Hugh's Worthless Blog

I just received a new book in the mail from Joseph D'Agnese and Denise Kiernan. They are both journalists who have written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and they have now written a personal finance book together specifically for the self-employed and part-timers, called The Money Book . They did interview me for parts of it, so I may be a bit biased, but after briefly skimming it, I think it is an easy to follow read that could benefit many people (not just personal finance geeks like myself). I will read the book more in depth, but upon first skim, I had to find some calculator worthy section I could use to develop some neat online tool. Therefore I have created my own Money Book calculator . This allows you to enter your monthly income and also specify how much to contribute to specific emergency, tax and retirement accounts and also all your "mandatory" monthly expenses. After entering your numbers it tells you how much you have left for discretio...

Since Microsoft decided to advertise Bing during the Olympics, I thought the least I could do was try it out a little bit. One thing I noticed is that the images they have on Bing Maps are actually newer than the ones that Google Maps has on either their normal maps or Streetview maps in the St. Louis area. One way to tell is by looking at highway 64 and the soundwall construction. My sample location is a house that is for sale in our area, namely 9062 Monmouth in Richmond Heights (63117). If you search for it on Google Maps you will see the highway is shut down and under construction but there is no wall yet constructed. If you then use Google Streetview and look at the house, as you move by its left side you will still see all the old trees and brush behind it which is how it looked even before the highway construction began. To see the pre-construction aerial view, you can use Bing and just look at the aerial projection. You will see a whole bunch of trees between the house and ...

Last night was an interesting evening for seeing two different methods of determining "winners" to a contest. I am comparing the results of the free skate program of the Vancouver Olympic women's figure skating competition to the "elimination round" of the American Idol competition. First in skating, there can be no dispute. Kim Yuna skated an extremely technical, difficult routine, but skated it nearly flawlessly and with grace. She was judged by the same set of expert judges who scored all the other skaters of the evening, and they each gave specific points to her for each element she performed and how well she performed them. Because they have very specific criteria on how to judge (number of revolutions, position of skates on the ice, wobbles, precision of skate circles, etc) it is difficult to dispute the scores she received. In reality I think the judges may have scored all the skaters high, but frankly that is perfectly fair since they were all the same...

I was visiting the St Louis County Library headquarters on Lindbergh last weekend thumbing through their most recent non-fiction books when I found " The New Rule for Mortgages " by Dale Robyn Siegel . Being the number geek that I am, I quickly found a chart in the book that shows how much lenders adjust interest rates based on your FICO credit score and loan to value (LTV) ratio. I quickly thought "that looks like a cool online calculator to me!" So I checked out the book, even after my wife gave me a weird look for checking out yet another bizarre non-fiction selection. I have now coded it up in PHP as usual and now it is living on my financial calculators page as my latest fun web calculator for the masses. The calculator is only useful for folks with FICO scores of 620 and higher, and shows your principal and interest payment both before and after the rate has been adjusted. The book also explains a lot of how the mortgage industry has changed and how everyth...

I just went to see my physician this week, and they took some blood and analyzed my numbers. I have had elevated cholesterol numbers for a long time now, even though I am not too old and not overweight. My doctor called and gave me the numbers, mentioning that they were a little higher than before but still looked good, and the higher HDL number was good too. So I thought it was time to take my online calculator expertise to task to create an interactive cholesterol ratio calculator on my calculator website . If you know 3 of the 4 values of total cholesterol,. HDL, LDL and triglycerides, you can actually calculate the missing value, but I did not find any such calculator available! However, using PHP and a little bit of time I could do it myself as well as calculate the ratios that tell you how healthy your blood levels are relative to each other. So I thought I would share my creation to the world at large. It sure is not fun getting older, but we may as well try to understand it a ...

One of the more interesting  news articles yesterday was that the chair of our Economics department here was being called upon for a court case against Paul McKee's redevelopment efforts on the northside of the city. The faculty member, Michele Boldrin , kept calling it "pie in the sky" with his best argument being about the 6,000 single family homes with an average price of about $450,000. He asks "Where are these 6,000 homeowners who can afford $450,000 homes going to come from?" That is a very good question! Personally I believe redevelopment on the northside of the city would be fantastic, but only if it is done realistically. That is a lot of fairly high priced homes to be for sale in the city. If there were 6,000 of those homes out in the county it would still be hard to sell so many of them, but in the city it would be next to impossible. In fact I checked one of my favorite local housing websites,  stlouis.blockshopper.com . If you look at the sales ...

This morning I received my regular Washington University propaganda e-mail spam which had an interesting article about a cool competition at the Olin Business School . The Olin Sustainability Case Competition  has students thinking of ways to solve the parking problem we have here on campus and possibly win a $5,000 prize.While checking their site I found a PDF file which contains some interesting survey data about from where all the Wash U students, faculty and staff commute. The data there is hopefully from a representative sampling, since there are many more than 300 faculty members and much more than 900 staff members (I know I do not believe I took that survey). I compiled the survey data and wrote up my own little PHP  statistics page which I put on my web site. This includes the top 30 zip codes (by total number of commuters) and I let the user sort by any column and I allow display the percentages of the totals. From the page you can see the ZIP codes where commutin...