Hugh's Worthless Blog

I am used to getting all sorts of preposterous e-mail scam messages in my various electronic mail accounts, but I was amazed one day recently to receive an actual Air Mail letter through the old U. S. Postal Service from South Africa. My name and address were hand written on the envelope with the incorrect middle initial, so I was quite curious what it was: Wow, someone actually went through the trouble of mailing this letter all the way from South Africa to me in the hopes I would contact them so they could pay me some portion of that $8.5 million. Do they not realize these scams have been around forever, and that modern day scam artists use this wonderful medium known as the Internet? This mailing cost them real time, effort, postage and paper to send this to me, not just a bulk e-mail burst from some mailing software. I hope they do not think the little "MEMO" line at the bottom added anything to their letter since that does not look very impressive at all (no re...

The recent attack of a white passenger on the Metrolink train by a group of African American young men made me reflect on the racial tensions plaguing the St. Louis region. It also reminded me of an incidence when I was a victim of racial profiling by one of my fellow passengers on the train. It was much more subtle, and much less violent, but telling nonetheless. It was a day like any other day when I was taking the train home to my car parked at the Richmond Heights Metrolink station . I was just standing there minding my own business, positioned just a yard or two away from a young, clean cut looking Caucasian fellow with a St. Louis College of Pharmacy backpack. I easily guessed he was in his early 20's and a student there (it is a rigorous 7 year program to complete the full doctorate degree), probably commuting home. On the train, we both noticed a middle aged African American man making his way through the train, stopping to ask one of the other passengers if he cou...

Since I work on a college campus where building construction never ends , I love to watch the construction progress both live and virtually. They have been working on the expansion to the Brown School of Social Work here at Washington University for a while, and I see the construction progress from the big parking lots just fine. However, I discovered they have a live  webcam which looks from Goldfarb Hall so we can see what it looks like from that vantage point. Yes, I could get off my lazy behind and walk over there the several hundred feet and look, but I prefer to do so from my desk! I also like the live  webcams they have up over at the medical campus which views the construction there from three separate vantage points. You can see the traffic going up and down Kingshighway from the three views which makes it easy to track individual cars as they drive around. If you lived in the Central West End and had people visiting you that you knew would be driving on Ki...

The latest endowment numbers for the end of 2014 are in for all colleges, and it looks like everybody had a good year due to booming investment markets. Leading the pack as always is Harvard at almost $36 billion, up about $3.5 billion from last year. That means its endowment increased in value about the current total endowment of Ohio State or Johns Hopkins . If we look at local universities, Washington University saw a nice 17.5% increase to jump from $5.65 to $6.64 billion to remain the 17th wealthiest college endowment in the country. That means it increased in value about one billion dollars or a "SLU-worth", as Saint Louis University saw its endowment pop back up over the $1 billion point (#87 on the list), which it had not seen since before the market crash several years back. Another local university who saw a hefty increase was Lindenwood , who increased 17.4% to jump from $122 million to $143 million to have the 372nd highest endowment in the USA. All these...

UPDATE:  Well, that did not take long, the Obama administration has already decided they will leave 529 savings plans alone. So much for my previous post which is now no longer valid: Since I work in higher education and also have a son who is about to start college this year, I am always interested in the latest news regarding higher education. When President Obama announced the plan to allow everyone to receive two "free" years of community college , everyone was curious where the funds would come to pay for the plan. It appears the answer is by taxing withdrawals made by those of us invested in 529 college savings plans like the Missouri MOST plan . The idea is that earnings from the plans would be taxed when withdrawn, and those taxes could help fund the free community college plan. I was unaware that less than 3% of U. S. families have 529 accounts, and they are most heavily used by more affluent savers. I found a very interesting report from the General Accounti...

As a person who loves analyzing personal finance data , like the balance and interest paid on our mortgage, I am both excited but also sad to say we have just paid off the mortgage on our current house. We had actually paid off the mortgage on our previous home years ago, but after we bought our current residence several years ago, we decided to acquire another mortgage loan to cover some of the cost on our current, more expensive home. But now, after a few accelerated payments we have paid it off so we are again debt free.  The graph above shows the actual declining loan balance of our loan over time (pulled from a Google spreadsheet I developed) and the 4 sharp declining periods shows the 5 months when we had added large extra chunks of principal to our payments to accelerate the payoff of our loan. Two of those months are back to back (the last two) so that looks like one really big plunge where it is really two of them. Some people would therefore think I would always b...

One item I wanted for this past Christmas was a small UPS to backup our AT&T U-Verse gateway during power outages. So I ordered an APC Back-UPS BE350G from Amazon which I knew would supply plenty of power for such a small device (and could also help a laptop or tablet or phone running for a while too.) I knew we had ordered APC BE550G units for work before and they have been quite reliable, but I did not need 550VA (330W) for just a gateway, a phone and maybe a laptop. So I ordered the BE350G and knew that would be sufficient for the purpose. So when I received it excitedly on Christmas morning, I knew what I would do later that week, use the PowerChute software to turn off the annoying alarm (like I had done for all our APC units at work) and then peacefully let it backup our AT&T U-Verse modem/router at home. But when I opened up the box, I was in for a sad reality - the BE350G does not have a USB interface and does not let you silence the alarm! All the APC units we have...