Aswath Krishnan

These are turbulent times - with inflation, market crashes, fears of a recession, a war in Ukraine, supply chain issues, climate scares, and political division. It's natural to get distracted, dismayed, or fearful of everything that's going on.  In your personal life, business, or career, you can get around it is by focusing on your mission and what's in your control.  For this to be possible, (a) your mission needs to be robust - something you really want to do, are capable of doing distinctly well, and something that others need and support, even during hard times, (b) you have partners who are aligned with you on mission and values, and (c) you need to live and operate well below your means and independently. 

I realized my investment portfolio is complex. I have investments across 6 different accounts and own over 25 individual stocks.   This may not be that complex for someone who's a finance expert or actively manages their investments. I'm not that. Managing finances is essential but not the area of my life where I want to excel - I'd instead focus on interests and differentiated skills in building products, businesses, or writing. I'd be happy with a B+ than an A+ (satisficer vs. maximizer).  The complexity prevents me from monitoring and managing effectively. I don't have enough knowledge, skills, or regular focus in this area to deal with the complexity either.  A more straightforward strategy like - (a) Automated investment and dollar-cost averaging, (b) Investing into a balanced portfolio of cash, stock indices, and a very few individual stocks, bonds, real-estate, and (c) Buy & hold and then, rebalancing twice a year and as needed to adjust for disturbances ...

Credit scores are like your gums. You know you need to take care of them now, or it'll be a pain in some distant future.  I'm trying to buy a home now and realized how consequential they can be.  Mortgage lenders, I was told, look at the middle of the scores from the 3 main credit bureaus/mafia (Experian, Equifax, and Transunion). If you're applying with a partner, they will pick the lowest one between you.  You need a middle of at least 680 to qualify for a jumbo loan (over ~$650k in WA state).  A middle of 680-700 can have an interest rate of ~5.6% vs. the ~4.8% that you get if it's >750. On a $1M loan, that's a significant ~$800 a month!  A single collections account (usually >$100) can impact your credit report by 100 points and stay on your credit report for up to 7 years. So missing a one-time $150 payment can end up costing you $800/month for many years or even disqualify you from getting a loan and home (If you can, you can pay the creditor - eith...

We were clearing up our house of unloved and unnecessary possessions before a move and decided to sell around 40 books that we'd never read or likely never reread.   We hauled them to a Half Price Book store. The lady at the counter told me that they have a computer program that calculates the offer price for each book.  That's an interesting programming puzzle.  There are 3 factors I'd take into consideration: (1) the price at which it will sell, (2) the average time to sell (payback period), (3) risk and profit buffer  These are related variables that can influence each other, but we can simplify the problem by treating them as independent varibles. For (1), we can assume it's half the average retail price across Amazon and maybe a couple of retailers. (2) is tricky as it involves predicting the future. We can use the past book sale date to do that. I'd use a weighted average of the recent average time to sell for (a) the very same book, (b) for the author, (c...