nshelly

When I was an American PhD student in Zurich, none of the Swiss banks would accept me—except the official post office bank. This was due to the stringent FATCA laws, which made U.S. citizens too burdensome for the traditionally privacy-centric Swiss banks.

Within the first few months, I accumulated around 40K CHF in salary that the university owed me (technically from the Swiss government, since researchers were federal employees). Eventually, the university emailed me to ask if I’d like to pick up my money in cash (Bargeld). Apparently, this wasn’t uncommon.

One day I went to the office to collect it. They asked which denomination I preferred (I assumed 20s or 100s). I asked for a mix, and they handed me several envelopes filled with 1,000 CHF notes and smaller bills. I distinctly remember carrying multiple envelopes. At one point, as I walked back to my office on top overlooking Zurich, a gust of wind blew behind me. I turned around and saw colorful 200 CHF and 1,000 CHF notes scattered along the road. I calmly walked back and picked them up.

For a few months, I paid my rent and groceries entirely in cash. The Swiss didn’t think anything of it—in fact, it was fairly common. Eventually, I was able to open an account and received a yellow two-factor authentication device that looked like an old calculator. I deposited the rest of the money and, for the remainder of my studies, used the “yellow calculator” to pay bills online by debit. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQhylNX...

I never did receive an official Swiss credit card which was fine. However, I did accumulate funds a Swiss 401K which is another story unto itself.

I would assume they could also dump memory, i.e. `/dev/mem`. Agreed they would need to also do frequent memory snapshots, but lots of malware will also run in the background waiting indefinitely, and often as the same name as common Linux processes but different hashes.

Yes, great win all round, and also can help save on administrative costs. Poetically it was Einstein who said:

Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn't … pays it.

I imagine Quickbooks is adding more features as part of an upsell. The business loans by paying invoices upfront was a bit of a ZIRP policy though (now interest rates to SMB's likely would be prohibitively high, ~15%).

Intuit also produces Quickbooks -- which actually is SMB accounting software, and used internationally.

As most of their revenue is from businesses who wouldn't easily be able to free-file, I wouldn't be surprised if Intuit's lobbying to prevent a free tax filing offering from the government was causing them more harm than good.

Congrats Geoff! During a trek for Iraq and Afghan war veterans, Geoff made the time to meet with us and provide office hours on our hairbrained ideas. A few of us made it into YC and are super appreciative of his support and feedback over the years. YC is lucky to have Geoff lead the organization.

Would love to connect. My email is in my profile.

Superhuman. Not cheap, but I love how fast it is with its native app (Electron I think). They write updates immediately locally, and sync that in the background, so you can breeze through your unsorted email quickly (pressing keyboard shortcut 'e'), and pressing 'tab' to switch between split inbox views. They also show read/open receipts if you enable it, and have keyboard shortcuts for unsubscribing as well. When you reach inbox zero they reward you with a new, beautiful picture every day.

A fully-featured integrated calendar is lacking but apparently will be improved in the coming year or so.

Princeton's current 2018 size is $25.9B. In 2001 it was $8.4B, so a annual growth rate of over 6% per year.

So Princeton would have to spend 1.6% of their endowment every year to offer free tuition to their students. Assuming their rate of return on the endowment (including alumni contributions) can grow faster than the cost of tuition growth, they can provide free tuition for their students indefinitely.

Is there a form of exercise you enjoy? Even walking is fine. Put on a podcast and go for a stroll (longer the better). Then afterwards, use the momentum and sense of accomplishment to push yourself to try something "strange" or out of your comfort zone. I think with Uber/Lyft drivers, I agree that the conversation in the car is very fleeting, so it's important to invest and try to build new relationships that will be more long-lasting (e.g. like a sports club, board games group, book groups, etc).

And in California, they (and their children) can also inherit the low tax basis from when their parents bought the property. Thank you Property 13.

Keep in mind Paragon Real Estate Group is motivated by turning over inventory and encouraging people to buy.

"longer term trends have always been positive"

This suggests that you should always buy if you're planning to stay in the Bay Area for the long term. The problem is that if you need to move within the Bay Area, then you could be setting yourself up for a very long commute, when one could have rented and invested the difference in the bull market over the past 10 years. And if you do ever leave the region (like many do, despite what the article suggests that lumps overseas in-migration with domestic out-migration), then you're looking at a 8-10% in fees to buy and then sell. Many parts of the region still haven't recovered from the bubble of 2007, and a more apt study would be to examine historical prices in urban areas like Boston or New York and the opportunity costs. A study of 100 years of commercial real estate in NYC show how property values were 30% lower in 1999 than they were in 1899, adjusting for inflation, and within, any decade values often rise and fall by 20–50% in real terms. https://economics.mit.edu/files/5887

Good point. Prices for each CPT code accepted by by insurance company are kept secret, and the chargemaster published by a hospital is so inflated it's basically useless. For some diagnostic tests, it's pretty straightforward to understand, but for others like an ER bill where there can be dozens of claim lines and codes, it can be really hard to understand and the patient is relatively powerless to do anything about it after the fact.

