All those figures tossed around by the financial planning community are a little screwy based on my observations. They like to use things in their models like a bond yield at 2.5% to show why you should have more invested so it pumps their management fees. But they don't actually put most of your money there, otherwise why would you need them?
Once my kids are out of college and the house is paid for I expect my 'need' to drop rather dramatically. But all the planners start with your current income to estimate what you will 'need' in retirement.
If you think about the amount they are saying we will need to live on, I have to wonder what lifestyle they are expecting you to have at 75+? My parents and in-laws are in decent health, but they're long past constantly jetting about on vacations. Their homes are paid for and they aren't driving to work or running kids around any more so they get new cars when they feel like it, not because it's ragged out and unreliable. Meals out a few nights a week, property taxes and household expenses don't add up to much.
That doesn't mean I'm still not planning for that sum as I can dream of wondering the world in my old age, but I suspect my kids are going to be the real recipients of decades of saving and investing.
I think you've been reading someone's fairy tale. Every dairy farm I've ever been to feeds them chopped corn, i.e. the whole plant, along with alfalfa and other grassy crops. It's commonly called silage. Yes grain corn is part of the feed mix, but they certainly don't eat mostly grain. With corn at $7 a bushel last year all dairy products would have been luxury items if they were fed mostly grain.
My point was that companies are almost encouraged to move operations overseas to avoid taxes as you indicate, however the US now wants to involve the financial industry around the world in making sure that any "US Persons" report and pay taxes on any income earned from overseas business or investments.
My contention is that individuals should be treated the same as the multinationals.
I am an American living and working overseas for over half my life. My ties to the U.S. are almost none-existent. My use of U.S. goods and services is possibly even less than many foreigners around the World. Occasionally I might buy a U.S. made product, but that is even rare given the poor quality.
Here are the real effects, and this is just a short list I have time to type.
1. Assumption that all Americans overseas are criminals by definition, even if we did not owe any taxes. The IRS, by their own calculations, says the basic forms will take over 72 hours a year for an American Expat to prepare to properly report their taxes. Most expat tax experts, can not figure them out.
2. Foreign banks are closing or will refuse to open accounts for Americans. I know dozens of real cases already among friends. It is not just American citizens. It is anyone with a U.S. mail address, green card, or any payments transiting the United States to foreign banks. So, yes, many, many none Americans are caught up in this sweep of private information, the majority of which has nothing to do with tax money.
3. The country I live in also has banking secrecy and privacy laws, and as a full resident, it even goes further because in the country where I live it is a constitutional right extended to both residents and foreigners.
4. It also includes any company where an American might be a 10% owner or more, or might have signature authority over the company accounts or other assets. Just think what most international companies are going to do when making a choice between an American employee or CEO vs. a foreigner, as far as disclosing private company information to the U.S. government simply because they have an American working there.
5. It includes disclosing foreign none-citizen none-resident private information to the U.S. government that are family members of an American citizen abroad. For example, a wife or kids account, investments, or pretty much anywhere the American might (you have to prove the negative) have authority over the money . Partnerships of all forms, of all sorts of complexity, are also subject to it. Imagine as a foreigner entering in to a contract with an American citizen, and having to report to the U.S. IRS your private information and dealings. Guess what most foreigners will do from now on to avoid such problems.
6. This includes not only bank accounts, but investments, pensions, insurance policies, various types of contracts. I am not even sure how many insurance policies I have, let alone what would need to be reported. If you are a foreign insurance company, just think how happy they will be to issue a policy to an American client living overseas.
In short, I am forced to obtain citizenship in my country of residency, and give up my citizenship in the United States. It is either that, or say good-bye to my entire life work and return to the United States to starve at some bullshit minimum wage job (I own my own company outside the United States).
Forget the Berlin Wall, what they are building in the United States is far, far more dangerous.
They do. That the US is spreading their net wider and wider is troubling. How much longer before the more middle of the road ex-pat countries get roped into this. Say Mexico, Belize or Costa Rica? Right now our retirees are welcomed down there, but I wonder if that will be the case if this happens.
