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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • $20 an hour is a decent starting salary for no prior experience or education, but as you’ve said, it’s not a lot. You will need to make concessions somewhere, such as roommates, food, subscriptions, or entertainment.

    The first step is to be honest with your expenses, going through your past few months of credit card and bank statements, and put everything into a spreadsheet or app.

    Use YNAB or a similar app and catalogue each of your recurring and non-recurring expenses. You say they’re not “that” much, but they do add up. You may be surprised with what you find, but mostly, it will help you think through your priorities, what is essential, and what is a recurring expense. In the end, you will know what your “baseline” spending is relative to your current salary, and how much you have free each month to spend on going out or hobbies.

    After you’ve been tracking your current state of expenses for a while, thinking about your immediate future and changes you can make, make a 3 to 5 year career plan. Assess if you need a different/second job, or assuming a 2% increase each year, if you are on a career track that will drastically increase your quality of life (How much do I need to NOT have roommates? Drive a NEW car? Save for retirement? Increase entertainment expenses by $200/mo?).

    What do you need to do to get that promotion or next job? When you are applying for that job in a few years, what salary number do you need to ask for? You should eventually have the answers to those questions, but not until you’ve got a real budget.




  • The best description I have seen for single store franchisees is, you’ve paid a lot to give yourself a job. They are not lucrative, and in fact, are capital intensive, and often predatory.

    There is a very high up front cost, and you generally do not own the real estate. This means you are locked into 30 year leases, often with complicated terms that are solely beneficial to the land owner.

    Next, with regards to liquidity, if you don’t own the real estate, you often can’t get multiple business loans with a single franchise, so you must secure the loan with your personal assets, which means you will go personally bankrupt if you hit a rough patch.

    Then, after dealing with the complicated business to business transactions and legal work, you still have to deal with the corporate bullshit, taxes, and supervisory duties, particularly if you do not already have a strong business partner to do this for you.

    Pretty much, unless you are independently wealthy, own the real estate in a high traffic location, or already have multiple other franchises, it’s a losing venture that will kill your soul and eat every dollar you have.









  • SpacePirate@lemmy.mltoPersonal Finance@lemmy.mlSalary Needed To Buy a Home In The US
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    10 months ago

    What is the size of the “median” home in each area? Single family, or townhome, or condo?

    Given that this appears to be a median average, this graphic does not account for the extremely wide variance depending on the cases above. A two bedroom condo and a five bedroom single family home could easily have a $2000/mo variance in the mortgage cost.

    The other item that would perhaps be useful would be to call out what the down payment requirement is for each of these areas; ie, you can only achieve a $3000/mo mortgage if you’ve also put down $140,000, which is unachievable for over 90% of the country.




  • While Microsoft should absolutely be held accountable for flaws in its code and its failures to disclose actively-exploited attacks in the wild against said flaws, most organizations have policies (or the lack thereof) resulting in security flaws you can drive a truck through.

    Specifically, a lack of M365 and Teams “app” review and approval processes, a lack of CASB tooling, and grossly inadequate asset inventories and security agent coverage. You can’t protect what you can’t see, and most Microsoft customers are barely doing the minimum.

    Is that Microsoft’s fault, when they explicitly tell your admins you’ve got a “Secure Score” of 19%, and they don’t do shit about it?


  • Lately, email is virtually not a priority outside of work, and is pretty much just storage for service notifications, online receipts, vendor mail, and poor man’s mfa/password resets. I’ve got these classified decently well, and virtually all of these are read/acknowledged in near real time on my phone.

    Human to human comms are now over signal or discord, though admittedly I don’t have a great method to track items needing follow up.

    All said, how is thunderbird these days?


  • You are trying to solve two different, but related problems, and there are discrete solutions for both.

    One is a personal cloud. You need a secure place to store your shit from multiple users and devices, from multiple networks. You’ll need a mostly static IP and dyndns or your own domain, and certificates signed by a public CA/letsencrypt.

    Then, you are looking for a backup application that supports rsync or sftp/scp over ssh or vpn, that is also cross compatible (Android and PC/Linux). Point this to the service above, and you are good to go.