new ones appear frequently. So the list is probably missing some great offers. Aside from any missed offers, there are many tips, tricks and announcements posted on the sub that will help you earn a little more beermoney. So if this is your introduction to beermoney, please do stick around and browse the posts.
1 - Megathreads (the most popular offers)
The most popular offers on beermoneyuk. So popular that we had to create megathreads to keep the subreddit in order. There's only one at the moment:
None at the moment.
2 - Free money Offers (i.e. no spend required)
Just some free money offers for signing up and using some services.
Free money offers come in free flavours:
- Just sign up and get some free money.
- Sign up, deposit and/or spend a little money to get some free money in return.
Totally Free Beermoney - Just Sign Up Offers
No need to deposit or do anything else to get these bonuses, just sign up with a refer-a-friend link.
| # | Site/App | Offer | Timescale |
| 1 | [Dibz (!!gambling offer!!) | Sign up, get 2 free football bingo tickets | Might win, might not |
| 2 | [PensionBee (Google PensionBee £50) | Sign up, get £50 in your pension for free | ~1 month |
| 3 | Snoop (Click to search) | Sign up, get £5 free | 1 month |
| 4 | Wombat (Click to search) | Sign up, get £10 Free | 90 days |
Free Money Offers - just deposit or spend a little first.
3 - Investing Offers
Get a little beermoney for investing in the stock market. Maybe you will be the next Warren Buffet.
Investing offers also come in three flavours: 1) just sign up for a bonus; 2) deposit some money to get a bonus; or 3) invest some money to get a bonus. Most require you to invest your funds/bonus for a few months.
This list includes only refer-a-friend offers. But other investing offers are available via cashback websites - detailed in the Investapedia Post (like the Bankedex, but for investing offers)
| # | Site/App | Offer | Timescale |
| 1 | AJ Bell (Click to search) | Invest £10k, get £100 free | 1 month |
| 2 | BestInvest (Click to search) | Invest £5000, get £100 free | 1 month |
| 3 | Dodl (Click to search) | Invest £500, get £30 voucher | 1 month |
| 4 | Fidelity(Click to search) | Invest £5k, get £100 free | 1 week |
| 5 | FreeTrade (Click to search) | Deposit £50, get £10-£100 free | 1 week |
| 6 | Income Company (Click to search) | Invest €10, get €10-€500 | Unknown |
| 7 | InvestEngine (Click to search) | Invest £100, get £10-£50 free | 1 year |
| 8 | RobinHood (Click to search) | Deposit £1, get up to £140 | Few days |
| 9 | Wahed Invest (Click to search) | Invest £100, get £10 | 30 days |
| 10 | Wealthify (Click to search) | Invest £250, get £50 Free | 90 days |
| 11 | Wealthyhood (Click to search) | Invest £100, get £5-£200 Free | 60 days |
| 12 | Wombat (Click to search) | Sign up, get £10 Free | 90 days |
4 - Money Transfer Offers
Get some beermoney for sending money abroad (can be to your own account).
Money transfer offers also come in free flavours:
- Get a discount off your first transfer
- Get a discount off your second transfer.
- Cashback money transfer offers
For more information on how to do these, read the The Send Money To Yourself (Money Transfer) Guide
5 - Pension Offers
For people who want to live out their golden years in the Costa Del Sol.
These offers get you a bonus for opening/transferring pensions.
Some people will post about PensionBee. It is a one-sided bonus that does not reward the new customer. To get £50 free money for signing up to PensionBee, google "PensionBee £50".
6 - Get-Paid-To (GPT) Sites
Many advertisers will pay you to play games or sign up to other services. Probably they are trying to manipulate user numbers, or download statistics. But we don't care as long as we get paid!
Some of my favourite sites in here. Lots of extra sign up and paid-to-play game offers that do not appear often on the subreddit.
GPT sites are like cashback sites (they pay you to complete tasks). To ensure you do not miss out on your rewards, read the tips in the Get Paid to Site Guide.
The best (in my opinion)
Lots of these sites have the same offers available via various offerwalls. They pay different amounts all the time. It's always worth checking which site is paying more.
The Rest
7 - Cashback Sites/Apps (some passive, some active):
Get cashback on your everyday shopping using a variety of means. Combine them to get even more cash back.
Cashback Cards
Get up to 4% cashback on almost all spending with these credit/e-money cards.
Cashback Websites/Apps
Get cashback when you use online shopping gateways (Topcashback/Quidco) or for purchasing eGift cards (e.g. Jam Doughnut).
Online shopping cashback platforms must be able to track your purchase in order to verify your cashback, read the cashback guide to make sure you maximise your chances of this happening.
For gift card cashback, Topcashback and Jam Doughnut are the best sites that have refer a friend offers. But better rates can usually be found elsewhere. You can find the best rates for most shops using the BeermoneyUK Cashback search tool.
Automatic Cashback Apps
Get cashback automatically when you link your bank account/card to these apps. Its free money, so why not?! For more information on these, read the Lazy (automatic) Cashback App Megalist
Receipt Scanning Cashback Apps
Get cashback for submitting your shopping receipts. For more information on these, read the Receipt Scanning App Megalist (it does need an update).
8 - Cashback/Rebates on Utilities (Gas/Electricity/Broadband/Mobile, etc.):
Get money off your bills or a bonus voucher when you swap your utilities provider. We figure that most people have no choice but to spend on these things anyway, so we consider them beermoney offers.
Energy (gas/electricity)
Get cheaper gas/electricity (despite the government cap) at Octopus energy, plus a £50 bill credit.
Telecommunications (Broadband/Mobile)
Get some cashback for essential utilities.
9 - Freebies (free food, etc.):
Who doesn't love a freebie?
10 - Bonus Money for giving your Opinion
Bonus money for market research sites.
Bonus money for survey sites.
Bonus money for mystery shopping sites.
Related subreddits:
Notes
Happy to add to, remove from, and correct this list as appropriate. So please suggest things you think should be on it.
submitted by
TightAsF_ck to
beermoneyuk [link] [comments]
2024.05.07 21:02 Gentle_Throttle Row reference broke everything...
Situation: Getting the following error when running script. Only happening on 'onEdit' function. Weird part, the code I began with (denoted at very bottom), was able to fire emails without any issue. However, as can be seen, it was using lastrow function when I needed the script to send the data on the row item edited. However, when I changed that function, it broke everything. Have systematically been trying to pin down the issue ever since, but that one change of getting the edited row to pass to an email has seemingly derailed the script.
Any help would be appreciated.