Basically it's becoming more and more evident that US citizens are being viewed as property by the government. And they want a piece of everything that property makes, no matter where it is.
Well yes, but by what stretch of the imagination do people believe this money grab is right? I see multiple posters agreeing with it. For the tax jurisdiction the business is in anyone can see the point, you're operating a business there like anyone else.
I'm at the age where retirement is in sight and have spent a lot of years bitching about US taxes. I've definitely considered moving somewhere that won't take 50+ cents of every dollar I earn, the thought of owning a beach bar in a tropical location not that many years from now is getting me through this winter.
One of the reasons companies move overseas is to avoid US taxes on anything they don't bring back to the US, why should actual citizens be any different?
I decide to move to NZ in my retirement. After a lifetime of working sitting on the porch and watching life go by isn't for me so I start or buy a local business. I hire local employees and pay all the required taxes in NZ for the income made there. I pay US taxes on my retirement income derived from US accounts. Why if I'm not sending money back to the US for deposit (which would have to be reported) does the US need to know anything about income derived from the NZ business?
The creaping featuritis thing amazes me to this day. I am a codeslinger, if you want it I'll write it. But I will tell you if I think you're making a mistake.
One of my old bosses put it well when a customer was questioning my opinion on some of their stuff I was pushing back on.
"If he thinks it's a bad enough idea to tell you that you shouldn't have him do it, you should f'ing listen. You do remember he bills by the hour? If he's telling you it's not something you want him to do he's doing you a favor. And if he won't do it there's no way in hell we'll do it for you, he's the guy we send people to for crazy shit."
That's not the way businesses operate, and the larger they are the more layers of BS things filter through. The person who champions the project hands it off to a subordinate, who hands it off again, etc. By the time it gets to the poor sap who had to bid out the project you're lucky if you get a cocktail napkin sketch of a UI concept and a few vague notes about what it should do.
There is another form of this that I deal with quite often, where upper management concieves of something that is totally impractical for the people who will actually need to use it. You go through all the look, feel and features stuff to get what the corporte folks envision and then install it only to find that the operations people won't use it.
It can be extremely frustrating, but if you were smart about collecting your money you've gotten paid and you're never going to have to support the code.
I almost wonder if they're counting on it, that's why they're stoking the fires dividing the haves and have nots. Rather than banding together and marching on Washington there will just be rioting where the local business owners houses are assaulted by the former recipients of the nanny state handouts when the system goes belly up.
I used to worry about my buddy the police officer and his stockpile of guns and ammo. He's positively convinced in the next few years we're going to see widespread rioting and looting. Lately I'm not so sure he's wrong.
Farmers spread the manure from their animals back on the fields as a way to maintain field fertility. They're not likely to want it shipped off and used to power a server farm, as that will just increase their chemical fertilizer costs.
Insightful? Most of the stuff built with these things are small utility applications for specific departmental uses. The beancounters know what they're doing, i.e. a book on Excel and VBA for Joey down in the warehouse so he can automate his inventory sheets to print in location order so his job is easier vs. a department of expensive CS majors bitching about doing "crap work" like this doesn't take much to see where the value to the stockholders is. The right tool for the right job, not everything needs to be a major production.
Think about things like budgeting/forcasting in a large operation with multiple departments, all of whom need to work on their individual sections. You end up with either lots of spreadsheets that are linked together if you're lucky, or everyone taking turns at the master spreadsheet. If they get a decent selection of formulas working this could really simplify things for stuff like that.
You're unlikely to find some kindhearted individual/company ready to take on an entire group of people with their associated costs.
However, I would suggest that if they've been saving a bit and aren't living paycheck to paycheck, starting a consulting company and chipping in to hire a sales/marketing person might be a viable alternative. Especially if the team has contacts with customers that could be persuaded to stay with the people they know, instead of your old company.
As always, consult a lawyer before doing anything, and if you signed away your soul in your employment agreement, be careful...
The majority of the school year is over the winter months in the US. In a very large portion of the country, it would be both too cold and too bloody dangerous to ride a bike.
