Scott Adcox

Doing More With Less Since 1972

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Paper Street Soap Investment
Paper Street Soap Investment Property

Comparison of Roth IRAs and Your Current Residence

November 15, 2011 / / 1 Comment

Assumption: you bought your current residence as an investment with the intent of selling it for a profit at some point.

Paper Street Soap Investment
Paper Street Soap Investment Property

Similarities

  • Both are purchased with after tax money
  • No capital gains taxes due when the gains are realized
  • Not taxable as income when the gains are realized
  • No guaranteed rate of appreciation
Differences
  • Roth IRA has a $5k/year limit on how much you can invest, but your home doesn’t
  • You can’t touch the gains of your Roth without penalty until you are 59.5, but you can get the gains from your residence whenever you choose without penalty
  • While you aren’t guaranteed appreciation in either vehicle, if your home has a mortgage you are guaranteed a percentage of interest savings by paying down (investing) the principal early. True, you lessen the tax deduction on the interest, but does it really make sense to pay the bank $100 so that you don’t have to pay the gov’ment $25 anyway?
  • Any improvement-type investments you make into your home (for instance, a foreclosure that needed a lot of work) can be enjoyed by you immediately while you wait for the market to appreciate and can also help you sell quickly and for a higher price later on.
What am I missing here? I’m not a financial professional…just something I was thinking.

Sight Word Activity For Preschool Bird Unit

November 7, 2011 / / 1 Comment
Mama Bird With Her Word Eggs

Mama Bird With Her Word Eggs

We’re doing an animal unit in our co-op, so I thought I’d share an example of how you can incorporate a book and craft activity into the unit. Preschool and kindergarten kids love doing crafts, and it’s great when you can tie everything together to help them make connections.

Today we focused on birds all day, and we read “An Egg Is Quiet” in class. This is a really nice book I found at the library. It has great information on all types of eggs–bird eggs, reptile eggs (we learned about reptiles last week), insect eggs, fish eggs, and even dinosaur eggs. We learned about dinosaurs in our last school unit!

It’s full of illustrations of different types of eggs, which let us match pictures of eggs with pictures of birds, and some great vocabulary words like “shapely”, “clever”, and “texture”.

Page Full Of Eggs From "An Egg Is Quiet"

Page Full Of Eggs From "An Egg Is Quiet"

After we read the book, we made paper nests to hold “sight word eggs”. On each paper egg, we wrote a sight word on either side. The kids can go through the eggs like they would flash cards, and each time they recognize the word they get to put the egg into the nest. For the nests, we just glued the bottom of the nest onto the paper and left the top open so that the eggs could be placed inside.

As you can tell by the un-named species represented in the first photo, they also have fun coloring the birds. 🙂

Some of the kids in our co-op know many more sight words than others, but that’s ok. Each child gets his/her own set of eggs with the words they are currently working on.

The younger siblings (2 year olds) have been participating in school a lot this year, and they spend time each week making animal letters. For them, we changed the egg/nest activity a little bit. So far they’ve made it up to ‘H’. For them, the game is to match the lowercase letter on the egg with the jumbled capital letter on the page.

Bird Nest for Letter Identification
Bird Nest for Letter Identification
Capital and Lowercase Letter Matching

Capital and Lowercase Letter Matching

 

All Hallows Link Dump

October 31, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Apple to Make Remote Obsolete? – Because sitting on your ass staring at a screen just isn’t easy enough yet. For some people, the only exercise they get is lifting sofa cushions to look for the remote.

How to Get a Personalized Financial Plan Without Spending a Fortune – Awesome idea, but not sure if I like the idea of giving up the personal attention. Then again, I don’t like the idea of giving up $100 an hour for personal attention.

Signs Of A Slowdown Are Obvious (In China) – They should probably borrow some money to work on that wall thing. You know, infrastructure and all.

7 Steps for Building A Mobile Future In Your Enterprise

Gmail to Unveil New Interface – Unlike FB, I think something Google can really leverage is becoming a place you live, not a site you visit. This looks much more like G+.

100-Year-Old Man Completes Marathon – How old are you?

Chin Bop Syllable Count

October 27, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Here’s a quick and easy game you can play in the car or around the house.

Learning to count the number of syllables in words they hear and say can help your child learn to “chunk” sounds in a word together when they are reading. A simple way to introduce this concept is to have them make a fist and place it just under their chin. Whenever they say a word, they can count how many times their chin bumps their fist to count the number of syllables in the word.

You can be in charge of keeping a running total of all the syllables they’ve counted, or make it a math/counting game by having them add the syllables in the last word they counted to their total. You can even challenge them to get a “high score” by learning and saying bigger and bigger words to increase their vocabulary.

PETA, Sea World, and Slavery

October 26, 2011 / / 0 Comments

The fact that PETA is suing Sea World for enslaving orcas is ridiculous on so many levels.

These are killer whales. They lost all their constitutional rights when they violated the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of food of the seals and fish they devoured while they were in the wild.

I consider their imprisonment justice for their misdeeds.  Doing flips and splashing me with their tails a few times a day beats the hell out of picking up trash on the beach. They should stop complaining and clogging up the courts with their frivolous lawsuits.

October 24, 2011 / / 0 Comments

You don’t need to see their tax returns.