Error: Exception: You do not have permission to call MailApp.sendEmail. Required permissions:
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/script.send_mail at sendVendorInfo(Code:22:11) at onEdit(Code:35:5)
Code: function sendVendorInfo(row) { Logger.log("Row number received: " + row); // Log the row number if (!row typeof row !== "number") { Logger.log("Invalid row number."); return; }
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getActiveSheet(); var data = sheet.getRange(row, 1, 1, 15).getValues(); // Make sure 'row' is a valid number var vendorInfo = data[0];
// Construct the email message var message = "New Vendor Profile:\n\n"; var fields = ["Company Name", "Contact Email", "Contact Phone Number", "Company Address", "Payment Type", "Bank Number (if applicable)", "Routing Number (if applicable)", "Payment Terms", "W-9 link", "GL Segment", "Product being purchased", "Approving Employee Name", "Assigned ID in Vendor System (if applicable)", "Swift Code (if applicable)", "Vendor Profile Complete"]; for (var i = 0; i < fields.length; i++) { message += fields[i] + ": " + vendorInfo[i] + "\n"; }
// Add email recipient, subject, and body here var emailTo = "
fakeemail@fakeemail.com"; // Change to your recipient email var subject = "New Vendor Profile - " + vendorInfo[0]; // Vendor Name as email subject MailApp.sendEmail(emailTo, subject, message); }
function onEdit(e) { var range = e.range; var editedRow = range.getRow(); var editedColumn = range.getColumn();
// Log the row and column to see what's being captured Logger.log("Edited column: " + editedColumn + ", Edited row: " + editedRow);
if (editedColumn == 15 && editedRow > 2) { // Ensures column 15 is edited and it's not the first two rows Logger.log("Triggering sendVendorInfo with row: " + editedRow); sendVendorInfo(editedRow); // Pass the row number to the function } else { Logger.log("Edit did not meet criteria to send email. Column: " + editedColumn + ", Row: " + editedRow); } }
ORIGINAL CODE THAT ALMOST WORKED: function sendVendorInfo() { var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getActiveSheet(); var lastRow = sheet.getLastRow(); var data = sheet.getRange(lastRow, 1, 1, 15).getValues(); // Adjust the 10 if your number of columns differs var vendorInfo = data[0];
// Construct the email message var message = "New Vendor Profile:\n\n"; var fields = ["Company Name", "Contact Email", "Contact Phone Number", "Company Address", "Payment Type", "Bank Number (if applicable)", "Routing Number (if applicable)", "Payment Terms", "W-9 link", "GL Segment", "Product being purchased", "Approving Employee Name", "Assigned ID in Vendor System (if applicable)", "Swift Code (if applicable)", "Vendor Profile Complete"];
for (var i = 0; i < fields.length; i++) { message += fields[i] + ": " + vendorInfo[i] + "\n"; }
// Add email recipient, subject, and body here var emailTo = "
chas@benepath.net"; // Change to your recipient email var subject = "New Vendor Profile - " + vendorInfo[0]; // Vendor Name as email subject
MailApp.sendEmail(emailTo, subject, message); }
function onEdit(e) { // Trigger the function when a specific column is edited; assuming column 10 is the last data point for a vendor var range = e.range; if (range.getColumn() == 15 && range.getRow() != 1) { // Check if the last column in a row is edited, avoiding the header sendVendorInfo(); } }
submitted by
Gentle_Throttle to
GoogleAppsScript [link] [comments]
2024.05.07 21:02 Superpie1661 UA-Phoenix vs IUSM
Not entirely sure if this is the right place to do this, but I'll give it a shot and would like to hear some more objective advice. I have 2 acceptances and need to make a decision on which one I will retain as my "Plan to Enroll" by Friday: UA - Phoenix vs IUSM.
Pros of UA-P is that it is closer to home (Cali resident), climate that suits me better, and has a really helpful admin side that has gone "above and beyond" in providing me answers to my questions and concerns. It is also in a rapidly developing city that is investing a lot of money into healthcare and such related fields. On the other hand, it is a rather new school, reputationally stands lower than IUSM, and does not receive as much research funding.
Pros of IUSM is that it is a well-ranked medical school with a great match rate success, making me believe that (pending same "stats" as UA-P) would open more post-grad doors comparatively. It is also has considerably more research funding and opportunities, although I admit it is difficult to exactly estimate that on the outside looking in. The drawbacks is that I'd be far from family and friends, be in a climate that I am not particularly a fan of, don't yet know which campus I've been assigned to, and may find it difficult to make my way back to the West Coast where I'd like to go to residency (for now).
Anyways, I hope I didn't bog anyone down with this info-dumping lol. Any advice, suggestions, and et cetera would be greatly appreciated!
submitted by
Superpie1661 to
premed [link] [comments]
2024.05.07 21:02 wcs1113 How much strength needed to start?
Hi!
It has always been a dream of mine (29F) to do some type of acrobatics like aerial silks or trapeze or pole (is that considered acrobatics?) or something like that. I've never tried as I never thought I'd actually be able to do it. But I'm turning 30 this year, and on my 29th birthday, I vowed to myself that I'll enter my 30s as a healthier version of myself, and start saying yes to doing things I always wanted to do but never thought I could. I completely changed my lifestyle this year - diet, sleep, exercise, hobbies... I started at pretty much zero with bodyweight training and am currently at the very beginner end of progressions and also still have about 40-50 pounds of weight to lose, so I'm pretty positive that by my 30th birthday, I still won't have enough strength yet to take up silks or trapeze or pole, but I don't mind as long as I know I'm on the right track that maybe next year (or the year after) I'll have sufficient strength to learn and actually incorporate it into my life. (I also used to be incredibly flexible as a kid, so I'm working on getting back my flexibility.)
I guess this post is really me trying to figure out a timeline for myself and to make sure I have realistic expectations and goals. At what point in bodyweight training will I have sufficient strength to do well with silks/trapeze/pole? I presume I need to wait until I can do multiple full pushups / pullups / etc.? Or are there ways to learn/train silk/trapeze/pole that I can start sooner and also use the lessons and practice to increase strength? (And how soon would that be - what's the minimum I must be able to do?) Or are full pushups / pullups perhaps not enough and I'd need to be able to do something like muscle ups? Any knowledge would be appreciated. I'd love to set an estimated timeline for myself on when I can start taking lessons but I want to make sure it's realistic. Thanks!
(I will add that money is a factor. If the answer is that technically I can start with no strength and I'll gain strength as I learn...but it will take a year to be able to do basic things - I'd rather wait and improve strength on my own so that I can properly benefit from classes right from the start. Since in order to take these kinds of lessons, I'd have to do some budget cuts in other hobbies, and I wouldn't want to do that if I'd be massively limited by my non-existent strength. So at what strength would I be able to do basic things?)
Thank you!
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2024.05.07 21:01 ohiamtranslol Headed to Berkeley
Hi, figured I'd go ahead and do this since I have all my results as of last week. I'm basically gonna super dox myself in this so I might delete it or pare down the details later but I figure reading stuff on this thread was helpful for me so I'll give ya the whole shebang at first. I hope my successes with this cycle can help motivate at least a couple people who have had relatively serious personal struggles and that my failures with this cycle can provide lessons for what pitfalls to avoid for at least a few future applicants.
3.83 LSAC GPA/180/T3 softs/lgBT/first gen college/nkjd (with irrelevant work that doesn't require a degree but happens to have really good trans health benefits)
A: Berkeley (attending w $$$), Wash U ($$$$)
WL: Chicago, NYU, Columbia, Penn, Michigan
R: HYS
I followed a relatively unique path getting here. I am currently living back in my low COL hometown to "finish my transition." Unfortunately, while it's cheap and I have a strong support system with my supportive dad and close friends from high school still around, my hometown is in one of the most transphobic states, where the state government came incredibly close to banning trans healthcare—even for adults—last year. I signed up for the LSAT as a knee-jerk reaction to that, motivated not by the idea that it was the next logical path for me but out of a combination of righteous fury and incredible fear. While the immediate threat passed, I went ahead and took the test because I was hitting a 180 as my mode result on timed practice tests after a couple weeks of studying (my diagnostic was a 171). When I took the test and the 180 went from theoretical to real there was no question I would be applying this cycle.
