Otherbarry
joined 2 months ago
Debt consolidation feels like it was a scam.
Sounds like it, whatever that was that you signed up for does not sound like anything people recommend doing. If anything you could try doing promotional balance transfers onto a lower interest rate credit card if it gives you say 12-24 months 0 interest rate - that strategy is only temporary to give you some more time to pay things off.
When struggling with multiple credit card balances you essentially need to decide how you want to pay them off (debt avalanche vs snowball method) e.g. pay the minimum on all the cards except one of them, that one you pay as much as you can until it is paid off, then keep repeating until you're done with all the cards.
https://www.creditkarma.com/advice/i/debt-avalanche
or
https://www.creditkarma.com/advice/i/what-is-the-snowball-method
And in the meantime obvs stop using them until it's all paid off.
But I have such a poor credit score now that I cant imagine anyone renting to me now.
Yeah that might be tough. Maybe living with roommates or temporary prepaid subletting is an option? Those sort of arrangements are less likely to run credit checks.
Broadcom is pretty bad, I've had to migrate away from products after Broadcom bought them and jacked up prices, changed licensing, etc. Generally speaking it feels like Oracle and Broadcom are the worst of the worst IMO.
Does your employer offer you a match on your 401k contributions? That's free money regardless of how the 401k is invested so you definitely want to keep that going.
Even without that generally speaking you'll still want to continue contributing to your 401k. Remember that a 401k is long term retirement savings, the market will continue to rise/fall during your employment over the next x years. You're not required to invest 100% in U.S. specific index funds, in fact most people would recommend allocating a mix of U.S. / International / Bonds e.g. the "lazy" portfolio is one of the more famous recommendations https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Asset_allocation
Or for just set-and-forget you can invest in target date retirement index funds if your 401k offers them (most 401k plans offer those nowadays).
Cash back rewards cards work well, I end up with at least 2% - 5% cash back on all my shopping.
The key is to treat credit cards like cash e.g. pay your bill in full every month, never ever carry a balance. It doesn't work for everyone and that's okay, some people just can't help themselves and get too spendy and end up in debt.
Other nice thing is that fraud is handled better with credit cards, if my card is lost/stolen no one has a direct line to my bank account and can't try to drain my bank balance with debit purchases. Sure your bank may/may not void those transactions but in the time it takes for them to "investigate" you're going to be out real money in your bank account. With a credit card you just dispute those fraud charges and never actually pay for them.
In NYC people never thought he was cool, he was just another rich blowhard in the NYC area. He has spent pretty much his whole life desiring some sort of celebrity coolness he never really attained.
I don't know about people outside the NYC area, maybe they always thought he was some sort of cool real estate rich guy? Do people down south idolize that type of person? Seems unlikely then again stranger things have happened.
Usually what I do is put the plate in the oven towards the end of whenever I need to take food out so it heats up a couple of mins or so then take everything out. Use oven mitts in case you left the plate in there a bit too long.
Going through that right now (Leg length discrepancy aka LLD), it's not fun! For me seems like a hip issue could be an old injury or something else, started seeing doctors about it. Gonna be a long year, ugh.
I believe you meant that you have an internet speed of 81 MegaBytes vs 81 Megabits.
OP is confused but I'm pretty sure they are right about that part. Most (all?) ISPs advertise service in Megabit / Gigabit speeds. Definitely here in the U.S. not sure if other countries do that differently.
Also most speedtest sites measure in Megabit / Gigabit. e.g. https://www.speedtest.net/ is a popular one and by default it measures bandwidth speeds in Megabit / Gigabit.
When I download something using torrent though, the speed is shown as 10 MB/s
You forgot the i, qBittorrent displays speeds in MiB/s not MB/s.
Mb/s = Megabit per second
MB/s = Megabyte per second
MiB/s = Mebibyte per second
Anyway 10 MiB/s is ~ 83 Mb/s so you're fine, seems you are already hitting your max speed.
"This isn't the ring you're looking for."
Gandalf, probably
Zip bombs wouldn't apply here, from what I understand to create those you'd have to start with uncompressed data. The typical example is using a bunch of zeroes as the starting point, not only is that compressible but the compression algorithm will look for redundancies in the data to increase the compression efficiency (a bunch of zeroes would have tons of redundancy).
Stackoverflow has a good discussion on it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1459673/how-does-one-make-a-zip-bomb