u/Speedy719

If baseball strikes next year, I’m guessing baseball cards will drop a ton.

What do you think will happen to other sports cards (mainly basketball and football)?

Will baseball drag the whole market down or will other sports actually rise because everyone will shift their attention and buying to those?

Considering Bend as one of the options to move to and could use advice on neighborhoods.

Family of 3 with a 4yr old. Some of the factors:

• Budget is up to $1.2M
• School quality is very important to us
• We want at least a 3br house, 2400 sq ft
• Not too rural due to fire risk - we lost our last home in a wildfire :(
• But, not a neighborhood where our neighbor's house is like 10 ft from ours if possible

Any neighborhoods you'd recommend?

For those of you that live in more suburban areas of Bend - how much do you worry about fires?

Hope everyone is staying safe and that the many OR fires are contained quickly.

Worked a w-2 job earlier this year and ended up having too much $ withheld (I know that it should've been fixed but it's a long story about a not so great employer).

Now I'm contracting for a company. If I feel like enough extra was withheld from the w-2 comp for 2026 to cover the taxes I'll owe on the 1099 income, do I still need to pay estimated taxes on the 1099 income?

Is there a way to calculate exactly how much "extra" was actually withheld?

Going with our 3yr old. Rates are pretty similar but it does seem like the rooms are a little bigger at Azul? I've been to that one years ago and thought it was pretty good but went solo.

We live by the beach in SoCal so not as concerned with being able to swim in the ocean (the big advantage of Hilton Cabo).

Planning to stay at the resort most of the time. Our daughter loves to swim.

I just started consulting for an e-com company. When I dug into their SEO, I found that they went from ranking for about 850 kws (ahrefs) to as low as 30 in the span of a few weeks.

Everything plummeted around May/June 2025 and only started recovering in April 2026.

Their marketing firm says that there was an algorithm update then and they got no notifications of issues or violations in Search Console (not sure I believe them).

I've seen algorithm updates that hurt SEO, but not like this. DA also dropped from like upper 20s to 6.

The marketing firm also does their web dev and I'm pretty sure used AI to write all the on page content.

Did they get absolutely wrecked for AI content? Anything else I should look into?

Long story short: My wife and my FICO credit scores both dropped by 80+pts in the past year after paying off our mortgage and closing our Amex platinum -- each of us was 840+ and now we're around 760.

My wife just also had her last car payment and her score dropped another 20+ pts today.

We have no debt, no late payments ever. We use one credit card and pay it off in full every month.

I'm kinda at the point where I just want to pay an expert to answer some questions such as whether we should open another credit card now since my wife has no open accounts.

But, I've seen that most "credit counselors" or scammy orgs that help you rebuild credit really focus on plans to negotiate or payoff debt.

How do I find someone who will just do a 1 hr paid call with us once so we can understand the best way to proceed?

Just pick one of the credit counseling places? Most have asked me about our current debt that we need help with and when I say we dont have debt then they say they cant help.

I did the dumb thing for a while where I haven't been using a separate bank account for 1099 income (because it was only a couple grand a year).

I'm opening a separate bank account now.

The business is consulting so there are very few dedicated expenses that are not also shared with personal -- like cell phone, internet, etc.

How should I pay those expenses? from the business account or personal? Assume each of those expenses are split 50/50 between usage for personal and business.

ChatGPT says:

• Pay the bill from your personal account.
• Have the business reimburse you for the business-use percentage (50% in your example) by transferring that amount from the business account to your personal account.

Sound right?

I posted a week or two ago about eligibility since my grandparents were German and I got some great advice - thank you.

While starting to gather the necessary info my dad mentioned that I have a German passport from when I was a baby/toddler.

He said he has one too (he never lived in Germany, his parents left in the 1930s and he was born in the 1950s). He doesn’t remember why we have them.

My guess is my grandparents (Jewish) reclaimed their lost citizenship sometime after the war.

what now? I assume I’m no longer a citizen, but how do I find out? Does this make it easier or harder to apply now if I’m no longer a citizen?

Edit to add more info:

I don't yet know when my grandparents got their German citizenship back.