For undergrad I went to an elite northeast school (not HYPM). I had always considered law but my career ambitions took a real back burner over the past several years as I focused on my transition. I had a really hard time coming out being from a midwest Catholic background, then adding a second puberty on top of college work was rough and things got even rockier for me during COVID when my mom initially didn't let me come home even though I was living quite close to the epicenter of the pandemic. I spent more than half a year regularly going over a week between in person conversations before my mom relented and let me come home. That time period impacted me very negatively and I was not a good person to be around for awhile there.
I had somewhat of an upward GPA trend in large part because of what progress I did make with my transition in undergrad, though the first semester after I started coming out was my worst GPA besides my first semester of my first year. I took time off school during the whole COVID debacle and never really got any serious work experience. I was mostly just happy to graduate and I managed to do it debt free between need-based aid and my time as a Resident Adviser. I had a pretty classic pre-law major and I didn't do a thesis even though I really wanted to because I was worried about how I would handle going back to school after time off. I got a 4.1 GPA senior year so I definitely regret not doing that thesis, but I got two decent, though likely not outstanding Letters of Rec from the professors I took my senior seminars with (got A+s on both papers, and I got an A+ in a second class with one of them).
I tried to do some serious but low paid work in a major city right after I graduated but couldn't get on a lease with my low income and lack of credit history (anyone really young reading this, get a credit card and use it responsibly, my parents are both actual Boomers and drilled the exact wrong advice into my head). Moving between friends' couches while working like 10 hours wasn't working and was preventing me from reaching the final milestones I wanted to with my transition so I decided to live somewhere cheap and prioritize that instead of my career, which led me back to my hometown.
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Advice for things I wish I had done differently:
- If you want top schools, don't apply later in the cycle. Berkeley was the only school I applied to before Christmas because of the BLOS deadline (didn't get it) and it ended up the only t14 I got into. It's hard not to feel like that mattered, though obviously I'll never know for sure. If anything, don't apply later in the cycle because if you get a ton of waitlists or smaller scholarships than you hoped for it's going to leave you with some what ifs.
- Write about something that makes you happy to write about. I delved into topics that I didn't really want to talk about for these essays because I had a pretty cynical take that as a trans person they wanted to hear my trauma (based in part on regrets from my undergrad applications, when the one top school that I did dump some "probably closeted trans trauma" on gave me admission+). It made me take much longer on my essays than I wanted to because I frankly did not want to work on these essays.
I also had friends, including a professional editor with a national news org, look at my personal statement and they verified that it was good writing (one said to save my first draft for my memoirs, that killed me). They also told me to emphasize my why law a bit more and I don't think I got back to it as much as I should have because I was pretty blinded by the uncomfortable feelings I was unproductively forcing myself to work through. I called out my home state's attorney general by name, it was totally a trauma—>righteous fury type essay. Law school is a professional school, they want to hear at least a few specifics about what you want to do with your career using the degree you're going to earn. I heard this advice, but honestly I wasn't really even thinking about material next steps when I applied since my initial motivation to apply this cycle was fear, anger and a really good LSAT score. Honestly if you're going to go into trauma, don't make it the major focus of your essays. Beyond just not coming across well for a professional school application, it will distract you from exploring material next steps with your career.
- If you want a t-14/t-20 school you should probably apply to the as many of the t-14 as possible, even the ones you wouldn't attend (and even if you had a limited number of fee waivers). The main reason I suggest that isn't even to increase your odds at just getting one—the only school in a state without trans civil rights protections I would have ever considered personally was WashU since it's close to home for me—it's to have more negotiation power for scholarships. Berkeley originally gave me literally nothing in scholarship and having the WashU offer is the only reason I was able to negotiate up to around 70% off tuition. Berkeley explicitly lists peer schools that they recommend you use in their renegotiation process and WashU wasn't listed while many schools I didn't apply to were; I can't help but feel that I potentially left some major money on the table in an effort to save time and less money in the short run.
- Apply to UCLA if you have PI goals. I think this one doesn't need much of an explanation. I can't really remember why I ended up not applying to UCLA, maybe something about not being super interested in LA, but looking back that was a bad reason to not even give it a shot. It was the last school I ended up cutting from my applications list and I pretty quickly started to feel super silly about it.
- Seriously consider a consultant if you think you're not a traditional applicant. I pretty clearly struggled to frame my unique situation. I don't have money to blow but before Berkeley got back to me on renegotiations I was fairly 50-50 split between WashU or reapplying and I would have definitely used a consultant had I reapplied.
- I took multivariable calculus at my local state university while in high school and got a B+ that doesn't show up my transcript and I thought would never count for anything. It unfortunately does make my LSAC GPA worse than my transcript GPA. Then I took accelerated multi my first semester at college because my undergrad didn't count college classes taken while in high school, I thought I would definitely need multi for my degree (I didn't), and regular Calc 3 at my undergrad was only like half the normal multi curriculum because they were trying to get econ bros through with the bare minimum multi knowledge. I did about as well at multi the second time as the first but since accelerated was self-selected there was no curve and I got a B-. Those two grades were the difference from me being at/above most t14 GPA medians and just below most t14 medians and made me a "splitter." It's hard to really blame teenaged me too much but I have some regrets around those two grades.
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I didn't write LOCIs for any of my waitlists. From the beginning I personally rated Berkeley over every school I got waitlisted at except for maybe UChicago and they gave me some weird vibes—not awful but, for example, their OutLaw page only mentioned gay and lesbian and the interviewer, while very kind, phrased a question about my identity in a way that struck me as odd. Since I do have some aspirations for a clerkship and UChicago is closer to home for me I seriously considered writing the LOCI for them anyway, but I ultimately decided I would be happier at Berkeley and didn't write the LOCI. I think if I were waitlisted at HYS I would have written an LOCI to any of them, though the only one I could really see myself as happy at would probably be Stanford.
All in all, I'm fairly happy with where I'm going, but I had my hopes set a little higher after I got the LSAT score that I did. I'm in a group chat of first gen college student law applicants with two friends from undergrad who also applied this cycle and while I knew they both had amazing work experience and I absolutely did not, I thought we would all be about equally competitive since I had the best stats by a decent margin (though we never got too into specifics on that). Perhaps if I wrote more relevant essays we would have been closer to equally competitive, but in the end one of them got a named scholarship at Berkeley and the other got into Stanford (literally one of my best friends in the world, I'm so proud of him and pretty happy that I can say I tutored a future Stanford lawyer on the LSAT. I hope he's done looking at these forums by know but I think he's fairly likely to see this so love you ( ♥ ͜ʖ ♥)). I'm happy all of us look to be ending up in the Bay, though I know named scholarship girl is hoping to get off WLs at top top schools so I'm rooting for her on that.
I feel a bit of a chip on my shoulder that I didn't at least get a named scholarship at Berkeley with a 180 so I'm going try to use that as motivation to perform well in law school. It's also a little strange that I wasn't even fully convinced I wanted to be a lawyer at the beginning of this cycle (though I'm convinced it's the right path for me now after learning significantly more about the career path during the past year) and only got started with applying this cycle as a way out of a state that very nearly made my basic healthcare illegal. Still, I'm actually in a really good place with my transition and I know that is going to really allow me to prioritize my career and my academics in a way I haven't ever been able to before; even living in a red state people assume my gender correctly like 10 times for every 1 time they misgender me. That has taken away a lot of the stress and depersonalization I lived with for most of my life and I feel ready to kick butt in law school! It feels like fate how well this all worked out.