Priced school buses lately? And educational software is quite good these days. Good teachers are almost impossible to find in some areas.
Haven't seen any hybrid buses just yet. And what about the disposal cost of the battery packs?
Spoken like someone who isn't paying many taxes yet. Between sales taxes, gas taxes, State income tax, Federal Income tax, Social Security, Property taxes, etc. I stagger at the thought of paying any more.
The waste of our money by our "public servants" is a crime.
Last month I worked on a solution that automated the production of analysis spreadsheets that had previously taken 1 person 20+ hours a week to enter data into. We're talking monsters that have 30000+ formulas in them, you have no choice but to turn automatic recalculation off. They're now done automatically and waiting for them when the users come in now.
What did the customer do? Grin from ear to ear, and start building more spreadsheets that will need to be automated... Number crunchers are funny people, but they sign the checks.
You can't prepare for the kind of BS that can get thrown at you in skills tests. I've seen things that you'd have to have the C++ Standard memorized to know, quirky product specific things they want you to know, and one place that set me down with a bug report and a development box with their code on it and wanted to see how I'd approach it...
You're going to get killed in fees if you don't process a decent level of transactions through a backup processor when it does come into play.
As I type this I have a client who's CC processing has been down nearly 24 hours, and has resorted to a dial backup solution. Not exactly the way to process 5000+ orders a day. And to top it off they sent out a special email offer to 500,000 subscribers this morning, so they're dying as we speak, and if it's not resolved in the morning we may be switching providers in a hurry. Thank the stars that they choose their own provider...
Ignore the posts talking about why you don't need this, and SLA's. No SLA is going to replace lost revenues, and anyone who doesn't have a backup plan in place is just waiting to get burned.
I think there was a misunderstanding. I know how the application works in great detail. I know that it can be scaled up across multiple machines. It will scale up.
What I don't know is how to judge what hardware to reccomend to someone wanting to self host.
I'm pretty damn sure that only comes from 1) Testing, and I'm not buying $10's of thousands in hardware to test with and 2) Experience, which I don't have.
The last place I worked at had a rack of nice quad zeon processor systems in their lab that they had to take back from a customer when they didn't withstand the onslaught. I'm leaning towards letting a consultant roll the dice, because I 'd lose my shirt if that happened.
300 sites, between 12 and 200 concurrent users at a site.
It's a CRM system, i.e. some basic data entry, some portions are transaction processing. i.e. the workflow portion for the base part of the app is very simply:
Search for customer by various criteria. No customer found, add one. Retrieve customer information. Add current order information being stored for this customer. Process loyalty/discount programs to see if customer qualifies for an award. Return award to order entry system for processing.
There's a lot more to it, but that's the meat of it. It's fairly data intensive, there is a great deal of information stored for customers for use in data mining the collected information. It's primarly web service based, but there is a fairly extensive management and reporting tool that is all HTML based.
My guess is going to be that the bottleneck is going to the the database, but we've done extensive testing with a million customer sample database running multiple instances of test applications from 10 other boxes, but that doesn't exactly prove much as it's too predictable.
Yeah, but you can move to a rural area in the US, try moving to India. I moved from the Baltimore/DC area this year, and I got three times the house I could have afforded back there. Plus a laid back community instead of the uptight 'everyone must paint their homes one of the three approved colors' BS that was common there. People raise families here on 40k a year, you can't even keep a roof over your head on the coast for that, unless you're rooming with 3 other people.
And don't kid yourself, about the only thing I don't have is a wide choice of brick and mortar shopping for PC stuff, and the bookstores around here don't have a ton of software books on the shelves. Since I bought most of that online for better prices before, it just means I can't waste time browsing on the weekend.
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All those figures tossed around by the financial planning community are a little screwy based on my observations. They like to use things in their models like a bond yield at 2.5% to show why you should have more invested so it pumps their management fees. But they don't actually put most of your money there, otherwise why would you need them?
