RAID is more likely to fail than a single disk. You have the chance of single-disk failure, multiplied by the number of disks, plus the chance of controller failure.

RAID 1 and RAID 5 protect against that by sharing data across multiple disks, so you can re-create a failed drive, but failure of the controller may be unrecoverable, depending on availability of new, exact-same controller. With failure of 1 disk in RAID 1, you should be able to use the array ‘degraded,’ as long as your controller still works. Depending on how the controller works, that disk may or may not be recognizable to another system without the controller.

RAID 1 disks are not just 2 copies of normal disks. Example: I use software RAID 1, and if I take one of the drives to another system, that system recognizes it as a RAID disk and creates a single-disk, degraded RAID array with it. I can mount the array, but if I try to mount the single disk directly, I get filesystem errors.

Treasuries are nice because they’re convenient and low buy-in, but their yields are crap, sometimes a little above inflation, sometimes below. TIPS are a decent way to hedge the inflation risk, but (IMO) it’s still really for people who are more worried about losing their savings than living off it. (i.e.: if you have, say, $1e8, you can live pretty comfortably off $1e6, even $1e5 in a lean year, so your rate of return doesn’t really matter)

For me, personally, the limited bond exposure I have is all corporate and mostly junk, bought through my broker in the secondary market, with maturity 10-20 years out. Until fairly recently, junk bonds were the only way to get yields above 4%, and that’s kind of my mental benchmark for gaining relative to inflation. One downside of corporate bonds is they generally have a $10k minimum.

That drop was when the Fed was raising interest rates to stall inflation. Interest rates up, bond values down. But the drop in VTINX was only 20% over all of 2022, where OP is showing 50% in maybe the first quarter.

Incidentally, the sensitivity to interest rates is why I don’t like bond funds. If you buy actual bonds, you get the face value back at maturity, where bond fund are forced to mark them all to current market prices to calculate NAV. IMO, this negates the main “safe” factor in holding bonds.

You can’t melt through snow or ice by spinning your tires.

Yeah, OP isn’t telling us everything. He’s got a 50% decline in what looks like January 2022, where FSKAX and VTI were off by ~10%. Half that drop looks like it happened on one day. In fact, now that I look at it, it’s kind of reminiscent of a BTC chart.

No. If you’ve been saving for 30 years, then you’ll have 30 years of accumulated 10±20% annual gains, which should be something like 16x your start, but could be 100x if you’re lucky or 1x if you’re not. Regardless, an historic crash on retirement day may take that down to 12x your start, which is still pretty good, and will be fixed by the following couple years.

I get political spam addressed to three different people who used to have my number. Real estate spam for one of them. Temp job offers for another. It’s annoying af going on four years.

https://wwwrcamnl.wr.usgs.gov/isoig/period/pb_iig.html

Lead-204 is the only isotope that doesn’t derive from radioactive decay, and it represents only 1.4% of the lead on earth.

I really enjoy lying in a warm, comfortable bed, especially a little groggy from sleep. I’m happy to wake up an hour or so ahead of my alarm so I can have that experience. That said, if my mind is really racing with anticipation of the day’s concerns, it kind of wrecks the lie-in. I’ll get up an hour or two early, have an extra special breakfast, start chores or some other thing I didn’t think I had time for.

CPUs have so many cores these days, that seems like a perfectly reasonable option. Declare a process ‘security sensitive,’ give it it’s own core & memory, then wipe it when done.

I’m not sure that one 69-year-old wall puncher really counts as ‘going up,’ but bones that old get pretty brittle.

That’s not necessarily a bad strategy, either. Most people, their home is their major asset, but you can’t really access that value to buy groceries in retirement. Take money out on a new mortgage on the inflated value of the house, buy groceries and pay mortgage with that money, and move in with the kids when/if the money runs out. The bank will take the house in the end, but leaving nothing to the heirs may be better than spending your last years living in your kid’s basement. The whole ‘reverse mortgage’ industry has grown up around just that plan.

“Corporate meterologists” basically just put pretty graphics on top of NOAA forecasts.

And X-windows. There’s a few server tasks that I just find easier with gui, and they feel kind of laggy over 1G. Not to mention an old Windows program running in WINE over Xwin. All kind of things you can do, internally, to eat up bandwidth.

If you can be flexible on timing - put off the home purchase for a couple years if there happens to be a crash right at your target date, then a lot of volatility concerns fade. Of course, the middle of a crash is also when home prices will be lowest.

Vanguard’s actual asset allocation on their TDFs is https://retirementplans.vanguard.com/VGApp/pe/pubeducation/investing/LTgoals/TargetRetirementFunds.jsf and there’s a simple asset allocation - return calculator https://smartasset.com/investing/asset-allocation-calculator There’s a bunch of them around, that was just the first one with error bars that came up for me, but it will give you a better sense of both how much and how variable the full equity vs the ~60/40 TDF will be. I like error bars. To my eye, it looks like there’s not much difference in the 5-year median or 25th percentile performance, but a notable upside potential in the 75th percentile. That’s why I say, if you’re comfortable with the volatility, you might as well go all the way.

A target date fund on that horizon is going to be shifting its assets from stocks into bonds and TIPS, but is still going to have most of the volatility of VTSAX. If you’re comfortable with the possibility of having negative return over 5 years, then you might as well VTSAX. If you need for the savings to grow, then you probably want less stock exposure than a future target date fund.

For reference, the historical 5-year return on US stocks is anywhere from +30% to -10%, annualized. Even over 10 years, you’ve got about 1-in-8 chance of losing money. I mean, the stock market is definitely the best way for most people to grow money over time, and the economy looks pretty good right now, but Time is definitely doing the heavy lifting, and almost no one ever forsees the event(s) that trigger crises. 5 years is pretty short term.

Wow. I thought I lived in a pretty walkable part of Atlanta. I really only use my car for the grocery or a ‘big’ shopping trip.

• Convenience store 2 km
• Chain supermarket 1.5 km
• Bus stop 1.3 km
• Park 300m
• Big supermarket 2.5 km
• Library 2.7 km
• Train (subway) station 1.3 km
• Downtown Atlanta 13 km

Yeah, it’s the screening that’s free. If that turns something up, then it transitions to “care.”

I’ve had the same experience with “wellness” check-ups: if I mention some complaint to the doc during the visit, it suddenly becomes “visit with complaint” and costs me $120.

Fun fact: for people over 45, colonoscopy screening for cancer is always free. If your insurance tries to make you pay for it, report them to your state insurance commissioner or the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. ACA made a lot of preventative medicine & screenings free.

I’d say colonoscopy, esp if you’re over 45, but those are required by law to have no out-of-pocket costs, regardless.