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Showing posts from July, 2018

Why I'm pulling all my money out of Wealthfront today

I'm pulling all my money out of Wealthfront today. I was always pleased with Wealthfront's simplicity and performance, and today took a close look for the first time at actual performance. I was shocked to see how poorly it's actually performed. Besides poor performance, there are other reasons I'm pulling out too. Wealthfront was marketed heavily to facebook/googlers and I took it for granted that it was a great modern product, better than what the banks offer. Assumptions are the termites of relationships. 1. performance is abysmal. If I kept it in S&P, did nothing at all, In 5 years S&P is up from 1600 to 2800 or a whopping 75%. In the same time my Wealthfront portfolio did an abysmal 30%. I have a 10.0 risk score selected. 2. interface is terrible. the website heavily dedicates UI to encourage you to transfer all of your money to Wealthfront by drawing retirement graphs and showing how the more money you transfer the better off you'll be (...

Continental IO550 Warranty Labor Allowance: How much should engine work on a Cirrus SR22 IO550N cost?

Airplane maintenance is very expensive, there is no way around this. This does not mean your mechanic gets a carte-blanche. The most important advice is to not argue once a bill has been issued, the discussion must happen before the invoice, ideally, before the work is done. Mike Busch, my favorite airplane guru and mentor, recently published a Q&A on this topic. Worth watching. I have one additional tip for SR22 or IO550 owners specifically. Continental publishes a warranty-labor allowances table. You can call them directly, or look it up on their website. These are not the recommended  hours, these are the maximum allowed. It's perfectly normal to reference this guide before the work is done, and ask the mechanic if his labor hours will not exceed these amounts. If your mechanic is offended by this notion, get a new mechanic. Remember to allow extra time for decowling and recowling. It's your plane and your money, don't let other people make decisions on yo...