Once my kids are out of college and the house is paid for I expect my 'need' to drop rather dramatically. But all the planners start with your current income to estimate what you will 'need' in retirement.
If you think about the amount they are saying we will need to live on, I have to wonder what lifestyle they are expecting you to have at 75+? My parents and in-laws are in decent health, but they're long past constantly jetting about on vacations. Their homes are paid for and they aren't driving to work or running kids around any more so they get new cars when they feel like it, not because it's ragged out and unreliable. Meals out a few nights a week, property taxes and household expenses don't add up to much.
That doesn't mean I'm still not planning for that sum as I can dream of wondering the world in my old age, but I suspect my kids are going to be the real recipients of decades of saving and investing.
I think you've been reading someone's fairy tale. Every dairy farm I've ever been to feeds them chopped corn, i.e. the whole plant, along with alfalfa and other grassy crops. It's commonly called silage. Yes grain corn is part of the feed mix, but they certainly don't eat mostly grain. With corn at $7 a bushel last year all dairy products would have been luxury items if they were fed mostly grain.
No problem, the Hitchhikers Guide provides the answer: http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/w...
My point was that companies are almost encouraged to move operations overseas to avoid taxes as you indicate, however the US now wants to involve the financial industry around the world in making sure that any "US Persons" report and pay taxes on any income earned from overseas business or investments.
My contention is that individuals should be treated the same as the multinationals.
I am an American living and working overseas for over half my life. My ties to the U.S. are almost none-existent. My use of U.S. goods and services is possibly even less than many foreigners around the World. Occasionally I might buy a U.S. made product, but that is even rare given the poor quality.
Here are the real effects, and this is just a short list I have time to type.
1. Assumption that all Americans overseas are criminals by definition, even if we did not owe any taxes. The IRS, by their own calculations, says the basic forms will take over 72 hours a year for an American Expat to prepare to properly report their taxes. Most expat tax experts, can not figure them out.
2. Foreign banks are closing or will refuse to open accounts for Americans. I know dozens of real cases already among friends. It is not just American citizens. It is anyone with a U.S. mail address, green card, or any payments transiting the United States to foreign banks. So, yes, many, many none Americans are caught up in this sweep of private information, the majority of which has nothing to do with tax money.
3. The country I live in also has banking secrecy and privacy laws, and as a full resident, it even goes further because in the country where I live it is a constitutional right extended to both residents and foreigners.
4. It also includes any company where an American might be a 10% owner or more, or might have signature authority over the company accounts or other assets. Just think what most international companies are going to do when making a choice between an American employee or CEO vs. a foreigner, as far as disclosing private company information to the U.S. government simply because they have an American working there.
5. It includes disclosing foreign none-citizen none-resident private information to the U.S. government that are family members of an American citizen abroad. For example, a wife or kids account, investments, or pretty much anywhere the American might (you have to prove the negative) have authority over the money . Partnerships of all forms, of all sorts of complexity, are also subject to it. Imagine as a foreigner entering in to a contract with an American citizen, and having to report to the U.S. IRS your private information and dealings. Guess what most foreigners will do from now on to avoid such problems.
6. This includes not only bank accounts, but investments, pensions, insurance policies, various types of contracts. I am not even sure how many insurance policies I have, let alone what would need to be reported. If you are a foreign insurance company, just think how happy they will be to issue a policy to an American client living overseas.
In short, I am forced to obtain citizenship in my country of residency, and give up my citizenship in the United States. It is either that, or say good-bye to my entire life work and return to the United States to starve at some bullshit minimum wage job (I own my own company outside the United States).
Forget the Berlin Wall, what they are building in the United States is far, far more dangerous.
Spot on. Wish I had mod points for this.
They do. That the US is spreading their net wider and wider is troubling. How much longer before the more middle of the road ex-pat countries get roped into this. Say Mexico, Belize or Costa Rica? Right now our retirees are welcomed down there, but I wonder if that will be the case if this happens.
Basically it's becoming more and more evident that US citizens are being viewed as property by the government. And they want a piece of everything that property makes, no matter where it is.
