Hugh's Worthless Blog

I received an e-mail message today from someone looking for an online financial calculator to see what kind of return he would need on an investment to get it back to where it was in the past, before the big market slide of the past few years. Some people think if your investments go down a fixed percentage, say 20%, to get them back to where they were before you only need a 20% return, but that is not the case. You need a substantially larger percentage to increase that smaller balance back up to the value where it used to be. A drastic example is if your investment falls 50%, say your retirement portfolio falls from $400,000 to $200,000. To get back to $400K from $200K you then would need a 100% return to double that amount back up to where it was in the past. That is a pretty grim task to try to meet. So that is where my new calculator comes into play. You can either enter your fixed percentage loss, or just put your old balance and your new balance and I will calculate the bad ne...

Yesterday I gave a coworker a USB flash drive from my stash, so I thought I might have to replenish the departmental supply. I looked at what I had spare in my office and I have four Kingston DataTraveler drives, one 1GB model, two 2GB models and one 16GB which I use for moving bigger stuff. Then it was time to go to our CDWG web store to check out the current prices on Kingston DataTraveler drives (for which we get a pretty hefty discount). I thought I would write up a table comparing today's prices and also the price per gigabyte since I love analyzing numbers. Here is a little table with my calculated costs: Capacity Price Price/GB 2GB $6.06 $3.03 4GB $8.36 $2.09 8GB $15.32 $1.91 16GB $30.07 $1.88 32GB $62.37 $1.95 64GB $155.92 $2.44 128GB $384.24 $3.00 256GB $779.62 $3.05 The first interesting thing I noticed is that it is hardly worth buying 2GB flash drives anymore since for only $2.30 more you can get a 4GB drive. That was timely since the only drives I now ha...