A popular topic of conversation among folks at work is how they save for when they don’t want to work anymore, that is, how they are planning for retirement. I figured I’d share my own setup.

Off the top of my paycheck, 10% of the money goes into Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP). Every six months, I get to buy Apple’s well-performing stock at a nice discount, 15% off of the stock price at the beginning or end of the period, whichever is lower. There are different tax issues depending on when I sell the stock, and it is favorable tax-wise to hold onto it for at least a year. The plan for stock sale proceeds is to use some of them to treat myself to the occasional vacation and to roll the rest into other investments.

The next 12.5% of my paycheck goes into my 401k. At my age, I can afford to be fairly aggressive with my investing, and have divided my investments between a number of mutual funds.

40% of money is divided into two blended fund investments, which do all the work for me based on when I will be retiring or on a general notion of balanced investing. 10% goes into real-estate, which I figure I am buying into low given the subprime collapse. The other half is in investments I picked out to do a similar thing to what the BGI Lifepath 2045 (retirement year) plan does. Of that half, 54% goes into large cap stocks, 10% into mid cap, 6% into small cap, 22% into foreign, and 8% into bonds.

My total IRA allocation is:

20% FBALX - Fidelity Balanced Fund (Moderate Allocation)
20% BGI LifePath 2045 N Fund (Professionally-Managed Retirement-Year-Based Fund)

10% TAREX - Third Avenue Real Estate Value (Speciality Real-Estate)

14% FCNTX - Fidelity Contrafund (Large-Cap Growth)
5% VIIIX - Vanguard Institutional Index Fund Institutional Plus (Large-Cap Blend)
4% VITSX - Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Institutional Class (Large-Cap Blend)
2% FGRIX - Fidelity Growth & Income Portfolio (Large-Cap Blend)
2% LSGRX - Loomis Sayles Growth Y (Large-Cap Growth)

5% VEXRX - Vanguard Explorer Fund Admiral Class (Mid-Cap Growth)

2% VSCIX - Vanguard Small-Cap Index Fund Institutional Class (Small-Cap Blend)
1% NSCRX - Nuveen NWQ Small Cap Value Fund R (Small-Cap Value)

7% DODFX - Dodge & Cox International Stock (Foreign Large-Cap Value)
4% VIDMX - Vanguard Institutional Developed Markets Index Fund (Foreign Large-Cap Blend)

2% GSHIX - Goldman Sachs High Yield Institutional (High-Yield Bond)
2% VBTIX - Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund Institutional Class (Intermediate-Term Bond)

Here’s the last year of data (where we bear in mind that you should only really mess with your 401K mutuals once a year):

Daily closing prices for my portfolio can be viewed here.

I ran across this article on Lifehack yesterday, and it resonated with me:

Many of our problems come from within our own minds. They aren’t caused by events, bad luck, or other people. We cause them through our own poor mental habits. Here are 10 habits you should set aside right away to free yourself from the many problems each one will be causing you.

I’ve reproduced the list below, but click over to the article to read more than just the summary:

1. Stop jumping to conclusions.
2. Don’t dramatize.
3. Don’t invent rules.
4. Avoid stereotyping or labeling people or situations.
5. Quit being a perfectionist.
6. Don’t over-generalize.
7. Don’t take things so personally.
8. Don’t assume your emotions are trustworthy.
9. Don’t let life get you down. Keep practicing being optimistic.
10. Don’t hang on to the past. This is my most important suggestion of all: let go and move on.

I have to hand it to the author — most people who I have seen unhappy have tended to suffer from one or more of the above afflictions, particularly #10. I’m doing pretty well here, but I know I need to be less of a perfectionist sometimes. My job has taught me about the notion of “as perfect as possible under the circumstances”, and I think I’ll roll with that in my personal life

A coworker forwarded me an interesting piece from OSNews on how Microsoft can prevent another poor development cycle like it had for Vista when it engineers “Windows 7.” The crux of the piece is that Windows should abandon its current userland code and break binary compatibility with the mountains of code that has been written for the WinTel platform ever since DOS was all the rage.

