Month: October 2007

A hard won lesson on investing

I started saving for my retirement in 1991 because my employer offered matching contributions. Matching money is free money so I saved exactly as much as they would match. Since I started at $7/hr, two percent of my check was about $6 per week. It’s a trifling amount but when I quit to found MichWeb 3 years later, I had saved about $900.

I paid no attention to that account until Kysor was acquired a couple years later. I was forced to roll over my retirement account and the dollar value was quite surprising. I had invested $900, the company match had kicked in another $900, and over 5 years it had grown to around $5,000. I invested for the match but learned a valuable lesson on leveraging compound interest.

Years later I read a book by Peter Lynch. One of his most famous bits of investing advice is, “buy what you know.” Instead of taking the advice of Wall Street or your neighbor, invest in companies whose products you are familiar with. If you eat Cheerios every morning, General Mills might be a good stock for you. If you ride a hog, Harley Davidson might be a great choice.

I know AAPL because of my familiarity with their products. For several years, I got into the habit of buying their stock at $15 and selling at $25. That was fun until one day I sold and the stock never came back down! After months of waiting, I bought back at (gulp) double the price I had sold at. This brings me to my hardest won lesson on investing: every notable error I’ve made investing was a sale. Over all, I’d be better off if I had never sold anything.

I ran the numbers to answer a nagging question, “How much more would we have in our retirement accounts if I had never sold AAPL stock?” $15,950. Tomorrow, that number will be even bigger.

my $0.02 on Leopard

Disclosure: I own Apple stock.

I first installed Leopard in early 2007. I backed up my system and installed. Since I have a spare mac, I can tolerate a fair bit of breakage on my main system but the pre-WWDC builds of Leopard exceeded my threshold. After a few days I reverted back to 10.4.

At WWDC, Apple seeded a new build and I backed up and installed again. After a few days of using it, I deemed the bugs I ran into as tolerable and have been running Leopard on my main desktop system since. Note when I placed my order.

Order Date: June 28, 2007
Order #: ***-*******-*******
Recipient: Matt Simerson

Items not yet shipped:
1 of: Apple Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard Family Pack
Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC

Amazon was running a promotion and guaranteed their lowest price on Leopard Family Pack if I pre-ordered. My experience with the pre-release versions had me convinced that it was just as compelling an upgrade as its predecessors. If you do buy from Amazon, which I recommend, please use the link above and it’ll provide me with a referral bonus. If you don’t need the family pack, here’s a link to the single license version.

Since then, new beta releases of Leopard have arrived and all the worst bugs have been exorcised. I find that build 9A559 is far less problematic than the four days I spent with the release version of Vista. Despite having a Vista license that came with a new machine, my experience with it compelled me to upgrade to XP.

iBought an iPhone

On Jan 17th, I wrote about the iPhone:

The ease of using all the devices is likely the phones most endearing feature, but I’m not in love. Yet.

And I went on to detail my reservations about the $599 iPhone.

Cons:
Painfully slow data access (EDGE).
Cingular AT&T only
No tethering (with a PDA / laptop)
Expensive.

Concerns:
SSH client
Email: multiple IMAP accounts? SSL/TLS encryption?

A lot has changed since January. Continue reading “iBought an iPhone”