Freelance Consultant's Diary

If you are like me and like to trade commodities like gold, silver, and oil (I have traded IAU, UCO, and SLV), you will simply need to do a lot more paperwork while filing your income tax return with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).  Even if you do your taxes using TurboTax, which pulled all my documents from the TD Ameritrade account, I was still stumped when it came time to complete the form related to these trades.  So this is how it works.  Unlike other equities that are simple buy/sell, the commodities are tricky.  Basically, the owner, iShares, of this exchange traded fund (ETF) sells a tiny portion of your holding to cover their costs, and that is why you will see that each month there are trades that you have not made.  In my case, the actual quantity was zero shares and the total proceeds were just $22. So how to calculate the cost basis?   I suggest that you plug the data in a spreadsheet.  In first column, list the 12 months.  In the...

Yes, the super-rich can lose a billion dollars to gambling , but I thought that was rare.  Elliott Orsillo, CFA, co-founder of Season Investments in Colorado Springs, tells CNBC, "One of my clients had $400,000 in credit card bills. He came to me because it was impeding his ability to fuel his jet. The credit card companies would not allow him to charge his fuel anymore."   If this were not true, I would have thought it was a joke.  I wonder if the wealthy are also "too rich to fail," that eventually someone bails them out.

During the late 90s, I found an awesome job that I loved, but it required a 75 mile commute one way, from Connecticut to New Jersey.  Yeah, it was mostly highway driving and I completed it in about 90 minutes or so each way, but with occasional delays, I was spending about 20 hours each week driving.  Around that time the Internet was just starting and my employer was terrified how their business of information collection and processing would be impacted by it, so they were very reluctant to embrace anything new, including telecommuting (which was emerging as new concept in the dot-com boom).  Since several employees were like me, eventually, they let us work one day from home, that we got to choose.  The company insisted on a separate phone line so that work calls could be redirected and an Internet connection, which was fine for me, but wow, it was awesome.  I got to sleep late, and a minute after my office closed at 530 PM, I was home.  It made such a di...

Ouch!  And that is when we are yet to see the full impact of impending massive immigration of cheap labor from Latin America , spread of free online education , and more visas for high tech workers .  The Times is reporting that a college degree is now a must for jobs that typically were done by high school graduates.  They cite the example Atlanta, GA law firm Busch, Slipakoff & Schuh which has hired newly minted college grads for jobs like filing clerks, receptionist, paralegals, administrative assistants. etc. arguing that they are much more motivated, talented, and smarter.  Job creator (I love this funny term) Adam Slipakoff, the firm’s managing partner proudly proclaims, “Going to college means they are making a real commitment to their futures. They’re not just looking for a paycheck.”  I guess the only winners in this are universities that keep charging ridiculous sums for college diplomas .  I don't see how the college graduates benefit and i...

I have been taking a massive open online course Introduction to Philosophy at Coursera .  I have always been curious about philosophy and this free course sucked me right in.  I have already completed four weeks and wait eagerly for the next week's course material to be uploaded.  I watch the videos, do the reading, and take the quiz.  I must confess that I have learned a lot more this way than I have done in some of my university classes the old fashioned way.  I am already debating what course to take next.  Should I continue to delve deeper into philosophy or try something entirely knew, like genetics or psychology?  I am so excited about the future of online learning that I wonder what will happen to brick and mortar universities where students pay tens of thousands of dollars each year to live on campus, drink lots of beer, party like there is no tomorrow, and then occasionally study.  They also have lots of weekends, holidays, and breaks w...

I don't know how it got into my head that one should workout every day , but when I decided to get more disciplined about my fitness , I found that the best way to be regular was to make it part of my routine.  So I argued that if I could do some exercises before the morning shower that I took five days a week before going to work, it would work well, and it did.  I am proud to say that for almost 20 years now, it has worked very well for me.  Just in case, a weekday happens to be a holiday or I am on vacation , I don't workout or might workout later in the day, but other than that, it works for me.  It has also helped me stay reasonably healthy and fit , despite the fact that I work from home on a computer . It was in this context that I came across a study (published in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine) by Dr. Gary Hunter of University of Alabama at Birmingham.  He has found that when it comes to exercise “ less may be more .”  According...

The FTC has found that about 5% of Americans have errors in their credit reports and that could mean that you may have a harder time borrowing or just pay higher interest rates.  While I am not so meticulous in getting my free credit report copy each year , and during the last year, I refinanced my home , changed my auto insurance policy , and leased a car without any problem, after reading about this report, I still decided to get a copy of my credit history .  Obviously, it is free, and easy to get (you have to remember some basic information about your previous addresses and loans because each credit agency asks for different information to confirm your identity). Well, I did find some minor errors on my report.  For instance, Experian completely missed one address that I lived at during the late 90s for several years.  And Equifax actually made two addresses out of one, in one case it was correctly listed as Apt# A19 and another time as Apt#819.  I don't kn...

For anyone who loves potatoes, this is a simple snack to make.  What we do is to make a lot of these and then freeze them.  Yeah, they don't taste as yummy as when eaten fresh, but there are times that when we stop working at around 6 PM, that by the time I climb one flight of stairs up to the kitchen, I am famished.  Lorena comes down from her second floor office and she too has no energy to cook.  Then, we pull a few of these babies out and bake them for a couple of minutes to munch them with a glass of wine , while we contemplate what to have for dinner, say, something like stuffed poblano peppers .  To make these, boil potatoes, peel them, mash them with your hands so they still have small pieces, add peas and chopped cilantro, salt, and black pepper.  You can cook them on a flat pan after spraying them with some olive oil, though, they will turn out pretty good in the oven as well.