I will be deferring an extra year, which I'm a bit bummed about (and I'm still in the process of sorting that out with Berkeley, though I believe it looks like it will come through just fine), because I couldn't get the timing right on a major trans surgery I have coming up. I'm sure the added peace of mind I will get from knocking that out before law school will more than make up for the delay. That means I'll be in the class of 2028 with all of you who are just about to apply! I don't really check reddit often and I think I somewhat underperformed my stats (?) but if anyone wants my advice anyway I guess you can dm me, particularly if you are first gen or LGBTQ. I think my exact process is particularly tough to replicate, but I think everyone's path to law school is unique.
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2024.05.07 21:01 SoupAbject1677 what do i do with this money?
hi. i’m 20f. i’m a server and i make about 1k+ per week. i also live at home with my parents. i pay my car note every month which is $290. right now i have 8k saved up in my savings, and 7k in a certificate that matures next year. is there anything i can do to make my money compound besides the certificate? should i put all my savings in the certificate? thank you
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2024.05.07 21:01 FriendLost9587 Reaching my limit, I don’t know what to do. Fake promotion, I hate my job and I’m depressed
I was recently congratulated on a “promotion.” When I asked my boss about compensation increase she said there would be no change in my compensation and she was honestly surprised that I even asked whether there would be one.
I’m now leading a team of a few people and would assume way more responsibility. I expressed this and how dissatisfied I was with the news as I obviously expected more money for a bigger role. She told me we could discuss at the end of the year.
Now I’m doing way more “management” work and getting paid the same amount of money.
I feel horrifically inadequate and like this whole thing is completely unfair. My partner makes 4x my salary and insists they are proud of the work I do, but it all feels like BS. I feel useless and talentless. I’m not even worth giving a raise to.
I don’t even know why I bother
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2024.05.07 21:01 Either_Anywhere_5101 Players asking for max
I saw that pg is gonna be an unrestricted agent but is seeking a max contract. I also saw edits of him going to the warriors, which we would know we could not afford him for a max. I understand players trying to get the most money out of their timely span of playing ball but if they wanna win a championship how come they don’t take a pay cut? Like the niners, Fred Warner took a pay cut to make room for others. Like do you wanna championship or do you want to add to your billions? Please educate me on the money aspect if there’s something I’m missing!
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2024.05.07 21:01 gingganggoolie999 I need help - did something when I found out he was cheating on me. He 29M was sleeping with other women, I 29F told him I was pregnant and needed termination money. I was never pregnant
.
I let him think I wanted to keep it. He was terrified and cried.
He hurt me and made me feel used and disrespected. He put me at risk of disease and treated me like nothing.
So he paid a lot of money to make the problem go away. But...
TL:DR: I was never pregnant.
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2024.05.07 21:01 Conscious-Opening-26 Frustrated Graduate
I’m hoping by posting here someone will have some insight or ideas. I recently graduated with a Criminal and Behavioral Sciences Degree and about $90,000 in student debt. I’m not expecting cancelation either due to 80% of my loans being parent loans (I pay them monthly but through my parents). Currently I pay $600 a month in student loans and that is with 1/2 of them still being in deferment and only make $38,000 a year.
The original plan was law school but after college that idea started to seem unlikely. I have a passion for social services and I currently work at a non-profit helping the underprivileged communities in my town and a law degree with a social service focus aren’t highly paid. Law schools looks like it will only add to my debt with very little pay back in the terms of money. I would also still need to work in law school for other bills, but my loans would all go into deferment.
Here’s the question; what am I working towards? Social services require a degree and are widely underpaid (these jobs should still exists and you want people doing these jobs) but I cannot afford to live on what i’m currently making. I don’t know what I need to do or what schooling I should get to make more money without adding to much to my debt. Any ideas are welcome but keep hate to yourself please.
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2024.05.07 21:01 Grouchy-Foot9308 like all countries are trash?
Like, a lot of my negativity comes from external factors such as religion, race, country. I'd rather talk about how rubbish this country is, Although on the one hand, I know that if I moved to another country it would be the same, Because I saw some of the same complaints from several penpals friends abroad. Although I'm sure there are actually some differences that certainly make other countries look better to me, and I plan to go there.
Look at my home country, it is very poor in education, ranking low in science, numeracy and literacy. There are many residents but all of them are very low quality, I don't blame the residents, because sometimes they are already living in poverty created by the government. And the government has perpetuated this for a long time. The free learning program is just a name, nothing is free, most are only for elementary and middle school graduates. Not to mention that there are not many outreach efforts from the government to the public regarding health, the environment, nature and wild animals, which is lame. Corruption is a necessity for the central government and regional governments. Like they don't care that people just eat rocks and make their stomachs hurt. Education costs are increasingly expensive and so is health. Many laws regarding online matters are unnecessary and could discriminate against protesting communities.
But look at the people too, Sometimes I think they allow themselves to be victims and brainwashed by the government . They keep watching TV and social media, Seeing gossip and giving more places and opportunities to people who are clearly richer than them. They also like to smoke and don't care about babies. It doesn't matter that while driving you will also smoke and the ash will blind other people's eyes. They like to use noisy exhausts and disturb other people at night. Where they will also quickly become jealous if they see new items from their neighbors, whether vehicles or accessories. I sometimes wish I could go to a country that regulates vehicles because they are so noisy, but it seems impossible, because the government also likes to flex stupid things like that and likes to destroy the environment behind their calls to protect the environment.
Protecting the environment? They cut down forests, they build new areas unnecessarily and increase the national debt. In fact, they invite people to get into debt and like to deceive people by always claiming it is government land, even though it is the land of indigenous peoples who protect the environment and the wild animals around it.
I hate God who allows all this, even all the supernatural things, ghosts, angels, etc. When many people are in trouble being crushed by their own government, where are the ghosts? Why don't they help terrorize the country's elite? Why don't ghosts help indigenous people who are trying to protect the forests where they are said to live? And where are the angels? Why don't they protect the good indigenous people? Why don't angels help those who are good and protect nature with superpowers and kill evil?
I don't know, I feel like it's increasingly useless to live in this world, it was unfair from the start, wasn't it? Even just writing this makes me feel like it's useless to live tomorrow, because for what? To remain my parents' child? To remain someone's friend? To be someone's lover while other people who are more depraved in life also get the same thing or even much better than me? I live to be an employee and give taxes to the government? Ha ha ha Of course I would rather die than give the results of my hard work to those damn corruptors. I sometimes hope they live a long and sick life where they can only watch the bitterness of the rest of their life without being able to do anything about it, Either they are sick of seeing themselves rotting away in every limb, or seeing their families fighting over the proceeds of their corruption. Should there be more than that because the money is supposed to be for the benefit of the community and their corruption is not equivalent to the crime. Not equal to how many victims were sick, died, intimidated, oppressed, forests were destroyed, animals were killed for all their greed for wealth
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2024.05.07 21:01 echochamber8734 “lol love. Remaking this with tootie”
Looks like Alex is getting ready to remake a video featuring the non-consenting baby she swore she didn't need to create any content or make money. She left a comment on IG on another disabled person's page (screenshot down below) stating that she will be remaking their video.
