Against my better judgment, I gave the solar sales guy at Home Depot my contact info. I’m glad I did, because it eventually led to me finding a deal from another company that will cut my electric bill in half.
I can’t claim victory because I haven’t signed the deal, let alone seen the end result, but I want to share what I have learned because the window of opportunity may be closing.
Continue reading “Solar is so back”
For a few brief moments, my stock holdings in my former employer were hypothetically worth $5 million. This is the wild story of how I realized less than 1% of that value.
I’ll be pretty specific about some of the numbers, because equity compensation is a mystery to most people. Until I went through this, I never knew what’s possible and what’s normal. It’s a very complicated topic, but I hope that by sharing a real world situation, someone else might be able to learn something useful.
Continue reading “$5 millionaire for a week: riches to rags in the startup world”With interest rates being what they are, I’m thinking about debt differently. When rates were low, I was pretty pro fixed-rate debt, as long as that rate <3.5%. But nowadays, it’s time value of money is a much more significant effect.
This has come up for me because I’m considering installing solar on my house, but the financing options make it much more difficult to try to analyze the many different ways to go about it. A solar panel system directly offsets utility expenses, so I’m comparing the financed monthly cost with the cost offset from running the system (plus the credits I would get from my state). The main point of going solar would be to liberate cash from day 1 onward. There’s no need to think too deeply about time until return on investment, because there’s no upfront cost.
That’s not the case these days.
Never Down, Always Up 