My dad was born a South African citizen (and possibly German, if that's possible to hold dual of those). I was born a South African citizen.

We immigrated to the US when I was 2. My parents naturalized when I was around 9 or 10 (around 1990) and we all became US citizens.

My wife and I both had perfect/near perfect FICO scores. We were always 850 or 840.

We lost our home in the LA fires and subsequently had to pay off our mortgage. After doing that, both of our scores took pretty big hits down to about 750.

When I looked on experian, it said something about not having enough credit accounts now. I can't remember the exact phrasing.

We only have two credit cards (one solely in my name from when I was 18 and one shared) and one auto loan which is ending in 2 weeks. Besides that, just utilities.

Score breakdown:
- Amount of debt: "Very good" - we pay everything off every month, but our cc has a fairly low limit at like $18k and we spend about $5-7k/mo

- Length of credit history: "Exceptional"

- Amount of new credit: "Exceptional" (we haven;t opened anything since 2022, which was our mortgage)

- Credit mix "Very good"

I had checked in here a while ago and the consensus advice was not to open any new cc accounts since we are considering purchasing a new home, however, we don't know exactly when.

My wife has her last car payment in a couple weeks and that will be the last credit line she has open. She unfortunately closed all her credit cards a few years back for some reason. We're worried her score will drop more.

Should we open a new cc account given that we don't know when we will be applying for a mortgage? My best guess is that will either occur in early 2027 or in early 2028 - likely not in between.

Any other advice? Should I pay down the cc early each month so we're not using so much of our available credit?

CEO of the company I'm stepping away from said to send him the total balance of unused PTO as an expense via our expense software.

HR stuff aside (like legality, compliance), does this have any tax implications if I allow it? I understand it's taxable, but wouldn't I pay a little more tax on it vs if it was run through payroll?

Also, am I right in thinking that because it's a reimbursement it doesn't get reported to the IRS... I'll leave that part at that, but I think you get what I'm getting at

California based in case it matters

San Diego County.

Daughter (minor) inherited $ from a family member who had no will. We (parents) had to get Guardianship of estate to get funds released.

We now have the $ and have spoken to several probate/estate attorneys who have provided us with conflicting info.

We are trying to invest in accordance with CA probate section code 2574. Code says:

"Subject to subdivision (b), the guardian or conservator, without authorization of the court, may invest funds of the estate pursuant to this section in:...
3. Securities listed on an established stock or bond exchange in the United States which are purchased on such exchange."

One attorney told us we can't invest in mutual funds (only individual securities), another said we completely could and should (without prior court auth).

I also found in a doc on Justia that we can't invest in securities on Nasdaq since it's not considered a typical stock exchange?

Happy to pay someone for a consultation, but since we've already done that and got conflicting info, I don't know where to turn for a trusted answer.

I'm looking to get a more unique thank you gift for a family (2 adults, 6 yr old g, 3 yr old b).

Budget is $200-300. I'd really like to not just send a food basket or similar.

An experience would be awesome. Unfortunately, I dont know them that well - it's a work colleague - so it'd have to be something with fairly broad appeal.

I was thinking of a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant, but as someone who also has young kids, that might not be the treat that it sounds like 😄

They're in LA in the Manhattan Beach area in case anyone has local suggestions.

Had a buyer open an INR return request. I responded and asked him to wait till the next day to see if the item came since it was sent with ESE. He let me know the next day that the item arrived and he thanked me for being responsive.

I asked him to cancel the return request, but he never did.

Got an automated email today saying the return is still open and I need to resolve it.

How do I get the INR closed?

Would it be stupid to spend the $ to replace my 2019 MBP Four Thunderbolt 3 ports battery?

Apple wants $250. Not sure what other places would charge. Definitely not DIYing it.

Specs:
- 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16GB

I'm an independent business consultant. I use my computer for work all day, mainly web browsing, claude, zoom and similar.

It runs ok - the fan does go nuts at times when I have tons of tabs open in Chrome and am clicking to open new tabs really fast. Battery doesn't last 15 minutes unplugged.

Basically, should I just spend the extra $ on an Apple refurb? or even just switch to Neo?

I know there's no right answer, more of a WWYD question?