Considering Noah has completely parished from the scene, I suspect it'll probably be all about her and how she is the absolute best "disabled mom" in the whole wide world despite drinking alcohol all throughout the day and calling Ari pathetic whenever she cries.
But who knows? Maybe the unemployable unemployed Accounting degree holder will resurface just in time for Mother's day so that Honkagus can record another "perfect little family" illusion clip for her clueless supporters.
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2024.05.07 21:01 Conscious-Opening-26 Frustrated Graduate
I’m hoping by posting here someone will have some insight or ideas. I recently graduated with a Criminal and Behavioral Sciences Degree and about $90,000 in student debt. I’m not expecting cancelation either due to 80% of my loans being parent loans (I pay them monthly but through my parents). Currently I pay $600 a month in student loans and that is with 1/2 of them still being in deferment and only make $38,000 a year.
The original plan was law school but after college that idea started to seem unlikely. I have a passion for social services and I currently work at a non-profit helping the underprivileged communities in my town and a law degree with a social service focus aren’t highly paid. Law schools looks like it will only add to my debt with very little pay back in the terms of money. I would also still need to work in law school for other bills, but my loans would all go into deferment.
Here’s the question; what am I working towards? Social services require a degree and are widely underpaid (these jobs should still exists and you want people doing these jobs) but I cannot afford to live on what i’m currently making. I don’t know what I need to do or what schooling I should get to make more money without adding to much to my debt. Any ideas are welcome but keep hate to yourself please.
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2024.05.07 21:01 lucxf The recent Xbox closures show that Sony's approach to acquisitions is more thoughtful
This is not to praise Sony in any way. But I think now it's clear that some ways of buying studios are better than others.
The way Sony does it (which a lot of PS fans don't like) is a lot more conservative. Sony first builds a relationship with a studio over the course of many years, usually serving as publisher. Then, if the opportunity arises, Sony acquires the studio. Most Sony first party studios went this path—not all, of course. Bungie being a recent counter example.
What Microsoft did was basically look for the biggest publishers they could buy and then buy them. There was no connection to the Xbox brand beforehand, no relationship whatsoever. Now, having spent a mountain of money, Microsoft will do anything in its power to squeeze the last bit of juice from those studios. This means that some will get butchered with no remorse. The focus needs to be on the big IPs.
I see a lot of PlayStation fans wanting Sony to buy Square Enix or Capcom, for example. If they buy them, don't be surprised when the exact same thing happens. There's a bunch of stuff on these companies that does not interest Sony in the slightest, and they would get their heads chopped off in no time.
I wasn't thrilled when Microsoft announced they would buy Activsion. It was clear they're only interested in Call of Duty and the potential it has to boost GamePass. My feeling is that MS execs are willing to do anything to make that happen. They bought them for CoD and if any other studio stands in its way, it will be killed.
Now there's a bunch of studios under the Xbox brand (Ninja Theory, Double Fine etc.) walking the mountain's ledge. A stronger wind, and they fall off. We can only hope they don't.
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2024.05.07 21:00 Conscious-Opening-26 Frustrated Graduate
I’m hoping by posting here someone will have some insight or ideas. I recently graduated with a Criminal and Behavioral Sciences Degree and about $90,000 in student debt. I’m not expecting cancelation either due to 80% of my loans being parent loans (I pay them monthly but through my parents). Currently I pay $600 a month in student loans and that is with 1/2 of them still being in deferment and only make $38,000 a year.
The original plan was law school but after college that idea started to seem unlikely. I have a passion for social services and I currently work at a non-profit helping the underprivileged communities in my town and a law degree with a social service focus aren’t highly paid. Law schools looks like it will only add to my debt with very little pay back in the terms of money. I would also still need to work in law school for other bills, but my loans would all go into deferment.
Here’s the question; what am I working towards? Social services require a degree and are widely underpaid (these jobs should still exists and you want people doing these jobs) but I cannot afford to live on what i’m currently making. I don’t know what I need to do or what schooling I should get to make more money without adding to much to my debt. Any ideas are welcome but keep hate to yourself please.
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2024.05.07 21:00 BigEdsHairMayo Asdf
Even before he really knew what it meant, Allen Wong wanted to be rich. As a kid, he didn’t yet equate the word with “luxury” or “status” or “expensive things.” He didn’t think wealth would bring him 85-inch televisions and Jacuzzis, a one-of-a-kind rose-gold Lamborghini in the garage, a wearable Iron Man suit that shoots lasers — though he does, actually, have all of that now. What “rich” seemed to dangle was something simpler, more elementary, more a feeling than anything else: freedom from pain.
Wong’s parents had fled poverty — at one point, his father used tennis balls as flotation devices to illicitly cross waters from Guangzhou into Hong Kong — in order to raise a family in a more opportune land. But growing up in New York City, Wong watched one parent peddle medicinal herbs all day long while the other toiled away in a Chinatown sweatshop. They barely had time to slough off one workday before trudging into the next.
“I didn’t want my life to end up like that,” he told me. “I didn’t want to be absent from my family and only show up a few hours each day after work. I didn’t want my life to be monotonous and stuck in a repeating loop until I die.”
Then, in 2008, right as he was graduating from college, the family convulsed. Wong’s father was ousted from his business, sank into a depression and committed suicide; his mother tripped down a spiral of mental illness. Suddenly, Wong’s entry-level computer programming job was the household’s only source of income, and there was a world financial crisis going on. He had always dreamed about digging out of the middle-class quagmire — striking gold, pulling in enough money from a one-off idea that he would never have to work the way his parents did. But it was now, as anxiety and medical bills piled up, that those idle daydreams began to feel urgent and necessary. So he turbocharged his ambitions. He started coding around the clock, tinkering on D.I.Y. software ideas whenever he wasn’t at work, barely sleeping. He doggedly pushed one project after another to the App Store, praying for something to take off.
Eventually, one did: an app that let users tune in to police scanners around the world. Then another. Their runaway success took even him by surprise. By the time his peers were splurging on their first West Elm sofas, he was a self-made multimillionaire.
Wong found his day job interesting enough, and he liked his colleagues. But submitting himself to a boss’s whims, spending his days trapped like a houseplant under corporate fluorescence, grated at him; it reminded him too much of his parents’ suffering. What, he wondered, could a so-called career really offer him if he had already secured enough money for a good life? The whole point of working was to get what he had just gotten. So, at 25, he bought a $250,000 sports car painted a shimmery lime green — it wasn’t so crazy a purchase, he reasoned, because his police-scanner app was by then generating that amount of revenue in a single month — and announced that he was retiring forever.
It was only after he bought a second exotic car, a five-bedroom house in Celebration, Fla., a dog and a Disney World annual pass for his mother that Wong learned that there was an entire online community of people seeking to do what he had just done. Wong had heard of the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement before, but he didn’t think it really applied to him because of its focus on frugality. FIRE got its start in the early 2000s with a mantra of extreme saving — you may remember hearing about stoic ultraminimalists living off beans and friends’ couches — but it has since come to include all the people who would like to exit the work force on their own terms, at an age of their own choosing, rather than hustling for a paycheck all the way into their 60s. After Wong made a Reddit post sharing his story, it attracted such a flurry from FIRE adherents that he quickly became the quasi president of one of the group’s biggest online enclaves.
