NYC budget:

• $30/mo unlimited metro pass
• $13/mo NYC gym membership
• 50% of food free from trash
• $100/mo food bought from stores
• $125/mo rent (lived in car)

That still left plenty of money for the occasional coffee after the library closed.

It's easier to budget with cash. I would put $100 in my wallet every Monday, and that would have to last me until the end of the week.

And that was a luxurious time in my life. Many people live in NYC for nothing, but it was nice to have a hardshell that I could leave parked instead of a tent. Many months (when I do work-trades) my expenses are maybe $10/mo just to pay for soap and toothpaste

Correct about credit unions, but not about the bitcoin earnings. I was denied before I was asked the source of my income or even how much I'd be transferring-in. This was an application just for a standard savings/checking account.

Unless the AI that is denying me learned that I used to work for a company that does cryptocurrencies. Or read my blog and saw the word "bitcoin" and put me in a "high risk; deny" bucket. It scares me to realize that's possible in 2024 :(

https://2fa.directory/

I have 3 banks that use TOTP. It's common in credit unions.

I started a business a few years ago :) I don't like living idle. Retirement for me means contributing to open-source.

Thanks. Is a tax accountant different than a CPA? That's definitely my priority now.

I'm still waiting for them to pencil me into a meeting, but so far it looks like three's not much I can do to reduce my capital gains tax burden.

If all global monetary transactions moved to Bitcoin, the amount of energy used by bitcoin would not increase, and global emissions caused by financial transactions would decrease by nearly 100%.

Do you have an ethical option? One that doesn't invest in evil corporations?

Low cost of living countries and work-trades at communities.

Low cost of living countries and work-trades at communities.

My guess is AI.

I can't say for sure because when I ask them, they won't tell me. But it seems like they use some third party to process their applications, and that third parry is probably using some sort of machine-learning or private AI algorithm that's throwing a false-positive. Two things would fix this:

1. Legally prevent banks from deferring account opening decisions to AI-powered systems, or
2. Legally require all banks to have a human-override in-place for when such systems inevitably throw false-positives

Right now it appears that the third party that tells the bank "yeah, don't open this account" doesn't really say why. Kinda like how AI doesn't tell you what it was trained-on to decide what word it should say next. It's incredibly frustrating.

Update: one time a bank did enumerate exactly which pieces of information that I supplied caused the rejection, due to not being able to verify its authenticity. One of them was my email address. One was my employer. I was never asked to prove the authenticity of this data. I emailed them asking what they need to authenticate my information, and they send me back another generic message that I had been rejected.

I'm planning on using most of it to buy land as soon as I can. I do have retirement funds, but I don't plan to contribute to them from this windfall -- other than my usual yearly max Roth IRA contribution.

The $250k FDIC limit has been a bit of a joke for decades. If the bank goes under, FDIC covers all deposits, basically everything.

Wow, that's a very interesting take. One I'm very skeptical-of..

Open a Vanguard account put most of it on VTSAX their total stock market index.

I try very hard to avoid investing in anything unethical, and when I look at the holdings of VTSAX, I see Apple, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Exxon, Walmart. Fuck, they're even holding stock in UnitedHealtcare.