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wed posted: Wed 2017-12-20 15:57:31 tags: amazon, calendar, finance
Google Calendar has an automatic "birthdays" subcalendar that pulls from your GContacts and/or G+ circles. Which is silly, because if you're using those services as much as G would like, there's bound to be many GContacts/G+ nodes whose birthdays are unimportant to you, and birthdays that ARE important of people who don't and won't use G+, Google registered services at all, or computers and internets even. So I hid the automatic "birthdays" subcalendar and created my own bdays subcal.

Without my laptop handy, I referred to my Amazon "friends" list to regenerate a bday calendar. Since Mom passed away, I figured it's time to tidy up that list. Easier said than done; after much Googling and almost emailing a curt inquiry to Amazon support, I stumbled across a way to do it in Gift Finder → Your Friends. Click the "edit" link at the top of the list and the page replaces the green "find a gift" links with red "remove" links next to each list entry.

I remembered I left my debit card at home the other day, so I ended up paying for groceries and coworker gifts with my secured credit card. It took longer than I expected for charges to clear (i.e. not overnight), so today I went to make a payment and discovered my credit limit had been raised, from 200 to 500. Apparently my credit card issuer raises limits by as much as 500 every 6 months on good behavior. So if I was aiming for "good" credit utilization, under 30%, then by pop advice I would previously have had to show under $60 balance (but non-zero) on their reporting date. Or maybe optimally under $20 (10%) if you apply the observation that people with the highest credit scores average just 7% credit card utilization. With the limit level-up, those thresholds climb to 150 and 50.

Took a stroll through my investments and discovered the mutual fund shares I bought in one IRA did something unexpected: RYVYX posted a short-term capital gains distribution, which was automatically reinvested. I did not design my portfolio spreadsheet to accomodate initial buy-in levels vs. reinvestment growth. Not going to worry about it for 2017 but moving forward, I'm probably going to want to figure something out that tracks growth since buy-in to inform rebalancing decisions.