Well yes, but by what stretch of the imagination do people believe this money grab is right? I see multiple posters agreeing with it. For the tax jurisdiction the business is in anyone can see the point, you're operating a business there like anyone else.
I'm at the age where retirement is in sight and have spent a lot of years bitching about US taxes. I've definitely considered moving somewhere that won't take 50+ cents of every dollar I earn, the thought of owning a beach bar in a tropical location not that many years from now is getting me through this winter.
One of the reasons companies move overseas is to avoid US taxes on anything they don't bring back to the US, why should actual citizens be any different?
I decide to move to NZ in my retirement. After a lifetime of working sitting on the porch and watching life go by isn't for me so I start or buy a local business. I hire local employees and pay all the required taxes in NZ for the income made there. I pay US taxes on my retirement income derived from US accounts. Why if I'm not sending money back to the US for deposit (which would have to be reported) does the US need to know anything about income derived from the NZ business?
Go tell that to the Amish. Or any number of other groups that eschew a reliance on some outside entity to enable them to continue their livelyhood.
Yes, your general big grain farmer isn't doing this, but a lot of the folks selling produce down at your farmers market do.
The creaping featuritis thing amazes me to this day. I am a codeslinger, if you want it I'll write it. But I will tell you if I think you're making a mistake.
One of my old bosses put it well when a customer was questioning my opinion on some of their stuff I was pushing back on.
"If he thinks it's a bad enough idea to tell you that you shouldn't have him do it, you should f'ing listen. You do remember he bills by the hour? If he's telling you it's not something you want him to do he's doing you a favor. And if he won't do it there's no way in hell we'll do it for you, he's the guy we send people to for crazy shit."
That's not the way businesses operate, and the larger they are the more layers of BS things filter through. The person who champions the project hands it off to a subordinate, who hands it off again, etc. By the time it gets to the poor sap who had to bid out the project you're lucky if you get a cocktail napkin sketch of a UI concept and a few vague notes about what it should do.
There is another form of this that I deal with quite often, where upper management concieves of something that is totally impractical for the people who will actually need to use it. You go through all the look, feel and features stuff to get what the corporte folks envision and then install it only to find that the operations people won't use it.
It can be extremely frustrating, but if you were smart about collecting your money you've gotten paid and you're never going to have to support the code.
I almost wonder if they're counting on it, that's why they're stoking the fires dividing the haves and have nots. Rather than banding together and marching on Washington there will just be rioting where the local business owners houses are assaulted by the former recipients of the nanny state handouts when the system goes belly up.
I used to worry about my buddy the police officer and his stockpile of guns and ammo. He's positively convinced in the next few years we're going to see widespread rioting and looting. Lately I'm not so sure he's wrong.
Farmers spread the manure from their animals back on the fields as a way to maintain field fertility. They're not likely to want it shipped off and used to power a server farm, as that will just increase their chemical fertilizer costs.
Insightful? Most of the stuff built with these things are small utility applications for specific departmental uses. The beancounters know what they're doing, i.e. a book on Excel and VBA for Joey down in the warehouse so he can automate his inventory sheets to print in location order so his job is easier vs. a department of expensive CS majors bitching about doing "crap work" like this doesn't take much to see where the value to the stockholders is. The right tool for the right job, not everything needs to be a major production.
So MS was considering leveraging Vista for world domination... Who here is surprised?
Think about things like budgeting/forcasting in a large operation with multiple departments, all of whom need to work on their individual sections. You end up with either lots of spreadsheets that are linked together if you're lucky, or everyone taking turns at the master spreadsheet. If they get a decent selection of formulas working this could really simplify things for stuff like that.
You're unlikely to find some kindhearted individual/company ready to take on an entire group of people with their associated costs.
However, I would suggest that if they've been saving a bit and aren't living paycheck to paycheck, starting a consulting company and chipping in to hire a sales/marketing person might be a viable alternative. Especially if the team has contacts with customers that could be persuaded to stay with the people they know, instead of your old company.
