Jump to content

Texas Jeff

Legacy Members
  • Posts

    1032
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Texas Jeff

  1. BTW, I have been to the new permitting office and I happened to go during an early voting window. For that election, they were offering free parking. The ballot place was in the first floor lobby. I was there for another reason, but a few folks were voting. It's a nice new building close to the new ACC Highland Mall campus. A little hard to find, and I felt that driving around ACC was a bit confusing, but a phone GPS should take you straight there. I agree that Austin is trying some electioneering here that may backfire. They don't want you to leave, so they don't want you to vote, so they are making it difficult. But that may ensure that only those angry enough to drive over there will vote.
  2. You can’t early vote at the Randall’s in West Lake Hills? Oops, I was thinking about the primary…
  3. CapMetro's new station is about a third of a mile from their existing station. We paid $60 million to move the station 1500 ft to better serve the needs of the soccer population. It will be used once every 1-2 weeks for four hours during soccer season. Folks on reddit said that to get on a train you had to drive to one of the rail endpoints, park, and hop on there. So to ride the rail to a soccer game, you have to drive to either Leander or downtown and find parking. Then get on a train and ride halfway down the line. Then fight for space on the train on the way back to your car, which is all the way at the end of the line. Or ... you could pay for parking, walk a bit, and save yourself a few hours. Rail is great for a steady flow of traffic but it sucks for special events. Buses are great for special events, like Texas used to do for football games.
  4. Eastside shut down their varsity program in 2021 for a year. I think they were back for 2022-24 but they played in an all-Austin ISD league. They got crushed by other AISD schools for two years. They are now in 4A with some Austin and some non-Austin schools, and they are probably going to be crushed for two more years by smaller schools. Eastside is only slightly smaller than Austin LBJ, but LBJ has a focus on football. LASA has some decent sports, but football isn't one of them. They went to state for the first time last year in tennis. They may do well in non-contact sports like tennis, diving, maybe cross country. They have the worst high school building in AISD, the second lowest percentage of poor kids, and tons of homework, so any kids that want to play sports need something that is more individual. The parents have the resources to pay for coaching. They don't have team training facilities or decent fields like you would find at Westlake, LT, or really any school west of AISD. Or north of AISD. Or south or east. Eastside has a cool stadium that hopefully AISD will renovate as part of the 2022 bond. It's a historic on-campus stadium and it was the only stadium for Black students in Austin during segregation. Most of the seating is on one side, but that side is a nice hillside with downtown views. Lots of potential for fun Friday night lights at a smaller school.
  5. Shutting down streets feels good for the one street but it puts extra traffic and risk onto neighboring roads, and for that reason I'm against it.
  6. As a child who lived through The Catch, today I am gruntled...
  7. I could be wrong, not sure. I am not an expert. The law changed in 2020 from a lifetime distribution to the 10 year rule. Since then there has been some chatter about if RMDs are required over the 10 years or not, and I *thought* the IRS had landed on requiring RMDs, with some exceptions for those that didn't take RMDs while the IRS was deciding, but I could be wrong. Vanguard has a calculator here to help with inherited IRAs and possible RMDs: https://inherited-rmd-calculator.web.vanguard.com
  8. Here's a free Monte Carlo-like site that helps model future finances, using past stock market returns: https://www.firecalc.com You plug in how much money you have, how much you want to spend in retirement, and how long you think you will live. It calculates what would have happened to your money as if you had retired in every year going back a hundred or so years. It shows you a bunch of lines and tells you in how many years your plan would have failed (your money hits $0 before time expires) or succeeded (more than $0 left at the end). You can accept their model of what you might be invested in and a constant spending plan, or you can play with the tabs on the site to fit your situation.
  9. Kinda depends on what you inherited. Stocks get a step-up in basis, so you will want to figure out what they were worth on the day of her death. An IRA account or a Roth IRA account becomes an inherited account. You have 10 years to take the money out. You have to take some required minimum distributions each year. You will be taxed on the normal IRA distributions, but anything from a Roth is tax free. Real estate should also get a step up in basis, so you need guess of what it was worth on the day of death and you''l have to figure out what you want to do with it. Real estate is tough to split if you end up sharing it with someone else and they want to sell and you don't. Some stuff may have to go through probate, but other accounts where you are named beneficiary can be transferred pretty fast.
  10. It’s free for a hour, but after that it adds up. You can visit for free but it’s not a place you can spend hours for free with a car. My neighborhood used to have a bus route that went right downtown, but it was cut during cap remap. The sales tax that funds the bus was not cut.