Some FIRE aspirants still get to early retirement by the traditional route of simply saving madly. Others, though, truffle-hunt for high-paying W-2s, tax loopholes, bold and risky market bets or big entrepreneurial ploys like Wong’s. The overarching credo of FIRE is that in today’s unpredictable financial landscape, 9-to-5s and decades-long careers have become bad investments: Old-school benefits like pensions and job security are a thing of the past, and wages aren’t even keeping up with the galloping pace of inflation. According to a 2023 survey, one-quarter of Americans would like to retire before age 50. After decades of tolerating workaholic culture as the norm, employees are tired, unafraid to show it and yearning to yank back control of their lives. To fed-up workers willing to do a little bit of math, FIRE offers a straightforward antidote: You can just leave it all behind.
Like Wong, and like so many other people who chase financial independence, I didn’t grow up with a lot of money — which might be why I became obsessed with it.
Long before “side hustle” became Merriam-Webster lingo, I was working Costco snack arbitrage on the elementary-school playground and hawking homemade bookmarks to my teachers. In adulthood, I moved on to online surveys, research studies, plasma donation, vintage resale, parts modeling and dog-sitting in other people’s homes in lieu of paying rent. I have left no income source unturned. I’ve trawled every page of NerdWallet and The Points Guy. I have made questionable margin calls. I have woken up at the crack of dawn to day-trade $NVDA, $TSLA, $TSM. I have “flipped”; I have “churned.” When I feel sad, I open my phone to check on the interest rates in the five-pronged CD ladder I’ve lovingly assembled in my Marcus account, like a tic, to feel better.
Come on, Kids. Let’s Grab Drinks. ImageWong in his Ironman suit standing next to the bathtub. Wong created a police-scanner app that was so popular that it allowed him to retire at 25.Credit...Maggie Shannon for The New York Times Is this all embarrassing to confess? Incredibly so. Would I characterize my relationship to money as “unhealthy”? Also yes. But I often wonder if anybody in this economy, in this country — where more than 60 percent of the work force lives paycheck to paycheck, where the average American is in five- to six-figure debt and often has only cursory knowledge of how he or she got there — has a healthy relationship to money. Simply learning to understand your own finances can feel, several FIRErs said to me, like acquiring a “secret weapon.”
The original FIRE doctrine revolves around delay of gratification. Save your money — ideally as much as 50 to 75 percent of each paycheck — instead of spending it immediately, and when you’ve amassed enough of a nest egg, quit your job and take the rest of your life for yourself. “It’s simple, because the main principles fit on a Post-it note,” Jacob Lund Fisker, a Danish former astrophysicist who is often thought of as the father of the FIRE movement, told me. “However, it is not easy, because everything the typical middle-class consumer has been raised and trained to believe goes against these principles. People have grown up associating success with money and spending money with happiness. They’ve been trained to sit still and perform repetitive work, first by a teacher, then by a manager. They’ve been educated to be specialists in a narrow field and never think outside that box.”
Fisker’s 2010 book, “Early Retirement Extreme” — written mostly while he lived out of an R.V. on $7,000 a year — is one seminal text for early retirees. Two others are “Your Money or Your Life,” a 1992 personal-finance bible written by Joseph R. Dominguez and Vicki Robin, and the blog Mr. Money Mustache, started in 2011 by Peter Adeney, who retired from his software-engineering job in 2005 at age 30 and figured out how to shrink his family’s expenses down to just $24,000 a year. The tao of all three tomes is that minimalist spending and anti-consumption can offer the keys to better living. (Adeney has professed to be “really just trying to get rich people to stop destroying the planet,” but his tens of thousands of monthly visitors tend to be more fixated on his other mantra: “Make you rich so you can retire early.”)
Conventional FIRE adherents are not necessarily big earners or genius mathematicians with incredible impulse control. Their superpower is their expert planning; it’s the ability to see the finish line from miles away that has allowed even some minimum-wage workers to achieve early retirement. One simple FIRE rule of thumb is to first calculate your target “FI number” by multiplying anticipated annual retirement expenses by at least 25, and then squirrel away as much as possible into interest-accruing or tax-advantaged buckets like 401(k)s, low-fee index funds, certificates of deposit, HSAs and Roth IRAs until you hit that number. As an example, if you bring home $150,000 a year, can save half of that and plan to spend $50,000 per year in retirement, then it will take only 16.5 years before you can kiss your job goodbye. For those who earn less or spend more, it will take longer — but for still others who can endure greater sacrifices, FIRE can be possible as early as their 30s.
From these plain origins, many offshoots of FIRE have sprouted up — some much more brazen than others. It’s rare to find anyone these days who actually wants to get to early retirement by living off beans; those people, with their stringent penny-pinching, are largely known in the community as LeanFIRE. A lot more people aim for CoastFIRE (a more measured approach that involves front-loading your retirement savings and “coasting” on compound interest and working lightly until you’re ready to quit) or BaristaFIRE (quitting your job but buttressing your retirement with a side gig, such as that of a part-time barista, to receive health-insurance benefits) or FatFIRE (a luxurious, no-sacrifice approach to retirement, the polar opposite of LeanFIRE — and the subset to which Wong belongs).
You might be tempted to regard early retirees as layabouts, soaking up sunshine while everyone else toils. But why not see them as brave maniacs, daring to build an entirely new vision of the world? Retirement has long been framed as a reward for a job well done — social reformers started pushing for mandatory post-work benefits in the early 20th century, and policies like Social Security later codified the tipping point between labor and leisure — but if FIRE’s incredible popularity of late (the
Fire subreddit alone boasts nearly half a million members) is a defiant reaction to economic hardship, then it’s also a plea to re-evaluate the centrality of work to modern living. Maybe, the movement suggests, we should have always been in it for ourselves, and nobody else, from the start.
To my left was a woman who runs a phone-sex hotline; to my right, a cruise operator, a disaster-response volunteer, a kitchen-appliance entrepreneur, a public-school teacher and a former Off Broadway actor who now lives out of the back of an 18-wheeler and puts 70 percent of her weekly paycheck into index funds. It was a chilly spring weekend, and we had all flown to Cincinnati for EconoMe, an annual all-flavors-of-FIRE conference in which hundreds of people of all ages, from all over, bandy about tips on financial independence from dawn to dusk. The point of FIRE meetups — EconoMe is the largest, but others take place all over the world, some of them at a monthly clip — is only partly to give fiscal advice. Every person’s retirement plan is a highly individualized choreography, after all, so the manifold workshops and breakout groups are meant to offer only high-level ideas. The broader purpose of these get-togethers is more a sort of group therapy, geared to help people achieve their common goals and forge through their common struggles.
Much of the crowd was timid but curious — like Laura Rojo-Eddy, who decided on a whim to fly out from Texas. “My family doesn’t know anything about FIRE,” she told me. “I’ve been really shy talking about it. It’s hard to talk about finances with strangers, but in a way it’s even harder with people you love.” She chanced upon the movement in 2021 via a former colleague’s LinkedIn post, which made her consider for the first time that she may not have to work until the standard age of 65. The friend “posted she was retiring thanks to FIRE, and I was like: That’s really cool! But what the hell is she talking about? And, holy crap, this person’s my age — 40 — and what if I could do that? Should I do that?”