Quoth the article:

… For programmers, however, this desire to maintain backwards compatibility is a potential hell. This means that if you, as a Microsoft employee, have come up with a new killer feature, or maybe something less significant like a fix for long-standing minor bug, it needs to pass through a long process of testing to ensure backwards compatibility is not affected by your code. And if it does affect compatibility, your code needs to be rewritten, or, new patches need to be made to fix the compatibility breakage caused by your original patch. You can easily see how something like this is a restraint on many developers, and how it can hold back many envisioned improvements.

The author suggests freezing the “legacy edition” codebase with Vista or Windows Server 2003 and then only maintaining it with bug fixes and security updates while pressing on with development of a new codebase that is based on the NT kernel but with a new userland to be filled with new APIs and applications:

… Removing backwards compatibility means business users would never buy into Windows 7, and that would mean a serious lack of cash-flow for Microsoft. Therefore, Microsoft needs to cater to business users and other people concerned about backwards compatibility by maintaining a version of Windows based on the ‘old’ Windows NT; call it Windows Legacy, if you will. This version of Windows would be Vista (or, more preferably, Windows Server 2003), receiving only security updates and bug fixes.

An alternate and arguably preferable solution would be a black-box compatibility environment for the old apps, similar to Classic and Rosetta, which have helped ease Apple through some operating system and hardware architecture transitions.

The author somewhat underestimates the engineering effort involved with maintaining an operating system fork (winning quote: “Would this require more developers than are currently needed? I doubt it.”) and too easily casts aside the reasons for application compatibility. A particular failure is that the author only seems to consider how businesses would handle the issue, and doesn’t consider end-user impact. Namely, every user would be forced to replace every application they own, and a large number of “fringe” applications will never be revised. The user is left with the choice of paying to stay on an outdated operating system (no sale, frustrated user) or paying more to get onto an incompatible one (sale, frustrated user).

My take, of course, is that maintaining compatibility with at least the bulk of the most important apps on the platform is worth the engineering effort. I could be biased, though, given that it’s part of my job

There is a personality profile application on Facebook that I just added to my profile. After taking a 100-question personality quiz, the website told me this:

I suppose that’s not too surprising if you know me.

My recent dinner at cru in LA

Here are some things I ate at a small “raw foods” restaurant in Los Angeles called cru. I thought all the food was great, though it was hard to tell how healthy it was, because some bits of it were rich in taste. Either way, if there is fat, it is good fat, and necessary fat, particularly when the portions are small and there is no protein-dense meat. Careful viewers will note that this has mushrooms on it, which are a new thing for me.

I know we do some pretty good avertising at Apple, but I think we could do better (and rotate it more frequently). Sprint did better. Tip of the hat to them for it.

The only gripe, I suppose, is that they are not advertising anything new, per se. They are saying “we have a fast network, and so we can do more.” (Than, say, AT&T: Their website for the campaign features a comparison of network speeds with AT&T.) There is an obvious elephant in the room that is causing all the other cell companies to aggressively advertise, particularly against AT&T, and I hope to see some good competition. Everybody wins in the end that way. And hey, I like a good ad now and then.

It has an interesting behind the scenes video too.

Mushroom! Mushroom!

As I implied that I was going to do in my previous post, I decided to give mushrooms another shot, after generally not eating them for over twenty years. It didn’t hurt that I’m in LA for the weekend visiting Melissa, long-time friend and long-time vegetarian.

Just as is necessary when getting into a cold swimming pool, I decided to jump right in. Friday night we went to a Thai restaurant, and the soup had thin slices of mushrooms in it. These I tentatively swallowed almost whole at first, and later tried to take some time to investigate the texture of the mushroom. They are firmer than I thought they would be, which is reassuring, and makes sense in context of the veggie burgers that I do eat now and then. I took things to the next level Saturday morning with a “Buddha Bowl” at a local cafe, which had what I suspect were button mushrooms cut into bigger pieces. These went into corn tortillas and down my gob. A third type of mushroom made it into dinner: straw mushrooms at a Chinese(ish) restaurant in a spicy fish dish.

While it’s going to be a while before they find themselves into my “favorite foods” list, I can appreciate that they are one of the most versatile and healthy foods known to man, and given my increasing trend of living well, I figured I may as well give them a chance. Having broken the proverbial seal, I suppose I will be more convenient to have around the dinner table. Yet, it’s going to take some sort of sausage-stuffedness to get me eating them whole any time in the near future, but I suspect my mom has just the recipe for that