  11. Which train? In Austin, you have to be specific... Cap Metro funds the Red Line. It is running at about 1/10th of the original projections. Way to go, planning people... City of Austin taxes us for Project Connect, which goes to the Austin Transit Partnership, where some of the money is swizzled around and comes back to the City of Austin to prevent people from being displaced by the new train that does not yet exist. Some of the ATP money goes to Cap Metro for stuff like the new Red Line soccer stadium station. So Cap Metro funds the Red Line except where it doesn't, which comes from ATP, which comes from the CoA, which comes from you the taxpayer who thought you were funding a rail system to get to the airport. It's almost as crazy as Austin school taxes. You pay taxes to your local school board, but half of that money goes to the state because other districts need the money because they are poor, and yet half of Austin ISD's population is economically disadvantaged. But as a wealthy district we must do our share so we send half of the money to the state, where they DO NOT SPEND IT ON EDUCATION and instead give everyone a break on their property taxes. Madness...
  12. City and state policies have created a ton of dead space around downtown. I visited the new library three times, and the third time an insane homeless person was running around in front of the circulation desk yelling and lunging at people, while city employees were calmly trying to help people checkout books. For my family's safety, we nope'd out of there and I haven't been back. It has to be the largest collection of staircases west of the Mississippi. The library has a great service that moves books between branches and I do use that, but because of that I have no need to go to the downtown location. The Faulk library, which the new library replaced, now appears to have no role. it's on the same block as the Austin History Center, which was the library before the Faulk library was built. The AHC is a cool historic building .... but Austin now has three libraries downtown. On the other side of Guad, two entire city blocks are worthless because of city and state capitol view corridors. These two blocks are someday going to be right next to a rail stop. A rail stop for who? People will get off the train and wonder why two blocks of downtown are either parking lots or one story buildings. Other than riding the rail to the courthouse once every two years for jury duty ... there's little point. Austin should be thinking now about what CVCs should be revised. There is still a CVC from Mueller airport, which was put in so that new arrivals could see the capitol building as they were taxiing to their gate. No one has landed at Mueller for a very long time, but the CVC persists. IH-35 has corridors from an upper deck that is about to be torn down. Get rid of them and open up downtown's east side. Austin ISD owns Pease Elementary, another cool historic building. AISD is going to reopen it as a child care center, but it's taking up an entire city block. Child care is needed, but it is the best and highest use of that land? How about maybe a new taller building with a child care center in it? Trinity St is almost 100% parking garages from 12th to MLK. Seven blocks of dead zone. A lot of land is there, it's just covered by a policy preventing its use, or owned by a government that does not want to let go.
  13. Based on the MAGA demographic, I bet they would refuse to buy her CDs, burn her cassette tapes, try to clog up phone lines when her tickets go on sale. Stuff like that…
  14. One of the candidates argues like a five year old. That’s pretty much all you need to know.
  15. How do high school football programs attract and compensate "elite" football coaches? Do the boosters just pay the coach a bonus? I understand that it's attractive to have a nice stadium and facilities, but school districts are kinda broke right now. Do they just make football a priority and fire a science teacher so that they can pay the coach more? Looking at Lovejoy's website, they have all kinds of stuff about budget woes, needing to charge students for bus transportation, charging out of district transfers tuition, having a tax-rate election to access copper pennies (basically taxing yourself more when you know that some of the tax is going to go back to the state). They have maxed out their bond debt at 50 cents by building facilities. They are a wealthy district but a small school and they don't seem to be in the financial position to go for an elite coach.
  16. My wife's AISD room has seen temperatures varying from 53 to 93 degrees during school hours. Neither the school district nor the teachers have much control over the room temps. The HVAC in many of the schools is shot and the buildings are poorly insulated.
  17. Money was cheaper than historic inflation rates. Why not buy something that will probably go up in value faster than you have to pay it back, while having others make the loan payments?