You're right, patients get an itemized bill. The thing is the bill is pretty cryptic with CPT codes (and modifiers, ICD codes etc) practically unique to each payer as each payer interprets the AMA's guidelines differently. Payer A, say Blue Shield, asks for codes 99453 while Payer B (e.g. Aetna) wants code 92502 for the same procedure. So the patient is really clueless to know if 1) it's the right code, 2) they got charged too much, or 3) the insurance made a mistake in adjudicating the claim.

I know a company that was trying to help patients understand their medical bills, and for one bill, the hospital accidentally put down 10cc for an antidote for a snake bite, 10 times, when it should have been just once. The cost was in the tens of thousands instead of the thousands, and the hospital eventually fixed the claim and resubmitted, but the insurance company simply billed the patient.

The amount an health insurance company pays is kept secret and we can assume is far less. Otherwise, insurance companies would find ways to open up more hospitals to compete with the large irrational ones, or face huge costs. The hospitals know they can get away these amounts on paper, so they do.

We should demand price transparency -- as we do for almost all direct-to-consumer purchases. Businesses can charge different amounts for volume purchases to other businesses, but it would be considered discriminatory if a restaurant didn't show their prices and then when you got your bill, it said -- oh, your company's not paying for it -- so it's $15,000 in extra fees.

Caring for an infant is hard, high-skilled work and something you want to get right. "Shaken baby" is a real thing and can lead to development disorders. A hands-on attentive caretaker has a very good ROI -- healthier, more communicative toddler and child. "You get what you pay for [or do yourself]" is a real thing for the first few years of a child's life, and having family nearby, which we fortunately did, was invaluable.

Of course, of the 4,000 new residents, only 12% voted. The postage requirement was still required, and nearly all the new residents didn't bother to send in their ballots.

And half of those got confused and voted to increase the "affordable housing" requirement to 50% of new housing stock, making non-Skylynr housing prohibitively expensive to build, and requiring citizen approval (by referendum) of all new developments in the Historic Market Street Corridor, including all areas east of Golden Gate Park.

I'm a fan too. I think we'd see fewer people take Uber/Lyft's for short drives (less than 2 miles), but commute traffic will stay the same due to "induced demand." Any reduction in the number of cars on the road will be met by more people willing to do a "super commute" from outside the city. Right now the traffic into cities is dependent on the jobs (and their pay) available downtown, and people's willingness to commute from afar. If the number of jobs increase, or highway capacity increases (along with added housing in the suburbs), more people will take to the roads and the roads will still be clogged. Only if a lot of mass transit is added to distant suburbs and no growth in suburban housing would the amount of traffic decrease. Anyways, vehicular traffic could still be reduced during non-peak hours which is a great thing.

Thanks for clarifying! That’s a lot of new track for one metro area. “Buying in bulk” seems to ring true with many of these expansions.

The Financial District of Manhattan (and Midtown) is the only place like that in the U.S., and most people have been to Times Square, so it does a good job conjuring up an emotional reaction in voters.

It's just that many of the stakeholders in these areas such as long-time property owners in the westside of San Francisco and residents with rent control fearing gentrification would not benefit directly from new development. Their incentives simply aren't aligned with younger generations who want to live and raise families in a city with reasonable housing costs. To break this quandary we simply to need intervention at the higher level. Congestion, long commutes and sprawl is hurting the U.S. (and Californian) economy so when change comes it will come at the higher level than the city.

If there were a Paris or Barcelona in the U.S, tons of people would move there. Cost of living in this "Paris" or "Barcelona" would skyrocket and you'd see the transit system hit the max and cost of housing skyrocket. There are just fewer cities in the United States with good transit systems, low-crime, high quality of life and urban amenities. This hypothetical city would go through similar growing pains as NYC and San Francisco have gone through with decent transit systems that just can't keep up with population growth.

The logical conclusion of this article is that a higher entity, likely the federal or state government, needs to step in and provide resources to help these mid-tier cities with their growing pains, assuming the optimal scenario is not another metro area with suburban sprawl and lots of traffic. As it stands now, it's unlikely this will change until the system gets much worse due to the high cost of intervention. It costs $1 billion for just one mile of rail in Los Angeles and New York City, and Paris has 133 miles of rail to support a population of only 2 million.