As always, consult a lawyer before doing anything, and if you signed away your soul in your employment agreement, be careful...
Wow. Amazing that this was marked Insightful.
The majority of the school year is over the winter months in the US. In a very large portion of the country, it would be both too cold and too bloody dangerous to ride a bike.
Priced school buses lately? And educational software is quite good these days. Good teachers are almost impossible to find in some areas.
Haven't seen any hybrid buses just yet. And what about the disposal cost of the battery packs?
Spoken like someone who isn't paying many taxes yet. Between sales taxes, gas taxes, State income tax, Federal Income tax, Social Security, Property taxes, etc. I stagger at the thought of paying any more.
The waste of our money by our "public servants" is a crime.
Yup, people do it, you just can't stop them.
Last month I worked on a solution that automated the production of analysis spreadsheets that had previously taken 1 person 20+ hours a week to enter data into. We're talking monsters that have 30000+ formulas in them, you have no choice but to turn automatic recalculation off. They're now done automatically and waiting for them when the users come in now.
What did the customer do? Grin from ear to ear, and start building more spreadsheets that will need to be automated... Number crunchers are funny people, but they sign the checks.
You can't prepare for the kind of BS that can get thrown at you in skills tests. I've seen things that you'd have to have the C++ Standard memorized to know, quirky product specific things they want you to know, and one place that set me down with a bug report and a development box with their code on it and wanted to see how I'd approach it...
They believed the provider when they said it would be back up by 10:30am this morning...
You're going to get killed in fees if you don't process a decent level of transactions through a backup processor when it does come into play.
As I type this I have a client who's CC processing has been down nearly 24 hours, and has resorted to a dial backup solution. Not exactly the way to process 5000+ orders a day. And to top it off they sent out a special email offer to 500,000 subscribers this morning, so they're dying as we speak, and if it's not resolved in the morning we may be switching providers in a hurry. Thank the stars that they choose their own provider...
Ignore the posts talking about why you don't need this, and SLA's. No SLA is going to replace lost revenues, and anyone who doesn't have a backup plan in place is just waiting to get burned.
I think there was a misunderstanding. I know how the application works in great detail. I know that it can be scaled up across multiple machines. It will scale up.
What I don't know is how to judge what hardware to reccomend to someone wanting to self host.
I'm pretty damn sure that only comes from 1) Testing, and I'm not buying $10's of thousands in hardware to test with and 2) Experience, which I don't have.
The last place I worked at had a rack of nice quad zeon processor systems in their lab that they had to take back from a customer when they didn't withstand the onslaught. I'm leaning towards letting a consultant roll the dice, because I 'd lose my shirt if that happened.
300 sites, between 12 and 200 concurrent users at a site.
It's a CRM system, i.e. some basic data entry, some portions are transaction processing. i.e. the workflow portion for the base part of the app is very simply:
Search for customer by various criteria.
No customer found, add one.
Retrieve customer information.
Add current order information being stored for this customer.
Process loyalty/discount programs to see if customer qualifies for an award.
Return award to order entry system for processing.
There's a lot more to it, but that's the meat of it. It's fairly data intensive, there is a great deal of information stored for customers for use in data mining the collected information. It's primarly web service based, but there is a fairly extensive management and reporting tool that is all HTML based.
My guess is going to be that the bottleneck is going to the the database, but we've done extensive testing with a million customer sample database running multiple instances of test applications from 10 other boxes, but that doesn't exactly prove much as it's too predictable.
Yeah, but you can move to a rural area in the US, try moving to India. I moved from the Baltimore/DC area this year, and I got three times the house I could have afforded back there. Plus a laid back community instead of the uptight 'everyone must paint their homes one of the three approved colors' BS that was common there. People raise families here on 40k a year, you can't even keep a roof over your head on the coast for that, unless you're rooming with 3 other people.
And don't kid yourself, about the only thing I don't have is a wide choice of brick and mortar shopping for PC stuff, and the bookstores around here don't have a ton of software books on the shelves. Since I bought most of that online for better prices before, it just means I can't waste time browsing on the weekend.