  18. Tours are kind of a junior/senior thing, although you can go earlier. You have plenty of time. For most schools, your kid (or you) books a tour online. You show up to a visitor center and go to a short presentation with some Q&A. Then a current student leads you around campus for about an hour and shows you stuff, while telling you amusing antidotes about the school. You have a chance at more Q&A and they leave you with a coupon to buy something at the campus store, or you walk away with some swag. Time of year does not matter much, IMHO, because you spend most of your time at the visitor center or walking around. You can go during the year if you want, but you are going to mostly see students walking from class to class with headphones in or walking slowly down the street staring at their phones. Some schools have "info nights" on campus, where you can go either virtually or in person and learn about a specific program, or the admissions process for that school. Once you get into senior year, some schools have "admitted students" events. These are all day programs where you go from session to session to learn specifics about housing, financing, a particular major, things like that. These are usually in the spring, between the time when acceptances go out and the kids have to pick one school. But in 8th grade you have a ton of time. I would suggest learning what college costs, how your family might pay for it, and talking a bit with your kid about what they might want to do with their life and what kind of school they like. Like small, medium, large ... public or private ... far away or close by ... on the coast or not ... things like that. You can walk around local campuses just to show your kid what that scale of school is like. Just start thinking about a framework. And, if your kid is in some activity in middle school, gently encourage them to keep doing that in high school, or find some place to "belong" in high school. For my kids, their home was the band hall and they had a ton of fun and personal growth by being in band. Teams, clubs, orgs, whatever ... gently encourage them to be part of something that they enjoy outside of the classroom.
  19. Time to plan for 2024. The tax office values your property as of the end of the previous year, which is now. If you want to protest in May, now is a good time to look around on Zillow or Redfin and print out some comps to your house to use as evidence. If prices are up, you may be seeing an increase in May. If prices are down now, you might be able to argue for a reduction.
  20. One of my favorite Tonight Show clips:
  21. Well, it's part of the original idea behind Social Security. Your benefit is determined by how much you make over your lifetime. And, since there was a maximum benefit, there was also a maximum tax. Beyond that maximum tax, you weren't increasing your benefit at all. So, no additional tax because there is no chance of additional benefits. That was the reasoning. I don't think that reasoning makes sense today.
  22. Well, if you want a Debby downer view of STEM admissions, there's this: https://texadmissions.com/blog/2022/2/21/tips-for-applying-to-ut-computer-science-cockrell-school-of-engineering-and-the-college-of-natural-sciences More concrete data and a little less negativity here: https://texadmissions.com/blog/2019/2/25/recommended-ut-austin-majors-rank-and-test-score-minimums That guy probably knows more specifically about UT admissions that anyone else I found when we were going through it. The short answer is that nobody knows if the 2nd choice is even considered anymore and it's possible that it's not. And if you want a STEM major then your kid increasingly needs to show some interest in the field during high school, like camps or projects and such. However, 6 out of 1200 is top half of one percent, and that's pretty darn high. If the kid really cares about some particular field of engineering, think about something to do over the summer that might be able to "demonstrate intent" in the field. You can take the ACT more than once and bump up the ACT score with a prep class. IMHO the prep classes mostly help to give you practice taking the test and answering the type of questions they ask, so that on test day your kid has been through the timing a few times and knows what to expect. College admissions is a crapshoot. Your kid spends four years carefully polishing a resume, essays, test scores, etc and the admissions person may spend 10-15 minutes on your profile and then move on. They are flooded with applications because it's easy to apply to 10 or more schools today even though every kid will only choose one of the 10. Kids have to submit tons of applications because everywhere they submit is flooded with apps, so their chances at any one school are small. It is a crazy system and not a perfect process.
  23. If you want to play with Social Security reform ideas, you can do so here: https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/ To balance social security, you have to get the trust fund projections above zero by choosing policy reforms.
  24. Social Security is insurance, not an investment. It is insurance against becoming old and poor at the same time. It is a minimal safety net. If people invested it on their own, we would have winners and losers based on the year of the person's birth and how the market did during their working window. And, if you gave people choice in their investments, some would choose investments that would not do well ... and when they were old and poor at the same time we would either have to support those people or put them on a raft and float them out to sea. If you want to blame someone, blame the boomers. They got the benefit of lower taxes over their lifetime because we were paying more into the system than the greatest generation was taking out. The social security taxes they paid went to build bombs and bridges, providing jobs and amenities that would not have been there without the surplus. They benefited from that spending and now they are going to benefit again through FICA taxes charged on younger Americans.
  25. Austin ISD numbers peaked around 2012 and have been drifting lower since then, from a peak of about 86,000 to today's enrollment around 73,000. It is projected to be about 67,000 in 2032. The kids that remain are likely to be weathier and more likely to be white or Asian. The district has about 100,000 seats. They were planning (or hoping) for growth and it went the other way.
×
×
  • Create New...