These aren’t the CEOs you’re looking for.

They can go about their business.

Move along.

{As seen here}

October 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Sorry…I just had to post what I saw on Twitter today:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/JoseCanseco/status/127435700441321472″]

Um…sure. Ok.

Actually, this response was much better:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/CaughtOffBase/status/127436411858194432″]

October 18, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Real quick…two articles in Mashable today that should give Facebook a clue:

Sean Parker (a FB shareholder) notes that Facebook’s power users are moving to Twitter and Google Plus

and

Users surveyed dislike Timeline.

What do these have in common? It’s the perception that users’ privacy is being chipped away too rapidly. For instance, I think Timeline is awsum! I want to look at my Timeline…what a great tool! It’s just that I want to be able to lock it down and only show it to a few people (or no one).

What if Facebook’s default position was to make all new features super-private in the beginning and give users a chance to adjust to them and open up themselves instead of forcing everything to be public and ratcheted down? They continually come at things from the wrong direction.

UPDATE

And teens will leave Facebook for Google+? I’ve said it before…they really screwed up by putting off that IPO.

I’m reading– September 27th through October 17th

October 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Facebook Missteps and Shortcomings – Exhibit F.

Heart Rate Training Zone Calculator – Will have to do until I write one. Which will be tomorrow plus infinity.

Page Speed Online – Woot…super useful tool.

Will the New Facebook Lead to Information Overload? – What he said.

Google Financing Solar Installations – This looks interesting. If the cost is the same as your typical electric bill and you don’t have to worry about the maintenance, what’s the downside? Thinking you could also get your pool heated this way. Yeah…I’m thinking.

October 12, 2011 / / 0 Comments

A guy came by yesterday selling a cleaner than works wonders on just about everything. I stared at the sun for a second, hoping I could muster up a sneeze I could aim in his direction and ask, “How is it with germs?” No dice.

Idea: Remove Limitations to Find Fitness Limits

October 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

This could be a long-ish post for me, but I’m going to try to keep it short and sweet. I’m done with my time in the Clydesdale division. It was fun, but it has really just held me back. The last race I ran I was struggling to keep my weight above 200 for the last few weeks of training. How much faster could I have gone if I’d let my self drop another 10 pounds?

Back when I was lifting weights regularly, it would have been tough to get to 199 and not be a little too little (I was 230 for my marathon PR). I was playing rugby for most of that time too, and I needed the bulk.

It’s not bulk anymore. Now it’s just fat. I’m about 218 right now, and could probably comfortably walk around at 185-190 if I got rid of all the, uh, bulk I currently have.

Ok…maybe I’ll lift just a little and shoot for 195. I mean, the only thing worse than being fat is being skinny.

“Occupy”. And Then What?

October 7, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Ok, so I have some questions about the whole “Occupy” movement. Not trying to be a jerk here, even though that will surely be the way it’s interpreted. There are just some things I don’t get about this movement. I don’t think what they are doing is wrong or a bad idea necessarily, I’m just not sure they are doing it for the right reasons or if they’ve thought about what would happen if they got what they’ve asked for.

  1. If the minimum wage is raised to $20 (demand one), all the people currently making $10-$19.99/hour will get a raise to $20/hour, but definitely no higher than that. They’ll only be making minimum wage. Because the increased cost of labor will cause the retail cost of pretty much everything to increase, isn’t this effectively giving those currently in the $10-$19.99/hour range a pay cut? Doesn’t this really hurt the middle class instead of helping them? Or is step 2 an introduction of price controls? Careful what you ask for there.
  2. If you put pressure on a political party (probably the Democrats) to nominate anti-capitalist candidates, what do you expect to be the end result at the end of election night? Will those folks receive “the other 99%” of the vote?
  3. One of the major talking points seems to be a disagreement with the 2008-2009 bailouts. Another major talking point seems to be that “Occupy” is an answer to the Tea Party. But aren’t the bailouts a major issue both groups agree on?
  4. Free college (demand four)? Ok…but by doing that you’ve basically ensured everyone will go, which waters down your liberal arts degree even further. Or do you still want entrance standards? If so, won’t this be giving things to people based solely on their intelligence? And people will have to compete for these funds–who will set the standards and entrance exams? Isn’t this knowledge rationing? And look out…those professors and administrators who planted some of these ideas in your head may not be to happy about working for less (or for free).
  5. Wipe out all debt (demand 11)? Ok, now you guys are just ripping off Fight Club. Of course, we never got to see the result of this effort. I am Jack’s longing for a sequel.
I’ll happily argue about this, but really I’m just looking for some clear answers. The impression I’m getting so far is that many of these folks are no different than some people who identify as Tea Partiers who are in favor of saving Social Security/Medicare and continuing/expanding war spending. You know…people who haven’t really taken their stated positions to their logical end.

In Honor of Steve Jobs – The Facts of Life

October 6, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Sad day. Whether you are with Apple or again’ ’em, you have to admit that Steve Jobs did more that any other single person to raise our expectations of Apple and every other tech company.

And now, a 1984 episode of “The Facts of Life” entitled “Dear Apple” where Jo has a Siri-esque conversation with a computer named “Steve”. “The Facts of Life” writers were visionaries as well.

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