At EconoMe, bank-account totals were traded more freely than phone numbers. The conference’s organizer, Diania Merriam (retired at 33), introduced speakers like Jeremy Schneider (retired at 36), who spoke about how to pick a good financial adviser; the retired divorce lawyer Aaron Thomas, who evangelized the importance of prenups; the real estate tax strategist Natalie Kolodij, who discussed real estate investing and recommended employing your children starting from the age they are able to do household chores, which offers a double benefit of reducing a parent’s taxable income while building an investment-accruing tax shelter for the 7-year-old. Stephanie Zito’s two-hour seminar on the nitty-gritty of “travel hacking,” a.k.a. traversing the world through strategic deployment of credit-card points, had the crowd on the edge of their seats.
In one morning session, a brave volunteer named Krista put her life’s “balance sheet” up on a big screen so that 500 strangers could critique it for blind spots. She is 35, with four kids ages 16, 15, 9 and 7, and makes $32,000 working in a library in Wisconsin. Over the last seven years, since discovering FIRE, she and her husband had slowly paid off $200,000 in credit-card and home- and auto-loan debt. But she knew, she said, humbly dipping her head a bit, that she still had a long way to go, especially when compared with all the younger, already-retired millionaires in the room.
“Wait a second,” Frank Vasquez, one of the conference’s speakers, interrupted. “No. Do you all see this? Krista was a teenage mom who grew up in poverty. We are looking, right now, at a map of a hero’s journey.”
Jackie Cummings Koski of Dayton, Ohio, grew up on food stamps, learned about FIRE in her early 40s and retired at 49 with $1.3 million in savings.Credit...Brian Kaiser for The New York Times During a break, Jackie Cummings Koski, an Ohio local, shared her story with me: She grew up on food stamps and had a “wake-up call” with money after an acrimonious divorce left her a single mother. She learned about FIRE in her early 40s. Newly enlightened, she started saving 40 percent of the salary from her five-figure job, reached financial independence at 47 and pulled the trigger on retirement at 49, with $1.3 million in savings. “My corporate job had nothing to do with what I want to do,” Koski told me. “I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it.” She added: “While most FIRE people brag about having an old car with 200,000 miles or whatever, I drive a luxury car. But nobody’s going to chastise me, because I still retired early, even with that car, even with having made some mistakes!” Koski spends her time nowadays creating financial content and advocating for personal-finance classes to be added to high schools, and she recently wrote a “FIRE for Dummies” manual.
To my surprise, a sizable portion of the FIRE crowd at EconoMe was older. This wasn’t so surprising to Bill Yount, a 58-year-old retired physician who recently started up a podcast with Koski and another friend, Becky Heptig, that speaks to older demographics. “The average American is a late starter,” Yount told me. “That’s just who we are, living in this consumption society and not having the mentality of saving often or early.” And things are no longer “9-to-5, 40 years and a gold watch” the way they were for his parents’ generation: “I’m not in the gold-watch generation. Gen X got lost, got forgotten.”
Heptig, who is 68, found herself in dire financial straits in her 50s, when her husband’s small business faltered. “I got really scared, thinking we will never get out of this debt and we will never retire,” she says. They took a course from the financial-advice radio host Dave Ramsey, and her husband signed up for a W-2 job. After that, they started saving madly. “We were net-worth zero at 50 years old, and he retired at 63 — so for us, where we started from, we consider ourselves retiring early,” Heptig says. She had made the same wild discovery that everyone in FIRE does: that it can really take as little as a decade to hit early retirement, from the moment you learn about it and start planning. But as Yount put it to me: “You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t even know to go looking for it.”
Maybe it’s because I know too much about looking for money that I found myself, while reporting this article, especially drawn to the subculture of FatFIRE — and to the lavish, unapologetic, in-your-face money philosophy that Allen Wong and others of his ilk prefer. FatFIRE flies in the face of all the other variants of FIRE. It is anti-anticonsumption. Its typical benchmark is to accumulate enough wealth that you can comfortably spend at least $100,000 a year in retirement, but some highfliers aim for much, much bigger sums. It espouses an unbridled maximalism, a have-it-all abundance.
While most other FIRE communities steer toward the friendly and pragmatic, FatFIRE’s adherents tend to be jaded, brusque, laser-focused. They hunt for the “exit,” in the tech-world manner of speaking: a fast, lucrative way out. On the
FatFIRE subreddit, aspirants ogle severance packages, geo-arbitrage, REIT, tax loopholes, high-risk options straddles and potential business moonshots. Successful FatFIRErs applaud one another for hitting double-digit-millions net worth, debate the merits of private jets versus second homes and agonize over how large a trust fund is ethical to set up for their kids. And just as Fisker and Adeney were beacons to early-era FIRE devotees, Allen Wong is FatFIRE’s mythic hero.
Wong is quiet and unassuming in person. When I finally met him this spring — three years after we first began chatting online — near his childhood home in Queens, he wore jeans, Asics and a wary self-consciousness. Now in his mid-30s, he has comfortably enjoyed nearly a decade of leisure; he spends the bulk of his days playing pickleball and counseling strangers online on how to follow in his footsteps. He’s not particularly interested in fame, so he posts, as the senior moderator of
FatFIRE, under his app company’s name. For someone who is a living talisman against the tenets of conventional living, he speaks with a surprising calm — though his eyes flashed with a certain pride whenever we talked about his childhood or his father. Even though it sprouted up only seven years ago,
FatFIRE is on the verge of overtaking
FIRE in size, Wong told me. Membership doubled during the pandemic despite moderators’ intentionally hiding the forum from Reddit’s homepage, he said, showing me a graph, and he added that most of its members seem to be “early-career American men.”
This makes sense. Millennials may have been ushered into the work force with the encouragement to hustle, but we soon found ourselves jerked around by utterly unaffordable housing, pandemic layoffs, salaries that flopped flat while costs went stratosphere-high. Nearly half of young adults have “money dysphoria,” according to a recent survey from the personal-finance company Credit Karma. Online, trends like “quiet luxury” and “dupe culture” glorify totems of wealth while making it clear how depressingly inaccessible that echelon is for the average Joe. If the recent “antiwork” movement laid bare the disillusionment of the young work force, then FatFIRE represents those feelings put into action.
Some FatFIRE success stories are like Wong’s: a result of obsessive entrepreneurism. Just as many are a byproduct of grinding away at a regular, albeit high-earning, job for enough years. (Fisker, for one, argues that FatFIRE is just an aesthetic rebranding of the work-smart-not-hard ethos that has been woven throughout American history.) In San Francisco, Sam Dogen faithfully saved his finance-job paychecks for 13 years before retiring in 2012 to live off passive investment income. He initially budgeted $100,000 for him and his wife to spend per year, but they upped the target to $200,000 after having their first child, then to $300,000 after a second child — and recently again to $350,000 to account for the recent bout of unchecked inflation. “We choose to live in an expensive coastal city and choose to have two children,” Dogen told me. “But you look at the $300,000 budget I made for a family of four, and you’re like, This is a pretty middle-class lifestyle. FatFIRE is almost a necessity if you want to live in San Francisco.”
“I think more people should aim for FatFIRE, because even if you don’t hit it, you’ll be at regular FIRE,” Jeff Underwood, a San Diego-based FatFIRE aspirant who started chasing financial independence after he lost his house and sank $10,000 into debt, told me. “The idea of LeanFIRE makes me super nervous. Health care costs are going up. There are all these unknowns. You could really find yourself in trouble.” Through smart tips he picked up on financial-planning forums, Underwood’s net worth steadily climbed from $0 in 2011 to $1 million in 2023. He is drawn to FatFIRE’s cheeky energy and its emphasis on securing a big safety net: “I had spent so long in the survival mind-set,” he says. “My default position is to plan for the worst, because I’ve already been through the worst.”