A relatively simple dish to make at home for anyone who is busy but wants to eat something interesting.  The hardest part is probably the roasting of the peppers but once you do that, get rid of the carbon.  From here on, it is entirely up to you what you want to stuff it with.  We used shredded Monterrey Jack cheese with pre-cooked Beluga lentils and then topped it off with Mexican corn salsa .  After a long day at work, this is easy and delicious, especially with a glass of Spanish wine .

I am sure that most families struggle with menu planning but Lorena and I do even more because we both run our business from home and often eat almost all of our meals at home .  We are very selective about where we go to eat out because unless we are positive that the extra calories are worth it, we would rather cook something fresh at home .  Trust me, after a few years of doing that, we are bored and have run out of ideas, despite watching way too much Cooking Channel and borrowing tons of cooking books from the library.  That is when we came across this service in which they mail you a box with a bunch of ingredients along with menus.  The first one was from Mexico and the tortilla soup was cooked within minutes of arrival because it came just before lunch.  Definitely yummy.  We also devoured the Mrs Renfro's chipotle corn salsa in a matter of days.  Delicious, as well.  We also tried the Nonna Lole's Soffrito for Arroz Valenciana and it is...

Call me unreasonable, but there are parts of the world for which I have a soft corner: France , Spain , Japan , and Argentina .  That often results in consumption of way too much wine from France, Spain and Argentina, and a lot of Japanese food .  Monte Ducay is a delicious wine with a earthy flavor.  We combined it with some delicious tapas made at home.  Strongly recommended.

When I was trying to lease a car during past spring, I did not even consider a hybrid because the initial cost is so high, even with all the tax incentives I was going to get.  So no surprise then that like most Americans, I ended up leasing a regular SUV.  I knew that we must look at the total cost of ownership of a vehicle over time and this chart below (from Union of Concerned Scientists) demonstrates that if you buy and use an automobile for 15 years and drive like an average American, a good hybrid is much cheaper.  My concern is that unless you take excellent care of your vehicle, 15 is a very long time.  While I am not as spoiled as many Americans who dump their cars after 100K, I find that once you have driven a car for about 7 years, it can give you a lot of trouble .  So it might very well be that a regular gasoline powered car might be cheaper for you as well, but this research is useful.

I had always wondered how the gas prices worked and if gas stations were profitable.  I once even asked a gas station owner in my town and he told me that they were not really profitable to give him a comfortable lifestyle so he made most of his money from an auto repair shop and towing service that he ran from the same facility.  He also mentioned that other owners stay in business by selling impulse purchase items like snacks and drinks , along with emergency items that people need in the neighborhood or during a road trip .  They overprice them because when people buy something at a gas station, they have pretty much decided that price does not matter.  Now the Union of Concerned Scientists has crunched some numbers and has published this graphic that shows that when I fill up my tank on the RAV4 , the gas station has barely made a buck.  

Lorena bought one of those LivingSocial deals to learn how to make truffles at the ChocoLee Chocolates (Dartmouth/Tremont Streets).  I guess we were both envisioning it to be something truly romantic to do in month of February around Valentine's Day.  We imagined being in a cute kitchen around a table learning the mysterious process of making truffles.  Well, we should have reasoned a bit.  After all, if you are buying a deeply discounted experience, that is what you are going to get.  So when we showed up at the place on a Wednesday night, this was nothing like what you see in those chocolates commercials on television.  The classes are held in a dinghy soup kitchen.  The chef is knowledgeable and a lot of fun.  She has also structured the class well so everything is taken care of, but the class is overcrowded.  So you have to mostly stand and watch.  You still get to do some things and you will learn pretty much what you need to in ord...

For the second time in our lives, we leased, this time a Toyota RAV4 and prior to that we had a Honda CRV.  Now when we leased the CRV , because raised our annual mileage to 15,000 by paying a discounted rate upfront, but when we drove it for a few months (the car was totaled in an accident) we realized that we never hit the monthly average (because we work from home).  So with the RAV4, we stuck to the standard 12,000 miles taking on the risk that we will exceed the mileage at the end of three years.  But what has fascinated me is that dealer keeps calling us much more ahead of time for our schedule maintenance.  For example, for the 5K maintenance, the phone started to ring when we had barely crossed 2K miles in the beginning of month three.  For the 10K maintenance, the phone is ringing not in the tenth month but in the 7th month when we have just about 7,000 miles.  It makes me believe that car lessors know fully well that people will drive a lot more ...

I have always been curious about philosophy and wished that if I had the time and money, I would join undergraduate classes at a nearby university (I wanted to learn for the joy of learning because I already have two masters degrees).  It did not happen till Coursera came along and I found that they, in partnership with University of Edinburgh in Scotland, were offering an Introduction to Philosophy course for free.  Let me tell you while I had heard great things about online learning, once I started taking the classes, only then I realized that it is even better than my wildest expectations.  Some of the best parts: I 'go to school' sort of whenever I want. I can literally take classes on my couch while sipping a glass of wine. If my mind wanders or I don't grasp something right away all I need to do is to rewind the video.  Yeah, one could ask a question in class, but not always, and it is impossible to admit to a professor that you did not pay attention to what he...