Yup, in general investing an equivalent money in stocks is better than leveraging your income to buy an illiquid, non-diversified asset like a single-family home.

From Jan 1987 to Jan 2018, prices in San Francisco MSA have gone up 5.0% a year, ((258.81-46.95)/46.95)^(1/(2018-1987)). The equivalent amount invested in the stocks over that time period would have yielded 10.3% a year[1], with dividends reinvested.

Unless you are planning to use it as an investment property and reinvest rents (net of property tax, maintenance) in other properties, it still doesn't appear clear that buying a home vs renting and investing heavily in the market is a better bet, not to mention other intangibles like upkeep and longer commutes.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA

[2] https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

I believe the Case-Shiller index is "seasonally-adjusted", not "inflation-adjusted"[1]. What makes you think it's adjusted for inflation?

[1] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2018/03/2...

If a student can get into MIT that student will likely be financially well off no matter where they go, even after an upper middle-class family spends nearly $300,000 in tuition, room and board. It's the edge cases that are much harder. Try comparing an expensive private school for four years with a state school (three if they accept AP courses).

Of course there are a lot of other non-financial reasons to attend college, such as growing a circle of friends and being exposed to new ideas in a formal setting. It's unclear how to value that properly however.

Child care is $20,000 to $30,000 per year in NYC and SF and many cities, the cost of the child's health care insurance is around $300-400 for a low deductible plan, and the extra rent, is around $1,200 for an additional bedroom, so the fixed costs are at least $40,000 per year, or one partner needs to drop out of the workforce which has its own costs. The birth itself is equivalent to the cost of only a few months of the child's life. You have to really want children to pull it off in American cities today.

I think the only viable option here if we want children (and their parents) in cities -- which would require buy-in from the older generation -- is to raise property / land taxes and use this to afford better schools and pre-K (so you're only on the hook for the first few years of the child's life), and to build more housing of course.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Right, but the mantra in the personal finance circles is "Mortgage Your Retirement" because you are borrowing all the money you will need to retire -- say $2m, investing it in the S&P 500 and paying that off over time. If the market goes up than you're that much closer to paying it off and retiring. The authors recommend only 2:1 leverage so only a 50% decline would wipe you out. The problem I personally have with this is the declining marginal utility of money. Losing everything (or a large portion) to squeak out better returns isn't worth it.

There was someone on Bogleheads who posted about trying this, exhausting their student loans and credit cards, but unfortunately when they started it was Fall of 2007. The guy had pretty bad luck, but I'm sure it's worked for other people especially those who don't know it (e.g. "I bought options on Google in 2006!") https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5934

Right, but the $700m valuation was preferred, and the employees likely paid AMT tax on the FMV (about 10-30% of that value). It's certainly sad but at least they can write off the AMT loss against capital gains if they have any and wish to, or take the $3,000 credit every year.

I think for early stage companies you should see the startup as a 1) learning opportunity first and chance to work with a great team driven by a passion outside of pure money, and 2) an out-of-the-money call option / favorable lottery ticket. Also, the new tax bill got rid of AMT for incomes under $500,000 for individuals ($1m for couples). It's difficult to go over that amount with ISO's as the FMV of your shares is valued at around 10-30% of preferred. You could exercise your options once every year for example to stay under that limit.

If you've already exercised and paid AMT, try to invest your other savings and if you need to take a loss you can offset it against those capital gains.

While it might not be something you're passionate about, I would also add that reading about startup law, discussing with your peers, and knowing your rights, and even asking (getting in writing) the terms of the investment rounds, is invaluable and certainly something you should do if you want to understand your full package.

Good point. But the person getting an extra $10,000 a day for losing an hour of sleep every day would need financial discipline (harder when we don't sleep) not to bump up their expenditures otherwise it would just set themselves up trading health for short term financial gain. It's very difficult to just snap your fingers when you're wealthy and overweight with blood pressure issues in your 40's and 50's to get back to and maintain a normal BMI for the rest of your life.

I think the hard part is that cooking and cleaning (some items) can be done while effectively multi-tasking, chatting about someone's day or collecting one's thoughts. I have a young daughter and when I put something in the microwave, cut up vegetables, fetch spices, or load the dishwasher, we can generally keep the conversation and activity going. Cooking or baking something from scratch is obviously much more time-intensive. Getting food delivered doesn't really save that much time. However, cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming are generally blocking activities and thus easier to rationalize outsourcing. I would agree that we as humans have a very hard time valuing our present and future time, so I would always love to have sometime critique my day. "Hey, you enjoy your job at tech company X enough for the next two years, so it seems like you can afford a laundry service for the next 10 years, time which you can spend more at playgrounds and working out, why don't you do it?"