Wong now splits most of his time between houses in Celebration, Fla., and in New York City. He wakes up early to play pickleball and can keep at it for hours if the weather is nice. Because he has so much free time to practice, he has gotten good enough to compete against elite players and coach novices. (He offered to teach me how to play, but it was a wind-whipped 35 degrees when we met up in early April, so we went to have soup dumplings instead.) Otherwise, he reads up on tech and cybersecurity news, plays video games and undertakes home-renovation projects. His houses have been burglarized three times, although he managed to halt the latest attempt with a self-programmed alarm system. He used to make videos about his exotic car collection on YouTube, a few of which went viral, but he grew tired of being a “content creator” because it felt too much like having a job. Plus, he had already done the whole rack-up-a-huge-number thing before — with money.
“It was as if I fast-forwarded through an entire movie, and the end credits are slowly rolling,” Wong told me recently, recalling his first, restless years in retirement. “There was nothing more to watch, and all my peers were still busy watching the movie that I already finished. After I traveled the world and had done just about every possible fun thing I could possibly do, I often found myself wondering, What now?”
Life after early retirement: the elephant in the room. What to do after the cruises, the skydiving, the teetering stack of books on the night stand? The main danger of FIRE is that you might be running hard away from something rather than toward it — that you’re propelled only by the too-nebulous idea of escape. And then, even for those who lay out a clear road map for decades of nirvana, the loneliness can eat at you.
That’s why some, like Merriam, EconoMe’s organizer, host regular social events in their local cities. The online community ChooseFI maintains a sprawling network of hundreds of local FIRE groups in cities around the world. Amy Minkley, who retired by working in Asia as a teacher and saving up to $90,000 of her salary each year, organizes an annual FIRE meetup in Bali as a way of keeping up the community that saved her from depression: “It just felt like someone had thrown me a life raft, and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she told me.
A lot of other people go the Mr. Money Mustache route: They blog. Their posts about income spreadsheets and VTSAX returns then attract the like-minded, as potential friends or even lovers. Koski has heard of romances blossoming among fellow FIRErs — though many of them prefer the company of a FIRE Luddite. “A good chunk of my friends are on my phone,” Gwen Merz, who began saving up for FIRE when she discovered the Mustache blog at age 22 and reached CoastFIRE at age 32 with $400,000 in savings, told me.
A common worry is when to stop. How much is enough? Why not make more? Since there is an upper limit to money’s effect on joy — studies have shown that global happiness tops out at income levels of about $75,000 a year — chasing infinite wealth may be psychologically futile.
“I think people can accumulate money to the detriment of their health and happiness,” says Alan Donegan, who with his wife, Katie, lives a nomadic lifestyle and coaches FIRE newbies toward their resignation letters by “trying to show money is a tool to create your version of an extraordinary life.” There are also those like Oliver Truong, a 27-year-old who cares less about the dollars and cents of it all than about fulfilling a self-imposed challenge: “I think FIRE people are some of the most creative people I’ve ever met,” he told me at EconoMe. “At least for me, it was never about the money, honestly. It was more about just doing something I wanted on my own.”
For those who succeed at early retirement, especially at the FatFIRE level, a surprise depression can set in. “It’s quite alarming and sad to see how many people are lost after they do this,” Wong’s
FatFIRE co-moderator, Mike Doehla, told me. Doehla himself thought he was prepared for the social segregation when he FatFIREd at 40 in 2022 through his nutrition-coaching business. He wasn’t. “It has been pretty isolating, and almost awkward at times,” he confessed. Based in a small town in upstate New York, Doehla doesn’t know anyone in real life who has retired early, and all his friends are still working. But, he told me, “I think I’m psychologically broken from ever working someone else’s schedule again,” and he is keen to discover who he is, as a person, outside of work. If the quest for happiness were a tangible metric, Doehla reckons he is about 60 percent of the way there: “I have this FOMO, this empty cup, regarding what is going around me that so many people have experienced, that I just want to taste a bit.”
At EconoMe, I met a 52-year-old architect who considers himself “FattishFIRE”; he and his wife spend about $8,000 a month in Boston and would like to keep up that lifestyle in retirement. But, he told me, “I pretend I have a lot less than I do.” He lives in a building where many of his neighbors “have very little money, live off government assistance and are critical of wealthy people. They don’t know we’re like ‘stealth wealth.’ Would they not like me anymore?” (For this reason, he asked not to be identified.) He has saved enough money to retire within two or three years if he wants to, but he worries about how he’ll be perceived within a field that takes pride in its workhorse culture: “I’d always thought ‘architect’ was my personality and was going to be until I died,” he said. “Am I being too nervous? Am I crazy? I’m still a little ashamed.”
Sam Dogen budgets $350,000 a year in expenses for his family of four: “FatFIRE is almost a necessity if you want to live in San Francisco,” he says.Credit...Maggie Shannon for The New York Times After a decade in retirement, Dogen, the San Francisco FatFIREr, recently did the unimaginable: He decided to go back to work. He doesn’t really need the money, but the endless leisure has begun to wear on him. “I can’t do pickleball all day,” Dogen told me. “So what’s the responsible thing to do? And the responsible thing to do is to find a job that has good purpose, good meaning, where you can work with some smart people and have a lot of camaraderie.” He added: “It just feels good to be part of something. I think it’s really important that we all feel like we’re part of something, contributing.” He took one gig but quit because it ate up too much time, and he is now looking for a less demanding part-time position.
Wong, these days, loves to volunteer. He donates to charities, serves on neighborhood boards and of course plays both chairman and soothsayer to the fraternity (for it is largely male) of
FatFIRE. Wong doesn’t so much mind being solitary in real life — he considers himself a lone wolf and is often wary of making new friends for fear they will try to take financial advantage of him. He has been duped in the past by family members or acquaintances, including a friend who falsely claimed to need support for lifesaving heart surgeries. It’s not uncommon for him to get Venmo requests from strangers. (Many of his pickleball acquaintances learned about his wealth when a photographer showed up on the court to shoot him for this article.)
I asked him what he plans to do in his second decade of retirement — or his third or fourth or beyond. He doesn’t know yet. He told me he has been intrigued by the rise of A.I. and has flirted with the idea of a D.I.Y. project in that space. Ultimately, though, he hasn’t pursued it. He fears even self-employment would bring back the manic stresses he fought so hard to leave behind. “When I FatFIREd, I freed myself,” Wong told me. Inner peace, then, is the precious goal. He treasures all the time he has been able to spend with his mother and may one day share his wealth with children of his own. “Should I have worked more and made even more money? I’ve definitely left many millions of dollars on the table by stepping away from it all,” he told me. “But I always end up coming to the same conclusion: There’s no point in making so much money if you’re not going to be happy. I’d rather be free.”
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2024.05.07 21:00 harpua555 Looking for advice on heating + cooling solution
I've spoken with some contractors, and so far have gotten very different answers from them ranging from home is incompatible to recommending giant units. Looking for some expert advice on here from folks who aren't going to be making the money off my decision:
Current heat - nat gas furnace in basement, ductwork throughout Current cooling - none Climate - Maine SqFt. - 2750 total ducted, ~1850 above grade living space
Ideally using the existing ductwork instead of littering split heads everywhere would be my choice (if possible?)
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http://activeproperty.pl/